Crisis Management, Organisational Resilience and Global Sustainable Development - 2 day workshop

The workshop is organised by the Centre for China Management and Global Business, a cross-discipline research centre located in the Department of Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour (LOB) with 25 cross-departmental faculty, and the Informatics Research Centre located in the Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting Department within Henley Business School. The workshop seeks to combine paper development workshops, keynote speakers, “meet the editors” and training activities focused specifically on crisis management, organisational resilience and global sustainable development.

Crisis management has been a long-standing issue in business management and organization studies (Bundy, Pfarrer, Short, & Coombs, 2017). At the moment, the unfolding of the most recent global health crisis COVID-19 is significantly reshaping the business and management practices in the world. Thus, understanding, managing and intervening with a crisis is a critical challenge for all stakeholders involved. In order to capture the nuances of crisis management and organisational responses, we argue that it can be conducive to view crisis management from a multi-level and multidisciplinary perspective, including individual, organisational, and institutional levels.

Resilience in organizational contexts covers multiple domains, thus a multidisciplinary approach may be conducive to obtaining a nuanced understanding of resilience in diverse organizational settings. One recent review highlighted the role of occupational context and argued paying close attention to occupational contexts may significantly advance theoretical developments in resilience research (Kossek & Perrigino, 2016). In organization and management studies, resilience can be understood as the skill and the capacity to be robust under conditions of enormous stress and change (Coutu, 2002) and can also be related to environmental and sustainability management in the face of drastic environmental events (Linnenluecke, 2017). The vibrant research activities attest to the fact that in contemporary society resilience is required in a wide range of organizational contexts, and that, examining resilience from a multidisciplinary perspective may engender revealing insights. Such a multidisciplinary approach resonates with the recent quest that multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach is urgently encouraged from scientists - including social scientists - (Trewhella, 2009; Van Noorden, 2015), business leaders and policymakers in order to tackle societal and economic grand challenges facing the global economy today.

Global challenges have become even more complex and sophisticated in today’s uncertain world, necessitating a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to tackle these challenges. We believe management research can and should make useful contribution to understanding and tackling global grand challenges (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016) by addressing important questions (Tihanyi, 2020). United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals were envisaged to facilitate achieving sustainable development for the mankind. For example, addressing sustainability challenges needs collaborative approach in leveraging the power of entrepreneurship (Sarasvathy & Ramesh, 2019). In the domain of international business, scholars urgently encourage IB scholarship should tackle ‘big questions’ and address ‘grand challenges’ in global business (Buckley, Doh, & Benischke, 2017).

Given these three challenges, and the new approach to foster a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding these areas, this workshop is both timely and relevant. In addition, this workshop focusses on the development of doctoral students and early career researchers likely to shape this domain in the years to come.

The workshop is set to be held in 2022.