Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

Today, corporate crises inherently pose a threat to brand reputation. Multiple stakeholders, online influence and the interconnectedness of reputation with major social issues raise the stakes for crisis teams. The level of complexity has perhaps never been so great, and with it, the need for data-driven decision-making. In practice, research, analytics, and intelligence experts are full members of corporate risk and crisis teams from planning, to response, to evaluation. These professionals develop the insights to fuel smart, timely decision-making by surfacing insights to ameliorate crises. Additionally, they are responsible for measuring and evaluating progress and performance improving the brand's readiness for future issues. Insights, intelligence and performance measures drive conclusions necessary to determine what, if any, brand damage has occurred, how to fix it, and how to prepare better for the next time.

Business continuity management (BCM) is an analytic process capable of fostering the resilience of critical societal functions. While previous research on BCM primarily has focused on its applications within individual organizations, today's modern society involves networks of interdependent actors collectively delivering these essential functions to end users. This necessitates an expansion of BCM to accommodate a multiactor context. Critical considerations that need to be addressed in multiactor BCM involve shared use of a common, finite resource by several actors, or situations where an alternative continuity solution is relied upon by more than one actor, but its capacity is insufficient for simultaneous use by all. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for multiactor BCM. The framework expands upon existing ISO 22301 standards to outline how BCM can be approached for the multiactor context. It diverges from the conventional BCM approach conducted by individual actors and embraces a societal safety perspective, facilitating the definition of a common analytic focus and promoting high conceptual harmonization. While acknowledging potential practical barriers, the framework facilitates the connection of BCM efforts from different actors with minimal additional analytic efforts. The overarching goal of the framework is to provide increased understanding of the continuity of the multiactor system, specifically focusing on its ability to deliver the most critical products or services to end users. Based on this understanding, the aim is to identify ways to further improve the continuity, for example by identifying and ranking critical products or services, identifying resources or alternative continuity solutions that many actors depend on in delivering their critical products and services. Finally, the paper addresses lingering challenges and highlights success factors necessary for the effective application of the framework.

In the digital age, social media (such as Weibo, Twitter), as a rich source of data, has become a vital platform for businesses to communicate and engage with their audiences. In this paper, we investigate crisis management effectiveness for enterprises using social media. To achieve this goal, a CRITIC-EDAS (the abbreviation for criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation-evaluation based on distance from average solution) evaluation approach is proposed. First, from the perspective of Weibo, an evaluation index system for the effectiveness of enterprise crisis management is constructed based on the analysis of the factors affecting the effectiveness of enterprise crisis management. Then, the CRITIC method is used to determine the weights of the evaluation index, and the EDAS method is utilized to calculate the enterprise crisis management effectiveness value based on the weights of the evaluation index. Finally, a case study about four enterprises' crisis events is applied to verify the feasibility of the CRITIC-EDAS approach. Furthermore, some existing problems of enterprise crisis management are summarized and some strategies of enterprise crisis management for these problems are provided.

The goal of this study is to present a thorough analysis of the ways that organisational culture (OC) and risk assessment competencies of leaders affect the creation of strategic frameworks, especially about high-quality crisis decision-making. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 436 organisational personnel; 304 valid responses were received, and these were analysed using variance-based structural equation modelling. The findings show that OC, leadership risk assessment and a strategic management plan (SMP) are favourable predictors of high-quality crisis decision-making. According to this research, every variable strengthens the link between SMP quality and crisis decisions. The study is supported by an integrated method for understanding complex organisational facts. Practical ramifications for leadership development include strengthening leaders' capacity to appraise risk, considering OC and employing an SMP to guarantee that, when making sound crisis judgements, they are both innovative and compliant with organisational ethics.

The sometimes rapid development of (new) threats and extraordinary events calls for a robust, flexible, and well-equipped civil crisis preparedness system to respond and limit the damage of crisis events. To achieve this, Swedish municipalities and regions are required by law to regularly perform and report risk and vulnerability analysis ‘bottom up’ to governmental agencies. When performed in large and complex public organisations, crisis preparedness planning activities require negotiation, coordination, and cooperation among large numbers of people. Crisis preparedness planners facilitate and produce this proactive crisis preparedness work. However, research has revealed that preparedness planners face organisational and practical challenges when performing their work.

This study aims at increasing the knowledge of crisis preparedness planners' understandings and sense-making of their work in one Swedish region when fulfilling the requirements set by the Swedish national regulations. The objectives of this paper are to present findings on (1) how the preparedness planners understand and make sense of their crisis preparedness work; (2) which major enablers and barriers that affect their work; and, based on the results, (3) forward possibilities for improvement.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the 10 crisis preparedness planners. A narrative stepwise analysis approach was applied. The analysis results revealed challenges in the crisis preparedness work due to uncommitted managers, unclear goalsetting, and the planners' sometimes limited skills in crisis preparedness work. It also report on managers' autonomy and varying focus on crisis preparedness, planners' unclear individual work space, and many different and sometimes strong voices about the work performance and content. This raises the question whose interest that in practice sets the agenda for crisis preparedness planning in the organisation.

