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Disaster preparedness has been identified with planning, resource identification, warning systems, trowing and simulations, and other predistister actions intended to improve the safety and effectiveness of community response to disaster. Despite its acknowledged importance, little attention has been given to clarifying the conceptualization and strengthening the measurement of preparedness. This paper presents an empirically based summative measure of preparedness, documents its reliability, and offers evidence of construct validity.

The dynamics of status concordance theory are explored in a heterogeneous sample of 67 ongoing interdisciplinary research teams in universities. This theory implies positive relationships between concordance and coordination, coordination and success, and a positive but spurious correlation between concordance and success. Our findings show coordination posi-tively related to success at all stages of team development; concordance positively related to coordination only during early phases of team develop-ment; concordance positively related to success for young teams, unrelated for middle-aged teams, and negatively related for older teams. These patterns remain with coordination statistically controlled. We conclude that status concordance can depress as well as elevate a team's overall success, and that external status criteria play a decreasingly important role in the co-ordination of interdisciplinary teams.

Two models of organization-environment relations are examined. One postulates organizational structure or behavior as contingent on environments; organizations are viewed as adapting to environmental changes. Conversely, the second model postulates environments as dependent upon organizations; organizations are viewed as actively manipulating environments. The two alternative models are empirically assessed and compared on a heterogeneous sample of 27 business corporations. In the contingency model, environmental manipulation is used to predict different dimensions of organizational technology. In the action model, the causal order is reversed; technology is used to predict environmental manipulation. Organizational assets are controlled in both models to eliminate the possible bias of differential resources. We find similar predictive power for both models. Explained variance was about equal, and standardized regression coefficients were similar across the models as well. It is thus concluded that a full understanding of organization-environment interaction will require simultaneous consideration of their effects upon one another.

Six status concordance measures (discipline prestige, academic rank, age, sex, highest degree, & discipline influence) were examined separately over time in an examination of two competing views of the relationships between leader status characteristics & performance in small professional organizations. Findings indicate that higher status older professionals with higher academic degrees are best used as leaders in early stages of organizational development. In older organizations, however, lower status individuals are more closely associated with success. Status characteristics were not found to be interchangeable & were not found to relate in the same way to other variables over time. 1 Table. AA.

An integrated conceptual framework acceptable across different disciplines and theoretical perspectives is presented. The scheme promotes one aspect of organizational environments, the cultural context, as crucial to explaining organizational structure or behavior. By crosstabulating member consensus and community consensus consistent predictions regarding survival, "character," and goal behavior are achieved for a diverse range of case studies. It is suggested, therefore, that community consensus be treated as a common denominator in future attempts to ferret out the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with particular organizational structures and behaviors.

A formal model is developed facilitating (1) an integration of theories dealing with organization-environment interaction, and (2) an explanation of how an organization's boundaries become increasingly permeated by the environment. It is argued that rates of change per se represent the principal impetus in promoting adaptive exchanges between an organization and its environment, both for long-term (evolutionary) and short-term (mutational) changes in the environment. The model reveals that a key variable in organization-environment interdependencies is the ratio of legitimate demands placed upon the organization by the environment to either the capacity or minimum performance levels of the organization.