Estudios de la Economía

Organizations and Disasters

Sociologists of disasters frame the organization and organizing as critical components in disaster management. Organization theorists have found disasters useful in making their case, particularly when disasters shed light on organizational failure or disintegration. Yet studies featuring both “organization” and “disaster” have produced very different kinds of accounts of the relationship between the two – sociologists of disaster and sociologists of organization only rarely confronting opportunities, and indeed tensions, that emerge from bringing these objects of exploration together.

We invite papers with an interest in both the sociology of disasters and the sociology of organization. What do these two fields and their objects have to say to each other? What might a more symmetrical understanding of disasters and organizations afford? How could links between studies of disaster and the sociology of organization be strengthened? What insights on organizational continuity, maintenance and basic economic infrastructure of the wider society, does a collaboration between these two research areas afford? Papers can be empirical or theoretical and should focus on issues relevant to both fields (e.g. uncertainty, preparedness, accountability, risk, communication, etc.).

Session Organizers
Dean PIERIDES, University of Melbourne, d.pierides@unimelb.edu.au
Joe DEVILLE, Goldsmiths, University of London, j.deville@gold.ac.uk
Avi KIRSCHENBAUM, Israel Institute of Technology, avik@tx.technion.ac.il

RC 39, Sociology of Disasters [host committee]
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2014/rc/rc.php?n=RC39RC 17, Sociology of Organizations
http://www.isa-sociology.org/buenos-aires-2012/rc/rc.php?n=RC17