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The American National Red Cross is in many ways the iconic symbol for disaster response and recovery. The organization, founded in 1881, has a long track record for coming to the aid of those in need in the wake of wars, natural disasters, and other crises. However, in the wake of recent disasters, the Red Cross has been criticized for underperforming. By combining the literature on bureaucracy in Austrian economics and the literature on monocentricity in the work of Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, we provide an analysis of the Red Cross that helps explain the organization’s evolution over time and that also yields implications for disaster management more broadly. Specifically, the Red Cross is a bureaucracy that has become increasingly centralized and rigid as it has become further enmeshed with governmental responsibilities.

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or manmade, disasters. Austrian economists have examined the political economy of natural disasters, disaster relief and recovery efforts, the economic effects of extended wars, post-conflict societal reconstitution, and the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. This literature advances two main findings: (1) that centralized governments are likely to be ineffective at providing the goods and services that are necessary for community recovery and (2) that decentralized efforts are better suited to address the needs of society, to discover the best course of action for producing and distributing these goods and services, and to adapt to changing needs, circumstances, and technology. This paper examines the Austrian theories utilized to examine disasters, provides a summary of the recent research on both natural and unnatural disasters, and proposes areas for future research.

This paper argues that commercial entrepreneurial activities have social implications and can provide needed social spaces during the disaster recovery process, and that viewing commercial enterprises as socially valuable has implications for post-disaster public policy.

This paper discusses themes and concepts developed through in-depth interviews conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas, after Hurricane Katrina. Particular case studies of the personal experiences of communities that recovered after Hurricane Katrina are utilized to highlight how commercial entrepreneurship creates and maintains social spaces where community members can share resources and connect during the recovery process.

Entrepreneurs need not have a specific social mission in order to make social contributions, and commercial entrepreneurship should create and maintain social spaces that are important for community recovery after disasters.

The social spaces that commercial entrepreneurs facilitate should be considered when designing and implementing public policy in the post-disaster context. Policies can often hinder recovery, and policymakers should instead establish clear regulatory regimes and allow for greater space for entrepreneurs to act.

This paper highlights the role entrepreneurs play in advancing social goals and purposes after disasters, specifically how commercial entrepreneurs can create and maintain social spaces where community members gather to discuss their challenges and strategies for disaster recovery. It highlights the extra-economic role of commercial entrepreneurs and discusses the implications for public policy based on this broadened conception of entrepreneurship.

The Mobay Corporation is the largest subsidiary of Bayer, AG, of West Germany. Mobay manufactures polyurethane raw materials, plastics, agricultural chemicals, colorants, and assorted industrial chemicals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the representation of Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) Hula Dance in traditional systems of representation and organization.

This exploratory study analyzes the controlled and natural language vocabularies employed for the representation and organization of Hawaiian culture, in particular Hawaiian hula. The most widely accepted and used systems were examined: classification systems (Library of Congress Classification and Dewey Decimal Classification), subject heading systems (Library of Congress Subject Headings and authority files (Library of Congress and OCLC Authority Files), and citation indexing systems (Web of Science Social Sciences and Art and Humanities databases).

Analysis of various tools of representation and organization revealed biases and diasporization in depictions of Hawaiian culture. The study emphasizes the need to acknowledge the aesthetic perspective of indigenous people in their organization and presentation of their own cultural knowledge and advocates a decolonizing methodology to promote alternative information structures in indigenous communities.

This study contributes to the relatively limited scholarship on representation and organization for indigenous knowledge organization systems, in particular Hawaiian culture. Research suggests that access to Native Hawaiian cultural heritage will raise awareness among information professionals in Hawai’i to the beauty of Native Hawaiian epistemology.

IT is fortunately very rarely that we have to deplore such news‐paper foolishness as the recent spurious investigation into “Library Censorship,” as it was called, which disfigured one of the London morning papers. The method was to find out the names of novelists whose works for reasons good or bad were not on the open shelves of libraries, to present this fact to the said novelists, net their views (which can easily be understood) gratuitously, and then upon the result to attack the competence of librarians. An epidemic of abuse ensued this apparently safe plan, but it appears that apologies have had to follow in one or two cases. The most virulent attack on an individual librarian and the handsomest apology appeared in The Saturday Review, and in various ways other newspapers have recanted.

Two major earthquakes which struck Northwestern Turkey in 1999 exposed rampant corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The government’s relief efforts were tainted by corruption as well, and exhibited a great deal of incompetence. How voters responded to these in the next election held in 2002 is investigated. The fact that different group of parties were responsible for the construction of the shoddy buildings, and for the corruption and mismanagement related to relief, provided us with a unique opportunity to determine whether and how the electorate punished the culprits for each of these. The purpose of this paper is to shed light also on the new party system which emerged in Turkey after 2002.

Vote equations are estimated for the seven major political parties. These are fitted to cross-provincial data individually, using ordinary least squares and robust regression methods, and as a system, using seemingly unrelated regressions procedures. The same picture emerges from each of these methods.

Not just those ruling at the time of the earthquakes, but also other parties which were in power when the substandard buildings, were built were held accountable by the electorate. Furthermore, the Turkish voters appear to have allocated the blame rationally, taking into consideration the division of labor in the central government, and the relative influences the parties had on local administrations. Reaction of the voters to government incompetence and corruption was one of the factors which resulted in the emergence of a new party system. In 2002, the AKP, established only a year before, captured almost all of the far-right Islamist, about half of the far-right nationalist, and more than half of the center-right votes in 2002.

Corruption usually makes little difference in the fortunes of politicians. Some recent studies suggest that it takes more than just exposure of corruption to get the voters to react. Politicians pay a significant price only when the corruption touches all political parties across the board, is not accompanied by good governance, and competent non-corrupt alternatives are available. The results provide support for this assertion from the natural experiment that has taken place in Turkey.