RESOURCES
RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
Author : | Girish Prayag & Caroline Orchiston & Mesbahuddin Chowdhury |
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School/Work Place : | University of Canterbury | University of Otago |
Contact : | girish.prayag@canterbury.ac.nz |
Year : | 2017 |
The tourism literature on the relationship between resilience and sustainability is still in its infancy. Some argue that resilience planning has emerged as an alternative to sustainable development to provide new perspectives on socio-ecological adjustments to a rapidly changing world (Lew, 2014). While sustainability mitigates or prevents change by maintaining resources above a normative safe level, resilience adapts to change by attempting to build capacity to return to a desired state following both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions (Derissen et al., 2011). Similar to the notion of sustainability, resilience also remains a problematic concept across several disciplines (Folke et al., 2010). While sustainability and resilience may be highly compatible concepts, resilient destinations are not necessarily sustainable (Espiner et al., 2017). Existing studies on tourism resilience are drawn mainly from case studies that adopt a systems approach (Becken, 2013; Espiner & Becken, 2014; Farell & Twining-Ward, 2004) to understand how a socio-ecological system is impacted, and then adapts and recovers from macro-level changes. While such studies are necessary, resilience related studies are needed to understand how different components of a socio-ecological system (e.g., communities, residents and organizations) interact with each other. For example, how do the different facets (e.g., employees, supply chain etc.) of one component of a system such an organization interact with each other to build resilience? This study focuses on examining how tourism organizations build resilience in the recovery phase of a disaster. Similar to ecosystems, organizations also face stressful events and are thus vulnerable to both internal and external shocks (Lee, Vargo & Seville, 2013). The objectives of the study are two-fold: (i) to ascertain the relationships between three concepts of resilience psychological resilience, employee resilience and organizational resilience); and (2) to identify the influence of life satisfaction on these three concepts.