Picking Up the Pieces: Businesses and Organizations after Katrina

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the people of New Orleans felt everything worthwhile in their city had either drowned or was blown away. 

But the city retained its social capital – “those resources embedded and available in social relationships,” as Rutgers’ Marya Doerfel describes it. 

Her study of how communication preserved, activated, and employed social capital appeared recently in the journal Human Communication Research. Doerfel describes how organizations – from large corporations and nonprofit groups to small businesses – used communication to hold themselves together, re-establish their organizational networks, and rebuild. Doerfel, an associate professor of communication in the School of Communication and Information, specializes in organizational communication. 

Doerfel’s research team made trips to New Orleans between December 2005 and April 2007, conducting interviews with organizational leaders. Their organizations varied from small, nonprofit groups to large corporations that engaged in activities as diverse as family entertainment, law, retail services, and community advocacy. 

Doerfel and her co-authors concluded that social capital could be spent after a catastrophe whether it had been carefully tended to beforehand. They found that organizations in post-Katrina New Orleans relied on old friends of long standing to help them recover, but also resurrected long-neglected contacts and even established completely new contacts to get them through the crisis. This finding ran counter to many previously held assumptions about social capital. 

The researchers also concluded communications hardware was crucial to organizations trying to recover from catastrophe. “Loaning cell phones or web page space may be as critical to supporting displaced organizations as financial support like insurance plans are when the revenue stream stops,” Doerfel wrote. Government agencies and charities, Doerfel suggested, should include communications technology in their disaster assistance plans, just as they include food, water, and medicine. 

The researchers identified four phases their subjects went through in the aftermath of Katrina: personal emergency, professional emergency, transitional, and rebuilding. 

In the personal emergency phase, the leaders scrambled to protect themselves and their families. In the professional emergency phase, they communicated with their employees,  coordinated remote work, reassured them about getting paid, or told them to find new jobs. 

In the transitional phase, organizations used the internet, telephone, and public service announcements to advise customers, suppliers, insurers, and others of their status and needs. Businesses, trade and professional groups, charities, and others outside the devastated area communicated with New Orleans businesses and organizations, offering help of various kinds. Doerfel et al. noted that these contacts were often with people new to her subjects and might be described as “charitable” contacts, not expenditures of previously built-up social capital. 

It was in the transitional phase, however, that organizations began to spend some of that social capital. One business leader, having trouble getting the necessary pass to get into the city, called the office of Senator Mary Landrieu for help. Another business owner contacted his insurance company to get copies of the pass needed to get back into the city. 

As time went on, Doerfel reports, organizations began to depend more on reconnected local and personal networks – social capital – and less on charity. Organization leaders began to contact peers, competitors, friends, and friends of friends whom they thought might help keep their organizations functioning..

Eventually, this led to the rebuilding phase: An energy consultant went back to work on a project with the city, a retail business worked with peers from out of town to get its store re-opened, and a community group that had applied for grants before the storm re-connected with the granting agencies. 

Doerfel and her colleagues concluded that social capital was a durable and sustainable resource. When other kinds of resources were unavailable after Katrina, social capital proved to be robust, even when personal relationships had not been nurtured for years before the disaster. 

“Just knowing” that others in their networks were “back in New Orleans,” more or less intact and potentially ready to help, gave them confidence.