key: cord- -xpzx qg authors: murphy, peter e. title: risk management date: - - journal: the business of resort management doi: . /b - - - - . - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: xpzx qg nan risk management has been placed at the end of this book in affirmation of its crucial and central role in resort management, and as a prime example of pulling together the external and internal elements of parts b and c. while some may think risk management is a recent phenomenon, a result of global warming and terrorism, it has been associated with resort management for a long time and in a variety of ways. in normal business, financial risk is a regular occurrence that should be recognized and managed like other factors of demand and supply. however, with the taking-in of guests comes an extra responsibility, known as 'duty of care', where management is obliged to protect their guests from harm to the best of their ability. on the demand side guests are often looking for excitement and the spectacular, which can put them at risk. those who seek excitement in adventure tourism, when they challenge themselves or look for an adrenalin rush, purposely place themselves at risk and it is up to resorts to ensure the real risk is minimalized by managing the situation. even those who have not come to a resort to exert or excite themselves regularly demand spectacular views and sunsets that often require building on risky sites and in nonconformist style. the sounds of the sea and uninterrupted tropical sunsets attract resorts to the water's edge in areas where hurricanes and cyclones occur with regularity. in the mountains, similar demands for spectacular views place buildings at crests or on steep slopes where local climatic conditions are at their extreme and avalanches can occur. on the supply side risk is present at the very start, requiring a correct interpretation of market research and feasibility studies over the - year life span of many resort investments. risk is present in the location of many resorts on the 'edge of civilization', well removed from regular infrastructure and services that are the basis of quality service experiences. it is present in the operation of resorts where guests come to participate in challenging activities, regular sports or simply to unwind, a process that inevitably leads some of them to leave natural caution and common sense behind at home. it is not surprising that 'risk management is not just good for business, but is absolutely necessary in order for tourism and related organizations to remain competitive, to be sustainable, and to be responsible for their collective future' (cunliffe, : ) . resort management risk not only involves both demand and supply considerations, it can range in scale from minor yet important internal issues like a lack of staff in crucial situations and places to overwhelming natural disasters or human external interventions like terrorism or financial crises. whatever form it takes the element of risk is ever present for resort management and some type of management structure needs to be in place to minimize its impact on the business. if no event or business decision within resort management is risk free, a risk management framework needs to take on a statistical probability structure. tarlow ( ) has suggested a useful framework would be one that considers the probability of an event and its likely consequences. figure . provides some examples, using tarlow's suggested framework, but it should be noted that the consequences will vary according to each incident's severity and relevance to the resort product offerings. food poisoning is a serious occurrence for a resort because it means one duty of care has failed, ruining the visit of some guests and possibly closing a restaurant; but in the overall scheme of things, it has a low probability of occurrence and low consequences in a well-run establishment. the consequences are generally limited to some temporary bad publicity, financial compensation, a revision of safety procedures and possibly new equipment. this level of risk is discussed under the heading of 'security' within this chapter. accidents are presented in the form of personal injury, where the probability of occurrence can be high when a resort is associated with adventure tourism or dangerous locations. duty of care is still a major consideration, but if a guest chooses to undertake a risky activity they are expected to assume some of that risk. under these circumstances resorts are expected to minimize the level of risk by preparing the site properly, instructing the guest where appropriate, and providing warning signs or professional help where warranted. this level of risk has been assigned a low consequences ranking in that it usually applies to individuals or small groups and through the implementation of 'risk management' these consequences can be minimized, but not eliminated. natural disasters have been a fact of life for the resort industry since its inception, with one of the earliest recorded disasters being the tarlow, .) destruction of pompeii by the mount vesuvius volcano in ad . natural disasters have high consequences because they cause severe damage and can destroy a resort or close it down for a long period. fortunately, their probability of occurrence is generally low. this form of risk is more difficult to anticipate so 'crisis management' is presented more as contingency planning, preparing for the worst in order to minimize its impact, especially on the loss of life. the weather had been classified as a high probability and consequence risk, because so many resorts are dependent on this feature yet it is something beyond their control. bad weather