MBA Level Term Paper

Book Reviews

Strategic Communication in Crisis Manage- ment: Lessons from the Airline Industry, Sally J. Ray, Quorum Books, Westport, Conn. (1999), 260 pp.

‘The airline industry teaches us how an industry can come together in a crisis and, with effective management, reveal truths about its processes for the purpose of improving conditions to prevent future recurrences’.

The opening quotation is the last sentence of Sally Ray’s Strategic Communication in Crisis Management: Lessons from the Airline Industry and provides the key to appreciating this book. Woven throughout the prose are examples of how the airline industry has learned from crises and used that information to improve crisis preven- tion; a topic preached by most crisis experts. This aspect of the book provides a starting point for discussing its strengths and weaknesses.

Strategic Communication in Crisis Management is a mix of case studies (seven chapters), information on the airline industry (one chapter), and discussions of the crisis management process (six chapters). Unlike many crisis case presenta- tions, Ray’s are engaging and informative to the reader. Ray provides interesting text and detailed descriptions of seven major aviation accidents. While each case has a set of lessons, the real value lies in the overall lessons and learning process the airline industry experiences. Two examples will illustrate this crisis learning pro- cess. The Northwest Airlines Flight 255 investi- gation lead the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) to include a check of the takeoff warning system prior to departing the gate. The Delta Flight 191 investigation rein- forced the dangers of wind shears and the need to utilize Doppler radar to detect wind shears in order to prevent accidents. The lessons are discovered as a result of the NTSB’s extensive crash investigations. The NTSB examines a wide array of crash factors: operations, human, weath- er, air traffic control, witnesses, structures, electricity and hydraulic systems, maintenance, and power plants and engines. It is the meticu- lous post-crisis analysis that yields the lessons. A variety of lessons is noted throughout the book so we easily see examples of how crisis analysis feeds into learning, which, in turn, should improve crisis prevention.

The dominant focus in the book is the airline industry. We learn more about it and its lessons than about strategic communication. However, do not be misled into thinking that only people involved in the airline industry can take away

specific lessons from this book. The airline industry has some unique features related to crisis management including being ‘completely vulnerable’ to crises and having multi-agency responses to crises. Any airline flight is subject to a combination of technical, human and weather factors that could lead to disaster – the industry is open to catastrophic disaster. Companies in the chemical and nuclear industries experience similar vulnerabilities that could have significant effects on stakeholders. When an airliner crashes, the NTSB, Federal Aviation Authority, a variety of unions, emergency response personnel, the air- line, and the manufacture can all become involved in the crisis investigation and that complicates the airline’s crisis management efforts. Again, chemi- cal accidents often involve multi-agency re- sponses and federal investigations. I would argue that the issues raised in this book about airline crash investigations will be relevant to any industry that must cope with a multi-agency response and coordination during a crisis.

Two crisis management issues stand out: the ‘problems’ that arise when politicians get in- volved in the crisis and the potential for conflict among multiple groups responding to a crisis. Airline crashes draw intense media coverage and many politicians choose to exploit the situation by placing themselves into the crisis and media limelight. Ray takes us back to TWA Flight 800 and then mayor of New York City Rudi Giuliani’s media intrusion and bashing of TWA’s crisis management efforts. This led to a press con- ference by TWA Flight Attendants Union to refute Giuliani’s charges. Giuliani’s comments became a crisis within a crisis. Politicians can complicate a crisis investigation if they believe they can make political gains.

Sometimes the groups working together on an investigation can fight among themselves, often over the critical issue of responsibility. The case of American Airlines Flight 191 led to a battle between American Airlines and Douglas Aircraft Company over who was responsible for the engine separating from the crashed airliner. Ray notes this fighting only made the situation worse by attracting more negative media coverage to the crisis. In December of 2002, Alaska Airlines was held responsible for inappropriate mainte- nance causing the crash of Flight 261. Alaska Airlines believes the recommended maintenance process contributed to the crash but has not taken this debate public. The reference in their public statement reads:

‘The airline agrees and concurs with many elements of the Board’s [NTSB] review and

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respectfully questions others. This is not, how- ever, a time to question those judgements – this is a time to move on and to continue to focus on improving safety at Alaska and throughout the aviation industry as a whole’. This response fits with Ray’s recommendations following her ana- lysis of American Airline Flight 191.

