Search results

Stress has considerable impacts on human health, potentially leading to issues such as fatigue, anxiety and depression. Resource loss, a common outcome of disasters, has been found to contribute to stress among disaster survivors. Prior research focuses heavily on clinical mental health impacts of disaster experience, with less research on the effect of cumulative stress during long-term recovery. To address this gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of stressors including resource loss and debt on mental health in a sample of households in Moore, Oklahoma, impacted by a tornado in 2013.

For this pilot study, questionnaires were mailed to households residing along the track of the May 2013 tornado in Moore, OK. Descriptive statistics were calculated to report sample characteristics and disaster experience. Independent associations between disaster losses and demographic characteristics with the outcome mental health were examined with χ² and unadjusted logistic regression analysis. Adjusted logistic regression models were fit to examine resource loss and mental health.

Findings suggest that the tornado had considerable impacts on respondents: 56.24 percent (n=36) reported that their homes were destroyed or sustained major damage. Greater resource loss and debt were associated with mental health distress during long-term recovery from the Moore, OK, 2013 tornadoes.

The association between resource loss and mental health point to a need for interventions to mitigate losses such as bolstering social support networks, incentivizing mitigation and reducing financial constraints on households post-disaster.

This study contributes to a better understanding of long-term, accumulated stress post-disaster and the impact on health to a literature heavily focused on clinical outcomes.

While uncertainty during emergency response operations necessitates adaptive performance, emergency response organizations, such as the fire service, tend to constrain adaptive behaviors due to their highly formalized bureaucratic structures. Structural theories suggest that leaders can empower employees to bypass these constraints.

Using survey data from four US fire departments, this research tests whether mid-level supervisors can empower firefighters by increasing their ability to improvise during complex emergency response operations, and whether this enhances department adaptive performance. Moderated mediation is also performed to assess whether senior leaders must also be effective, empowering leaders in order to achieve heightened levels of empowerment and subsequent adaptive performance, as many senior leaders in the fire service are criticized for being overly bureaucratic, risk averse, and resistant to change.

The findings support compensatory effects and show how immediate supervisors are key to overcoming senior leader deficiencies and producing adaptive performance during conditions of high uncertainty and complexity.

The lack of response organizations’ success during complex incidents is often attributed to senior leaders who are risk averse, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change (Wankhade and Patnaik, 2020). This study is the first to show how empowering leadership can help overcome these constraints to enhance adaptive performance under complex conditions in the fire service.

Home buyout programs are typically funded by the federal government and implemented by local agencies. How these agencies design and implement buyouts has considerable impacts on participating households and communities, making understanding the internal processes of implementing agencies a critical component of buyout research. This study addresses this issue by exploring the early design and implementation phases of a buyout program in Harris County, Texas, following Hurricane Harvey.

Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with buyout staff and government stakeholders. Data were analyzed in two phases using grounded theory methodology and holistic coding.

There was considerable tension regarding the role of buyouts in mitigation and recovery. Participants conceptualized buyouts as mitigation programs, but recognized that residents, in contrast, viewed buyouts as a tool for household recovery.

This study adds to questions raised in the literature about the efficacy of buyouts and other relocation efforts implemented in response to disasters and global climate change. Future research should work to build systematic knowledge regarding design, implementation, and impacts of buyouts on affected households and communities.

Tension in the purpose of buyouts may be the cause of consistent shortcomings in buyout implementation including attrition, checkerboarding, and transfer of risk. Funding, timing, and the scale of buyouts do not align with household recovery needs and priorities, limiting the mitigation potential of buyouts.

This study identifies a fundamental tension in the purpose of buyout programs that has yet to be discussed in the literature.

Diasporic mobilization studies often incorporate collective emotions into the discussion of movement strategies, less we knew about how emotion becomes the language by which they communicate collective responsibility after the protests. The purpose of this paper is to draw from participant observation research to explore how diasporas construct the language of collective emotions to sustain their commitment to the transnational mobilization project during and after the homeland protests.

Drawing on ten months of participant observations in the USA, the author observed how members in a Hong Kong diaspora group, Black Bauhinia Society (BBS), transform their project from a transnational protective gear sourcing action during the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Movement into a global medical personal protective equipment (PPE) sourcing action during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During homeland uprising, BBS recruits participants using a set of compassion language that encompasses the suffering stories of homeland dissidents and the members’ expression of guiltiness for staying afar. The compassion talk reinforces the transnational ties between BBS members and Hong Kong dissidents over the process of resource mobilization. When the homeland movement ceased during the pandemic, BBS transformed their compassion talk to politicize charitable actions and recruit volunteers and donors to source PPE for Hong Kong.

