Social Media Support Mechanisms for Organizational Adaptation in Governmental Response to Extreme Natural Hazards
Publication: Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23, Issue 2
Abstract
Extreme natural hazards pose huge challenges to public administration. In the era of social media, governmental response takes the form of complex adaptive systems, applying information technology to support public organizations to interact with and adapt to each other in achieving collective performance. Using multiple sources of data on the 2016 Funing tornado, which affected Jiangsu Province, China, four mechanisms supporting the organizational use of social media (core-organization adoption, rapid message iteration, critical task orientation, and multiple channel integration) to adapt to the disaster situations are examined in the centralized public administrative context. It is found that WeChat, the most popular social media application in China, supported the timely flow of information between core organizations to execute critical tasks mainly at the initial stage of disaster response, and, in association with other information channels, improved organizational adaptation. These findings increase our understanding of governmental response to extreme natural hazards in the social media era.
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Data Availability Statement
Some of the data is available. The encoded questionnaire and interview data after redaction that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the National Foundation for Social Science of China (Grant No. 20&ZD160), “Research on Improving the Modernization Level of Emergency Management System and Capability in China”; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71921003), “Environmental Risk Management.”
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Published In
Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23 • Issue 2 • May 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 18, 2021
Accepted: Jan 5, 2022
Published online: Feb 28, 2022
Published in print: May 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Jul 28, 2022
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