system and the learning environment of the organizations are likely to create the
resistance and obstruction to transition and change. Comfort agrees on importance of
information infrastructure and organizational flexibility as the main factors in
enhancing the capability of the organizations to deal with uncertainty such as natural
disaster (Kauffman 1993). However Comfort also points out that cultural openness is a
crucial component in developing an adaptive organization.
Table 1: Level of Complex Adaptive System
Level of Adaptive Capacity of
Disaster Management System
Organization
Flexibility
Technical
Infrastructure
Cultural
Openness
Non-adaptive System Low Low Low
Emergent adaptive system Medium Low Low-Med
Operative adaptive system Medium Medium Medium
Auto-adaptive system High High High
Source: Share Risk (Comfort, 1999)
In her discussion of shared risk, Comfort applies a model to explain different
combinations of crucial components in emergency operation. These components are
technical infrastructure, organizational flexibility, and cultural openness. Comfort uses
a three-dimensional model to capture the interaction among technical structure,
organizational flexibility, and cultural openness that leads to successful transition for
inter-organizational disaster response systems. Comfort introduces four types of
response systems; non-adaptive, emergent adaptive, operative adaptive and autoadaptive
systems, which represent the dominant patterns found in actual cases. These
four types of response systems provide a useful illustration of the process of transition,
and the characteristics that both facilitate and hinder the emergence of self-organizing
processes. This model will be used to analyze the performance of disaster management
systems in Thailand.
Following the introduction of Comfort’s socio-technical components as the
indicators to level the capacity of complex adaptive system, Kamolvej, in her
dissertation, developed several criteria, shown in Table 2, to be used to assess disaster
management performance in Thailand. Her criteria are tested statistically to confirm
validity and reliability appropriate to analyze the performance in Thai environment.
With respect to the stronger influence of organizational flexibility and technical
infrastructure one disaster management performance, the uniqueness of cultural
openness component stands out in Thai system. This article also discusses what makes
Thai safety culture differs from those of western we learn from as well as to what
extent and how these cultural criteria affect performance in both events.