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The scope of disaster impacts has become extensive. It is important that resources can be distributed to the needed places in time, and to prevent a second disaster. The appropriate usage of open contract to disaster management is important; therefore, this study aims to discuss the implication, possible problems and strategies of the current use of open contracts.

Content analysis was used to analyze the operation experiences from contract data collaterally. An in‐depth interview with contract participants was also applied to probe into more issues in practice.

The study targeted emergency supplies and services, focusing on three dimensions: regulation, contract preparation and contract execution, and found that: conflicts and problems exist between current major procurement and disaster management regulations; government must master open contract suppliers; items in the open contract must be concrete and specific; performance bond and default clause would only keep contractors away from any service; missing links are still among audit system, construction estimation, and construction inspection and acceptance in the current open contract system.

The results of this study can be applied to assist governments to review the current implications of open contract, and to construct better systems which meet the features and needs of emergency responses.

Open contract is a very important tool for saving lives during emergencies, although rarely discussed. This study explored current problems and strategies, and can be provided for better future system construction.

Emergency contracting has risen to the fore in both interest and importance in the US since September 11, 2001 (9/11). Most recently, the US government's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita piqued the interest of both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government and their respective oversight bodies. This paper briefly reviews the literature of emergency contracting with special focus on the statutory and regulatory framework for emergency contracting, identifies some contracting solutions established by the US government to deal more effectively with emergency contracting, and pinpoints some problems faced by emergency contracting agencies and anomalies of their emergency contracting practices.

Natural disasters often destroy hundreds of homes that leave victims homeless and leads to community displacement. In the USA, such disasters happen over 60 times per year. This leads to logistical and contractual nightmare for the planning agencies and political/community leaders required to provide shelter for displaced citizens. One of the most important challenges for the policy makers and aid providers is to make homes available to the homeless victims in as short a period as possible. Temporary shelter is costly and often excessively delayed. Also quality and long stay (more than four years for the Katrina victims) in temporary shelter affected victims both mentally and physically. The aim of this paper is to propose a strategic framework that assists responsible entities to provide housing to the disaster victims in a short period of time, for example to construct 200 homes in 30 days after disaster (representing a subdivision).

The main objective of this research is to perform feasibility study of implementing such a strategy that would enable agencies to provide better solutions for post disaster housing assistance. This paper mainly explains four phases that constitute the development of the strategic framework. The first two phases of the framework carry out pre‐disaster planning and establish relationships among the participating entities. Whereas, the third phase includes simulating post disaster processes identified in the previous phases to evaluate response trade‐offs. The last phase is about the real implementation of this strategy after disaster that also incorporates its outcomes and experiences into previously planned strategy.

It was found through second part of research, simulation studies, that such a strategy can be prepared before the disaster and activated when needed. This would drastically reduce the housing response time.

This would help in improving the strategy for future disasters. Successful execution would facilitate opportunities to reduce stress for the victims and encourage faster recovery.

During a construction crisis, traditional contracts are inflexible, restrictive and counter‐productive. Consequently, project participants tend to opt out of contract procedures which, in turn, leads to a disjointed organization and a loss of managerial control. To avoid this problem, drafters of traditional construction contracts need to embrace the principles that underlie contemporary crisis management thinking. However, the construction industry culture is likely to represent a barrier to the successful implementation of more managerially astute contracts such as the Engineering and Construction Contract. As an intermediate step, emergency procedures are suggested. These could be easily incorporated into the existing traditional forms of contract, providing temporary flexibility during a crisis, while at the same time, affording an element of managerial control.

Emergency organizations allocate specific tasks to responders in an attempt to resolve increasingly complex incidents. Many studies take a pragmatic perspective by studying how emergency organizations can more effectively compartmentalize response tasks. Yet, the effects of compartmentalization on responders' sensemaking of moral issues (i.e. moral sensemaking) has received almost no attention.

Based on existing research, the authors bring together different insights on the relation between compartmentalization and emergency responders’ sensemaking of moral issues.

The authors demonstrate that emergency organizations may undermine the moral sensemaking of responders through introducing moral blind spots and moral dissociation or, instead, enable moral sensemaking through enhancing moral agency and awareness. The authors argue that emergency organizations need to induce moral sense-discrediting among responders to enhance their moral sensemaking. Finally, the authors conclude with discussing two types of compartmentalizing tasks, functional concentration and the holographic metaphor, to show that the latter is most likely to enhance moral sensemaking among emergency responders.

This study introduces moral sensemaking to the emergency management literature and investigates how organizational design influences it.

This paper aims to explore the key risk factors affecting the Personnel Localization Management of international construction projects under the major public emergencies represented by the novel coronavirus pneumonia pandemic (hereinafter COVID-19) and how the public emergency affected the Personnel Localization Management from three levels: staff turnover rate, the number of different personnel, the salary and performance of workers. The paper also helps to enhance the construction enterprises' response capacity of major public emergencies and provides a comprehensive framework of optimization strategies for the Personnel Localization Management of international construction projects (hereinafter projects).

