Social Network Interaction among Nested Sets in Dynamic Contexts: Disaster Operations as a Laboratory for Social Change

Disaster operations represent a classic laboratory for the study of social network interactions that are constrained by both space and time and that involve multiple modes of communication. Further, these interactions vary significantly at different levels of authority, capacity, and severity of damage to the affected community. At each level of operation, differences in resources, number of skilled personnel, extent of prior knowledge, and experience affect significantly the frequency and type of interactions among organizations in a given community as well as access to outside sources of assistance, and potential strategies for reducing risk and minimizing losses. One means of extending theories of social network interaction to incorporate the constraining effects of space, time, and different modes of communication on organizational interaction is to address these problems through the lens of complex, adaptive systems. From this perspective, a system is composed of multiple subsystems, many of which include sub-subsystems, nested inside one another, but sharing common goals. These " nested sets " can easily be identified in large-scale disaster operations. For example, in Haiti, the primary actors in delivering public services to quake-shattered Haiti was a set of large, powerful, NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) that drew resources from an international donor base and created an organizational operations environment that functioned largely in parallel to, rather than with, the Haitian Government. While the Haitian Government was struggling to resume its limited and fragile delivery of public services, it was heavily outspent and surpassed in performance by international NGOs operating largely in English, instead of the language of the country, French. The inability to track exactly who was doing what tasks in which regions of Haiti now ten months after the earthquake reveals the critical importance of spatial analysis. The interdependence of the tasks that were performed. .. or not performed. .. and the consequences of both types of action shows the key spatial and temporal relationships among actions taken or not taken. Three streams of literature inform the study of social network interaction in complex systems. First, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework proposed by Elinor Ostrom (2005) acknowledges the interaction of social units at different scales of operation within the same broadly defined social system. By identifying a domain of action, for example, disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, Ostrom notes that different " action arenas " will likely emerge in response to an urgent event at different times and