Engaging stakeholders through social media and emergent organizations: The West Virginia Water Crisis Recovery as a case study

The West Virginia water contamination crisis began on the morning of January 9, 2014, and left approximately 300,000 customers of the West Virginia American Water Company unable to use the water in their homes for any purpose other than flushing their toilets. Given the lack of appropriate response from the established organizations involved, many emergent organizations formed to help fill unmet informational and physical needs of the affected population. Crisis researchers have observed these ephemeral organizations for decades, but the recent proliferation of information communication technologies have made their activities more widespread and observable. In West Virginia, their activities were indispensable to the affected population and helped restore a sense of normalcy. This article analyzes four emergent organizations that formed in response to the West Virginia water contamination and the functions they performed in different phases of this crisis.

Whips, Chains, and Books on Campus: How Emergent Organizations With Core Stigma Gain Official Recognition

This article explores how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma, and work toward official recognition. The qualitative research design used organizational constitutions, listserv communications, and interviews to examine officially-approved student organizations focused on kinky sexuality in U.S. universities. Our findings indicate (a) due process and impersonal evaluations enable official approval of emergent organizations, particularly if this focuses on operational concerns; (b) emergent organizations leverage credible social discourses, such as individual rights, to emphasize issues pertinent to approval bodies and mainstream throughout society; (c) organizations can strategically embrace stigma, entailing complex decisions about balancing revelation and concealment; and (d) organizational tactics shift depending on the maturity of the stigmatized issue, important because organizational stigma can be resilient and persistent despite organizational legitimacy. The article contributes to research on organizational management of stigma by examining how emergent organizations with core stigma manage stigma while moving from informal to official status.

How will we Manage Recovery from a Catastrophic Disaster? Organization Structure for Recovery Management in the World

The role of recovery organization management is important, and organizations in various forms have been established internationally to aid recovery from large-scale disasters. This paper clarifies three types of recovery organizations by analyzing them in various countries based on disaster organization theory. Furthermore, it analyzes recovery organizations that operated after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan. It then examines the operations of recovery organizations during large-scale earthquakes that may lead to a national crisis by comparing recovery organizations internationally. Finally, this paper clarifies the necessity of “emergent” organizations.

Enterprise Knowlegde Management for Emergent Organizations

Lately, some Knowledge Management (KM) solutions suggest strategies to identify and acquire the invaluable organizational knowledge. These statements seem especially true in the case of emergent organizational forms for which the beginning of the new century has brought about a paradigm change in which capital and work are no longer the only fundamental bases for successful management. Although this has caught the attention of both the industrialists and researchers, an important gap exists between these two domains, mainly, due to the lack of understanding of the KM concept and the activities that it implies by organizational managers. Several KM models have appeared in the research field, but none of them includes all the necessary aspects for an effective KM. This chapter presents a Distributed Knowledge Management Conceptual Model that encompasses the key factors for KM in emergent organizations and proposes the means to implement them. Moreover, to address heterogeneity, documentation overload and lack of context we propose Onto-DOM, a question-answering ontology-based strategy within a Distributed Organizational Memory.