The main research method of this paper is the case study, and ten representative international construction projects are selected for case study in China construction enterprises (hereinafter CCE). And this study used the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and comparative analysis to find out all potential risk factors under the COVID-19 and analyze how the epidemic affects the Personnel Localization Management of projects which based on the primary data from 10 projects obtained through in-depth interviews and the secondary data from China First Metallurgical Group and Central South Construction Group's Overseas Enterprise.

The findings show that the outbreak of the major public emergencies not only greatly increased eight risk factors but also directly led to an increase in staff turnover rate. Meanwhile, the numbers of Chinese and local managers and workers are all affected, and an increase in the number and the salary performance of local workers can be reduced, to a certain extent, to the cost-to-output ratio of the projects. The findings would help construction enterprises better cope with Personnel Localization Management and enhance the response capacity of major public emergencies.

This study will broaden researchers' horizons regarding “Personnel Localization Management under major public emergencies” and “risk factors of Personnel Localization Management in an international context.” Furthermore, construction enterprises looking for a better mechanism of Personnel Localization Management can benefit from research findings and lessons learned from the authors' case study during or before an outbreak of major public emergency. Lastly, the framework of optimization strategies for Personnel Localization Management can be used both for research purposes and practice issues in international construction projects.

The findings from the authors' case study offer the direction for international construction enterprises in China and other countries to formulate effective measures, strengthen overseas business and establish a crisis management mechanism for Personnel Localization Management under major public emergencies, and the findings provide emergency plans for projects to improve the public crisis handling capacity and respond to major public emergencies such as the COVID-19.

This study analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 on the Personnel Localization Management of international construction projects from the perspective of personnel. This study provides a theoretical reference for the international construction industry to actively respond to major public emergencies. Besides, the research is conducive to improving the emergency response mechanism in the construction industry, and further promoting the high-quality and globalized development of international construction.

This study provides other researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the risk factors affecting the Personnel Localization Management of projects under the COVID-19 and insight for further research on localization management, risk management, and project management.

To meet the rapidly increasing demand for medical treatment during the outbreak of COVID-19, Huoshengshan and Leishenshan Hospital are rapidly built (9–12 days) in Wuhan. These two urgent emergency projects are unprecedented. In general, substantial literature suggests that the possibility of shortening a schedule by more than a quarter of its original duration is implausible. By contrast, the two projects had successfully compressed the schedules from months and years to about ten days. This study aims to investigate how this was done and provide references for future projects.

The study uses qualitative case study techniques to analyze the project practices in two urgent emergency projects. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and archival research. During interviews, interviewees were asked to describe the project practices adopted to overcome the challenges and freely share their experiences and knowledge.

The results illustrate that a high degree of schedule compression is achievable through tactful crashing, substitution and overlapping applications. The successful practices heavily rely on the high capacity of participants and necessary organization, management and technology innovations, such as three-level matrix organizational structure, reverse design method, site partition, mock-up room first strategies and prefabricated construction technology. For instance, the reverse design method is one of the most significant innovations to project simplification and accelerate and worthy of promotion for future emergency projects.

The empirical findings are significant as they evoke new thinking and direction for addressing the main challenges of sharp schedule compression and provide valuable references for future emergency projects, including selecting high-capacity contractors and replacing the conventional design methods with reverse design.

Substantial studies indicate that the maximum degree of schedule compression is highly unlikely to exceed 25%, but this study suggests that sharp compression is possible. Although with flaws in its beauty (i.e. compressing schedule at the expense of construction cost and quality), it is also a breakthrough. It provides the building block for future research in this fertile and unexplored area.

The construction industry is facing challenges not only for workers' mobility in the pandemic situation but also for Lean Construction (LC) practise in responding to the high-quality development during the post-pandemic. As such, this paper presents a construction workforce management framework based on LC to manage both the emergency goal in migrant worker management and the long-term goal in labour productivity improvement in China.

The framework is created based on the integrated culture and technology strategies of LC. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is taken to explore factors influencing the mobility of construction workers and to measure labour productivity improvement. The case study approach is adopted to demonstrate the framework application.

For method application, a time-and-motion study and Percent Plan Complete indicator are proposed to offer labour productivity measurements of “resources efficiency” and “flow efficiency”. Moreover, the case study provides an industry level solution for construction workforce management and Lean Construction culture shaping, as well as witnesses the LC culture and technology strategies alignment contributing to LC practise innovation.

Compared with previous studies which emphasised solely LC techniques rather than socio-technical system thinking, the proposed integration framework as well as implementation of “Worker's Home” and “Lean Work Package” management models in the COVID-19 pandemic contribute to new extensions of both the fundamental of knowledge and practise in LC.

Bill Freudenburg’s concept of recreancy is used as a frame for explaining processes that perpetuate questionable regimes of emergency response planning. The specific instance of tar sands upgrading in Alberta, Canada, is used as a case in point. When recreancy is institutionalized so that the results correlate across permitted hazardous facilities, it must be concluded that recreancy is less of a situational response than a normative dynamic.