Business and Political Dimensions in Disaster Management

A considerable and growing body of crisis management literature seeks to help business managers address disasters. Notwithstanding, the business literature on crisis management fails fully to understand the policy and political aspects of business disasters, and concentrates on prescriptive, managerial issues that show disregard and sometimes disdain for plural democracy. We illustrate our argument with a review of the existing crisis management literature, and three case studies: the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Jack in the Box E. Coli outbreak, and the crash of ValuJet flight 592. We find that the primary gap in the crisis management literature is its failure to understand the motivations of countervailing interest groups and the facts that mobilize them to take action. We argue that the lessons derived from these cases are equally applicable to North American, European and Asian business crises.