Just like Nicholas I am very much interested in disasters, and his earlier post made me wonder some more about the connection to the issue of infrastructures. Some connections are obvious once you talk about technological disasters propers, especially if you approach the topic from a “normal accidents” angle (as Perrow in his treatise on normal accidents utilizes a general notion of networks including humans, technological artefacts, institutions, etc.). But there is also the whole literature about high-reliability organizations (HROs) which Nicholas alluded to in his second post on this topic, in which the focus is more on human behavior in high-risk situations and on “mindful organizing”.

One common denominator between the various types of research and literatures on disasters and near misses is the emphasis given to relational structures and processes: Perrow’s notion of vulnerable systems is basically a conceptualization of networks the elements of which can be loosely or tightly coupled, and HRO authors like Weick characterize mindful behavior as “heedful interrelating”.
Having been concerned with micropatterns of responding to disruptions in my own post-doc research, I am struck by the extent to which such responses are characterized by spontaneous forms of interrelating among participants, for example in emergent groups in communities struck by disasters. Furthermore, organizations coping with disruptions look more like networks than like hierarchies – a condition which HROs almost appear to emulate.

Bottom line is, I think, that an extended infrastructural understanding of understanding disasters, near misses, high-risk situations, and so on, may be elaborated by more systematically discussing the various social and technological aspects of interrelating in extreme situation. Actually, there is a lot of research going on in this area right now since disaster researchers and disaster response practitioners generally tend to be quite aware about the relational aspects of responding to disruptions. Just this week, our local communicating disaster research group met for a workshop on the use of social media in crisis situations, and you may check out the outline here. Apparently, disaster response organizations increasingly ponder possibilities of utilizing people’s technologically augmented abilities of interrelating in real time: if you have people with smartphones present at a disaster site, and they will spontaneously interrelate in immediate disaster responses (like looking for survivors, moving debris etc.) anyway, while you as an outsider start with knowing nothing or very little about where and how to deploy your own helpers and machines, why not use survivors’ smartphones, their GPS and photo capabilities for coordinating disaster responses? The “disaster app” may at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, become an obligatory smartphone functionality.

As I am generally interested in “technological” disasters and write for an infrastructure blog, I always wonder about infrastructural disasters.

I recently read an interesting and somewhat non-tradition piece for an economics journal (although it does harken to the “Freakonomics” style of inquiry, if only it had a comparison case where the same set of underlying mechanisms operated):

Frey, Bruno S., David A. Savage, and Benno Torgler. 2011. “Behavior under Extreme Conditions: The Titanic Disaster.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(1): 209–22.

The full-text article, which is currently complimentary, reviews how individuals behaved (based mainly on personal characteristics) during one of the “deadliest peacetime maritime disasters.” The abstract reads:

During the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on her maiden voyage. Two hours and 40 minutes later she sank, resulting in the loss of 1,501 lives—more than two-thirds of her 2,207 passengers and crew. This remains one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous. The disaster came as a great shock because the vessel was equipped with the most advanced technology at that time, had an experienced crew, and was thought to be practically “unsinkable” (although the belief that the ship had been widely believed to be truly unsinkable actually arose after the sinking, as explained in Howell, 1999). The Titanic’s fame was enhanced by the considerable number of fifi lms made about it: not including various made-for-television movies and series, the list would include Saved from the Titanic (1912), In Nacht und Eis (1912), Atlantic (1929), Titanic (1943 and 1953), A Night to Remember (1958), Raise the Titanic! (1980), and of course the 1997 Titanic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. In 1985, a joint American–French expedition, led by Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard, located the wreckage and collected approximately 6,000 artifacts, which were later shown in an exhibition that toured the world.

The results suggest when you compare the quick sink of the Lusitania (under 20 mins) to the show, gradual sink of the Titanic (over a 3 hour period), you learn something about the dynamics of self-interest under certain circumstances.

The comparison between the Titanic and the Lusitania suggests that when time is scarce, individual self-interested flight behavior predominates, while altruism and social norms and power through social status become more important if there is suffificient time for them to evolve.