or even the threat of it can reduce visits and sales, but in this era of global warming the signs of severe weather stress are starting to have an impact. the increasing number of force hurricanes is raising the insurance rates of all tropical resorts and not just those affected directly. the long-term drought in australia's alpine areas is creating poor snow seasons and raising questions about the ski industry's viability in these areas. such events do not have the sudden impact of a site-specific natural disaster, but they can have a major say on the long-term viability of a resort business. in this regard such risks are incorporated into the overall framework of 'sustainable management', where the evolving weather patterns are integrated into the long-term resource planning for a resort. at the basic level a resort's 'duty of care' requires it to ensure the safety of its guests within reasonable limits. possible threats to a guest's safety can arise from internal and external sources. internally, the design of facilities should include safety considerations along with their functional role, whether that involves a ski lift or a hotel balcony. staff should be trained to undertake their tasks safely, to keep an eye on guests and the general situation, and to note any external threats. these threats can include vandalism, theft or terrorism. the level of security will be determined by the perceived degree of threat in the local area, but some attention to this matter is necessary everywhere, for insurance and legal purposes alone. security of a resort involves three basic steps: . analyze and identify vulnerable areas/processes. resorts offer extensive and varied terrain with open and friendly access to welcome guests. they need to reduce the vulnerability of property and guests by identifying the weakest and most exposed elements of the property, and the riskiest regular activities of the guests. . establish security priorities. as figure . indicates not all risks warrant equal attention because their probabilities of occurrence and levels of impact on the operation will vary. in terms of basic security a differentiation should be made between public areas and private accommodation which ensures the privacy and security of guest accommodation can be maintained. in the restaurants and food outlets the storing, cooking and presentation of food must be undertaken with respect to health and safety regulations. in the most popular recreational areas like swimming pools and play areas, there must be qualified supervision. in guest rooms there should be a smoke alarm and sprinkler system to protect guests and the resort investment. . organization of a security system. the combination of guest enjoyment and security often requires a delicate touch in a resort environment, so as not to spoil the vacation experience. this means security should be present, but as invisible as possible. in a casino resort the presence of occasional guards can be re-assuring, but most of the security surveillance is conducted by closed circuit television (cctv). in other resorts there may be patrols for the grounds, especially at night, alarms in sensitive areas and instructions to staff and guests about possible dangers. in-room security is aided by instructions via notices or local hotel channel on the television, and an in-room safe. when resorts are exclusive in terms of being up-market, providing extensive facilities and attracting wealthy guests they need to be particularly concerned with security because they can become a magnet for criminal activity and litigious activity. for example, the jalousie plantation resort and spa in the island of st lucia would offer a tempting target according to the description offered by pattullo ( : a security system is only as good as its staff and cannot operate effectively in isolation from general staff and guests. resorts can either hire their own security staff or outsource the responsibility to a professional company. regardless of the approach used it must be integrated into the daily operations in such a way as to be effective yet undetected. 'management should view the cost of developing a security training program as an investment. a resort in which all employees are attuned to the safety and security concerns can create a safer environment for guests and employees and a more profitable operation in the long run' (gee, : ) . there are several aspects to security planning: in major resorts it is now common to hire a professional security company to provide coverage for key areas and assets. in addition to being skilled in their task the individuals selected for resorts need to be presentable and able to interact with guests. just like disney theme park street sweepers are trained to know about their theme park and emergency procedures, resort security will find themselves called upon for directions and advice by the guests. ■ staff training. even if a resort has a professional security arm it needs to include general staff in its security planning. they should be knowledgeable about basic procedures and able to advise guests. they should learn to keep their ears and eyes open for trouble. ■ records and reports. recording what happens is vital because it can help identify danger spots and become invaluable evidence for insurance and litigation purposes. there are several types of reporting mechanisms; daily activity report, general incident report, loss report, accident report, monthly statistical report. failure to fulfil the 'duty of care' responsibility may result in a security related liability law suit. in a suit alleging negligence, the plaintiff (the accuser) must show the defendant (the resort) failed to provide 'reasonable