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The purpose of this paper is to determine whether it is useful to tease apart the intimately related propositions of social production and social construction to guide thinking in the multidisciplinary study of disasters.

The authors address our question by reviewing literature on disasters in the social sciences to disambiguate the concepts of social production and social construction.

The authors have found that entertaining the distinction between social production and social construct can inform both thinking and action on disasters by facilitating critical exercises in reframing that facilitate dialog across difference. The authors present a series of arguments on the social production and construction of disaster and advocate putting these constructs in dialog with vulnerability frameworks of the social production of disasters.

This commentary contributes to disambiguating important theoretical and practical concepts in disaster studies. The reframing approach can inform both research and more inclusive disaster management and risk reduction efforts.

This article provides an introduction and assessment of the English and Spanish literatures on gender relations in disaster contexts. We analyze regional patterns of differences and similarities in women’s disaster experiences and the differing research questions raised by these patterns in the scholarly and practice‐based literature. The analysis supports the claim that how gender is theorized makes a difference in public policy and practical approaches to disaster risk management. We propose new directions in the field of disaster social science and contribute a current bibliography in the emerging gender and disaster field.

This paper aims to demonstrate how vulnerable consumer-citizens mobilize social capital following a natural disaster, showing how different forms of social capital contribute to well-being and resilience.

An embedded case study design comparing three different social networks is employed.

Understanding the active role consumer-citizens play in provisioning within social networks provides a deeper understanding of the important mechanisms that explain how different forms of social capital contribute to well-being. The three identified networks demonstrate different structural signatures composed of differing forms of social capital that arise following a natural disaster.

Drawing on social capital theory, this study contributes to advancing transformative service research, providing implications for both theory and practice.

This study is one of the first to empirically compare networks in a natural disaster context, demonstrating the effects of bonding, bridging and linking social capital on well-being and community resilience. This study shows how social network analysis can be used to model network processes and mechanisms. Findings highlight the important role of social provisioning to vulnerable consumer-citizens as an alternate form of consumption.

Though some disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) abstractions and core concepts may appear transparently obvious to some readers, others might not easily grasp the complexities embedded in them. This chapter focusses on the main arguments connected to DRRM. It unravels some of the complexities that abound in the framing of key disaster risk reduction concepts in literature. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part focusses on understanding the dynamics of disasters. This part revisits definitions of disasters in literature, how they have been conceptualised in academia and what makes them different from other related concepts such as hazards, crisis, vulnerabilities and emergencies. Furthermore, considering that some impacts of disasters are more obvious than others, it examines some of the less conspicuous relationships between disasters and other phenomena. The second part examines the concept of DRRM in existing literature, highlighting the importance of resilience in DRRM and revisiting key methodological approaches in building resilience among communities. The third part places the concept of DRRM within the African context. It demonstrates the delicate aspects embedded in successful DRRM in Africa amid institutional development and policy issues. This part concludes with the identification of key knowledge gaps in DRRM in Africa. These knowledge gaps identified in the wider literature are used to justify why the chapters in this book and the context covered (sub-Saharan Africa) are of utmost importance in DRRM.

This paper aims to highlight the roles of sudden change and social disruption in the disaster landscape that shapes the environment of tourism destinations when hazards intersect with human systems.

This paper draws on the social science literature on disasters and crises. To this end, this paper provides an overview of the role abrupt changes have in transforming the tourism and hospitality industries.

This paper serves as a call to seek bold solutions that bring about industry best practices while fostering local community stakeholders in a more integrated way to build a more resilient future.

The disaster landscape provides opportunities to advance new structures, norms, cultural beliefs and collaborations that can foster resilience. This paper highlights the need to integrate resilience in the form of disaster management, recovery and organizational continuity strategies in the post-COVID-19 hospitality and tourism industries.

The purpose of this paper is to present a concept of informational capital to explain the interplay between social capital and information technology in community-based disaster management. It aims to discuss the role and formation of informational capital in community disaster resilience.

Based on an exploratory case study focusing on the 2010 eruption of Merapi volcano in Central Java, Indonesia, the paper seeks to analyse the emergence of disaster response fully organized by grassroots groups in Yogyakarta. In advancing the concept of informational capital, this paper analyses how the grassroots groups were able to mobilize resources for disaster mitigation, through which social capital became the foundation of community-based disaster response and recovery. Furthermore, the mobilization of social capital was significantly enhanced by mutual interactions facilitated by the use of information technology. This is evident in the role of Jalin Merapi, a web-based organization formed to respond to the crisis after the volcano eruption.

The concept of informational capital revolves around the ways in which social capital and information act as crucial assets when a disaster strikes. Through informational capital, strong community bonds and ties are transformed into organized information that effectively facilitates collective action to face the emergency crisis.

