Collaborative Research: Organizational Design Issues in Emergency Management

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project, funded as a NSF SGER in response to Hurricane Katrina, is a scholarly study of organizational constraints on federal disaster activities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Coast Guard. The research will consist of data collection about perceptions of each organization's performance in Hurricane Katrina, analysis of rule-making and budgetary changes in affecting each organization's outputs, and initial development of a dynamic model of organizational processes. The organizational process model will focus on the dynamics of agency adoption of new missions where agency information processing capacity is serial rather than parallel. The project team will collect secondary data from publicly available data archives and a limited number of interviews in order to better understand the changes over time in organizational structures and responsibilities for federal emergency management. These interviews are to be selected as a dozen or so individuals among current and prior congressional and agency staff who can provide insights about these issues. The data will be used to develop the model and to report on the particular organizational bottlenecks in emergency management.