There are two ‘language’ problems with the book. First, Ray is writing from a communication- based perspective on crisis management. While communication scholars have long been writing on crisis management, the pieces are generally not cited in management-based research so there could be a lack of familiarity with the language/ terms Ray uses when discussing strategic commu- nication. Chapter 2, especially pages 22 through 25, is critical to understanding the language she uses when evaluating the strategic communica- tion. Those unfamiliar with the communication side of crisis management research will learn a great deal from Ray’s writing. Second, Chapter 4 uses the phrase contingency planning instead of the more common designation of crisis manage- ment plan (CMP). For those with a background in contingency planning management, you might expect a treatment of the business continuity plan.

One final observation is the lack of attention to the Internet’s role in crisis management. Ray does note that TWA used the Internet during the Flight 800 disaster. However, much of the development of online applications of crisis management occurred after this book would have gone to press.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to write a new book on crisis management that is completely different. There are accepted principles and concepts in the field that must be covered in any book. The challenge is to provide the reader with some new insight in crisis management. Strategic Communication in Crisis Management succeeds in providing some new insights by taking readers through the crisis management process of the airline industry and how that process is used to learn lessons and to improve crisis management. The detailed case studies alone are enough to peak the interest of any student of crisis management.

W. TIMOTHY COOMBS, Department of Speech Communication, Eastern Illinois University/Com- munication Resources Northwest, United States.

What the Future Holds: Insights from Social Science, Richard N. Cooper and Richard Layard (Eds), The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2002), 285 pp.

Decisions, decisions, decisions! Although life may be one damn thing after another, most of those things turn out to be decisions. And, as the editors of What the Future Holds, Richard N.

Cooper and Richard Layard, remind us, decisions ‘involve making judgments about the future’.

Those judgments, of course, can make an enormous difference to our future. For example: ‘In 1980, IBM forecast the total sales of personal computers at 280,000 – so few that they subcontracted the software to Bill Gates and the chips to Intel. Actual sales have been one hundred times higher, at 30 million. The fortune lost to IBM went to Microsoft and Intel’. Now that, from IBM’s point of view, was an egregious error in forecasting.

The authors of these nine essays show us how to minimize such errors. They encourage social scientists to recognize the importance of antici- pating the future and to devote more time to thinking hard about it. They show that, by doing so, social scientists can make decision- making more effective and their research into the present and past more fruitful. Ignoring the future will not do, because a ‘social scientist cannot claim to explain the past and deny that she or he has anything to say about the future’.

Unlike most such collections, these papers are uniformly excellent. Each one is carefully thought through and solidly tied to current thinking in the author’s specialization, and, truly surpris- ingly, stays focused on the same set of questions. This is not to say, of course, that the reader will necessarily agree with everything that each author says.

For example, Peter Schwartz in his discussion of the methodological tool of ‘scenarios’ says that variables ‘such as culture, values, beliefs, and behavior’ are ‘not objective like the inflation rate’. Given the debate and tinkering with the inflation rate that we have seen, I fail to see that it is any more – or less – objective than any number of social indicators of beliefs, values, and behaviors used by social scientists.

Then, too, his distinction between ‘useful anticipation’, of which he approves, and mere ‘getting the future right’ seems fuzzy. Many predictions are contingent. Thus, not getting the future right may be the result of taking evasive action in response to a ‘mere prediction’ that was presumptively true at the time it was made but terminally false when the time of the prediction arrived because of the self-negating action the prediction itself inspired. But these are nitpicking comments.

Mainly, Schwartz gives sound guidelines for thinking through consequences of surprising but plausible scenarios. Clearly, the complex, holistic, and indeterminate mindset that he proposes can usefully endow the decision maker with confidence in the face of risk. In most instances, a single point prediction fails to convey the alternative possibilities the way that scenarios can.

Joel E. Cohen surveys the changes in the Earth’s population in the last century, including the near

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quadrupling of the total human population, the rapid increase in people living in urban areas, the unprecedented increase in life expectancy, and, since 1965, a dramatic fall in fertility rates.

