This book explores how and why an event is a precursor to the emergence of a crisis and how a given crisis affects an organization and its stakeholders. Using existing systems theory blended with innovative use of wave, epidemiological, immunological and psycho-social theories, the author discusses ways to understand the effects of different types of crises while showing how to document and/or quantitatively measure those effects. The book offers new models illustrating how events trigger crises and how they subsequently morph into catastrophes and disasters. Using theories and tools tested in organizational settings to identify contributors to a traumatic event, this book makes a valuable contribution to organizational and crisis management literature.

The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Historians of the stabilization phase of Weimar Germany tend to identify German recovery after the First World War with the struggle to revise reparations and control hyperinflation. Focusing primarily on economic aspects is not sufficient, however, the author argues; the financial burden of recovery was only one of several major causes of reaction against the republic. Drawing on material from major German cities, he is able to trace the emergence of strong local activism and of comprehensive and functional policies of recovery on the municipal level which enjoyed broad political backing. Ironically, these same programs that created consensus also contained the potential for destabilization: they unleashed intense debate over the needs of the consumersand the purpose and extent of public spending, and with that of government intervention more generally, which accelerated the fragmentation of bourgeois politics, leading to the final destruction of the Weimar Republic.

Andrei Bely was the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century. Chiefly known outside of Russia as a novelist (his Petersburg is the best modern Russian novel), he was also a leading symbolist poet and profound philosophical critic. Bely was also a mystic who had an unsurpassed ability to express his visions in writing, and he often did so in the form of lyrical essays, a selection of which is offered here. Many of these essays were written as the twentieth century stood at the threshold of a new epoch. For Bely, a new religious consciousness was emerging, rooted in Vladimir Solovyov's visions of Sophia and Nietzsche's proclamation that a new man was on the verge of being created. A new dawn-both joyful and terrifying-was already visible on the horizon. "The artist is the creator of the universe," Andrei Bely declares in one of his philosophical prose poems collected in this book. Roaming fluidly between poetry and theory, between analysis and reverie, Bely transforms the material and intellectual revolution of modernity into an aesthetic revolution, and at the same time presages the revolutionary political upheaval of the twentieth century. In Boris Jakim's capable translation, Bely's intriguing, breathless improvisations sparkle with insight and wit.-Robert Bird, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, Univ. of Chicago Andrei Bely-poet, novelist, and thinker-was one of the central figures of early twentieth-century Russian literature. His thought, represented by the nine essays collected here, examining in depth the works of Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Nietzsche, and the Russian poets (particularly his fellow Symbolists), is remarkable both in its scope and in its form of expression. His style combines visionary exaltation with self-humor in a way uniquely his own: "Our salvation," as he writes in the final essay, "lies in playful exuberance." Boris Jakim succeeds at the almost impossible task of capturing that quality in his fine translations.-Richard Pevear, translator of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov For Andrei Bely, every question is a religious question, every answer a religious answer. The essays included in this collection, each in its own way, figure as both question and answer. For, with Bely, all that is important in human life-art, meaning, struggle, discovery-shimmers in a metaxu whose domain is precisely that of religion as the site of revelation. These essays-apocalyptic, imaginal, gnomic-though written nearly a century ago, nevertheless provide us with new ways of seeing the implicitly poetic, integral, and eminently religious nature of both human existence and the structure of the world. Boris Jakim is to be commended for the gift of this translation, which provides the English-speaking world a much-needed alternative to the prevailing religious discourses so preoccupied with apologetics and polemics and so forgetful of poetry and mysticism.-Michael Martin, author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics

A Marxist-feminist approach examining disaster relief in the US.

Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing form we encounter them, our collective repertoire of symbolic forms, historical sensibilities, modes of representation, and patterns of imagination determine how we identify, analyze and deal with catastrophes and crises.This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire’s eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.

Presents a chronologically-arranged reference to catastrophic events in American history, including natural disasters, economic depressions, riots, murders, and terrorist attacks.