care' regarding 'foreseeable' acts or situations. judges often apportion blame for an accident. that is a certain percentage of the blame is seen as the responsibility of the operator and the remainder the responsibility of the guest. damages associated with negligence can be of two types: . compensatory damages: to compensate for loss of income, for pain and suffering. . punitive damages: to inflict punishment for outrageous conduct and to act as a lesson for others (setting precedence). examples of the legal consequences from insufficient attention paid to 'duty of care' abound, but in many cases involving private companies the cases are settled out-of-court with minimum publicity. to illustrate what can happen with regard to apportioned blame and the challenges in safeguarding tourists, the following two published accounts of australian cases are presented. the first involves a young man, who like many before him went to swim at a local waterhole in the murray river. he dived from a log in the waterhole and struck the riverbed, suffered permanent spinal injuries and sued the berrigan shire council and forestry commission of nsw for a$ million in damages.'both defendants denied liability, but agreed that damages should be assessed at a$ . million' (gregory and hewitt, : ) . in the original judgement the presiding judge reduced the assessment by per cent to take account of the plaintiff's share of responsibility, through contributory negligence. for the remaining a$ . million he ordered the council to pay per cent and the commission per cent. as often happens in such cases involving large sums this judgement was appealed. in a new judge upheld the decision but placed all the blame and financial responsibility on the council. in his summary the new judge said: council employees were aware of people diving from the log, and the changes to the riverbed that floods could cause. he said the council has means and opportunity to put up warning signs, and in the longer term, to remove the log. justice nettle said the council owed (the plaintiff) a specific duty (of care) to take reasonable steps to guard against the risk of harm resulting from the use of the log for diving. but he said the commission had a very different charter and purpose (responsible for managing the forest alongside the river), and arguably no actual knowledge of the use of the log (as a diving platform). (gregory and hewitt, : ) the second case involves a man who on a warm day in went to sydney's bondi beach for a swim and like a responsible australian risk management waded into the sea 'between the red-and-yellow "safe swimming" flags, (where) he dived under a foaming wave and collided with a sand bar' (feizkhah, : ) . by , the plaintiff who is now a quadriplegic as a result of this incident, claimed: waverley council's life-guards should have put the flags in a different spot or installed warning signs. perhaps 'a fellow diving and a cross through it or some words saying "sand banks"'. last week a jury agreed, ordering the council to pay (the plaintiff) a$ . million. (feizkhah, : ) this judgement not only cost a local council a great deal of money, it sent shock waves through the industry because it meant standard procedures had failed to demonstrate sufficient 'duty of care' in the eyes of the law. the wider implication of this case and others like it has been an increase in claims for negligence and a rise in public liability insurance. feizkhah ( : ) reports: between and , the number of public liability claims australiawide rose by % to : total payouts rose by % to a$ million. most claims are settled out of court for less than a$ . but, 'there is a jackpot mentality, where people with minor injuries see reports of big payouts and see if they can get something too'. one of the most affected tourism activities in this regard has been adventure tourism, an activity closely associated with resorts whose owners, such as international chains and public companies, are often viewed as possessing deep pockets. claims in these activities and areas have been increasing over a long period and have been associated with rising public liability insurance costs to cover not just recorded claims; but to help cover the broader costs of global insurance increases. given its importance as a major attraction for many resorts and as a prime source of risk and insurance claims, adventure tourism deserves special attention. depending on the level of risk and size of insurance claims, it can vary from a general security issue to a risk management issue. as can be seen in table . representing the insurance claims for a whole state, the number and amounts are relatively minor, although they can be crippling for small businesses with limited resources. when accidents and claims involve major incidents, with extensive pain and suffering, loss of the business of resort management income and possibly life there is a need for more extensive risk management and control as will be discussed in the next section. adventure tourism is a very general term and hence a very inclusive subset of tourism, including a large array of activities. the term implies excitement and a change from normal daily life by pursuing an activity in a different environment. adventure tourism can take many forms because three dimensions have been linked to its structure (page et al., ) . these dimensions involve the following characteristics, with an indication in the brackets of who is the major player: the amount of physical effort a person is prepared to put into the activity is a major feature of adventure tourism. in terms of an active situation the guest is an active participant who, with or without the help of a guide or instructor, is