Cohen describes errors in past demogra- phic projections, pointing out that the farther into the future the forecast, the greater the error; simple methods are as good as compli- cated ones for short-term forecasts; and forecasters generally underestimate the uncer- tainty of their forecasts and the instability of their core assumptions. He also shows that, especially for single country projections, errors in the initial population data are an important source of error in the projection, especially in the short run.

Included in Cohen’s speculative scenario for the twenty-first century is a larger population (because so many young people are entering their childbearing years), but one that will increase less rapidly than at present and that will be more urban and older.

In addition to population projections, Cohen discusses coming changes in society, the envir- onment, economies, and culture – all in a context of how to make choices that will improve humanity’s chances for a livable future.

Clark C. Abt maps the future of energy. As with other phenomena discussed in this book, getting this right matters. In the case of energy, hundreds of billions of dollars are gambled annually on the accuracy of long-range forecasts. But, as Abt says, it is not easy to get right, because energy demand and supply are mutually reactive.

Abt evaluates past energy forecasting and gives a devastating critique of current projections of the U.S. Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 1999. One massive parochial error that Abt sees in the DoE 2020 forecast, for example, is the assumption that the poorer parts of the world (Less Developed Countries) want to and will go the wasteful energy ways of the wealthy industrialized countries.

In the twenty-year future, Abt says that ‘the world is not remotely running out of total energy, but it is (slowly) running out of major non- renewable sources such as coal, oil, gas, and (more quickly) the arable land environment and healthy air quality urban environment’. He says that wind, solar heating, solar photovoltaic- electric, and solar-thermal electric will be the most rapidly growing sources of renewable and nonpolluting energy.

In an overview of the current climate debate, Stephen H. Schneider concludes that at least part of the recent climate change is probably human- caused. To help the reader understand the debate, he reviews the fundamentals of climate modeling, the greenhouse effect, subjective prob- ability estimation, and the environmental and societal impacts of climatic change projections.

Although Schneider believes that human behavior is contributing to climate change, he, nonetheless, emphasizes the role of uncertainty, the many alternative future outcomes that could flow from the complex interconnections among climate-changing emissions scenarios on the one hand and adaptive and mitigative capacities of societies over time on the other.

But Schneider does not recommend a ‘wait- and-see’ attitude. Rather, he calls ‘for cautious, but cost-effective positive steps both to slow down the rate at which humans modify the climatic system and to make natural and social systems more resilient to whatever changes do eventually materialize’.

Focusing on the future of the labor market, Richard B. Freeman gives six trends: the femin- ization of work in advanced countries; older and more educated workers in the advanced coun- tries; a shift in the world labor force to less developed countries and, therefore, to younger less educated workers; the decline of manufactur- ing production jobs in advanced nations and a shift of such production to less developed countries; the increase of employment in health and personal care in advanced countries; and a shift to near-universal use of computers and information-based technologies.

He evaluates six conflicting scenarios: job security vs. contingent compensation, increased leisure vs. greater work effort, worker participation vs. employer control, dominant firms vs. niche producers, a frictionless economy vs. renaissance of institutions, and a highly unequal apartheid economy vs. more equal shared capitalism.

After adding some ‘wildcard’ possibilities, Freeman concludes with three thoughts. The first is that science and technology almost invariably progress faster than the scientists and engineers would ever predict. The second is that advances in information communication technology will require firms to empower workers and will ‘increase the opportunities for workplace democ- racy, decentralizing decision making and labor market institutions’. And the third is that ‘the only certainty is that the future will surprise us’.

Benjamin M. Friedman considers the possible future of central banks’ monetary policy making over the next quarter-century. In assessing past predictions, he says that it is impossible to say whether monetary economists got the future right or not because opinion was so divided. Many did, but many did not.

Friedman describes a number of ways that the future of central banks’ ability to conduct monetary policy might be threatened, ways in which their monopoly over the supply of reserves might become irrelevant. The results could reduce central banks’ ability to influence prices in the nonfinancial economy no less than production and employment.

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Timothy Besley takes up the question of the future organization of government and the division of responsibility between national, su- pranational, and subnational units. He focuses not on nationalism and ethnic identity, but rather on the regulation of externalities, transaction costs, and vested interests.

