Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
23
Understanding the factors of vulnerability, stress and resilience can help to identify the
necessary interventions to enable a system to maintain its essential functions, while
understanding the fluctuations within a system can enable mechanisms to be incorporated to
better predict possible disturbances and accommodate their impacts, thereby strengthening
structures to allow faster and more successful regeneration. Resilience principles take further
the phases of Faulkner’s crisis management framework in that Stage One (Pre-event) relates to
the latter stages of the ‘Conservation’ phase, when firm societal and institutional structures are
in place; Stage Two (Prodromal) relates to the ‘Release’ phase of the disturbance event, or crisis;
Stages Three and Four (Emergency and Intermediate) relate to the ‘Reorganization’ phase of
rapid change and regeneration of structures; Stage Five (Recovery) relates to the ‘Exploitation’
phase of new systems being created based on the social, political and institutional capital built
up before the crisis; and Stage Six (Resolution) relates to the early stages of the ‘Conservation’
phase, when a new stable state is formed.
Resilience theory is increasingly widely applied in tourism, with its introduction to tourism
academia notably by Farrell and Twining-Ward (2004; 2005). Since then, the concepts have been
used in a number of contexts. For instance, in the context of case study countries studied for this
report, a resilience and vulnerability analysis was carried out by Calgaro and Cochrane (2009) to
examine the social and political dimensions of tourism recovery in Thailand and Sri Lanka after the
2004 tsunami (see also Section 5).
1.4.3. TourismBusiness Resilience
More recent studies have examined organisational resilience in the tourism sector (Orchiston et
al, 2015), the resilience of formal and informal tourism enterprises to disasters (Biggs et al,
2012), and how local tourism business can build resilience in unpredictable business
environments (Dahles and Susilowati, 2015). As explained by McManus et al (2008), enterprise
resilience is viewed as a combination of financial capital, social capital and lifestyle benefits.
Together, these allow the enterprise to fulfil its core functions of providing a product or service
to consumers while providing a livelihood for employers and a return on investment for owners
and shareholders.
The two principal aspects of organisational resilience are ‘planned’ and ‘adaptive’ resilience.
Planned resilience is the existing planning capacity within an enterprise which enables it to ensure
business continuity and undertake standard risk management initiatives, while adaptive resilience
is the ability of an enterprise to respond successfully to a crisis. This is often an expression of strong
leadership and organizational culture, which enables organisations to respond effectively to
situations as they occur (Orchiston et al, 2015).