Introduction: Social organization of demographic responses to disaster: Studying population-environment interactions in the case of Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue of Organization & Environment that uses the historic case of Hurricane Katrina to investigate the social organization of demographic responses to disaster. It begins by establishing natural disasters as a dramatic form of human interaction with the environment. It then goes on to advance a novel framework for understanding the different population movements triggered by such interaction in the context of broader organizational failures. These population movements include unequal resettlement of the disaster zone by former residents, prolonged displacement in other locales, and arrival of a new recovery labor force perceived as socially different from formerly established populations. Respective articles on the social organization of these different population movements are previewed and connections with allied subfields are discussed. © The Author(s) 2009.