Search results

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of community-based and driven approaches during the lockdowns and early periods of the pandemic. The study examines the impact and perceptions of the state-led intervention. This would help to discover a better approach for postpandemic interventions and policy responses.

This article used the inductive method and gathered its data from surveys. In search of global opinions on COVID-19 responses received in communities, two countries in each continent with high COVID-19 infection per 100,000 during the peak period were chosen for study. In total, 13 community workers, leaders and members per continent were sampled. The simple percentile method was chosen for analysis. The simple interpretation was used to discuss the results.

The study showed that poor publicity of community-based interventions affected awareness and fame as most were mistaken for government interventions. The study found that most respondents preferred state interventions but preferred many communities or local assessments of projects and interventions while the projects were ongoing to adjust the project and intervention as they progressed. However, many preferred community-based and driven interventions.

State secrecy and perceived opposition oppression limited data sourcing for this study in countries where state interventions are performed in secret and oppression of perceived opposition voices limited data collection in some countries. Thus, last-minute changes were made to gather data from countries on the same continent. An intercontinental study requires data from more countries, which would require more time and resources. This study was affected by access to locals in remote areas where raw data would have benefited the study.

The absence of data from the two most populous countries due to government censorship limits access to over a third of the global population, as they make up 2.8 out of 7 billion.

The choice of two countries in each continent is representational enough, yet the absence of data from the two most populous countries creates a social identity gap.

The survey collected unique and genuine data and presents novel results. Thus, this study provides an important contribution to the literature on the subject. There is a need for maximum support for community-based interventions and projects as well as global data collection on community-based or driven interventions and projects.

The paper aims to examine the conditions under which disaster entrepreneurship contributes to community-level resilience. The authors define disaster entrepreneurship as attempts by the private sector to create or maintain value during and in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster by taking advantage of business opportunities and providing goods and services required by community stakeholders.

This paper builds a typology of disaster entrepreneurial responses by drawing on the dimensions of structural expansion and role change. The authors use illustrative case examples to conceptualize how these responses improve community resilience by filling critical resource voids in the aftermath of natural disasters.

The typology identifies four different disaster entrepreneurship approaches: entrepreneurial business continuity, scaling of organizational response through activating latent structures, improvising and emergence. The authors formulate proposition regarding how each of the approaches is related to community-level resilience.

While disaster entrepreneurship can offer for-profit opportunities for engaging in community-wide disaster response and recovery efforts, firms should carefully consider the financial, legal, reputational and organizational implications of disaster entrepreneurship.

Communities should consider how best to harness disaster entrepreneurship in designing their disaster response strategies.

This research offers a novel typology to explore the role that for-profit firms play in disaster contexts and adds to prior research which has mostly focused on government agencies, non-governmental organizations and emergency personnel.

Community governance plays an important role in the prevention and control of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in China. Community workers, the main executors in community governance, experience a huge amount of stress, which affects their physical and mental health. Thus, it is crucial to pay more attention to the stressors and stress responses of community workers and propose strategies to alleviate such responses. This paper aims to analyze the work stress of community workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in China.

Based on a questionnaire survey of 602 community workers during COVID-19 in China, the four main stressors and 14 stress factors of community workers were identified and six factors at three levels of stress responses were defined. A stress analysis model is proposed that tests the mediating role of psychological capital and the moderating role of organizational climate.

The results show that stressors influence stress responses through the moderating role of psychological capital, organizational climate plays a negative mediator role between stressors and psychological capital and the main stressors for community workers are work, safety and performance stress.

This paper contributes to existing research because it offers suggestions for reducing the impact of stress on the community workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, it can promote the control and prevention of the COVID-19.

This study aims to examine and understand South Korea’s (S. Korea) COVID-19 response operations, a notable case for other countries to emulate, and suggest some practical implications for other countries struggling with coping with the current pandemic.

To examine the case, the authors propose a new theoretical framework based on concepts of the whole community approach in the emergency management field and on co-production in public administration studies, and use the theoretical framework to analyze the details of S. Korea’s whole community co-production for COVID-19 response.

