Crisis Management

Crisis Management (Esmaeili, 2009) offers an early and comprehensive framework that positions crisis management as a fundamentally communicative, governance-driven, and sustainability-dependent process. Drawing from eleven chapters, the work integrates organizational communication, strategic decision-making, ecological resilience, and critical-infrastructure coordination to explain how societies prepare for, absorb, and recover from crises. The book emphasizes that crises are rarely caused solely by natural hazards; rather, they emerge when communication networks fail, information systems break down, or centralized structures delay vital decisions. Esmaeili advances a model where decentralization, transparent communication, and community-based preparedness significantly enhance resilience. The text highlights the importance of geospatial intelligence (GIS), cross-agency collaboration, and culturally responsive public messaging, anticipating contemporary crisis-informatics research. Later chapters explore interdependencies among water, electricity, gas, telecommunications, and transportation systems, demonstrating how infrastructure failure becomes a communication failure. The book concludes by proposing an integrated crisis-governance model aligning strategic communication, sustainability principles, and distributed decision-making. Although originally produced for a governmental organization, this conceptual synthesis provides a valuable foundation for scholars in crisis communication, public administration, emergency management, organizational behavior, and resilience studies.