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A review of the literature relating to Fire Services reveals a lack of research concerning the meanings and uses of strategy and strategic management in these institutions. The primary aim of this study, therefore, is to contribute to widening debate in this particular field of discourse. The researcher investigated the nature of management style preferences expressed by Chief Fire Officers of fire brigades within the British Fire Service and compared these management behaviours with Chief Fire Officers in Denmark. While the design of the study was cross-national and comparative its overall research strategy employed mixed methods by means of which to generate both quantitative and qualitative data from an empirical approach. Research questions were utilised as guiding issues with which to focus the study consistently on the strategic behaviours of Chief Fire Officers in the public sector brigades in each country. With Chief Officers as its unit of comparison, this study comprises an examination of strategic management styles and behaviours of senior managers in the public sector fire brigades of Britain and Denmark. It is supported by the developing literature on strategy and strategic management in public services contexts, which, nevertheless, has not addressed this area of the public service, where its quasi-military aspect might be thought to give rise especially to marked strategic styles and behaviours. The study is cross-national and comparative in its focus and research strategy. In Britain wholly 'public' fire services are in operation, and a privatised service has never appeared on the main policy agenda. In Denmark, by contrast, the municipal brigades are in competition with a single private sector provider, the 'Falck' company.

Firefighters occupy a special place in modern society. The fire service provides a rich cultural script to understand how firefighters, like other workers in dangerous occupations, organise themselves as well as derive meaning from their work. One conclusion that emerges regularly in this literature is that firefighters tend to share a distinctive firefighter culture that binds firefighters to one another and makes their work meaningful. Yet in practice this concept proves exceedingly difficult to empirically or even theoretically explain. Here I critique the traditional concept of firefighter culture arguing that it is a myth. I draw heavily upon Pierre Bourdieu's Field Analytic Perspective to provide an alternative explanation for the underlying organisational and interpersonal dynamics observed in fire departments. Accordingly, I argue that what is often referred to, as "firefighter culture" is simply the most visible manifestation of the competitive struggle to monopolise control of the profession, police its boundaries and maintain legitimacy in the field of structural fire protection. This boundary-work suggests that we should reconceptualisefirefighter cultures as imagined moral communities, as they are necessarily fluid and contextual.

Fires are integral to the global environment. Changes to that environment have, and will, modify fire behaviour. In turn, fires impact the land surface by burning vegetation, and the atmosphere by emitting large amounts of heat, gases and aerosols. I first studied extreme wildfires in North America, finding satellite observations estimate 79% of the burnt area logged by ground crews during firefighting campaigns, and only 54% during peak burning days. I then describe the development of one such model: the INteractive Fire and Emission algoRithm for Natural envirOnments (INFERNO), a global fire model developed for the UK Met Office’s Unified Model. It innovates by providing a simple parameterisation which uses information on temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and vegetation, to estimate burnt area and fire emissions at the global scale. Live vegetation is used as a proxy for fuel, in reality, litter and ground fuel are predominant. The model performs well against fire danger indices and observations, but shows regional biases and a notable underestimate of emissions during El-Niño years. INFERNO was most sensitive to changes in soil moisture, with regional patterns of fire also strongly influenced by number of ignitions, fuel density, temperature and humidity. Results from multiple fire models participating in the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP) show similar performances, with a multi-model mean underestimate of global burnt area, and overestimate of emissions. I identified systematic biases in fuel consumption, which models generally underestimate in tropical forests and peatlands compared to field observations. Models particularly disagreed in areas with strong human-influences. Global fire models are central to our understanding of how fires interact with the land and the atmosphere on large scales, and hold the potential to be an integral part of global models in the future and to catalyse new understandings of feedbacks in the Earth system.

The purpose of this programme of study was to construct a theory of resilience in volunteer firefighters, a population that, despite facing intermittent and at times intense work-related stressors, is underrepresented in the resilience literature. Using a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) perspective, the study engaged a purposive sample of 8 firefighters from a single volunteer fire rescue service (FRS) in Canada, conducted in-depth interviews, and analyzed the data using CGT methodologies. The findings offer unique insight into the resilience of firefighters and demonstrate that resilience in the volunteer FRS is multidimensional, complex, dynamic, and contextual. The CGT asserts that within a volunteer FRS there are a number of concepts that inter-relate to construct resilience: relationships, personal resources, meaning-making, leadership, culture, and knowledge. Recently some researchers have noted relationships between concepts such as social support, adaptive health strategies, etc. (see for example: Almedom et al., 2010), and others are recognizing cultural influences on resilience (see for example: Panter-Brick & Eggerman, 2012), however, there is a dearth of literature linking all of the components together within a theory of resilience in high-risk professions such as the FRS. As well, many of the extant theories/models are linear whereas this theory is multidimensional and more patently represents the complex nature of resilience in volunteer firefighters. The findings further offer concrete strategies for practical integration of resilience theory into policies and actions to mitigate risks and enhance resilience in high risk professions such as the FRS. The outcomes of this programme of work have implications for volunteer firefighters, but there are also more global implications for career firefighters and other emergency service, disaster and humanitarian aid workers, and any organization or business that responds to emergencies, humanitarian crises or disasters.