looking for excitement and an adrenalin rush. in a passive situation the guest is a spectator or observer, one who wishes to learn more about the world around them rather than about themselves and their personal limits. ■ hard-soft dimension (business). these are the categories applied by the industry and relate more to the degree of preparation and pampering the guest requires for the activity. a 'soft' activity is one where the guest is able to view the scenery or wildlife from a safe vantage point with low risk of injury. a 'hard' activity is more risky because the guest participates directly in the activity in order to obtain that adrenalin rush and requires more individual attention, before (preparation) and during (guidance) the activity. ■ high risk-low risk dimension (business-guest). this is where guest perception and business management create the preferred and real tourism experience. beedie ( : ) notes correctly that a paradox has been created, 'whereby the more detailed, planned and logistically smooth an adventure tourist itinerary becomes, the more removed the experience is from the notion of adventure'. this helps to explain why 'injury rates do not necessarily conform to the notion of perceived risk', with some soft activities having substantial injury and death rates while some hard activities have far fewer than commonly expected. in bringing the guest's desires and expectations together with the resort's prepared and staged offerings, adventure tourism has been seen as a natural business opportunity by some (cloutier, ) and a commodifiction of the human spirit by others (beedie, ) . regardless of which interpretation is correct, for resorts it provides a varied and profitable business mix (figure . ). many of the references quoted in this section have extensive lists of activities cited as adventure tourism, but most shy away from classifying them because whatever groups are selected cannot be mutually exclusive given the three dimensional characteristics and the varying conditions under which they operate. for example, skiings' rating would be influenced by its location, whether it be in mountain areas with steep slopes and tricky runs or on the gentler beginner slopes attached to some resorts and urban centres. it would also depend on whether we are considering downhill or cross-country skiing, and of course on the skill and experience of the individual skier. when resorts present hard adventure tourism products they face the challenge of providing an exciting adrenalin provoking experience in the safest way possible. in many tropical resorts scuba diving is one of the key attractions, and although not physically demanding does require a reasonable level of health and fitness. wilks and davis ( : ) observe, however, that a review of consecutive scuba diving deaths found 'that in % of the fatalities there was a pre-existing medical contraindication to scuba diving' and those people should not have risked a dive. in this respect most dive companies rely heavily on personal honesty when guests fill in preliminary medical questionnaires, and at times this trust is abused through bravado and peer pressure. at other times the bravado and peer pressure can be laid at the door of the adventure tourism company. this was one accusation and explanation offered in relation to the canyoning tragedy in switzerland that claimed lives in (head, : ) . according to morgan and fluker ( : ) : clearly the risks associated with this incident were beyond the capabilities of participants. importantly, newspaper reports of the interlaken tragedy speculated that early warning signs of danger had been ignored by the activity's guides. expert opinions of experienced river guides were also reported. these reports expressed serious concerns that the interlaken river guides employed by the adventure company may have been under pressure to put profits before safety, this being compounded by their lack of knowledge of local conditions. the judge apparently agreed, stating the 'safety measures taken by the now defunct adventure world were totally inadequate -with no proper safety training for the employees' (bbc news, ) . something that should have been undertaken before hand, as part of a risk management process. risk management is a way in which to prepare for the security risk and crisis issues outlined above. it is becoming a significant aspect of resort risk management management given the adventurous nature of many of their activities, their exciting locations, the growing litigious nature of customers, and the growing threat of terrorism. risk management should incorporate the following, which involves considerable overlap with the previous security planning. the difference being that risk management is more comprehensive, including environmental concerns and financial considerations as well as human safety. the unique characteristic of adventure tourism, and those resorts offering that type of product, is that 'participants are deliberately seeking and/or accepting the chance of sustaining physical injury' (morgan and fluker, : ) . this means that for adventure clients perceived risk becomes an important part of the adventure experience, while for the commercial operator the actual and managed level of risk is the real risk as shown in figure . . when guests pay money for the specialized knowledge, skills and equipment of the commercial provider, 'they reduce their need for risk awareness and responsibility. this transfer of risk responsibility to an activity operator, arising from the tourist's financial consideration (contract), raises a number of legal and ethical issues' (morgan and fluker, : ) . the legal issues revolve around duty of care and individual