Contemporary Sociology - American Sociological Association

when the disaster ‘‘agent’’—the flood, earthquake,
hurricane, fire, or other threat—
appears on the scene and begins to threaten
human communities. Most research has
focused on such topics as responses to predisaster
warnings; patterns of social behavior
during the period following disaster impact;
organizational adaptation and improvisation
during disasters; and the disaster response
activities of specific types of organizations
and institutions. There has also been an
emphasis on developing empirical generalizations
and insights on the basis of the study
of specific disasters, which subsequently
developed in an incremental fashion into
a body of empirical findings.
This is not to claim that the field has been
atheoretical. Disaster research was shaped
initially by the sociological theory that
was prominent at the time of its development,
which was functionalism or systems
theory—an influence that can still be seen
in current scholarship. However, as the influence
of functionalism declined, no overarching
theoretical perspective has replaced it.
As I discuss elsewhere (Tierney 2010), current
disaster research boasts a wealth of middlerange
theory and an even greater wealth of
empirical findings, but no unifying theoretical
paradigm tying the field together.
The field also took a very long time to
incorporate broader sociological perspectives
on social inequalities and disparities, such as
those associated with race, class, gender, and
differences in access to political power. These
topics were not incorporated into disaster
scholarship in a meaningful way until the
mid-1990s (on gender, for example, see
Fothergill 1996; Enarson and Morrow 1998;
Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek 2007). Since
that time, race, class, gender and their intersectionality
have been taken into account in
a great deal of the work that is being done.
In contrast, despite its importance for the
study of disasters, political power still
receives little emphasis.
Catastrophe in the Making is in many ways
the antidote for these ills. It was not written
to answer the questions that federal agencies
want answered. Quite the contrary, it asks
and answers questions that many agencies
would like to ignore. The book is not about
what people, organizations, or institutions
did during a disaster, but rather about
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a lengthy series of historical processes, decisions,
and practices—and indeed ideologies
concerning nature, technology, and their
management—that produced the catastrophe
that was Katrina. Additionally, the
book makes political power central to an
understanding of disasters, their impacts,
and their outcomes. But most important, it
provides a framework and set of concepts
that explain the process of risk buildup,
showing in the process how disasters are
socially produced. That framework is political
economy/political ecology, and the
book’s key concepts include the idea of cities
as growth machines and rent-seeking, or
efforts to extract profits from land-use, infrastructure,
and ‘‘development’’ projects for
the benefit of elites. At the same time, the
outcome of growth machine politics is the
spread of downstream risks to others,
including future generations. And in an
especially nice twist, the book shows how,
at least in the case of New Orleans, but no
doubt also true in many other cases, the
promised benefits from such activities (in
this case, the massive boondoggle that was
the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MR-
GO) never actually materialized.
The ideas in the book are not entirely new
in the field of sociological disaster research.
Other studies have been guided by similar
theoretical assumptions. For example, Hurricane
Andrew: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Sociology
of Disaster (Peacock, Morrow, and
Gladwin 1997) explicitly argued for a sociopolitical
ecology approach to the study of
disaster, even though many of the chapters
in that book did not make the best use of
that framework. The Northridge Earthquake
(Bolin and Stanford 1998) analyzed the
post-disaster recovery experiences of four
different communities affected by that earthquake,
taking into account those communities’
positions in the political economy of
Greater Los Angeles, including their distinctive
histories and political ties with regional
elites. More than two decades ago (Tierney
1989), I argued that to understand the
seeming inability of local communities to
enact hazard mitigation measures, such as
improved building codes, earthquake retrofit
ordinances, and land-use planning
measures that can reduce losses from
future disasters, we need to focus on how
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