James Kendra’s research while affiliated with University of Delaware and other places

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Publications (76)


Business continuity as self-efficacy: Augmenting existing business continuity practice
  • Article

September 2024

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29 Reads

International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters

Roni Fraser

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Zackery White

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[...]

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Bridget Flynn

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of traditional business continuity principles. As much of the novel response to COVID-19 involved a curtailment or cessation of in-person commercial activity, businesses and communities were at unprecedented financial risk. Traditional methods of ensuring business continuity were likely insufficient; thus, an improved understanding of business continuity through disaster is needed for both business and community well-being. Canonically, academic studies examining business survival post-disaster have emphasized vulnerability characteristics and focused on factors outside the businesses’ locus of control. Recently, studies have found that business survival is related to features of self-efficacy that are not easily developed through succinct templates: creativity, flexibility, and improvisation. By critically examining ninety-three publicly available business continuity guides in a content analysis approach, we point to the need for further research on business preparedness as the building of self-efficacy and the effectiveness of converting these scientific findings into useful formats for business operators.





Reproductive Improvisation and the Virtues of Sameness: The Art of Reestablishing New York City's Emergency Operations Center

January 2023

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24 Reads

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12 Citations

International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters

Based on an inductive analysis of qualitative in-depth interviews, extensive field observation, and document material, we introduce the concept of reproductive improvisation, an improvisation form that emphasizes reproducing something valued that is lost. We address how an organization might choose sameness in turbulent and ambiguous environments, and how it achieves that goal. Using the reestablishment of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) following its destruction during the September 1l, 2001 World Trade Center disaster in New York City, we discuss how factors such as system stability, pressures to maintain the status quo, substitution accessibility, and retaining a preexisting mental map that develops into a shared vision all facilitate reproductive improvisation. This research differs from most other work on improvisation (e.g., Weick, 1998) that focuses on improvising to generate something new. Here we focus on improvising to generate something that is, as much as possible, the same as a previous model. We therefore add a new perspective on the usual thinking of improvisation and organizations responding to changing environments.


Differences in Household Preparedness and Adaptation for COVID-19

December 2022

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13 Reads

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1 Citation

Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

Objective: To quantify differences in preparedness for and adaptations to COVID-19 in a cohort sample of New York City residents. Methods: A proportional quota sample (n=1,020) of individuals residing in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic participated in a Qualtrics web survey. Quotas were set for age, sex, race, and income to mirror the population of New York City based on the 2018 American Community Survey. Results: Low self-efficacy, low social support, and low sense of community increased the odds of securing provisions to prepare for COVID-19. Being an essential worker, poor mental health, and children in the household reduced the likelihood of engaging in preparedness practices. Essential workers and individuals with probable serious mental illness were less likely to report preparedness planning for the pandemic. Conclusions: The findings contribute to evolving theories of preparedness. There are differences across the sample in preparedness types, and different kinds of preparedness are associated with different household characteristics. Findings suggest that public officials and others concerned with population wellbeing might productively turn attention to education and outreach activities indexed to these characteristics.


Household Adaptations to Infrastructure System Service Interruptions

December 2022

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40 Reads

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8 Citations

Journal of Infrastructure Systems

When critical infrastructure system services are disrupted, households typically respond by reducing, delaying, or relocating their demand (e.g., delaying laundry), or augmenting supply (e.g., using a generator). While this phenomenon is well known, there has been little systematic empirical investigation of it. Focusing on electric power and water service interruptions and using revealed and stated preference survey data from Los Angeles County, California, we develop 24 mixed logit models, one each to predict the probability an individual undertakes a specified adaptation as a function of outage duration and characteristics of the individual. The analysis aims to determine: (1) how common different household adaptations are; (2) how adaptation implementation varies with infrastructure type, outage duration, and uses of the service; (3) what household characteristics are associated with implementation of different adaptations; and (4) how adaptations tend to occur together. The percentage of individuals who report doing an adaptation varies greatly across adaptations and outage durations, from 2% to 88%. In general, adaptations that require moving out of the home are the least common of those investigated. For electric power outages, adaptations that could be done at home are less likely as the outage duration increases, while those that require going somewhere are more likely as the duration increases. For water outages, all adaptations (except delaying consumption) are more likely as an outage lasts longer. Using electric power or water for medical devices and/or work and business has a large effect on the likelihood of implementing many adaptations. Preevent conservation habits are also associated with an increased likelihood of implementing adaptations. The influence of household characteristics varies greatly across adaptations. There is evidence that some adaptations tend to occur together (e.g., using water from lakes and the government) and others tend not to (e.g., delaying electricity use and going to a hotel).