responsibility, the ethical issues include the paradox that 'accidents can add to the allure of the adventure experience through providing a valid testimony of the risk' (morgan and fluker, : ) . risk management is a rational approach to deal with real risk. it is about managing risk rather than eliminating it because as we have seen some degree of perceived risk is inherent in adventure tourism and many resort locations. but 'it is important to grasp the concept that the level of risk management applied is relative to the tolerance of a specific business and its guests for risk, which can vary substantially from one operator to another' (cloutier, : ) . gee ( : - ) has identified a general process, that can assist resorts in their management of risk for both adventure tourism and general operations which consists of four steps. risk is associated with all aspects of business, and like the adventure tourist that is part of the thrill for many entrepreneurs and business people. adventure tourism operations must be identified in terms of their real risk, and even when they are outsourced to separate organizations with their own liability insurance, their professionalism and record will still impact on a resort's reputation and business. asset risks involve the major investment in property and facilities that need to be protected. identifying areas of particular danger and hazard is an important first step, such as the buildup of under growth and leaf-litter in woodland areas; the presence of currents or steeply shelving beaches along the beach-front; the physical dangers associated with wastewater treatment plants and with electrical substations; and the ever present danger of fire when people are relaxed and having fun. income risks are a major concern for resorts, which have a high dependence on external conditions often beyond their immediate control. anderson ( anderson ( : in the introduction to her article on crisis management in the australian tourism industry lays out a catalogue of disasters that have befallen that country's tourism over the past years: ■ -pilot's strike ■ -gulf war ■ -asian economic crisis ■ -dot com crash ■ -collapse of hih insurance company (which was the major public liability insurer in australia and with its demise there were major increases in insurance premiums for everyone). -world trade centre attacks -demise of ansett airlines (which had a per cent market share of the domestic airline business at the time). ■ -bali bombings which killed people ■ -iraq war -outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) as if this is not enough some countries could add the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, avian flu epidemics, further terrorists attacks and unreliable weather. although in australia and most countries tourism has recovered from such experiences, the industry has learned valuable lessons along the way. one has been to recognize the potential loss of business that can occur through interruption or damage, and to prepare for it through contingency planning and market diversification. legal liability risks are increasing as society becomes more litigious. resorts as businesses are responsible to their guests, employees and shareholders, all of whom are better educated regarding their rights and are more prepared and able to exercise those rights in court if need be. now liability insurance is a major cost factor that all businesses must consider, including resorts. loss of key personnel risks are often under-appreciated until such a situation occurs and the resort discovers how much a certain individual contributed to the business' overall attraction. a key person like a chef, an entertainer or instructor whose skills and special qualities are hard to replace can leave a big hole in a resort's reputation. these people should be identified and retained wherever possible, and if they are lost to illness or poaching then succession plans should be in place. to control the frequency and magnitude of losses due to risk it is essential to develop recording procedures and to create a repository of past records. detailed record keeping is a key to identifying where and when risks are occurring, and the staff who were or should be involved. if personal injury is involved it is particularly important to obtain independent witnesses to the incident, in case there are later legal or insurance claims. such data should be recorded in a central registry on a daily and weekly basis to be deposited in an appropriate computer database.this will provide important information regarding the safety record, or otherwise, of individual operations and the total resort. such data will prove useful when negotiating liability insurance or to demonstrate the resort's actual duty of care record. . risk reduction. business, like life, is never risk free so in designing and operating a resort one important emphasis is safety -for guests and staff. many of the common dangers like food, health and safety and fire are regulated and controlled by local by-laws or ordinances. however, such statutes often involve the 'minimum acceptable' precautions, so a resort may choose to follow the walt disney world lead and select higher standards. this will mean higher initial building costs, however it should reduce both the associated risks and annual insurance premiums. 