In commenting on such political responses, and as an extension of the opposition to herd immunity as an intervention strategy, Ashton ( 2022) goes on to argue that: More recently, politicians have spoken of the need to live with the virus, and, in the United Kingdom, most of the COVID restrictions have been (or are due to be) lifted by the various devolved governments (Vaughan, 2022). One of these early assumptions was the need for herd immunity to deal with the transmission of the virus, a concept that has been subject to criticism within the public health community (Ashton, 2022). The pandemic illustrated the fragile nature of many public health systems in dealing with the shock of an emergent virus and the assumptions that underpinned contingency planning for such events (Gostin, 2022 Parmet, 2022). The landscape of costs and benefits associated with the crisis was uneven, and this is particularly apparent in terms of the public health response and the emergence of what has been described as vaccine nationalism (Bollyky & Bown, 2020 Hassoun, 2021 Katz et al., 2021). At the same time, other organizations benefitted from the increased demand to provide protective equipment, develop vaccines and support the means of mobile working. The move to lockdown and the constraints around supply chains moved many organizations into what could be seen as a crisis state in which they were close to the point of failure, and the pandemic was seen to generate a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges for many organizations to contend with (Hyndman, 2020 Slagle et al., 2021).
COVID-19 can be considered an extreme event-a low probability, high consequence event that generated a sense of crisis for many organizations. In contrast, others could not respond effectively (see, e.g., Dayson et al., 2021). There has been considerable discussion about how some organizations were resilient in the face of the task demands associated with the pandemic. Inevitably, an extreme event on the global scale of COVID-19 generates a range of impacts across the organizational and societal landscape.
Before outlining the aspects of these problems covered in this special issue, we need to highlight some of the challenges associated with the pandemic and its implications for the relationships between the processes of resilience and crisis management.Ĭhallenges associated with crisis management and organizational resilience (along with the linked concept of business continuity management ) were brought to the centre stage of organizational awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is essential because it represents the first major global health crisis of the 21st Century, and it also highlights the ‘messy’ nature of those management and policy problems which have the potential to escalate into a crisis and which can highlight the inadequate nature of management responses (Ackoff, 1981 Turner, 1994). This special issue of the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management aims to consider the early lessons and implications of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for both the theory and practice of crisis management.
0 kommentar(er)
