Politics of Crisis Management : Public Leadership Under Pressure

List of figures and table vii Acknowledgments ix Crisis management in political systems: five leadership challenges 1(17) Crisis management and public leadership 1(1) The nature of crisis 2(2) The ubiquity of crisis 4(3) Crisis management: leadership perspectives 7(3) Leadership in crisis: five critical tasks 10(8) Sense making: grasping crises as they unfold 18(24) What the hell is going on? 18(1) Barriers to crisis recognition: organizational limitations 19(9) Psychological dimensions of sense making: stress and performance 28(2) Precarious reality-testing: constraints 30(5) Conditions for reliable reality-testing 35(2) Conclusion 37(5) Decision making: critical choices and their implementation 42(27) The myth of chief executive choice 42(1) Leaders as crisis decision makers 43(2) Leaders and their crisis teams: group dynamics 45(6) How governmental crisis decisions ``happen'' 51(5) From decisions to responses: the importance of crisis coordination 56(7) Putting crisis leadership in its place 63(6) Meaning making: crisis management as political communication 69(22) Crisis communication as politics 69(1) Crisis communication in a mediated political world 70(8) The battle for credibility 78(4) Meaning-making strategies: symbolic crisis management 82(5) Conclusion 87(4) End games: crisis termination and accountability 91(24) It ain't over till it's over 91(2) The political challenge of crisis termination 93(6) Crisis termination and the challenges of accountability 99(4) Blame games and the politics of meaning making 103(8) Accountability, blame games, and democracy 111(4) Learning from crises and the politics of reform 115(22) Never again! 115(2) Learning from crisis 117(5) Change without learning: crisis as opportunity for reform 122(8) Implementing lessons of crisis: an impossible task? 130(2) The perils of opportunity: from crisis-induced reforms to reform-induced crises 132(5) How to deal with crisis: lessons for prudent leadership 137(21) Introduction 137(1) Grasping the nature of crises 138(2) Improving crisis sense making 140(4) Improving crisis decision making 144(4) Improving crisis meaning making 148(2) Improving crisis termination 150(2) Improving crisis learning and reform craft 152(4) Preparing for crises: concluding reflections 156(2) References 158(18) Index 176