Nadene Vevea, communication doctoral student, and Robert S. Littlefield, professor of communication, received notification that their manuscript, titled “Hurricane Gustav: Disassociation as Evidence of Organizational Learning,” was accepted for publication in an upcoming volume of the Journal of Emergency Management. Hailed as one of the top journals in the field of emergency management, its purpose is to better equip all persons responsible for emergency preparedness and response to deal effectively with everything from acts of terror, fires, floods and weather emergencies to gas explosions and catastrophic accidents on land, in the air or at sea.
While the job of emergency managers includes creating plans to mitigate, manage and restore communities following natural disasters, the effectiveness of their plans is entirely reliant upon the compliance of individuals and organizations involved. Vevea and Littlefield apply the concepts of crisis communication, image restoration, organizational learning and renewal in a media analysis of the time shortly before, during and in the few days following Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Ultimately, the study shows how the leaders and media during the crisis were able to enact the concepts of image restoration to manage the crisis, and it offers a new direction for showcasing organizational learning through disassociation from previous mismanagement