He argues that citizenship and civil society qthat transcend national boundaries are neces- sary for effective supranational democratic action and he foresees a future in which inter- national cooperation will inevitably be greater than it now is.

The European Union, for example, could establish supranational democratic institutions with directly accountable supranational institu- tions, possibly as early as 2020. This will be important, not only for Europe but also as a demonstration for other regions of the world where there are potential gains for supranational cooperation. The shift of some spheres of policy making to the supranational level, however, will be accompanied by other shifts toward greater decentralized authority.

Alexander Schmidt-Gernig concludes the vo- lume with a scholarly and thoughtful review of Western futures studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, given his limited space, it is a selective review, though nonetheless, informative and insightful. Among other things, he points out that on a variety of topics, the futurists of these decades, such as Herman Kahn, Anthony J. Wiener, and Johan Galtung, among others, often had the future right. Many of their predictions ‘were amazingly realistic’.

Schmidt-Gernig evaluates these and other strengths of futurists, including their emphasis on the cybernetic approach. He also evaluates the weaknesses, most of which had to do with overestimating the scope and extent of coming social and cultural change.

All things considered, I strongly recommend this book. Serious, knowledgeable, and compe- tent social scientists have peered into the future from the solid grounding of their expertise in particular subfields. What they have seen is how social scientists can reorient their work more toward the future to benefit not only social science but also the freedom and well-being of the human community.

WENDELL BELL, Department of Sociology, Yale University, United States.

Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security, Mark Duffield, Zed Books, London (2001), 293 pp.

Professor Duffield has produced an important work that contributes greatly to our under-

standing of the nature of conflict in under- developed countries and the reasons why developmental aid and humanitarian action have faced almost insurmountable challenges in at- tempting to ameliorate the plight of peoples suffering from underdevelopment and the con- flicts that often arise from it.

I approached this book with great skepticism. As a specialist in strategic studies firmly rooted in the realist tradition, I have found little in the literature on development that has practical value in the area of crisis management. Nor have I found the grand prognostications on the nature of the post-cold War security environment or the implications of globalisation for international security to be of great value. Theories such as ‘the end of history’ or ‘the clash of civilizations’ may capture the fancy of pundits and the public, but offer little for scholars seeking to understand the myriad conflicts festering around the world today. Duffield’s work stands in stark contrast to those pieces. He offers significant new insight into the nature of conflict and how it is intrinsically linked to prevailing views on security and development.

One issue needs to be raised at the outset. The war in Iraq, being fought as I write, is not an example of the ‘new wars’ that are the focus of Duffield’s study; it is a classic inter-state war. The fact that an inter-state war is being fought two years after Duffield’s book was published does not invalidate his thesis. It simply underscores the complexity of the post-Cold War security environment and the obvious fact that scholars and policy-makers must address a wide range of conflicts. Duffield has made a noteworthy con- tribution to our understanding of a significant number of those conflicts. Indeed, the current war in Iraq may well generate conditions, at least in portions of that country, ripe for one of the ‘new wars’ he describes.

Duffield argues persuasively that global gov- ernance lies in networks that bring together states, international governmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private companies to accomplish specific regulatory tasks. Since the end of the Cold War, global governance has been marked by growing emphasis on authority delegation: regional security arrangements, privatisation, subcontracting, and other network arrangements that share the burden of global management among a wide range of actors. These networks establish durable structures of global governance, yet are fluid and non-territorial, adapting to changing security perceptions and risk assess- ments. They also constitute what Duffield calls ‘strategic complexes’ of state and non-state actors, building connections within and between donor governments, military establishments, IGOs, NGOs and the commercial sector.

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Duffield observes that the question of security has shifted dramatically: from being concerned with the biggest economies and war machines in the world to an interest in some of its smallest. He is right. In the United States, for example, this can be seen in public statements by American foreign policy officials and in the view of the world held by American defense planners.1

Although conflicts in underdeveloped countries traditionally have been described by aid providers as ‘complex political emergencies’, Duffield argues that they are in reality a new form of non- territorial network war that works through and around states. These ‘new wars’ are associated with the emergence of new forms of authority and areas of alternative, largely non-state, regulation of commerce and violence where global market deregulation has allowed the emergence of parallel and shadow transborder trade. These emerging political complexes are based on increasingly privatised networks of state and non-state actors working beyond the competence of territorially defined governments. The wars fought by such networked political complexes are financed and provisioned shadow economies and have blurred conventional distinctions between peoples, armies and governments.

