Decision making as community adaptation: a case study of emergency managers in Oklahoma

This paper explores how emergency managers make judgments regarding long-term policy and offers a sociological account of organisational decision making within an ecological context. Discussions with emergency managers focusing on the relative merits of rainfall estimation and tornado detection served as data with which to address these issues. Among the 39 interviewees, a consensus emerged favouring tornado detection over rainfall estimation. From these findings, the paper attempts to understand why emergency managers prefer tornado detection to rainfall estimation and to develop theoretical generalisations explaining trends in these preferences. When developing long-term policy, analysis of transcripts revealed emergency managers to be most concerned with the relative uncertainty of hazards, the capabilities of technology in hazard mitigation, and how the public perceives environmental threats. Given the environmental, technological, and social concerns reflected in this reasoning, there appears to be a strong ecological context driving the need for tornado detection among emergency managers. Implications and concerns are presented in the final section.