DISASTER RESEARCHinteractive computer net of researchers in the
area, and intentionally helped to create interna-
tional networks and critical masses of disaster
researchers.
DRC was joined in time in the United States by
two other major social science research centers
(both currently headed by sociologists). The Natu-
ral Hazards Center at the University of Colorado
has as part of its prime mission the linking of
disaster researchers and research-users in policy
and operational areas. The Hazards Reduction
and Recovery Center at Texas A & M University
has a strong multidisciplinary orientation. The
organization of these groups and others studying
disasters partly reflects the fact that the sociologi-
cal work in the area was joined in the late 1960s by
geographers with interest in natural hazards (Cut-
ter 1994), in the 1980s by risk analysts (including
sociologists such as Perrow 1984; Short 1984)
especially concerned with technological threats,
and later by political scientists who initially were
interested in political crises (Rosenthal and Kouzmin
1993). More important, in the 1980s disaster re-
search spread around the world, which led to the
development of a critical mass of researchers. This
culminated in 1986 in the establishment within the
International Sociological Association of the Re-
search Committee on Disasters (# 39) (http://
sociweb.tamu.edu/ircd/), with membership in over
thirty countries; its own professional journal, The
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disas-
ters (www.usc.edu/dept/sppd/ijmed); and a news-
letter, Unscheduled Events. At the 1998 World Con-
gress of Sociology, this committee organized
fourteen separate sessions with more than seventy-
five papers from several dozen countries. The
range of papers reflected that the initial focus on
emergency time behavior has broadened to in-
clude studies on mitigation and prevention, as well
as recovery and reconstruction.
CONCEPTUALIZATION OF ‘‘DISASTER’’Conceptualizations of ‘‘disaster’’ have slowly evolved
from employing everyday usages of the term,
through a focus on social aspects, to attempts to
set forth more sociological characterizations. The
earliest definitions equated disasters with features
of physical agents and made distinctions between
‘‘acts of God’’ and ‘‘technological’’ agents. This
view was followed by notions of disasters as phe-
nomena that resulted in significant disruptions of
social life, which, however, might not involve a
physical agent of any kind (e.g., a false rumor
might evoke the same kind of evacuation behavior
that an actual threat would). Later, disasters came
to be seen as crises resulting either from certain
social constructions of reality, or from the applica-
tion of politically driven definitions, rather than
necessarily from one initial and actual social dis-
ruption of a social system. Other researchers equat-
ed disasters with occasions where the demand for
emergency actions by community organizations
exceeds their capabilities for response. By the late
1980s, disasters were being seen as overt manifes-
tations of latent societal vulnerabilities, basically of
weaknesses in social structures or systems (Schorr
1987; Kreps 1989).
Given these variants about the concept, it is
not surprising that currently no one formulation is
totally accepted within the disaster research com-
munity (see Quarantelli 1998 where it is noted that
postmodernistic ideas are now also being applied).
However, there would be considerable agreement
that the following is what is involved in using the
term ‘‘disaster’’ as a sensitizing concept: Disasters
are relatively sudden occasions when, because of
perceived threats, the routines of collective social
units are seriously disrupted and when unplanned
courses of action have to be undertaken to cope
with the crisis.
The notion of ‘‘relatively sudden occasions’’
indicates that disasters have unexpected life histo-
ries that can be designated in social space and
time. Disasters involve the perceptions of dangers
and risks to valued social objects, especially people
and property. The idea of disruption of routines
indicates that everyday adjustive social mechanisms
cannot cope with the perceived new threats. Disas-
ters necessitate the emergence of new behaviors
not available in the standard repertoire of the
endangered collectivity, a community, which is
usually the lowest social-level entity accepted by
researchers as able to have a disaster. In the proc-
ess of the refinement of the concept, sociologists
have almost totally abandoned the distinction be-
tween ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘technological’’ disasters, de-
rived from earlier notions of ‘‘acts of God’’ and
‘‘man-made’’ happenings. Any disaster is seen as
inherently social in nature in origin, manifesta-
tion, or consequences. However, there is lack of