Business and Post-disaster Management

Business, organisational and consumer resilience and the Christchurch earthquakes

C. Michael Hall, Sanna Malinen, Rob Vosslamber, Russell Wordsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317276333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the effects of a natural disaster on businesses and organisations, and on a range of stakeholders, including employees and consumers. Research on how communities and businesses respond to disasters can inform policy and mitigate the cost and impacts of future disasters. This book discusses how places recover following a disaster and the vital roles that business and other organisations play.

This volume gives a detailed understanding of business, organisational and consumer responses to the Christchurch earthquake sequence of 2010-2011, which caused 185 deaths, the loss of over 70 per cent of buildings in the city's CBD, major infrastructure damage, and severely affected the city's image. Despite the devastation, the businesses, organisations and people of Christchurch are now undergoing significant recovery.

The book sheds significant new light not only on business and organisation response to disaster but on how business and urban systems may be made more resilient.

Part I Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640211-1

1 Introduction

The business, organisational and destination impacts of natural disasters – the Christchurch earthquakes 2010–2011

C. Michael Hall, Sanna Malinen, Rob Vosslamber and Russell Wordsworth

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640211-2

Introduction

A disaster is ‘a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope with its own resources’ (UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) 2009: 9). Disasters have always been significant for economies and societies. However, population growth, economic change and restructuring, increased urbanisation which attracts more people and leads to greater infrastructure growth, and environmental change have all served to make the threats posed by natural disasters greater than ever (Pelling 2003; Swiss Re 2014). According to Swiss Re (2015a), there were more natural catastrophe events in 2014 than in any single year yet recorded in the period 1970–2014. Concurrently, economic development, population growth, a higher concentration of assets in exposed areas and a changing climate are increasing the economic cost of natural disasters (Swiss Re 2015a: 8).

Yet despite the growing literature on natural disasters and disaster management and impact (e.g. Cavallo et al. 2013; Meyer et al. 2013; North and Pfefferbaum 2013; Lazzaroni and van Bergeijk 2014), especially at a time of increasing concern with respect to global environmental change (Hall 2013, 2015; Neumayer et al. 2014), there is a relative paucity of literature on the business and broader organisational dimensions of natural disasters and the following response and recovery stages (McManus et al. 2008; Corey and Deitch 2011; De Mel et al. 2012; Park et al. 2013). This book is, in part, a response to some of the ‘unanswered questions’ of the relationship between business and disasters (Webb et al. 2000: 83). It addresses the call for studies that explore how disaster creates impact and business recovery varies across and within sectors and firms, while some of the chapters also take a more longitudinal research on businesses and organisations in the context of disaster.

This book provides research on the business, organisation and destination impacts of post-disaster environments from multiple perspectives. The research reported in this volume was undertaken in the post-disaster context following the earthquakes which struck between September 2010 and December 2011 in Canterbury, New Zealand, causing severe damage to the city of Christchurch. However, the various chapters do not just treat the Christchurch experience in isolation, but seek to relate local research to the international research literature and agenda. Although the focus is primarily on business and organisations, the research is not approached through a narrow lens. Clear connections are also made to broader community and governance issues as well as marketing, strategy and planning and wider concerns regarding disaster resilience (Patton and Johnson 2001). Therefore, as well as seeking to understand what businesses and organisations do in post-disaster situations, the book also indicates how some of the disciplinary approaches and frames used within business studies can also help inform our knowledge of natural disasters and their impacts.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book and is divided into three sections. The first section provides a broad overview of some of the literature on natural disasters and positions some of the business and organisation-related contributions to the literature. The second section then briefly outlines the impacts of the Canterbury earthquake sequence and why it is significant not just for Christchurch and New Zealand but in an international context. The final part of chapter then provides an outline of the book.

Researching natural disasters: an overview

Notwithstanding the argument that ‘there is no such thing as a natural disaster’ (Hartman and Squires 2006; Mora 2009: 101), in the sense that the effects of a disaster are a product of social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities as well as natural hazards (Blaikie et al. 1994), a natural disaster may be defined as:

… a serious disruption to a community or region caused by the impact of a naturally occurring rapid onset event that threatens or causes death, injury or damage to property or the environment and which requires significant and coordinated multi-agency and community response. Such serious disruption can be caused by any one, or a combination, of the following natural hazards: bushfire; earthquake; flood; storm; cyclone; storm surge; landslide; tsunami; meteorite strike; or tornado.

(Council of Australian Governments 2004: 4)

In addition to the examples noted above, other types of disaster events often included in international disaster databases or studies, as well as in lay people’s understanding of a natural disaster, include drought, epidemics, extreme temperatures, insect infestations, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and windstorms (Cornall 2005; Leroy 2006; Bellamere 2015). Nevertheless, for the purposes of this book it is useful to distinguish between a natural hazard, which is a geophysical, atmospheric or hydrological event (e.g. earthquake, landslide, tsunami, flood or drought) that has the potential to cause harm or loss, and a disaster which is ‘the occurrence of an extreme hazard event that impacts on communities causing damage, disruption and casualties, and leaving the affected communities unable to function normally without outside assistance’ (Benson and Twigg 2007: 126). An earthquake event fits into both categories; the difference between the two is that in the latter the potential of a natural hazard to cause severe harm and loss has actually happened. As Leroy (2006) emphasises, natural hazards are an integral part of life on Earth. The disaster element, which includes measurable human and economic costs (e.g. death, infrastructure destruction, cultural impact, financial loss) is more a function of vulnerable people and systems than severity in the natural hazard. Yet use of terminology clearly is extremely important as it arguably affects whether a disaster is regarded as “natural” – or not – and the responses to it, while the human dimension of disasters also highlights the importance of a social science perspective on disaster, risk and natural hazards.

One of the difficulties in assessing the impacts of natural disasters is that the definition being used can change according to the aim of the study (Petrucci 2012). However, the notion of impact is broadly understood as including the direct, indirect and intangible economic, environmental and social losses caused by a natural disaster event (Lindell and Prater 2003; Swiss Re 2014). Direct losses include physical effects such as destruction and changes that reduce the functionality of an individual, system or structure. This includes damage to people (death/injury), buildings, their contents, as well as clean-up and disposal costs. Indirect losses include the effects of disrupted or damaged utility services and local businesses, including loss of revenue; cost inc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Context
• Part II Business and organisational responses and relationships
• Part III Consumer and communication responses
• Part IV Learning from ‘the new normal'
• Part V Conclusions
• Index