This paper presents a new concept of informational capital and highlights its key role in facilitating disaster management processes and contribution to community disaster resilience.

This paper aims to analyse how emerging technologies (ETs) impact on improving performance in disaster management (DM) processes and, concretely, their impact on the performance according to the different phases of the DM cycle (preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation).

The methodology is based on a systematic review of the literature. Scopus, ProQuest, EBSCO and Web of Science were used as data sources, and an initial sample of 373 scientific articles was collected. After abstracts and full texts were read and refinements to the search were made, a final corpus of 69 publications was analysed using VOSviewer software for text mining and cluster visualisation.

The results highlight how ETs foster the preparedness and resilience of specific systems when dealing with different phases of the DM cycle. Simulation and disaster risk reduction are the fields of major relevance in the application of ETs to DM.

This paper contributes to the literature by adding the lenses of performance measurement, management and accountability in analysing the impact of ETs on DM. It thus represents a starting point for scholars to develop future research on a rapidly and continuously developing topic.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze some barriers and the “drivers of localism” during the long-term disaster recovery process. The main question is: what types of discourses and practices about localism are being heard and revealed in the frontline?

Fieldwork, which was conducted from January 2010 to June 2013, consisted of participant observation and qualitative data collection. The authors opted for an approach that privileges narrative and observation, dialoguing with participants to gather local knowledge and information. Data were analyzed in light of the disaster recovery literature, focusing on disaster recovery as an expression of power relations.

Localism has been framed in diverse ways according to the interests of social groups placed in contextual meanings and, sometimes, in different phases of risk and disaster management. One important driver of localism is disaster narrative framing that allowed identification of how localism is composed, by whom and how.

One important aspect that needs further research is longitudinal studies to investigate how the barriers are changing between the generations, and how intergenerational dialogues can be promoted to sustain long-term participation and localism.

This study recommends the need to identify who is talking about the importance of local and how localism has been framed in policy and action. It is important to empower localism in order to provide ways for local people sharing what is going on in the frontline. But it is also essential to provide funding and means of implementation for local initiatives regarding advocating, researching and proposing disaster recovery interventions led by people.

Purpose – Everyday human behavior is complicated and difficult to understand. When a disaster event is factored in, human behavior becomes even more complicated. Much like during routine times where resources are unequally distributed, so too are the impacts of a disaster. That is, people are more and less vulnerable to disaster and the damage a disaster inflicts has more to do with the social context (type of housing, level of urbanization, average level of education) of the impacted community. Part of the social context of a community that is not considered part of vulnerability analysis is rates of crime. Indeed, there is reliable evidence that demonstrates lawlessness and crime do not happen after “typical” disasters (e.g., see Quarantelli, 2005). However, we are beginning to see antisocial or conflict behavior, such as looting, price gouging, and violence, especially in more recent events like Hurricanes Hugo and Katrina.

Design/methodology/approach – Using the case studies of Hurricanes Hugo and Katrina, this chapter applies conflict and structural strain theories to lawlessness post-disaster, and makes call to consider these theories as part of disaster studies.

Findings – There are emerging patterns of lawlessness that are happening after contemporary disaster events.

Value of the paper – Considerable research posits that people, for the most part, act in consensus following a typical disaster event. However, current events like Hurricane Katrina are by no means typical, and, in fact, trigger new typologies for understanding acute crisis events. These new events are showing us that what have traditionally been called disaster myths may be becoming more of a reality than we once thought. Therefore, criminology of disaster is important to develop further. Little research does this, outside of Harper and Frailing (2010).

Cities have been exposed to a variety of natural disasters such as flooding, extreme temperatures, storms, earthquakes, and other natural shocks, and have had to respond and adapt to such pressures over time. In the context of global climate change, natural disasters have increased across the globe. Apart from climate change, many urban environments in Latin America are experiencing significant transformations in land use patterns, socio-demographic change, changing labor markets, and economic growth, resulting from recent decades of globalization. Such transformations have resulted in the internal fragmentation of cities. In this context, the purpose of the present chapter is to demonstrate the importance in both theoretical and methodological terms, of integrating the concept of socio-environmental fragmentation into urban vulnerability research in order to make progress toward higher degrees of local sustainability in those areas of the city that suffer natural disasters and fragmentation.

A mixed methods approach is used in order to combine different technical issues from urban and climate change studies.

The findings are related to the importance of an integrated approach, regarding the complexity of urban life, and the relationship between the urban, the social, and the environmental phenomenon.

This chapter relates to the revisit of the current state of preparedness and to determine whether further adaptations are required. The authors understood that these kinds of mixed approaches are necessary in order to understand the new complexity of urban processes.