'one of the most rewarding loss-control projects is training personnel to think in terms of accident and loss avoidance' according to gee ( : ) . this becomes particularly important in the operations phase and needs to be emphasized as part of the resort's duty of care. when accidents occur they become significant 'moments of truth' for the guests and if they are handled in an empathetic and professional manner many later difficulties can be avoided. most businesses, including resorts can absorb small and infrequent losses brought on by seasonal fluctuations or occasional accidents, but will need to transfer the risk of large business interruptions or liability claims to outside suppliers of such coverage, such as insurance companies or brokers. small losses and claims will still be a matter for management's discretion even when they have insurance coverage, due to the deduction or excess clause associated with their insurance premium. most personal injury and damage claims can be accommodated within these parameters and involve negotiation with the affected parties rather than court cases, but if it becomes a major contentious court case insurance providers will become involved. resort owners can also transfer risk to other parties via non-insurance responsibility. in terms of major recreation equipment, like ski lifts or spas, the supplier can be encouraged to guarantee the safety of its equipment if it is properly installed and operated. this often involves the supplier installing the equipment and certifying the operators. in terms of more hazardous adventure tourism activities the resort can sub-contract these activities to specialist operators who carry their own and independent insurance policies. cloutier ( : - ) provides some insights into actual risk management, as seen through the eyes of will leverette, who offers simple guidelines based on the real experience of lawsuits and consultations with adventure tourism companies. according to leverette there are six basic rules to follow: . develop a means to prove that guests were adequately warned and informed. . any guarantee of safety made in a business' literature or marketing materials is an open invitation to be sued. . all field staff must have current training in basic first aid. . the business should develop a written emergency/evacuation plan for all areas and activities to be used. . one good witness statement will shut down a frivolous lawsuit faster, more cheaply and less painfully than will anything else. . the business must use a properly drafted liability-release form. (this author's emphases) such personal experiences are a guide as to how today's risk management is evolving into a legal discourse over duty of care, but when there is a major disruption to business through some form of disaster the emphasis changes from prevention to the rescue and recovery of crisis management. 'crisis management is an extension of risk management' according to the pacific asia travel association (pata, : ) . risk management can be viewed as management initiatives designed to minimize loss through poor decision-making; but it can also be viewed as an important proactive step in reducing the dangers of catastrophic business collapse due to crisis or disaster. the pata booklet presents a 'four r' step process to crisis management: . reduction -detecting early warning signs; . readiness -preparing plans and running exercises; . response -executing operational and communication plans in a crisis situation; . recovery -returning the organization to normal after a crisis; where risk management practices would dominate the first two steps. risk management procedures that help to identify safety and security weaknesses in an operation will not only help to minimize danger and loss, they will expose the weak points in case a crisis occurs. crisis in a literate sense represents a moment of acute danger or difficulty, which in terms of the tourism industry has been defined as: an unwanted, unusual situation for an organization, which, due to the seriousness of the event, demands an immediate entrepreneurial response. (glaesser, : ) this approach places the emphasis of crisis management on the response and recovery phases of a crisis and brings it into line with disaster planning which has its own four-stage process of: assessment-warningimpact-recovery (foster, ) . it is natural disasters which often trigger crisis within the tourism industry be they earthquakes (kyoto - ) , volcanic eruptions (mount st helens - ), forest fires (yellowstone national park - ), tsunami (phuket - ) or hurricanes (new orleans - ) . one should not forget that human beings can and do create their own crises for tourism and the resort industry. wars, terrorism and political decisions can bring about dramatic declines in visitation due to the prospect of danger or the removal of access. king and berno ( ) provide a good example of this in their analysis of the impact of fiji's two coups in and on the local tourist trade, which is heavily resort oriented. they note that: like many other tropical island nations, fiji has long established procedures in place to deal with emergencies such as cyclones. this meant that the overall preparedness in was relatively good with provision to contact hotels across the country with advice on how to react (king and berno, : ) such an experience demonstrates strong synergistic links can exist between natural disaster and human crisis management. from past crisis experiences ritchie ( ) sets out a strategic framework for the planning and management of crises by public or private organizations. his model outlines three main stages in managing such incidents -prevention and planning, implementation, evaluation and feedback. ritchie's three strategic management stages, along with faulkner's earlier crisis stages and their ingredients, has been combined with more resort oriented issues and actions in table . . if the process is divided into the three phases of pre-, actual and post-crisis it is possible to determine a clear pattern of events and responsibilities for