title: Emergency management: does it have a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of decision-making, process and context?
abstract: It is widely recognised in the social and management sciences that the effective support of decision-making requires a multidisciplinary perspective. This trend is also clear in nuclear emergency management (EM). However, communication between disciplines is not easy to maintain in EM contexts when the decision makers (DMs) are likely to be highly stressed. Such circumstances can lead them to revert to the instinctive patterns of perception of their core disciplines, making communication between disciplines difficult and, perhaps, obscuring complex interactions that have not been rehearsed in practice exercises. This paper explores decision making in EM and the nature of the socio-technical issues that will arise, suggesting that despite the lessons of past accidents the research EM community is still not taking a broad enough view of what future incidents may entail.
authors.affiliation: Manchester Business School, Booth Street West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK. Carmen.Niculae@mbs.ac.uk
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Niculae
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: French
authors.forename: Emma
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Carter
mesh_terms: D003660:Decision Support Systems, Management / Q000458:organization & administration*; D004630:Emergencies; D005060:Europe; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D007373:Interinstitutional Relations; D009688:Nuclear Reactors; D011835:Radiation Protection / Q000379:methods*; D018788:Radioactive Hazard Release; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D012307:Risk Factors; D017751:Safety Management / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014481:United States