The findings demonstrate that the successful pandemic response in S. Korea is attributable to a nationwide whole community co-production among multiple actors, including government, various industries, sectors, jurisdictions and even individual citizens, within and across relevant public service and public policy domains.

This study suggests a new theoretical framework, whole community co-production, which contributes to the conceptual advancement of co-production in the field of public administration and a whole community approach in the field of emergency and crisis management. The framework also suggests practical implications for other countries to integrate whole community coproduction that may transform current response operations to cope with COVID-19.

Tucson, Arizona, experienced two large‐scale floods in October 1983 and January 1993. In comparing these floods, examines both the natural events and the response of public safety organizations. A summary of the natural events compares the weather, flooding and damages. In consideration of the human response to the 1983 event, finds that the community′s emergency co‐ordination centre was ineffective and isolated from the public safety response network. Furthermore, an organizational structure, suited to the management of large‐scale, multi‐organizational response, failed to emerge. Concludes that local government mitigated these deficiencies before the January 1993 flood. This was accomplished in two ways. First, the community′s emergency management agency merged into the Sheriff′s Department and second, through consensus building and training, the community institutionalized an effective disaster response organizational structure.

When the devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand on the 22 February 2011 the landscape of the city and its communities were irrevocably changed. The purpose of this paper is to provide case study evidence demonstrating the role of a grassroots organisation in shaping a community defined concept of resilience through self-organised disaster response action.

The case organisation, Project Lyttelton is a community group, located in the suburb of Lyttelton, dedicated to building community and resilience through local projects and action. This case study was conducted through in-depth qualitative interviews with key members of the organisation, as well as key individuals in the broader community.

This research has found that Project Lyttelton played a strong role in providing avenues for citizen participation post disaster. Of particular significance was the role of the timebank in providing an already established network for active participation by citizens in the response and recovery. Other findings outline the importance of pre-disaster community activity for facilitating social support and social learning.

This research contributes to the literature by providing case study evidence for the value of a community led and defined framework of resilience. The findings of this work support the need for further integration and support for local community led preparedness and response initiatives and demonstrate the possible value of pre-disaster community preparedness activities. Consequently, this work is of use to academics interested in the role of community following disasters, as well as emergency management practitioners interested in possible pathways for fostering and encouraging locally focused disaster preparedness activities. The findings may also be of interest to community groups working in the sphere of community building and resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of trust in a school community related to the leadership response to crisis.

This study was a multiple-source qualitative study of a single case of a PreK-12 international school called The Learning School.

The findings revealed the nature of how leadership influences and is influenced by context and community. These led to a discussion about two shifts, the focus on self to focus on others and the collective community, and a shift from a focus on self-preservation and protection to learning and growing together as a community. Communication, decision making, and collaboration in the community played a significant role in the community learning and growing from the crisis.

The study was limited by the nature of the topic, crisis in schools. The nature of crisis limits the ability to engage in inquiry before the crisis, and the inquiry was limited to the specific case that occurred in a unique context. The author proposes future cross-case research to develop an understanding of school and leader responses to crisis varies across individuals and contexts, and culture.

While there is a growing literature about trust, it is difficult to study schools in crisis due to the limitations of the topic and sensitivity of issues of crisis in schools. This study gives insight into the dynamics of leadership and trust in a school in crisis.

The primary objective of the current study is to examine the impact that the size of a police department and workload on a department have on response time. Secondarily, the authors look at the effect that incident-level factors such as the severity of a call for service (CFS) and community-level factors such as ethnic diversity have on police response time.

The current study examined CFSs data collected over a three-year period and organizational information from 26 police departments in Northeast Texas, as well as community-level information. In order to measure the effect of organizational variables, community factors and incident-level variables on police response time, the authors employed the use of hierarchical linear models (HLMs).

The results of hierarchical linear modeling indicated that incident-level factors and police department size are significant predictors of response time.

There are two primary limitations: first, there were a lack of available organizational structure correlates such as age and differentiation. Second, the primary data set had a significant number of incomplete or repeating cases, thereby limiting the accuracy of the current study’s analysis.

