Dr Mark Stein , Senior Lecturer and Director of Tanaka Business School's MSc Management programme, has been awarded an Emerald Citation of Excellence by Emerald Management Reviews for his new article.

The is article entitled "The critical period of disasters: Insights from sensemaking and psychoanalytic theory". Of 20,000 articles published worldwide in management journals each year, the Citation is awarded to the top 50, judged by an independent review board.

The paper examines the period just after a disaster has been triggered (termed the critical period) to understand how people make sense of what is happening during this period and how this affects the outcome of the disaster. Previous research has shown cases where sensemaking is essential for survival during this period, but Dr Stein argues here that there are other cases in which sensemaking compounds the problems.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, he argues that the capacity for anxiety toleration influences whether correct sense can be made of the situation, and, in turn, whether the likelihood of survival will increase.

The article appeared in the October 2004 edition of Human Relations journal and is also freely available on the Sage Human Relations homepage (download the paper). Research for the paper was supported by a personal bursary from the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology.