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The purpose of this paper is to explain the significance of cascading crises for translators and interpreters, and how their work may be affected by such events. It provides a theoretical basis for analysis and field practice.

The authors define cascades and explain how they influence the development of preparedness, mitigation and response. The authors identify key drivers of cascading crises and discuss how they challenge conventional approaches to emergency management. The authors discuss ways in which use of language could be a key factor in crisis escalation. The authors define priorities and operational challenges of cascading crises for translators and interpreters. In terms of methodology, this paper develops a conceptual framework that can be used for future enquiry and case history analysis.

The authors provide a qualitative description and synthesis of the key instructions to be used in the field. The authors offer a short list of key questions that can be referred to by linguists and scholars. The authors identify situations in which translation and interpretation are important ingredients in the success of emergency preparedness and response efforts. These include multilingual populations, migrant crises, international humanitarian deployment and emergency communication during infrastructure failures.

This work has academic value for the process of understanding cascades and practical relevance in terms of how to deal with them.

Translators and interpreters need to understand cascading crises in order to be prepared for the challenges that such events will present.

Society has become more complex and interconnected, with non-linear cascading escalation of secondary emergencies. Emergency planners and responders need to address this in new ways. Effective communication and information strategies are essential to the mitigation of cascading disaster risk.

The study of cascading crises from a socio-economic point of view is relatively new, but it is important because society is increasingly dependent on networks that can propagate failure of information supply.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical examination of the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009. It considers the elements of the recovery process that are unique or exceptional and endeavours to explain them.

The analysis is based on a survey and synthesis of the abundant literature on the disaster, coupled with observations from the author’s many visits to L’Aquila and personal involvement in the debates on the questions raised during the aftermath.

Several aspects of the disaster are unique. These include the use of large, well-appointed buildings as temporary accommodation and the efforts to use legal processes to obtain justice for alleged mismanagement of both the early emergency situation and faults in the recovery process.

Politics, history, economics and geography have conspired to make the L’Aquila disaster and its aftermath a multi-layered event that poses considerable challenges of interpretation.

The L’Aquila case teaches first that moderate seismic events can entail a long and difficult process of recovery if the initial vulnerability is high. Second, for processes of recovery to be rational, they need to be safeguarded against the effects of political expediency and bureaucratic delay.

Many survivors of the L’Aquila disaster have been hostages to fortune, victims as much of broader political and socio-economic forces than of the earthquake itself.

Although there are now many published analyses of the L’Aquila disaster, as the better part of a decade has elapsed since the event, there is value in taking stock and making a critical assessment of developments. The context of this disaster is dynamic and extraordinarily sophisticated, and it provides the key to interpretation of developments that otherwise would probably seem illogical.

This paper applies the theory of cascading, interconnected and compound risk to the practice of preparing for, managing, and responding to threats and hazards. Our goal is to propose a consistent approach for managing major risk in urban systems by bringing together emergency management, organisational resilience, and climate change adaptation.

We develop a theory-building process using an example from the work of the Greater London Authority in the United Kingdom. First, we explore how emergency management approaches systemic risk, including examples from of exercises, contingency plans and responses to complex incidents. Secondly, we analyse how systemic risk is integrated into strategies and practices of climate change adaptation. Thirdly, we consider organisational resilience as a cross cutting element between the approaches.

London has long been a champion of resilience strategies for dealing with systemic risk. However, this paper highlights a potential for integrating better the understanding of common points of failure in society and organisations, especially where they relate to interconnected domains and where they are driven by climate change.

The paper suggests shifting toward the concept of operational continuity to address systemic risk and gaps between Emergency Management, Organizational Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation.

The purpose of this paper is to review the issues and challenges associated with examining PhD theses in the modern, rapidly changing academic world. The PhD degree has been described as the “pinnacle of academic qualifications”, but it is under threat in terms of the quality of supervision and the outcome of examinations. By bringing the issues into the open and discussing them, more can be done to safeguard the health of the modern doctorate.

This paper reviews the mainstream academic literature on doctoral degrees from the point of view of the origin and development of the contemporary PhD. Then it offers some reflections on supervision, examination, standards of judgement, benchmarking of results and different routes to the doctorate. The pressures upon the modern university are related to issues encountered in examining doctoral theses.

In modern neo-liberal environments, the PhD degree is under pressure in terms of its quality and rigour. This paper offers a simple conceptual model of the challenges involved in ensuring the quality of PhD examinations and their outcomes. Priorities for the various stakeholders are suggested to ensure that PhD research continues to set the “gold standard” for excellence.

Recognising and confronting the problems with the modern PhD and how it is examined will help guarantee the quality of the degree. A more open debate on the pressures under which supervision and examinations are conducted will help establish rules or guidelines for conduct.

There are remarkably few evaluations of the PhD examination process, which in recent years has become increasingly problematic. The authors adopt a comprehensive approach to the issues and relate them to the societal context in which universities are developing.

Accounting practices vary not only across firms, but also across countries, reflecting the respective legal and cultural background. Attempts at harmonization therefore continue to be rebuffed. The purpose of this paper is to argue that different wordings in national laws, and different interpretations of similar wordings in national laws, can be explained by taking recourse to the philosophy of language, referring particularly to Searle and Wittgenstein.

The example of the substance over form principle, investigated in seven countries, is particularly suitable for this analysis. It is known in all accounting jurisdictions, but still has very different roots in different European countries, with European and international influences conflicting, which is reflected in the different wording of the principle from one country to the next, and the different socially constructed realities associated with those wordings.

This paper shows that, beyond accounting practices, the legal and cultural background of a country affects the wording of national law itself. The broad conclusion is that different socially constructed realities might tend to resist any attempt at harmonized socially constructed words.

The paper contributes to the debate surrounding the possible homogenization of accounting regulations, illustrating the theory of the social construction of both “reality” and “language” on the specific application of one common principle to various Member State environments.

Civil protection, or emergency preparedness as it is known in the USA, has grown in response to the need to protect populations against natural and technological disasters. Over the past two decades it has partially supplanted civil defence, which is primarily concerned with civilian response to armed aggression. This article traces the evolution of both fields and analyses their often uneasy relationship. It discusses the probable long‐term effect of the US terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on emergency management policies around the world and considers the implications of the probable changes in terms of citizen’s rights and expectations in disaster situations. With the new emphasis on anti‐terrorism measures, and a new spirit of authoritarianism, civil defense appears to be becoming resurgent at the expense of the more democratic forms of crisis management inherent in modern civil protection arrangements.

This paper discusses the possible future role of standards in assuring the quality and content of programmes for educating and training people in the fields of emergency planning and management. Principles for the establishment of standards are presented. Existing standards in the civil protection and emergency preparedness fields are reviewed. The requisites for a training standard are described. Finally, a prototype standard is presented. The paper also addresses the question of whether standards are appropriate instruments and concludes that they would help ensure comparability, quality assurance and international compatibility of training.

This paper aims to focus on corporate accountability, analysing the case of Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC) from the perspective of civil society, acting as a significant stakeholder.

The authors ground the research on legitimacy theory, as the paper presents the company’s efforts to obtain the approval/legitimacy from one of its main vocal stakeholders: civil society. The paper presents the historical background of the Rosia Montana region, and then explains the stages of the RMGC project development, together with the company’s actions to be recognised by the local environment. They also investigate the corporate reports issued by Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, especially in and after 2010.

The results show that RMGC failed to gain the legitimacy of the Romanian society, and the authors discuss causes and implications.

This research brings a valuable contribution to the corporate reporting literature, being one of the first studies on the state of reporting in Romania in the mining sector, analysing the implications of the relationship between corporate accountability and civil society.

Scenarios are discussed in terms of their various uses in emergency planning and management. Their function in teaching programs is assessed with respect to various sorts of curricula for training emergency personnel. The format of scenarios is discussed and the potential for using the methodology creatively is explored. It is concluded that scenario methods are useful in developing such skills as time management, cognitive mapping, mediation, team management, and decision making under stress. A brief example of an emergency training scenario is presented and evaluated in terms of its teaching potential. Finally, scenarios are assessed in relation to other forms of modelling and simulation, such as table‐top games and field exercises, which are commonly used for training emergency managers.

The role of policy in the development of education is crucial. So much rests on the decisions, support, and most of all resources that policymakers either give or withhold in any given situation. This volume of International Perspectives on Education and Society highlights the valuable role that educational policy plays in the development of education and society around the world.