Recognizing Competitive Cultures: A case for describing the complexity of coordination between dynamic crisis response actors

Crisis management frameworks are typically associated with concepts related to command and control or “hierarchical” decisionmaking. However, advancements in communication technologies and new media platforms have brought new prospects to the design of crisis management frameworks. Social media platforms, for example, enable volunteering citizens to actively take part in crisis response efforts. In our paper we explore comparing and contrasting two forms of crisis management frameworks: a formal, the welltested Incident Command System of the US, and an informal example, the Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) program. The goal of the paper is to outline potential ways to examine the disparities in network structure and collaboration linkages in different forms of crisis management frameworks.