| This study will focus on the United States' crisis management of events with the Soviet Union as adversary. Given the reality of the world situation, crisis management should have received considerable academic attention. However, no comprehensive effort to discover the common elements in successfully managed crisis exists. Because of a dearth of crisis management material, the researcher must examine related topic areas. Crisis is the most obvious related area; but, here again, there has been little regard for the development of a body of cumulative knowledge. It is clear then, there is a need for this study.; This study first offers a definition of crisis which is more useful and complex than any existing definition. Five elements comprise crisis (1) threat, (2) unexpectedness, (3) short decision time, (4) damage to image, and (5) challenge to future safety. Of these, threat is considered the independent variable; the other characteristics are represented as dependent variables. It follows that threat in combination with any other single element constitute a crisis. This is not a simple conceptualization of crisis, but it does portray the complex phenomenon called crisis. The second contribution is to suggest that successful crisis management has three characteristics (1) adverse partnership, (2) control of the military, and (3) flexibility. The third contribution is to test these concepts through a comparative analysis of three crisis cases--Berlin 1948, Korea 1950, and Cuba 1962. The final contribution is to place this effort within the context of alternative perspectives of foreign policy.; In summary, my contribution has been to review the amorphous and unsystematic studies of crisis and crisis management; to consolidate and isolate those common elements which define crisis and crisis management; to construct a model which helps delineate the distinctive components of individual crises so that crisis managers can objectify and categorize relevant characteristics into levels of crises, thus avoiding the idiosyncratic interpretations which have characterized past responses; and to provide a conceptual framework--adverse partnership, control of the military, and flexibility--for the future study of crisis management. |
