Types and concept of crisis situations

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

In practice, it is clear that each new crisis situation is not similar to its predecessors, and subsequent ones will also be quite different from it. All crises are different, each with its own causes and consequences. And even the essence itself is different. The crisis situation does not fit into any, even the most ramified classifications, and therefore there is no way to fully manage it. Of course, with all possible differentiation of means, there are some opportunities to reduce the severity of a disaster, shorten its duration and make the consequences less painful.

Scope and issues

The scale of the crisis can be local or general. The latter covers literally the entire social and economic system, while the local one covers only part of it. But this division is also very arbitrary. Concrete analysis must take into account the boundaries where the crisis occurs, unravel its structure, and also explore the environment in which it operates.

From the point of view of problems, microcrises andmacrocrises. One covers either one problem or a group of them, while the other has much larger volumes. But the most important feature is that a crisis situation is similar to a terrible contagious disease: even if it is small - a local crisis or a microcrisis - a pandemic begins as a chain reaction, spreads to the entire system, where each element is organically linked to others.

Types of crises

Not a single problem can be solved independently of the others, usually its appearance affects the entire system of problems, and therefore assistance in crisis situations is most often late, moving a few steps behind. Especially if it is poorly organized, and the worse the organization, the further away help is from the suffering. Crisis situations can be managed to some extent if measures are taken to contain them, reducing their severity in every possible way.

However, it also happens that the development of the crisis is carried out intentionally, and there is always a certain motivation for this ("fish is well caught in troubled waters" or "some war is like a mother"). Assistance in crisis situations should be provided immediately and targeted, depending on the structural component of what happened. It can be an economic, social, organizational, psychological, or technological crisis. Next, consider each variety in more detail.

Economic

Crisis situations in Russia (and in any other country) related to the economy primarily reflect contradictions inthis area, and it is possible to distinguish such cases only by scale. Either this is an economic crisis in the state, or in a separate industry, or in a separate institution.

The latter are happening now almost constantly: the crisis situation at the enterprise is a hallmark of today. These are difficulties in the sale of products, these are production crises, a shortage of specialists, misunderstanding between economic agents, non-payments, losses in competitive advantages, bankruptcies and much more.

Financial

Closely related to economic and financial crises, although they are a separate line in the classification. However, they are the essence of the monetary expression of the same economic processes. They are characterized by the same contradictions, only in the state of the possibilities of the entire system of financing. The crisis situation of an organization belonging to the financial sector will not surprise anyone today.

If Belarus still remembers the bankruptcy of Delta-Bank (Ukrainian subsidiary), which happened a long time ago, in Russia the Central Bank sometimes revokes licenses from several banks a day. Moreover, there were no negative consequences for Belarusian neighbors - the state completely satisfied all depositors, but one cannot be happy for Russian depositors.

Social

When the interests of different social formations or groups (employers and workers, entrepreneurs and trade unions, managers and staff or simply workers of different professions) collide, there arecrisis situations. The Ministry of Emergency Situations will not help here, since this is not a flood in Krymsk, which was a real natural disaster, here the crisis, as it were, continues and complements the economic and financial crises.

But you can't say that it is less painful. Most often, the scale of the social crisis is local, but as it grows, it may well cover large areas if measures are not taken at the very beginning. This is how revolutions and upheavals happen. Before my eyes - a Ukrainian example, when the not too pronounced discontent of certain social groups was picked up and inflated to incredible proportions by people who are just not averse to fishing in troubled waters.

Political

Social crisis does not always occur by itself. If a crisis situation appears due to dissatisfaction with the management style in the company, working conditions, they disappear as these factors change. But there are permanent crises over dissatisfaction with land use, in connection with environmental problems, society has a lot of common causes for concern, and patriotic feelings also mean a lot.

This can also be observed everywhere. In a special place in the group of social crisis situations are political crises, when the structure of society and power do not satisfy, the interests of individual social groups or classes are violated. This crisis is wholly and completely in the field of social control, and it usually affects absolutely all aspects of the life of the state and practicallyalways turns into an economic crisis.

