Special issue

Special issue

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Volume 7, Issue 3.

This special issue presents three papers selected from papers presented at the track titled “Crisis Management and Recovery Projects and Programs” in the European Academy of Management (EURAM) conference held at Istanbul in June 2013. The fourth paper was submitted as a response to the call for papers for this special issue.

The aim of the conference track at EURAM 2013 was to extend the knowledge of members of the EURAM community regarding the management of various aspects of a crisis including preparedness before a crisis, resilience during a crisis and recovering from a crisis. Papers for this track were expected to extend the scope of project management beyond disaster recovery. The scope proposed for the track was to cover strategies, tactics and methods required to deal with a variety of crises including natural (e.g. floods, earthquake, tsunami), economic (e.g. global financial crisis), political (e.g. recovering from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), manmade (nuclear, terrorism) and humanitarian (HIV Aids and famine).

A crisis or disaster can cause extensive loss of life, affect livelihoods, property and business and personal confidence. Recent examples are the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima, the earthquakes at Christchurch, the global financial crisis, attacks on the World Trade Centre, and HIV Aids.

Large numbers of people may be dislocated and traumatised during a crisis. Dealing with serious security, safety, health and welfare risks to deliver urgent and effective responses needed for recovery and reconstruction in the midst of limited resources, while working with groups having differing values posing serious communication challenges, often needs extraordinary efforts from people, organisations and the society.

Managing a crisis as well as recovering from it would need different types of capabilities from the individuals and organisations involved in them. When a crisis is occurring, emergency measures are required to minimise damage to life and property; while after a crisis, more planned strategies and methods would be required to return the situation to normal or to determine if that is even possible.

Two of the papers in this special issue deal with disaster recovery related to the recent tsunami that devastated part of Indonesia and Sri Lanka while the third deals with a social crisis that affected India and received international attention. The fourth paper deals with organisational responsiveness to stay ahead of the competition using an example from the Netherlands.

Mannakkara and Wilkinson lament on the inefficient and poorly managed post-disaster activities after a major crisis. The authors urge the people involved in post-disaster recovery to “Build Back Better”. They argue that post-disaster recovery needs to progress from simply aiming to repair the damage caused by a disaster to address vulnerability factors that contributed to the disaster in the first place. The Build Back Better theme became a mantra after former US President Bill Clinton, in his capacity as a UN Special Envoy urged that the disaster recovery process should accomplish more than “just restoring what was there before” but treat disaster as an opportunity to improve (www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/8693.pdf). The authors propose a Build Back Better Framework to improve a community's physical, social and economic conditions to create more resilience.

The resilience theme is also taken up in the paper by Walker, Steinfort and Maqsood who propose that creating resilience in those who survive disasters not only helps them to meet immediate hardships but also to develop sustainable measures to address the long-term post-disaster problems. They advocate the use of “rich pictures” to uncover meaningful and valuable data, information and knowledge. These pictures also take into account emotions to not only assess situations related to a crisis but also to help in developing effective action plans. Their paper is based on research carried out after the tsunami that affected Aceh and Nias Islands in Indonesia. Rich pictures are often associated with Soft Systems Methodology developed by Peter Checkland and colleagues from the Lancaster University in the 1960s to address ill-structured problems faced by managers. The authors illustrate how rich pictures can be developed through a researcher-stakeholder interaction in disaster recovery projects. The authors conclude that using rich pictures as a collaborative situational analysis tool allows stakeholders to have an influential voice to develop sustainable disaster recovery plans.

The paper by Sharma, Pardasani and Nandram focuses on a social crisis that engulfed India and drew worldwide attention in 2012 due to a horrific gang rape. The paper presents a study carried out by the authors using root cause analysis using multiple perspectives using institutional, sociological and psychological theories. The authors also propose multidimensional strategy to address such a distressing phenomenon, taking into account social, cultural, institutional, environmental factors. They hope that their recommendations will help to mitigate rape and lead to eradicating it from the country.

The paper by de Waard, Volberda and Soeters reports on research that was carried out with armed forces in the Netherlands. The study investigated the extent to which modular organising and organisational sensing stimulate the responsiveness of the Netherlands armed forces. The study found that the level of modularisation is an important factor to aid organisational responsiveness. The author concludes that the insights from this study can be applied in new settings and configured to increase an organisation's plug-and-play speed that will help it to deal with the dynamics of its immediate task environment.

The papers for this special issue cover a wide range of issues under the umbrella of crisis management and will help extend the knowledge of project and program managers in this new area of increasing research interest.

The guest editors would like to thank the reviewers of the papers for helping us to improve the quality of the papers published and for providing valuable suggestions to the authors. EURAM 2014 will continue the initiative started on EURAM 2013 with a special track on crisis management that will also include emergency management.

We would like to thank Professor Derek Walker for inviting us to be Guest Editors for this special issue.

Professor Shankar Sankaran
School of the Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, Australia

Professor Nilgün Okay
Department of Geological Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

Professor Gerhard Chroust
Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz, Austria