Conceptual framework of infrastructure system disruption impact on household well-being
Questions to solicit information associated with a past outage
Questions to solicit information associated with hypothetical future outages
WTP vs. outage duration for electric power and water supply
Probability of at least each unhappiness level k versus outage duration for a electric power and b water supply

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Household impacts of interruption to electric power and water services
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

November 2022

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217 Reads

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18 Citations

Critical infrastructure systems derive their importance from the societal needs they help meet. Yet the relationship between infrastructure system functioning and societal functioning is not well-understood, nor are the impacts of infrastructure system disruptions on consumers. We develop two empirical measures of societal impacts—willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid service interruptions and a constructed scale of unhappiness, compare them to each other and others from the literature, and use them to examine household impacts of service interruptions. Focusing on household-level societal impacts of electric power and water service interruptions, we use survey-based data from Los Angeles County, USA, to fit a random effects within-between model of WTP and an ordinal logit with mixed effects to predict unhappiness, both as a function of infrastructure type, outage duration, and household attributes. Results suggest household impact increases nonlinearly with outage duration, and the impact of electric power disruptions is greater than water supply disruptions. Unhappiness is better able to distinguish the effects of shorter-duration outages than WTP is. Some people experience at least some duration of outage without negative impact. Increased household impact was also associated with using electricity for medical devices or water for work or business, perceived likelihood of an emergency, worry about an emergency, past negative experiences with emergencies, lower level of preparation, less connection to the neighborhood, higher income, being married, being younger, having pets, and having someone with a medical condition in the house. Financial, time/effort, health, and stress concerns all substantially influence the stated level of unhappiness.

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FEMA Event and No-FEMA Event Counties and Events Rates, 2011-2014.
Cont.
Flood-Related Federally Declared Disaster Events and Community Functioning (COPEWELL)

October 2022

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74 Reads

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2 Citations

Climate

Objective: Understanding long-term disaster effects is key to building theories of recovery and informing policymaking. Findings regarding long-term recovery are inconsistent, with some scholars finding that disasters have little long-term impact, and others asserting otherwise. To assist in resolving this discord, we apply a conceptual framework and computational model of community resilience (“COPEWELL”) that places community functioning (CF) at the center of evaluating the effects of disaster over time. Using flooding as a disaster type, we hypothesize a change in baseline CF trend when a flood-related federally declared disaster event occurs. Methods: We used county-level flood-related federally declared disaster events (2010–2014) and selected population demographics to study their effects on annual CF trends among United States counties (N = 3141). Results: In multivariate analysis of baseline CF, we found a significant negative relationship of prior five-year flood status, federal regions relative to the Northeast (Region I), lower total earnings, and greater population size. Annual CF trend was 0.09% (95%CI: 0.01%–0.16%). In multivariate analysis, significant predictors included baseline CF (β = 0.0178, −0.0047–−0.0309), any concurrent flood-related federally declared disaster events (−0.0024, −0.0040–−0.0008), ten-year prior flood events (−0.0017, −0.0034–−0.0000) and concurrent population change (−0.0186, −0.0338–−0.0035). Conclusions: Recent floods depress baseline CF, while concurrent and ten-year-ago floods depress trend in CF. Resilience may potentially be modified by raising baseline CF and maintaining population over time.


Managing disaster risk associated with critical infrastructure systems: a system-level conceptual framework for research and policy guidance

April 2022

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71 Reads

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7 Citations

Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems

This paper presents a new conceptual framework of the disaster risk of critical infrastructure systems in terms of societal impacts. Much research on infrastructure reliability focuses on specific issues related to the technical system or human coping. Focusing on the end goal of infrastructure services – societal functioning – this framework offers a new way to understand how those more focused research areas connect and the current thinking in each. Following an overview of the framework, each component is discussed in turn, including the initial buildout of physical systems; event occurrence; service interruptions; service provider response; user adaptations to preserve or create needed services; and the ending deficit in societal function. Possible uses of the framework include catalysing and guiding a systematic research agenda that could ultimately lead to a computational framework and stimulating discussion on resilience within utility and emergency management organisations and the larger community.


Citations (61)


... Parallel to and to some extent extending the problem-oriented approach to SLOs, numerous scholars have highlighted their adept crisis management capabilities. This is exemplified by the emphasis on the significance of the ad hoc organizing process within SLOs (Danielsson 2020;Kendra and Wachtendorf 2016;Oscarsson 2022;Sparf 2018). Danielsson (2020) investigated how familiarity with places, tasks, and situations influenced the response strategies of various stakeholders, including SLOs, during a parasitic outbreak in the drinking water of a Swedish city. ...

Reference:

Adaptive Capacity in a Crisis: Turbulence Managers in Street‐Level Organizations
American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11
  • Citing Book
  • June 2016

... In addition, in related studies, the authors collected and analyzed five diverse, empirical datasets household adaptations to infrastructure system outages: (1) a web-based survey of 1615 individuals in Los Angeles County, California that asked about adaptations they implemented in response to past electric power and water supply outages and they would expect to implement in hypothetical future outages [3]; (4) Twitter data from Hurricane Maria (2017) analyzed to identify evidence of adaptations to telecommunications outages [30]; and three types of data capturing adaptations implemented in response to electric power and water supply outages in the 2021 Texas winter storm. The Texas storm data include: (1) a web-based survey of 215 individuals [31]; (2) a set of semi-structured interviews with 22 participants in and around North Texas asking about their experiences with service disruptions (under review); and (3) 174 videos shared through Twitter [32]. While it will certainly be possible to extend and modify the typology over time, having drawn on this diverse set of events, the typology is expected to be reasonably robust across hazards and regions with regular access to fairly continuous infrastructure services. ...

