The Network Closure And Collective Performance Of The Emergency Response

Natural disaster is different from accident disaster, public health incident and social security incident. It occurred without human control, and will produce super demand which excess the supply capacity of public organization, and will cause huge losses that is difficult to restore in a short period of time. However, by taking timely monitoring, early warning, control, rescue, restoration measures on natural disasters, emergency management organizations can effectively meet the needs of the disaster and reduce disaster losses. Therefore, the research on emergency management of natural disasters, especially the research on the earthquake disaster has an important practical significance.Perplexing emergency management system coexists with disaster emergency management system. In view of the actual experience of unconventional emergencies, emergency response to natural disasters has been changed from rescue operations dominated by public organizations to the joint action which cross multi-force organizations. Through the sharing and connection of capacity, information and other aspects, the organizations and regional resources can achieve a goal which single organization or region can not be achieved. However, our existing comprehensive emergency management system has exposed some questions such as unsmooth information communications and organizational conflicts etc.. Given the organizations’ coordination as an example, it exists not only in the space between central government and local governments, but also in the space between routine organizations and emergent organizations. How to reconcile the organizations’ relationships effectively, improve the organizational coordination ability and the information communication mechanism, and meet the huge demands of disaster, has become the most important problem of the current emergency management. How to improve the adaptability of the emergency management system is the focus of the research in the field of crisis management.With the focus on the emergency management system has changed from control behavior based on the known information to continue search and effective exchange of information as a basis for the next step, complex adaptive system has adopted in the existing emergency response system. Complex adaptive system emphasizes the interdependence of organizational unit in the whole network, it points out the organization can use continuous information search and exchange methods to capture the changing process of complex environment. With the methods, complex adaptive system can reallocate their resources and actions at any time according to the changing disaster environment, in order to achieve the stated objectives.Although the system can sensible give response to the changing of complex environment, stress level and support degree, and timely be adapted to the changes of organization itself and changes in the increasingly complex network. But the system still exist generic property- vulnerability, this vulnerability performs as:First, the complex adaptive system is designed to achieve the optimal efficiency of collective organization, and improve the whole network’s adaptability to the emergent, but because of huge demands created by disasters, many organizations suddenly emerged, this kind of emergent organization beyond the original organization coordination system and applicable scope; Second, when selectively remove some important nodes of complex system, the network will become unconnected, and fault-tolerant rate will reduce as a consequence, in this case, the local failure may result in the whole failure because of the lose efficacy in whole network’s information capacity, resulting in serious damages suffered by complex adaptive system.Therefore, maintaining and protecting key nodes is very important to the complex adaptive system. It can reduce the vulnerability and improve the robustness of the system. For maintenance of key nodes, we need to pay attention to balance network closure and overembeddedness, Network closure——which Burt mentioned in 《Brokerage and Closure:An Introduction to Social Capital》 (1995)——considered the groups within the closed group and in vitro non redundant contacts, can act in the following three points:First, It’s the key node to obtain information benefits and control benefits, so as to reduce the vulnerability of complex system; Second, by preventing excessive low network efficiency brought by the overembeddedness, it controls the scale of the network; Third, by preventing the disintegration of the whole network caused by the network opening, it can keep the network scale enough big. Therefore, finding and using the network closure of emergency network can help finding the key organizations, maintaining emergency network in a reasonable scale, promoting the network information communicate and coordinate, and getting the suboptimal goal of the collective network performance.In this research, the writer analyzed emergency network structure based on the angle of the network closure and selected the network governance and the complex adaptive system as research perspectives. Using the theoretical basis of social capital, the whole network as the research angle of view, and social network analysis as a research tool, the writer considered three research dimensions including whole network, centrality and structural hole to search for key nodes in complex systems such as Ludian earthquake. Through simulating Core-Periphery selective integration model, the writer analyzed the existing emergency network and the simulation emergency network. Some countermeasures were putted forward in the corresponding period to improve the existing emergency network, so as to enhance the ability of the emergency response system.