Title: Impacts of Organizational Structure on the Effectiveness of Emergency Response System
Description: The thesis focuses on the impacts of Organizational Structures on the effectiveness of the emergency response system under different cultural contexts. By comparing the situations of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, United States and Super Typhoon Hato in Zhuhai, China, it turns out that the Organizational Structures in both countries are effective in different aspects, with the American structure, which is horizontal and distributed, more comprehensive and the Chinese structure, which is hierarchical and condensed, more efficient. Instead of the traditional planning theory standpoint claiming that the effectiveness can be directly influenced by the level of centralization of the Organizational Structures, this paper offers a new way of thinking, arguing that it is the stability of the inter-organization connections within the Organizational Structures that essentially affects the outcome of the emergency response systems. The permanence of the connections among the public and private organizations can be revealed by the collaboration form, quantity of the engaged organizations, trust among the organizations and the legitimacy of the structure.