Equip your students with a strong understanding of the essential role that communicators play in moments of crisis and the tools they need to conduct ethically sound crisis management.

Ethics for Disaster addresses the moral aspects of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, plane crashes, Avian Flu pandemics, and other disasters. Naomi Zack explores how these catastrophes illuminate the existing inequalities in society. By employing the moral systems of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics to analyze the consequences of recent natural disasters, Zack reveals the special plight of the poor, disabled, and infirm when tragedy strikes. Zack explores the political foundations of social contract theory and dignitarianism and invites readers to rethink the distinction between risk in normal times and risk in disaster. Using both real life and fictional examples, Zack forcefully argues for the preservation of normal moral principles in times of national crisis and emergency, stressing the moral obligation of both individuals and government in preparing for and responding to disaster..

Leading scholars in bioethics and public health ethics clarify the key values and norms of emergency planning and response and address ethical issues relating to the allocation of scarce resources, research in the context of emergencies, community participation in preparedness planning, the protection of those with special needs, and the duties public health professionals.

Offering a strategic orientation to crisis management, this fully updated edition of Crisis Management: Leading in the New Strategy Landscape, Second Edition by William "Rick" Crandall, John A. Parnell, and John E. Spillan helps readers understand the importance of planning for crises within the wider framework of an organization's regular strategic management process. This strikingly engaging and easy-to-follow text focuses on a four-stage crisis management framework: 1) Landscape Survey: identifying potential crisis vulnerabilities, 2) Strategic Planning: organizing the crisis management team and writing the plan, 3) Crisis Management: addressing the crisis when it occurs, and 4) Organizational Learning: applying lessons from crises so they will be prevented or mitigated in the future.

The daily process of public service provision and administration is filled with value judgments and value trade-offs, and the safeguarding of just and fair processes is key to the public’s trust in governing institutions. In crises, public decision-makers face complex ethical judgments under great uncertainty, timepressure, and heightened public scrutiny. A lack of attention to the ethical dimensions of crises has lead decision-makers to long-shadow crises that never reach closure. Furthermore, crises triggered by unethical conduct by public officials steadily feed people’s cynicism about politicians and bureaucracy. The fact that decision-makers often are judged on how they dealt with ethical issues in crises further underlines the importance of this topic. Little scholarly attention had been paid to how ethics play into and are dealt with in situations when they matters most – in crises. In order to improve government performance we need to analyze the ethical dilemmas and normative challenges that face practitioners in crises. This book meets this challenge by presenting a public policy framework for analyzing the ethical dilemmas in crises and introduces ten empirical chapters written by prominent public administration and crisis management scholars. The cases reviewed include Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 Commission, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Memorial Hospital Tragedy during Hurricane Katrina. Building off the empirical focus on inherent ethical challenges in crises and actor ethics in evaluation and judgment, the concluding chapter outlines important lessons about criteria for crisis decision-making and strategies, the poisoned apple of bureaucratic discretion, and the nature of post-crisis evaluations. The book is geared toward students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with public management, public sector ethics, public policy, crisis management, and the implication of these factors on business and corporate crisis management.

During a wide-reaching catastrophic public health emergency or disaster, existing surge capacity plans may not be sufficient to enable health care providers to continue to adhere to normal treatment procedures and follow usual standards of care. This is a particular concern for emergencies that may severely strain resources across a large geographic area, such as a pandemic influenza or the detonation of a nuclear device. Under these circumstances, it may be impossible to provide care according to the standards of care used in non-disaster situations, and, under the most extreme circumstances, it may not even be possible to provide basic life sustaining interventions to all patients who need them. Although recent efforts to address these concerns have accomplished a tremendous amount in just a few years, a great deal remains to be done in even the most advanced plan. This workshop summary highlights the extensive work that is already occurring across the nation. Specifically, the book draws attention to existing federal, state, and local policies and protocols for crisis standards of care; discusses current barriers to increased provider and community engagement; relays examples of existing interstate collaborations; and presents workshop participants' ideas, comments, concerns, and potential solutions to some of the most difficult challenges.

In this fully updated Second Edition, three of today’s most respected crisis/risk communication scholars provide the latest theory, practice, and innovative approaches for handling crisis. This acclaimed book presents the discourse of renewal as a theory to manage crises effectively. The book provides 15 in-depth case studies that highlight successes and failures in dealing with core issues of crisis leadership, managing uncertainty, communicating effectively, understanding risk, promoting communication ethics, enabling organizational learning, and producing renewing responses to crisis. Unlike other crisis communication texts, this book answers the question, “What now?” and explains how organizations can and should emerge from crisis.