We live in turbulent times with continents and nations facing ever-heightening risks such as natural disasters, intense and protracted conflicts, terrorism, corporate crises, cyber threats to infrastructures and mega-events. We are witnessing the rise of mega-crises and a new class of adversity with many unknowns. The prospect of mega-crises presents professionals and students in the field of crisis management with four major tasks. First, they should engage in “deep thinking” about the causes of the increasing occurrence of mega-crises. Second, they should identify and work through the dominant trends which complicate contemporary crisis management. Third, they should upgrade institutional crisis management capacity. Fourth, they should improve societal resilience since no institutional complex can mitigate or manage these mega-crisis on its own. This book is divided into four primary parts, each of which looks at one facet of mega-crises. Part I focuses on the concept of a mega-crisis and mega-crisis management; Part II examines crisis management of mega-natural disasters; Part III evaluates crisis management of man-made mega-crises; and Part IV identifies mega-threats and vulnerabilities. Additional major topics include Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Gustav; the London Bombings; the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks of July 7, 2005; corporate meltdowns; the subprime crisis; the Olympic Games; electricity grids; global climate change; the Dutch Delta; risks to food security; and mega-crises and the Internet. This comprehensive text will provide practitioners and academics with the results of an across-the-board research effort in the prospects, nature, characteristics, and the effects of mega-crises.

The world is wrought with risks that may harm people and cost lives. The news is riddled with reports of natural disasters (wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes), industrial disasters (chemical spills, water and air pollution), and health pandemics (e.g., SARS, H1NI, COVID19). Effective risk communication is critical to mitigating harms. The body of research in this handbook reveals the challenges of communicating such messages, affirms the need for dialogue, embraces the role of instruction in proactively communicating risk, acknowledges the function of competing risk messages, investigates the growing influence of new media, and constantly reconsiders the ethical imperative for communicating recommendations for enhanced safety.

Swans, Swine, and Swindlers argues that we must view crises as "messes": webs of complex and dynamically interacting ill-defined and/or wicked problems, conundrums, paradoxes, puzzles, crises; their solutions; and our conscious and unconscious assumptions, beliefs, emotions, and values. Working systematically with this concept, the text digs deeper into the causes, mitigation, and management of crises.

In an era marked by the rapid integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our lives, the discourse surrounding its implications has intensified. The Role of Generative AI in the Communication Classroom is a pioneering book that delves into the multifaceted dimensions of AI, specifically focusing on OpenAI's revolutionary Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (Chat GPT) and its profound influence on the landscape of communication education. This book navigates the intersection of technology, education, and ethics, shedding light on the imperative need for a collaborative approach to shape AI's evolution. AI's potential to reshape industries and human roles is undeniable. Rooted in the intricate workings of AI and its hallmark, Chat GPT, this book meticulously dissects the dynamic relationship between humans and machines. The discourse extends beyond technology and into the realm of education, asserting that the power to mold AI's trajectory cannot rest solely in the hands of developers. While revealing AI's transformative potential in the communication classroom, the book conscientiously explores ethical concerns and biases, fostering a balanced approach to its integration. This book is instrumental to the ongoing discourse on AI's role in education. The call for ethical considerations, inclusivity, and regulation serves as a guiding compass for educators, students, developers, and policymakers alike. The book ensures a holistic perspective on AI's integration by addressing privacy, citation, voice ownership, and overall digital ethics.

Our societies have become very crisis-prone. This book explores crises and the methods of anticipation, management and reconstruction, and considers a risk-crisis-territorial development continuum. The aim is to better understand a widely used concept and clarify the methods of action in the field of crisis management. The different forms of learning proposed to better face future crises are also questioned. This book invites us to analyze the resources available to support crisis management and reconstruction, and consider the unequal access to these resources in different territories in order to design future territorial strategies. This often results in a form of territorial inertia after the crises. However, some innovate, imagine renewed territories, prepare for reconstruction, or even recompose territories now in order to make them more resilient. The crisis can then be the driving force or the accelerator of these changes and contribute to the emergence of new practices, or even new urban and territorial utopias.

