Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social network in an emergency management organization during a large exercise held in Greenland in 2016. Inspired by approaches in business and organizational studies the aim is to investigate the flow of information through formal as well as informal channels.

Social network analysis is applied to model this flow and the social network is analyzed with regard to core/periphery structure and actor centrality. In order to explore the relationships between actor attributes such as age, years of experience, operational Arctic experience, smoking and personal interests, a regression analysis is employed with membership of the network core as dependent variable.

The findings show that smoking, rank and ad hoc membership of the emergency management organization influence the odds for being in the core of this particular social network most. Finally, some strengths and weaknesses of the approach are discussed as well as implications for future research in the field.

Emergency management tasks are often performed more through informal coordination than “by the book.” A medium for such informal coordination is the social network that emerges among individual actors who like each other, share interests and experience and communicate directly with each other. Emergency managers use that kind of social network to cut red tape and solve urgent problems and share knowledge in ways not mapped in plans or shown in organigrams. Most practitioners are aware of this, but it is a field not well theorized.

IThe activity of the group has continued to progress with great energy and enthusiasm for practical applications of the theoretical ideas and schemes of the members, many of whom have acted as consultants to private, government and international institutions. Some of the longer‐serving members retired, but continued to attend meetings. The Group heard with great regret of the death of Mr B. I. Palmer, its Founder Chairman. An important element in the discussions from its beginning was the theoretical scheme of S. R. Ranganathan, and this was largely due to Palmer, who had returned from war service in India fired with enthusiasm for Ranganathan's ideas, and determined to interest others in developing and applying them. His collaboration with Mr A. J. Wells, another founder member, had as an early result their little monograph, The fundamentals of library classification, which has greatly influenced both teaching and practice of classification, and not only in Britain.

Reasons are given for a proposed new universal decimal classification obtained by re‐allocating the subject fields of the UDC main classes according to present day views, state of knowledge, and priorities, and to subdivide these main classes only by subfields of subject fields. The specific facets of each field should be represented by a uniform array of special auxiliaries attached to the fields through the technique of interrupted subdivision. These should express the following categories: (1) Theory, (2) Objects, (3) Processes, (4) Attributes, (6) Order, organization, (7) Relation, (8) Determination, (9) Evaluation ((5) is left free for the moment). Proposals for further simplification of the scheme are outlined regarding the general categories, the symbols used, and the rules for syntagmatic organization, taking into account the implications of computer technology. Possible changes in the layout and editions of such a new classification are discussed.