Representing crowd behaviour in emergency planning guidance: ‘mass panic’ or collective resilience?

By J. Drury, David Novelli, C. Stott. 2013

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emergency planning often includes assumptions about crowd behaviour. These assumptions matter, as they can operate as rationales for emergency management practices. We examined the extent to which crowds are represented in UK emergency planning guidance as psychologically vulnerable or as contributing to psychosocial resilience. A systematic search of 47 guidance documents identified 9 referring to ‘panic’. These were discourse analysed, along with six more guidance documents considered key to civil contingencies resilience. It was found that the references to ‘panic’ served to construct collectives (and particularly crowds) as a source of psychological vulnerability. References to collective sources of resilience in the public were mostly found to be limited and often served to marginalise the crowd as a basis of coping in emergencies. We argue that the emphasis in the current guidance on the marginal role of crowds and the indispensable role of the professionals conflicts with aspects of current policy on community resilience.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2c31a48142e1d53320bbc2396d09afeb6fbe028

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In Sociology and Political Science

1. Emiliano Cristiani
2. Maik Boltes
3. Nikolai Bode
4. Alessandro Corbetta
5. Milad Haghani

Citations in the corpus

• Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research (2019, background): “As pointed out by Drury, Novelli, and Stott [24], “To judge a response as irrational requires a frame of reference, but the frame of reference is often unclear in a mass emergency”.”