The study focuses on organized activities within communities experiencing disaster. It is initiated by a description of the nature of disaster involvement on the part of various community organizations. A discussion follows of the different meanings of the term 'disaster' and of the social implications created by differential characteristics of disaster agents. It is suggested that the primary disruption of the social structure is revealed in unplanned changes in interorganizational relationships. Four types of organized behavior are isolated, derived from a cross-classification of the nature of the disaster tasks and the post-impact structure. Using these four types, problems of mobilization and recruitment are discussed as well as the specific operational problems these groups experience functioning under disaster conditions. A final chapter deals with the implications of disaster research in dealing with the organizational consequences of a nuclear catastrophe.

"Human action is guided by social structure, but there are also many situations in which behavior is improvised, emergent, and outside conventional normative constraints. This book focuses on these types of occasions, which include panics, crowds, social movements, and organized behavior following disasters. Social scientists in the fields of collective behavior, social movements, and disaster research study these topics. E. L. Quarantelli, cofounder and longtime director of the Disaster Research Center (DRC), is one of those scholars; indeed, he has devoted his career to understanding them. Quarantelli's impact on the fields of disaster research and collective behavior is traced in the foreword to this volume."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, held in College Park, MD, USA, March 29-31, 2011. The 48 papers and 3 keynotes presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including social network analysis; modeling; machine learning and data mining; social behaviors; public health; cultural aspects; and effects and search.