The most unique aspect of this manuscript is that it examines how organizational factors affect police response time. Numerous studies analyzed determinants of police response time such as incident- and community-level factors, but the importance of organizational factors has not been analyzed.

This study aims to present and discuss the international library and information community’s initial responses to the coronavirus pandemic. It chronicles official statements from various library and information associations as they were released in real-time, thereby providing a contemporary and historical snapshot of the early stages of this global health crisis. The aim is to both historically and thematically contextualize these initial responses to help establish a foundation upon which to anchor, build, extend and analyze approaches to the pandemic as it unfolded (and indeed as it continues to unfold at the time of this writing in June 2020).

Drawing upon a qualitative documentary analysis of statements on COVID-19 released by various international library and information associations, this study provides a thematic analysis of these contemporary policies. Specifically, this thematic analysis was carried out to identify and illuminate major themes appearing within the statements. Further, a comparative thematic analysis was then undertaken to compare the themes across all statements to discover and determine convergences or divergences in content and coverage.

The formal statements released by these organizations feature and share many similar themes in their initial responses to COVID-19, including support for/solidarity with libraries; information provision; maintaining services; digital migration of services; workplace arrangements/concerns; contextual contingencies of libraries (diversity of kinds, circumstances and challenges); health concerns and proper/good hygiene; countering dis/misinformation; external collaborations with public health agencies; and partnerships with industry including publishers.

Although this study’s purview is admittedly limited in size and scope – involving six, albeit major, library and information associations from mainly English speaking countries – it can be used as a foundation for further studies into how libraries and information centres in other English and non-English speaking countries responded to the coronavirus pandemic.

This study can help inform current, alternative, contingency or other future library responses geared towards or tailored for the coronavirus or other health-related crises. It can also be used as a baseline to track the trajectory of library responses and actions as they unfolded throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

By providing the start of an account and analysis of the international library and information science (LIS) community’s initial responses, this study also contributes to the broader (ongoing) conversation about the coronavirus pandemic and intervenes in emerging historical examinations of this crisis. This study could be of interest to LIS scholars and practitioners, in addition to public health researchers, public policymakers, cultural studies academics and historians, interested in how different and intersectional efforts – in this case, the international LIS community – contributed and can contribute to this pandemic and other similar or parallel crises.

The international library and information community’s initial responses to this global health crisis are contextualized, thereby serving as a foundation upon which to anchor, build and extend other research on responses to the pandemic as it unfolded. Drawing upon a qualitative documentary analysis of these statements, this study presents and discusses the international library community’s initial responses to the coronavirus pandemic. It chronicles these statements as they were released in real-time, thereby providing a contemporary and historical snapshot of the early stages of this crisis. The aim is to both historically and thematically contextualize the international library and information community’s initial responses to help establish a foundation upon which to anchor, build, extend and update the international library community’s responses to the pandemic as it unfolded (and indeed as it continues to unfold at the time of this writing in June 2020). This foundation, it is hoped, will help illuminate their respective positions, circumstances, convergences, divergences and areas of possible (future) cooperation, coordination and collaboration.

Gamification elements have been increasingly used in online weight-loss communities to help users lose weight. The purpose of this paper is to systemically examine whether and how social interactions influence users’ continued participation in the context of online weight-loss competitions (OWCs).

This study empirically investigated sustained involvement in OWCs using a Cox proportional hazards model. Additionally, the research utilized a text-mining technique to identify various types of social support and explored their roles in sustaining participation behavior in OWCs.

Community response both within and outside OWCs positively influence users’ continued participation in OWCs. Moreover, whereas emotional support and companionship received within OWCs have a greater impact on users’ continued participation than informational support received within OWCs, informational support received outside OWCs has a greater impact on users’ continued participation than emotional support and companionship received outside OWCs.

This paper highlights users’ social needs in OWC engagement and provides empirical evidence on how different types and sources of social support influence continued participation behavior in OWCs. The research additionally provides management implications for online health community service providers.