May 2000 - Of the 27 major armed conflicts that occurred in 1999, all but two took place within national boundaries. As an impediment to development, internal rebellion especially hurts the world's poorest countries. What motivates civil wars? Greed or grievance? Collier and Hoeffler compare two...

Purpose – The international nuclear community continues to face the challenge of managing both the legacy waste and the new wastes that emerge from ongoing energy production. The UK is in the early stages of proposing a new convention for its nuclear industry, that is: waste minimisation...

Purpose – Many managers would like to take a strategic approach to preparing the organisation to avoid impending crisis but instead find themselves fire‐fighting to mitigate its impact. This paper seeks to examine an organisation which made major strategic changes in order to respond to the...

Every year, natural and man-made disasters affect hundreds of thousands of people and cause extensive damage. OR has made substantial contributions to disaster response and these have been the subject of several recent literature reviews. However, these reviews have also identified research gaps...

Earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding and terrorist attacks continue to threaten our society and, when the worst happens, lives depend on different agencies to manage the response. The literature shows that there is significant potential for operational research (OR) to aid disaster management and...

Purpose – To consider the role of technology in knowledge management in organizations, both actual and desired. Design/methodology/approach – Facilitated, computer‐supported group workshops were conducted with 78 people from ten different organizations. The objective of each workshop was...

Large-scale evacuations are a recurring theme on news channels, whether in response to major natural or manmade disasters. The role of warning dissemination is a key part in the success of such large-scale evacuations and its inadequacy in certain cases has been a ‘primary contribution to...

This paper contributes a new methodology called Waste And Source-matter ANalyses (WASAN) which supports a group in building agreeable actions for safely minimising avoidable waste. WASAN integrates influences from the Operational Research (OR) methodologies/philosophies of Problem Structuring...

This paper describes the organizational processes of knowledge acquisition, sharing, retention and utilisation as it affected the internal and external communication of knowledge about performance in an English police force. The research was gathered in three workshops for internal personnel,...