Duffield develops a convincing argument that the manner in which global governance has sought to deal with the new wars has led to a merging of development and security. Growing regionalisation and market deregulation in the global economy have resulted in a widely held view of conflict as stemming from internal developmental causes and the emergence of a new security framework in which stability is regarded as unfeasible without development, while development is not sustainable without stability. Development, he argues, has been radically refocused on conflict resolution and the reconstruction of societies in such a way as to avoid future wars. Duffield calls this radicalisa- tion of the politics of development: the commit- ment to transform societies as a whole, including the attitudes and beliefs of their members, and the use of development resources to shift the balance of power between groups and even to change attitudes and beliefs. Humanitarian as- sistance action is viewed as legitimate as long as it supports conflict resolution and transformation of the societies involved in the war. Thus, Duffield observes, the emphasis in humanitarian assistance has shifted from helping people to supporting the process of societal transformation.

Duffield’s most provocative thesis is that the strategic complexes of global governance are implicated in a process of complicity and accom- modation with the emerging political complexes that are the warring parties in network wars. He contends that, while opposing the violence and dislocation of the ‘new wars’, the strategic com-

plexes of global governance selectively link the regulatory networks of the developed world with warring networks beyond the regulatory regimes of territorially defined governments. Further, Duffield contends that strategic actors, including politicians of powerful states, officials of donor organisations and even international interests that support market liberalisation, can facilitate violence either by tolerating the war by their actions or even making warfare easier. In a compelling case study of the violence in southern Sudan, Duffield shows these processes of com- plicity and accommodation in action.

Duffield concludes that, despite the post-Cold War evolution from a state-centered system of international regulation to one of networked global governance, the organisational culture in donor organisations and aid agencies has yet to undergo a corresponding process of systemic reform. The result has been a mismatch between the complexity of network wars and existing institutional cultures. Not only are many organisations culturally maladjusted to complexity, but this maladjustment is actively maintained by powerful groups and networks. Development organisations have been trans- formed into agents of crisis management as environments have become less predictable and more chaotic. This, in turn, inhibits the formulation of effective development strategies that are capable of moving beyond the complicity and accommodation that the strate-gic com- plexes of global governance have fallen into with the political complexes of network wars.

Duffield argues for radical reform of the institutional culture of aid and development organisations – turning their rule-based bureau- cracies into adaptive, learning and networked organisations – in order for global liberal govern- ance to deliver the relative security of the Cold War era, when states had greater authority to regulate commerce and violence. To reform aid and development bureaucracies into adaptive, learning organisations, he advocates studying the process of development policy formulation. Cor- recting development policy failure is more com- plex, he contends, than finding a better way of delivering assistance in underdeveloped countries; it requires an understanding of the groups and interests on both sides – the strategic complexes global governance and the political complexes of network wars – that are perpetuating the current system of using development to serve conflict resolution ends, rather than to improve the lot of those adversely impacted by underdevelopment.

This work is a significant contribution to the literature on development and security. I com- mend it to professionals in both fields seeking to understand the complexities of security and stability in underdeveloped countries and the challenges of providing effective development.

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For scholars and policy-makers dealing with contingency planning and crisis management for what have traditionally been called ‘complex political emergencies’, this book will dramatically change their perspective on the nature of such conflicts and the policies that would be effective for handling them.

Note

1. See for example Richard N. Haass, Director, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of

State, ‘Remarks to the School of Foreign Service and the Mortara Center for Interna- tional Studies, Georgetown University’, January 14, 2003, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 2003; and Thomas P.M. Barnett, U.S. Naval War College, ‘The Penta- gon’s New Map’, Esquire, March 2003, avail- able at http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ ThePentagonsNewMap.htm.

JOSEPH F. BOUCHARD is a strategy analyst in Washington D.C., United States.

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