Explore the major theories within crisis communication, fully revised and updated Theorizing Crisis Communication provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art review of both current and emerging theoretical frameworks designed to explain the development, management, and consequences of natural and human-caused crises. A critique of the many theoretical approaches of crisis communication, this volume provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the management, response, resolution, and significance of failures in corporate responsibility, as well as destructive global events such as pandemics, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, chemical spills, and terrorist attacks. This second edition contains new theories from related subfields and updated examples, references, and case examples. New chapters discuss metatheoretical considerations and theoretical advancements in the study of social media. Throughout the text, the authors highlight similarities, patterns, and relationships across different crisis types and offer insight into the application of theory in the real world. Integrating work from organizational studies, social sciences, public relations, and public health, this book: Covers a broad range of crisis communication theories, including those relevant to emergency response, risk management, ethics, resilience and crisis warning, development, and outcomes Presents theoretical frameworks based on research disciplines including sociology, psychology, applied anthropology, and criminal justice Provides clear and compelling examples of application of theory in contexts such as rhetoric, mass communication, social media, and warning systems Offers a systematic and accessible presentation of topics by explaining each theory, describing its applications, and discussing its advantages and drawbacks Theorizing Crisis Communication, Second Edition, is the perfect textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of crisis and risk communication, and an importance reference for scholars, researchers, and practitioners in fields including crisis communication, emergency management, disaster studies, sociology, psychology, and anthropology.

This handbook focuses on new threats to psychological security that are posed by the malicious use of AI and how it can be used to counteract such threats. Studies on the malicious use of AI through deepfakes, agenda setting, sentiment analysis and affective computing and so forth, provide a visual representation of the various forms and methods of malicious influence on the human psyche, and through this on the political, economic, cultural processes, the activities of state and non-state institutions. Separate chapters examine the malicious use of AI in geopolitical confrontation, political campaigns, strategic deception, damage to corporate reputation, and activities of extremist and terrorist organizations. This is a unique volume that brings together a multidisciplinary range of established scholars and upcoming new researchers from 11 countries. This handbook is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and professionals interested in this new and developing field of social practice and knowledge.

This book explores how China's political system responds to crisis. A crisis is an episode whose impact cannot be controlled merely by astute on-the-ground incident management, particularly in cases involving widespread doubt about the legitimacy of established policy paradigms or the political order as a whole. Crisis can create “political windows” for advocacy groups challenging established policies in pluralist democracies. The political battle between competing definitions of an uncertain and ambiguous situation among the various actors provides them with crisis-induced opportunity space for dramatic policy change. However, the process of crisis-induced policy change, mainly by crisis framing, in non-west regimes like China has not been adequately addressed. As China's leadership foregrounds legitimacy in “victory” over COVID-19, and a new era of climate change disasters begins, this dynamic model of crisis and recuperation will offer food for thought for scholars of Chinese and global politics.

Managing Federalism through Pandemic summarizes and analyses multiple policy dimensions of Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy issues from the perspective of Canadian federalism. Contributors address the relative effectiveness of intergovernmental cooperation at the summit level and in policy fields including emergency management, public health, national security, Indigenous Peoples and governments, border governance, crisis communications, fiscal federalism, income security policies (CERB), supply chain resilience, and interacting energy and climate policies. Despite serious policy failures of individual governments, repeated fluctuations in the overall effectiveness of pandemic management, and growing public frustration across provinces and regions, contributors show how processes for intergovernmental cooperation adapted reasonably well to the pandemic’s unprecedented stresses, particularly at the outset. The book concludes that, despite individual policy failures, Canada’s decentralized approach to policy management often enabled regional adaptation to varied conditions, helped to contain serious policy failures, and contributed to various degrees of policy learning across governments. Managing Federalism through Pandemic reveals how the pandemic exposed structural policy weaknesses which transcend federalism but have significant implications for how governments work together (or don’t) to promote the well-being of citizens.

Every decision that is made by managers and policy-makers in a public sector organization requires an evaluation and a judgement of the risks involved. This vital requirement has been recognised in the growth of risk management. However, risks can never be fully prevented, which means that public managers also have to be crisis managers. Today’s crises develop in unseen ways; they escalate rapidly and transform through the interdependencies of modern society, and their frequency is growing: the global financial crisis, the European volcanic ash cloud, the Japanese tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown, the Christchurch earthquake and the Queensland floods. All highlight the extreme challenges that public sector organizations across the world have had to face in recent years. Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector Second Edition responds to these challenges by presenting the only guide for public managers and public management students which combines lessons about risk and crisis management together in a single, accessible text. It equips readers and public managers with the knowledge and skills to understand key issues and debates, as well as the capacity to treat risks and better prepare for, respond to and recover from crisis episodes. This exciting new edition enhances the original text with contemporary cases and a greater focus on the international, trans-boundary and multi-agency dimensions of risk and crisis management. These enhancements reflect the fact that today’s public manager must increasingly operate within a global and interdependent governance context.