Redefining Disaster Preparedness

Abstract

The utility of disaster preparation efforts involving volunteers is axiomatic, but a poor understanding of volunteer responder organizing may waste volunteer effort or, worse, endanger response. Effectively integrating volunteer effort during response necessitates understanding how volunteers figure into preparation, but most disaster research is concerned with best practices for response not preparation itself. Insights regarding the management of the political, rhetorical, and organizational challenges of implementing and evaluating disaster preparation are also needed. This study investigated how volunteer disaster responders—volunteers and volunteer coordinators in multiple Citizen Emergency Response Teams and Medical Reserve Corps—negotiated contradictions among and within institutional logics relevant to disaster preparation to justify their efforts. Their accounts drew on institutional logics of preparation and the professional to do so, and provided evidence of reflexivity about, mobilization of, and reconstruction of these logics—generative praxis that may enable innovation in disaster policy and preparation.