CHAPTER 36 ACCOUNTING FOR CRISES SANNEKE KUIPERS AND PAUL ‘T HART Crisis Management: Coping with the Intolerable Not so long ago crises and disasters were likely to enter collective memory as an unfor- tunate incident or “Act of God.” Such unfortunate incidents challenged or defeated available administrative and political repertoires of prevention and response (Boin et al. 2009, 85). Academic research primarily focused on operational response and mass behavior during crises, and on post-crisis recovery, collective traumas and solidarity impulses (Barton 1969; Drabek 2009; Perry and Quarantelli 2005). Times have changed. Even natural disasters immediately evoke an intense debate on responsibility and guilt (Boin et al. 2009; Quarantelli 1998; Steinberg 2000; Perry and Quarantelli 2005). Today, nearly any signiicant disturbance of life as usual is liable to being labeled—and indeed being felt to be—a “crisis” in the process of public and political meaning-making that such non-routine events provoke. Crises are commonly deined as situations that are being experienced as seriously threatening to core values or structures, requiring urgent action, yet also highly uncertain as to their origins and consequences (Boin et al. 2005). When labeled as such, “crises” dramatize the vulner- ability of key tenets of the existing socio-political order (e.g. the belief in the power and capability of the state to protect citizens from collective harm or in the fundamental integrity of public oice-holders and institutional practices) and individuals and insti- tutions that are supposed to epitomize and defend this order. hey are, in societies that pride themselves as being stable, well-ordered, peaceful and safe, viscerally intolerable. As crises abate, endure or reoccur, this perceived intolerability adds to or even super- sedes the collective stress that the “on the ground” events themselves have triggered. Something unacceptable has happened, therefore somebody or some organization/ OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Feb 26 2014, NEWGEN Book 1.indb 589 2/26/2014 9:11:08 PM