This paper contributes to the emerging discussion on how diaspora mobilizes after the protest by showing how the language of collective emotion cultivates commitments and sustain collective identity after the protests.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the 174th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held 14‐18 February 2008 in Boston, MA, USA.

Conference report.

The conference theme was science and technology from a global perspective, which emphasized the power of science and technology as well as education to assist less‐developed segments of the world society, to improve partnerships among already developed countries and to spur knowledge‐driven transformations across a host of fields.

Overviews of six conference symposia are presented, which will be of interest to this journal's readers.

Strategy implementation is a critical component of firm performance and middle managers play a key role in the implementation process. This study was conducted to enhance the authors’ understanding of how middle managers influence strategy implementation (SI) effectiveness by investigating the impact of leadership and work team coordination.

A field study was conducted using interviews and survey data gathered from executive managers, middle managers and work team members within a large municipal organization undergoing a major strategic change.

Middle manager transformational and instrumental leadership have a direct positive impact on work team SI effectiveness. Additionally, middle manager transformational leadership has an indirect positive effect on work team SI effectiveness through coordination.

The study offers insights into managers and practitioners seeking to improve SI effectiveness by highlighting the importance of middle manager leadership development and the coordination of interdependent tasks within work teams.

The study provides valuable insight into an important but previously unstudied relationship between middle manager leadership and SI effectiveness. The work also helps bridge the chasm between leadership research and strategy research by linking leadership behavior to SI effectiveness – a key ingredient of firm performance.

On 2 February 2020, 99.9 million viewers learnt about the Women's Football Alliance (WFA), the largest women's American football league in the United States, when former player Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl. In the same month, the WFA announced several corporate partnerships and a new television deal with statements that connected the support for women's American football to advancing gender equity.

This chapter examines the professionalisation of women's American football in the United States through the lens of mediated visibilities. We use the term mediated visibilities, rather than media coverage, to move beyond how journalists are writing about sport (or ‘covering’ sport) and account for the complex ways in which content about women's sport circulates across producers and platforms in the digital media environment. In particular, our analysis examines the opportunities and limitations of digital media in the process of (semi-)professionalisation of women's American football.

The WFA joined the broader ‘momentum’ of women's sport in the United States as both the league's social media platforms and the sponsors aligned their messages with cultural narratives around women's sport to invoke gender equity in promoting women's American football. Moreover, the league positioned the strategy to enhance mediated visibility the sport as an integral step in the process of (semi-)professionalisation. However, the role of the WFA's digital media platforms alone appears to be limited without substantial structural change.

Two years ago a programme designed to enable the majority of staff at the University of Westminster to begin using web technology was initiated. To achieve this the institution established an intranet, linked to user friendly web authoring software. An associated staff development programme, focusing on the integration of the software with the intranet hardware was also started. This paper describes the progress made, highlighting the successes, the problems encountered and the failings of the approach taken.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is about understanding and acknowledging when racism has impacted a policy, person, system, and our history. This chapter examines CRT as a tool to understand what has happened in our history and educational system and as a tool to dismantle our current system to bring about true inclusive and authentic schools. It serves to analyze the practical use of CRT in our current public K-12 educational system. The purpose is to fast forward our discussion on race and to explicitly illustrate the dire need for an inclusive education fundamentally girded in an abolitionist mindset for school systems, educators, parents, and students. Although CRT has branched out to be inclusive of many populations, the core purpose was to examine anti-Blackness in America and how that has stained our education system. Inspired by the dissertation conducted by Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, the aim of this chapter is to draw our attention to that essential purpose of CRT so that schooling can become more liberatory and meaningful to all.

Research on what leads to or detracts from persistence among Black female students is scant and inconsistent in terms of systematic inquiry. Little is known about these women's perspectives on the specific challenges they face that result in either their persistence or departure. Despite the dearth of information, the extant literature on college students can provide some insight. Our understanding of the phenomenon of persistence among Black female students attending PWIs was informed by a conceptual framework incorporating: (a) Social Integration; (b) Student Involvement; and (c) Black Feminist Epistemologies. Together these paradigms help explain the environmental and psychosocial factors that contribute to understanding Black female involvement in college and provide a framework for situating our study in the larger context of the Black female college experience.