The study demonstrates needs for increased organisational sense-making on the concept of crisis preparedness and how it should be performed, and for conceptual and technical skills to perform the preparedness work. To increase sense-making and strengthen generic subjectivity on crisis preparedness work, further discussions are needed about enablers and barriers in preparedness work and an increased joint focus on possible internal and external threats. There are also needs for increased manager-coworker-planner cooperation when developing the preparedness work, and strategic changes in the organisational development involving goalsetting for crisis preparedness ‘top-down’ as well as ‘bottom-up’.

This article provides a systematic literature review of existing strategic crisis management training research. The review explores practices on which strategic crisis management skills to prioritize and how to train these skills to be prepared when a crisis strikes. Our research question was: How is strategic crisis management trained, and is there a best practice? In all, we identified 538 articles from 3 databases and read the abstracts. From this, we selected 41 articles based on the defined inclusion criteria and read them as a whole. In the end, eight articles were a part of this analysis. A thematic analysis based on the categorization of repetitions of concepts was used to analyse the data. The analysis resulted in two main categories: what to train, which focuses on the outcome and skills, and how to train, which focuses on the process and pedagogy. The outcome (what to train) categories were (1) related to working together, (2) related to understanding the situation, (3) related to making adequate decisions in complex contexts, and (4) related to practicalities. The process (how to train) categories were (1) training methods and (2) learning theories. A model considering three main strategic crisis management training approaches, outcome-focused training, process-focused training, and learning-focused training, was developed. The latter was concluded to be the desired option, as it is a balanced approach of both outcome and process focus.

The risk perception of lay people is believed to be guided by qualitative characteristics of risk they perceive. Outrage factors refer to perceived characteristics of risk that arouse emotional responses and thereby influence risk perception. Conducting a content analysis of coronavirus disease 2019 online news coverage, we identified outrage factors embedded in news stories to determine how those factors are associated with audience engagement, measured by counting news consumer comments and clicks on emotional expressions on each news story. As a result, the average outrage score for a news story was significantly associated with the number of clicks on emotional expressions and comments. When it comes to individual outrage factors, a news story covering a case of violation against social distancing or other governmental guidelines was found to be accompanied by more comments and more emotional expressions, indicating the strongest power of moral nature. The outrage factor of voluntariness, human origin, accident history and controllability were also associated with one or both types of the audience responses. The news stories of business owners who involuntarily shut down their businesses or those comparing the current pandemic to Middle East respiratory syndrome that broke out in 2015 in the nation showed a similar pattern of audience engagement. Furthermore, liberal media were more likely to convey outrage factors than media with a less liberal orientation, which was manifested in the outrage score for each story. We discuss the potential of outrage factors as a new content-based factor for audience engagement in online risk communication.

During COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions (HEIs) implemented new types of working, teaching and communicating quickly. Thereby, faculty staff faced multiple challenges in professional regards. They were in a ‘sandwich position’ between the HEIs and the students and they presumably took on the role of ‘on site’ crisis managers who often had to embed the situation communicatively. Against this background, this article addresses the questions: What challenges for HEIs revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic from the teachers’ perspective? And: To what extent can assumptions about turning points in the higher education (HE) system be derived from this? Answers are based on the triangulation of a literature review and data from an online survey. The results point to human, organizational and technical challenges, and opportunities in terms of communication, teaching, resilience and crisis management. At the end, some assumptions are derived that can be used for further research.

The literature confirms that organizational ambidexterity (OA) is the key to increasing an organization's prospects for survival and success in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) international environment. A critical review of this literature reveals that the conceptualization of OA is disorganized and ambiguous when it establishes and labels relevant aspects of this construct, such as its development and implementation. This study provides a conceptual framework for OA and its dimensions and explains the mechanisms for building and implementing OA. The most important contribution resides in providing research guidelines to improve the consistency and rigour of OA conceptualization in the VUCA international context. To develop this research agenda, we use the VUCA framework, which allows us to identify possible future research and the application of theories and methodologies not previously used. Thus, in general terms, to respond to volatility, studies must be carried out on the agility of organizations. For uncertainty, the topics of knowledge and information management are interesting. To respond to the complexity, topics on restructuring are interesting. And to avoid ambiguity, studies on experimentation would be ideal. Based on this generality, this study proposes multiple future lines of research.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in the global economy, particularly, in tourism and hospitality. However, they face challenges due to their vulnerability to external disruptions. A research model was proposed to enhance SME resilience in tourism through supply chain collaboration, strategic human resource and adaptive capability. Drawing on Dynamic Capability Theory, a total of seven hypotheses were presented. The data collection were conducted in Malaysia. There were 210 SME owners/managers participated in the survey. Data were analysed using Smart PLS software version 4. Results suggest that addressing business collaboration and human resource development are critical factors in developing capabilities that foster business resilience in tourism SMEs. The study addresses the dearth of theoretical and practical research on tourism SMEs. While calling SMEs for more attention to developing resilient businesses, this study serves as insights for disaster planning to withstand potential future shocks.