A Strategic Approach to Crisis Management and Organizational Resilience

The paper adopts a strategic view on organizational survival and argues that preparedness, responsiveness, adaptability and learning abilities constitute organizational drivers of resilience and a new direction on crisis management. As a conceptual and literature exploration, the methodological focus is to combine various concepts within a unified model for resilience. The proposed conceptual model highlights the need for strategic reconfigurations toward the construction of a resilience culture and the development of a supporting social capital in organizations. It also portrays organizational survival and sustainability as dependent on strategic characteristics rather than the managerial ability to handle situations and manage crisis. Implications, methodological concerns in the study of resilience and further research directions are also presented. The paper approaches a new way of thinking about crises and provides a set of cultural and organisational characteristics that would increase resilience and crisis management abilities. While organisations are nowadays more than even affected by disruptions and crises, their inherent ability and strategies to protect their sustainability have been under theorized. This paper aims at contributing to a growing and fruitful discussion

A New Multi-Index Method for the Eutrophication Assessment in Transitional Waters: Large-Scale Implementation in Italian Lagoons

Eutrophication represents one of the most impacting threats for the ecological status and related ecosystem services of transitional waters; hence, its assessment plays a key role in the management of these ecosystems. A new multi-index method for eutrophication assessment, based on the ecological index MaQI (Macrophyte Quality Index), the trophic index TWQI (Transitional Water Quality Index), and physicochemical quality elements (sensu Dir. 2000/60/EC), was developed including both driver and impact indicators. The study presents a large-scale implementation of the method, which included more than 100 Italian lagoon sites, covering a wide variability of lagoon typologies and conditions. Overall, 35% of sites resulted in eutrophic status, 45% in mesotrophic, and 25% in oligotrophic status

Environmental restoration by aquatic angiosperm transplants in transitional water systems: The Venice Lagoon as a case study

The paper reports the results obtained after 4 years of aquatic angiosperm transplants in areas of the Venice Lagoon (North Adriatic Sea, Mediterranean) where meadows almost disappeared due to eutrophication, pollution and overexploitation of clam resources. The project LIFE12 NAT/IT/000331-SeResto, funded by the European Union, allowed to recolonize the Habitat 1150* (coastal lagoons) in the northernmost part of the lagoon, by extensive manual transplants of small sods or single rhizomes of Zostera marina, Zostera noltei, Ruppia cirrhosa and, in some stations also of Cymodocea nodosa. Over the 4 years of the project more than 75,000 rhizomes were transplanted in 35 stations with the support of local stakeholders (fishermen, hunters and sport clubs). Plants took root in 32 stations forming extensive meadows on a surface of approx. 10 km2 even if some failures were recorded in areas affected by outflows of freshwater rich in nutrients and suspended particulate matter. The rapid recovery of the ecological status of the involved areas was the result of this meadow restoration, which was in compliance with Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC) objectives. Moreover, the monitoring of environmental parameters in the water column and in surface sediments allowed to identify the best conditions for successful transplants. Small, widespread interventions and the participation of local stakeholders in the environmental recovery, make this action economically cheap and easily transposable in other similar environments

An argument against the focus on Community Resilience in Public Health

Background - It has been suggested that Public Health professionals focus on community resilience in tackling chronic problems, such as poverty and deprivation; is this approach useful? Discussion - Resilience is always i) of something ii) to something iii) to an endpoint, as in i) a rubber ball, ii) to a blunt force, iii) to its original shape. “Community resilience” might be: of a neighbourhood, to a flu pandemic, with the endpoint, to return to normality. In these two examples, the endpoint is as-you-were. This is unsuitable for some examples of resilience. A child that is resilient to an abusive upbringing has an endpoint of living a happy life despite that upbringing: this is an as-you-should-be endpoint. Similarly, a chronically deprived community cannot have the endpoint of returning to chronic deprivation: so what is its endpoint? Roughly, it is an as-you-should-be endpoint: to provide an environment for inhabitants to live well. Thus resilient communities will be those that do this in the face of challenges. How can they be identified? One method uses statistical outliers, neighbourhoods that do better than would be expected on a range of outcomes given a range of stressors. This method tells us that a neighbourhood is resilient but not why it is. In response, a number of researchers have attributed characteristics to resilient communities; however, these generally fail to distinguish characteristics of a good community from those of a resilient one. Making this distinction is difficult and we have not seen it successfully done; more importantly, it is arguably unnecessary. There already exist approaches in Public Health to assessing and developing communities faced with chronic problems, typically tied to notions such as Social Capital. Communityresilience to chronic problems, if it makes sense at all, is likely to be a property that emerges from the various assets in a community such as human capital, built capital and natural capital. Summary - Public Health professionals working with deprived neighbourhoods would be better to focus on what neighbourhoods have or could develop as social capital for living well, rather than on the vague and tangential notion of community resilience.</p

Disaster Supply Chain Management: Responsive Inter-organizational Networks Under Pressure

Supply Chains are often required to absorb unexpected pressure, turbulent changes in demand and disruptions across their structural components. In this paper, we acknowledge both the inter-organizational and collaborative nature of supply chains and explore how established logistics structures respond to conditions of crises as a result of unforeseen natural events and disasters. After a brief review of existing practices in the area of Disaster Supply Chain Management (DCSM) we focus on identifying and presenting the sharing 'realities' of inter-organizational networks through a short case study showcasing the situational, complex and temporal nature of responsive networks under pressure

Introducing corporate reputation continuity to support organizational resilience against crises

As Corporate Reputation (CR) evolves into an important asset for organizations, crises, disasters and other supply chain disruptive events, stand as threats to the preservation of the reputation capital since they usually result to negative projections to their audiences and to problematic evaluations by their stakeholders. Viewing CR as the accumulated trust and positive evaluations of the stakeholders, this paper proposes a conceptual and normative framework for Reputation Continuity, which enhances the ability of organizations to preserve their reputation, instead of working for its recovery in the post-crisis period. In our approach, we propose a process of maintaining trusted links, instead of restoring them and establishing a reputation resilient organization, instead of one struggling to recover from reputation losses, after the crisis has emerged. Working closely with stakeholders during the crisis, injecting a sense of normality continuity through effective leadership and mitigating image problems are seen as critical concerns, alongside a set of managerial practices to be followed. Ultimately, it is argued that, the value-based and strategically integrated view of Business Continuity must be enhanced and supported by Reputation Continuity activities

A hierarchical system for effective coordination of available-to-promise logic mechanisms

International audienceThis paper aims to provide a combinatory approach towards addressing the advanced ATP problem, consisting of three deterministic optimization models that operate on both sides of the Customer Order Decoupling Point. The proposed approach is based on long term aggregate capacity reservation for periods when increased volatility is expected, while still obtaining production plans that meet the predefined and agreed customer service levels. The three optimization models together guide a system that helps manufacturers to optimally decide on ATP quantity and due date quoting on the basis of available manufacturing resources. To support this system, a prototype software module was designed and implemented in Java that loosely integrates with the popular Open Source ERP system Compiere2's databases and uses the Linear Programming solver QS-Opt to solve the models developed in this research. The system response times as evidenced in the experiments described in this paper are quite acceptable for real-world operations. The proposed solution of the ATP problem is of great value for all competitive and proactive organizations that need a practical tool to support, in the best possible way and in an almost real time fashion, their decision on whether to accept or decline an incoming customer order request. It is our belief that an integration of the proposed models into existing ERP systems will enhance their limited ATP functionality and provide management with a powerful decision support tool