Organizational

The manifestation of organizational crises can be seen in the division of activities, in integration, in the distribution of functions, in the separation of administrative units and entire regions, in the arrangement of branches or subsidiaries, in the regulation of the work of some divisions. Organizational relations become aggravated in absolutely any social and economic system if unfavorable conditions develop. This is manifested in the appearance of confusion, irresponsibility, in business conflicts, in the exceptional complexity of control.

It is impossible even to enumerate all the manifestations, but for sure every adult has repeatedly seen such crisis situations live. On a national scale, we are witnessing this with our own eyes: the dominance of corruption, the impunity of some social groups and prejudice against others, very strange things are happening in the judicial system. Experts are sure that such crisis situations of an organizational type always occur when the economy grows too fast, when the conditions for its development change, and also because of errors in the reconstruction of the system or reinsurance, when bureaucratic tendencies are born.

Psychological

Modern conditions for the development of most segments of society and the socio-economic state of the country as a whole are increasingly forced to face crisis situations of a psychological type. These are manifestations in the form of stress, which are becoming massive. Then society is taken overfeelings of fear about the very near future, panic, uncertainty.

There is a feeling of dissatisfaction with their own activities and results of work, lack of legal protection and a disastrous social situation. Such crises can happen both in a separate team and in a large social group, it all depends on the socio-psychological climate in society.

Technological

A technological crisis is the absence of new ideas when the need for new technologies is clearly expressed. This is a very difficult crisis for society. When, over and over again, efforts are unsuccessful not only in the conquest of space, but also the processing of the caught herring cannot be done on our own, when products created for one node are incompatible at different enterprises, when new technological solutions appear somewhere not with us.

Such crises, generally speaking, look like a crisis of scientific and technological progress, contradictions between opportunities, trends, consequences. An example is the idea of a "peaceful atom". It is also generally weak to use it: either Chernobyl or Fukushima. Nuclear power plants and nuclear warheads, ships and submarines, the construction of huge tokamaks - all this threatens the planet with terrible death, and society clearly feels this way to nowhere.

Crisis Command Center

TSUKS was established in 2009 at the Headquarters of the All-Russian Disaster Medicine Service and itstook into its structure the Unified State System for the Prevention and Elimination of Emergencies. The creation of the TsUKS pursued the following goals: to increase the efficiency in managing the means and forces of the VSMK with constant interaction with the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation and other departments in cases of threat of emergency situations and to eliminate the consequences. As a result, coordinated decisions regarding relief and evacuation are made much faster.

Only the outgoing 2017 brought more than two hundred emergencies to our country. This is a little less than last year, but still a lot. The Center for Crisis Situations assisted the National Center in every possible way in forecasting and modeling the development of each situation, in monitoring the activities, the timeliness of the deployment of funds and forces, and the involvement of both regional and federal groups. As a result, there are significantly fewer people who died as a result of emergencies in 2017 than in 2016.

Psychological help

In crisis situations, new approaches are applied to the activities of the department's psychological service, and the significance of this work is noted everywhere. Fires were not extinguished by psychologists, in road accidents they also did not deal with the aftermath on the highway, however, working with an injured person who survived catastrophes and accidents can be more difficult. Psychologists support the families of the dead and injured, passing their pain through their own hearts.

In 2017, 577 specialists were urgently called about twenty thousand times to provide psychological assistance. Hundred times they worked at liquidationlargest emergency in the country. These are the TU-154 plane crash (Sochi), an explosion in the St. Petersburg metro, a hurricane in Moscow, an accident at the Mir mine. There were floods, and fires, and traffic accidents in various parts of the country. Thus twenty thousand emergency calls were made.

About types of crisis situations

Our country is huge, the population density is small, the distances are great, many settlements are almost inaccessible by transport. But in any type of emergency - environmental and natural - the Ministry of Emergency Situations always responds immediately, and people get help. Earthquakes and hurricanes, fires and floods, climate change - all this cannot but affect social and political processes, the country's economy and human psychology. It is these natural phenomena at a certain scale that can give rise to a real crisis.

Man has long disturbed the natural balance on the planet. The result of his activities - and these are dangerous technologies, imbalance in nature, pollution of the atmosphere, water bodies (including the oceans), soil, depletion of resources - has become an increase in environmental crises. Such crises are predictable because they are stages of development. They are even predictable. And almost never prevent. But most crisis situations come unexpectedly - some as a result of gross management errors, others due to oversight or negligence.