Household Adaptations to and Impacts from Electric Power and Water Outages in the Texas 2021 Winter Storm
  • Citing Article
  • November 2023

Natural Hazards Review

... These risks range from natural calamities like earthquakes and floods, which can devastate physical infrastructure, to technological challenges, such as the need for constant upgrades and protection against cyber threats [11]. Additionally, socio-political factors like regulatory uncertainties and political instability can impede growth and create a volatile operating environment [12]. These disruptions have the potential not just to disconnect communication channels but also to derail economic progress and social cohesion. ...

Searching for signal and borrowing wi-fi: Understanding disaster-related adaptations to telecommunications disruptions through social media
  • Citing Article
  • February 2023

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

... Improvisation and "on-the-job" learning are common in an EOC setting, which often pulls together staff from various organizations, who may have little experience working together or working in a specific EOC environment. 24,26,27 In the case of the COVID-19 response, the fact that over half of respondents had not used a virtual EOC format in the past 5 years undoubtedly exacerbated this learning curve. One way to minimize this learning curve is to provide training and build capacity pre-event. ...

Reproductive Improvisation and the Virtues of Sameness: The Art of Reestablishing New York City's Emergency Operations Center
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters

... These adaptive capacities are viewed as an integral part of community resilience 76 . Regarding infrastructure, households can prepare for infrastructure losses and have service substitutes such as power generators or water storage tanks 77,78 . It may also include the household's ability to tolerate disruptions and the ability to perceive risk to infrastructure losses 66 . ...

Household Adaptations to Infrastructure System Service Interruptions
  • Citing Article
  • December 2022

Journal of Infrastructure Systems

... In summary, previous academic communities put more emphasis on the research of infrastructure systems themselves and contributed substantially to protecting infrastructure. Indeed, infrastructure systems are critical because of their role in societal functioning, especially in situations where modern societies become increasingly dependent on infrastructure systems [7,29]. However, precisely how infrastructure service disruptions impair society is poorly understood owing to the difficulties in quantitatively measuring the societal impact and integrating it with disruptions [8,9,29]. ...

Household impacts of interruption to electric power and water services

... A flood has a negative impact on community functioning that may persist for a period of many years, so while it is good to have strong community resilience to bounce back from a flood, it is also better to not have a flood at all. Infrastructure improvements that can avoid an event impacting an area would be preferred to people having to engage in coping skills, but improvement in both infrastructure and "social cohesion" are warranted [54]. ...

Flood-Related Federally Declared Disaster Events and Community Functioning (COPEWELL)

Climate

... In addition, while many infrastructure network assessments of interdependency and recovery from hurricanes detailed the impacts on transport and other physical systems, they often overlooked the fact that humans are highly adaptive and can adjust to physical disturbances (Dong et al., 2020;Hossain et al., 2019;Najafi et al., 2021). Yet, research has clearly shown that residents have a range of hazard adaptation behaviors in both pre-and post-impact periods that can mitigate the impacts (Carman and Zint, 2020;Chakalian et al., 2018;Davidson et al., 2022;Kuhl et al., 2014). While some of these adaptation behaviors may have limited relevance to transportation infrastructure supply and demand (e.g., using generators during power outages (Davidson et al., 2022)), post-impact evacuation itself is a direct demand for the transportation network. ...

Typology of Household Adaptations to Infrastructure System Service Interruptions
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022

SSRN Electronic Journal

... The U.S. government issued the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), which outlines how government and private sectors work together to manage risks and achieve infrastructure resilience [13]. Similarly, Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and other countries have also made efforts to better protect their infrastructure [2,14]. This increased attention of governments attracts researchers from various backgrounds to study the protection and modeling of infrastructure. ...

Managing disaster risk associated with critical infrastructure systems: a system-level conceptual framework for research and policy guidance
  • Citing Article
  • April 2022

Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems

... Resilience, in the social system's domain, is understood as the ability of an organization, individual, or community to adapt, resist, transform and recover from the effects of persistent stress or disruptive events in an effective and timely manner, and to recover or adjust accordingly [32,33]. Community resilience is a key indicator of social sustainability [34], which refers to how community members adjust their behavior and perceive changes in the social environment based on past experiences and available knowledge in order to achieve beneficial effects that collectively improve community functioning and well-being [35]. Community resilience is a dynamic process [36], and its components may sometimes weaken or strengthen the pathways to resilience, but the basis for community survival and development is that the overall state is balanced and good [37]. ...

Community Resilience: Toward a Framework for an Integrated, Interdisciplinary Model of Disaster
  • Citing Article
  • November 2021

Natural Hazards Review