A framework for crisis management in developing countries

Crisis management involves systematic collaboration among various roles at different service levels. The level of gravity of the situation mandates execution of patterns of collaborative ranging from normal situation processes where predefined timely outcomes can be expected, to unstructured and emerging collaborative processes. As a contribution to the field of crisis management (also known as situational management), this paper both introduces, and syntactically evaluates a conceptual model for managing post-disaster situations where natural courses of events are interrupted by natural disasters that are mostly unpredictable, disruptive and puts many lives in danger. The theoretical grounding of the proposed conceptual model is the interactionists' theories in the field of social psychology which implies awareness propagation of various collaborating roles is one major factor for successful management of any post-disaster situation. The paper introduces a conceptual model for knowledge sharing called Awareness Information Network (AIN). To demonstrate the analytical capabilities of the proposed model, it was applied to a hypothetical disaster scenario. Also in order to assess the semantic validity of the proposed model, a semiotic validation method was used.