Crisis-Related Decision-Making and the Influence of Culture on the Behavior of Decision Makers ― Cross-Cultural Behavior in Crisis Preparedness and Response

This book provides an analysis on the impact of culture on crisis management, exploring how different cultural types are reflected in crisis-related decision making patterns. Providing an interdisciplinary and international perspective with a rich research and practical outlook, this work is an important contribution to the field of crisis management and decision making. Offering essential understanding to how countries, organizations, groups and individuals prepare for and respond to crises thus combining research across several disciplines, offering theoretical development, empirical testing and reporting on the testing of a large number of hypotheses across several frameworks. The novelty of this book lies in its presentation of the quantitative testing of the relationship between cultural theory and crisis management, drawing on data from cases that cross continents and crises types. The book also includes a review of cases from South Korea and suggests a number of ways in which practitioners at various levels of government can prepare their organizations to cope better with the introduction of cultural bias into the decision making process. Those with an interest in risk management, disaster management and crisis management will value this pioneering work as it reveals the influence of cultural bias in decision making processes. This work offers important insights for practice as well as for theory-building, scholars and practitioners of public administration, management, political, and international relations, organizational, social and cultural psychology, amongst others, will all gain from reading this work.

Asthildur Elva Bernharesdottir is a research scientist at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre, University of Iceland. She holds Cand.oecon degree and PhD in Political Science. Asthildur has managerial experiences as a former director for Excellence Iceland, and director for the Institute of International Affairs and the Centre for Small State Studies, University of Iceland. She has also been involved in the broadcasting media. She has taught crisis management courses and supervised case study research. Associate of CRISMART and of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University Asthildur’s approach is interdisciplinary but her research focuses on crises, culture, risk, risk education and recovery. She has published research on crisis and disaster management, coordinated research group on crisis management in Iceland and participated in the development of a long-term disaster relief and recovery planning for local authorities. At the Earthquake Engineering Centre, Asthildur teaches a graduate course (on MSc/PhD level) “Urban resilience in disaster prone areas”.