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Toxic smoke from fires is regularly identified as the leading cause of death in fire casualties. In most countries statistics suggest more than 70% of fire deaths are caused by either toxic smoke inhalation, or heat burns and toxic smoke inhalation. In most cases, fire victims are impaired from escape due to smoke irritation and poor visibility. The fire community is now recognising the need for further research into the sub-lethal toxicity, as in most cases fire victims are impaired by these sub-lethal effects from making a safe escape. However, despite the recognition of the importance of the fire toxicity problem, limited work is done on quantifying the different fire smoke products. The available information is incomplete, and in many cases misleading. This work, attempts to address the fire toxicity problem in depth. By using state of the art experimental techniques, a thorough investigation into toxic components of fire effluent is conducted. Using a specially designed reduced scale enclosure, and an FTIR sampling system, a series of experiments were conducted examining the toxic products of low ventilation compartment fires. As a first objective, a review was conducted into the current practice of fire toxicity assessment; it was found out, that in most cases, the previously developed models, overlook the irritancy and sub-lethal quantification by adopting the lethal end-point for assessment. A review on the work exposure limits, and its relation to fire was provided. In addition, this research included experimentally examining different types of fire fuels, relevant to residential and industrial fires. The fuels studied included wood cribs, cotton towels, acrylic curtains, and hydrocarbon pool fires. The fires were burnt at ventilation rates corresponding to 5, 11, 21, 37 ACH, which simulated conditions of a limited ventilation enclosures in modern buildings. Quantified yields of irritant species, such as Acrolein, Formaldehyde, Benzene, Acetic Acid, and Acetaldehyde, are reported on a scale never accomplished before. In addition, detailed assessment of the measured species in terms of lethality and irritancy was reported. The amount of information gained from the experimental work, expanded our current understanding on toxic fire effluent, and was published in a series of publications. Finally, the gained knowledge from the experimental work was then used in an attempt to propose a new methodology for toxic fire prediction in fire models.

This study examines the organisational culture of the Scottish Fire Service, and the political pressures for change emanating from the modernisation agenda of both the United Kingdom and Scottish Governments. Having completed a preliminary analysis of the Fire Service‟s culture, by examining the cultural history of the Scottish Fire Service and the process through which individuals are socialised into the Service, the study analyses the contemporary culture of the Service through research in three Scottish Fire Brigades. This research concludes that there is a clearly defined Fire Service culture, which is predicated on the operational task of fighting fire, based on strong teams and infused with masculinity at all levels. In these circumstances, the Service‟s cultural realities attempt to exclude women and are derisive in their regard for other more marginalised males. Following an analysis of Government driven imperatives for change, being applied to the Fire Service, it is further concluded that the resistance to change, evident within the cultural realities of the Service, can be defined as an attempt to defend one of the last bastions of male identification in the workplace.

Wildland fire is a natural part of the earth’s phenomenological pattern and like most natural phenomena has presented a challenge to human activity and engineering science. Wildfire presents Fire Safety Engineering with the task of developing fundamental research and designing analysis tools to address fire on a scale where interactions with atmospheric and terrestrial conditions dominate fire behavior. The research work presented in this thesis addresses a fundamental research issue involving transport processes in porous wildland fuel beds. This research project had the specific goal of developing an understanding of how transport processes affected the combustion of wildland fuels that were in the form of a porous bed. No detailed study could be found in the literature that specifically addressed how the fuel structure affected the combustion process in these types of fuels. To this end, a series of experiments were designed and carried out that approached the understanding of this problem using commonly available fire testing equipment, specifically the cone calorimeter and the FM Global Fire Propagation Apparatus. The goal of this research study and the basis for the novel and relevant contribution to the field of engineering was to conduct an experimental test series, analyze the data and examine the scalability of the results, to determine the effect of transport processes on the Heat Release Rate (HRR) of porous wildland fuels. The project concluded that flow dominates HRR in fires involving the wildland fuels tested. A dimensionless analysis of the fuel sample baskets showed consistency with well established mass transfer, fluid flow and chemical kinetic relationships. The dimensionless analysis also indicates that the experimental results should be scalable to similar configurations in larger fuel beds. One conclusion of this study was that wildland fire modeling efforts should invest in understanding flow conditions in fuel beds because this behavior dominates over the chemical kinetics of combustion for predicting HRR which is an important parameter in fire modeling.