resorts. pre-crisis for most resorts will be some form of preparation for a future possible disaster. whether that be an 'inevitable' physical disaster like an earthquake in certain regions or a possible negative political change, such major 'unthinkable' events need to be considered and prepared for. the recommended and common approach at this phase is to develop contingency plans -plans for actions that will mitigate the disaster's effects. this involves recognizing the potential scale and frequency of the expected disaster, and planning accordingly. in terms of the guests, all staff must be trained in emergency procedures and have a role to fulfil. in most cases there will be an obvious overlap with regular security measures such as fire drills, but in terms of major disaster preparation additional factors will need to be considered and plans prepared. for human created crises the degree of notice may be shorter than for natural disasters but there will usually be a warning period of political unrest. in this case the experts will be political commentators and the global news services, and it will be up to owners and managers to keep abreast with their regional situations. more governments are becoming involved in this scanning process on behalf of their travelling citizens, and are offering travel advisories. for many resort destinations these advisories have both positive and negative features. on the positive side they provide up-to-date and comparable risk assessments for tourists; on the negative side they are susceptible to political influence and may not be as objective as one would hope; plus they paint the risk picture with broad strokes, so that relatively safe enclaves become included in the national summary. glaesser ( : - ) provides an example of how one crisis, the bali bombing of october , produced various levels of advisory notice in europe, ranging from a low level general security advice to warnings against travel under any circumstances. during the actual crisis there is going to be chaos and confusion and it is the prepared and cool-headed who will prevail. hence the key management task at this stage is to have staff able to implement the contingency plan and to be empowered to show initiative when conditions do not exactly follow the predicted pattern of events. a major disaster or crisis is likely to affect more than one resort or destination, so collaboration with other tourism organizations and government agencies will be essential. hopefully in the imminent stage all or most guests would have been evacuated with the help of public agencies and industry partners to safer areas, but generally a skeleton staff of key personnel will be required to stay on site as long as possible to ensure the safety of assets. one of the biggest challenges during this period will be media relations, for in today's global village a disaster or crisis attracts the attention of the world and a media frenzy erupts. glaesser ( : ) in his discussion of communications policy with respect to a crisis states 'the principle (sic) task is to convey information with the aim of influencing and guiding consumer behaviour, opinions and expectations'. to achieve this he advocates the affected organization creates a quick understanding of the situation and a transparency in its preparation and response, to build the credibility of the business. he recommends (glaesser, : - ) a communication process that follows the sequence of: . portray the dismay and responsibility of the organization. . describe decisions and measures introduced to cope with the crisis. . indicate, based on the current experience, what further measures will be introduced to avoid future repetitions. in the case of major disasters and crises resort destinations and businesses will need to collaborate with central and regional governments, for it is they alone who can mobilize the resources needed to handle major catastrophes.the evacuation of guests to other areas will require bus and truck transportation and possibly air evacuation. the chaos and confusion of a crisis provides the opportunity for crime and lawlessness, so governments will need to bolster regular police forces with federal police and possibly troops. in the case of the new orleans hurricane of such a government response was widely criticized for its slowness and inadequacy. since much of the world's resort business occurs in the developing world when a major disaster or crisis occurs the host communities often need international assistance. it is at such times that the international community has revealed its better nature, ignoring old differences to come to the aid of fellow humans suffering from the ravages of nature or the actions of a few. unfortunately, the generosity of individuals, charities and nations is not generally put to the best use. partly this is because many receiving nations have neither their own contingency plans for such disasters nor the organization and infrastructure to handle a major in-pouring of generosity; and partly because some of the recovering nations have been susceptible to pilfering and corruption, which results in funds and materials not reaching the designated destinations and sufferers. given the occurrence of irregularities and disappointments with various international aid programs, it is not surprising that their recovery period is often much longer and more difficult than many expect. the post-crisis phase occurs when the actual crisis has abated and is out of the international news headlines, and represents the business and community efforts to return to pre-crisis conditions. as many students of disaster/crisis management indicate this is not only the time to get back to business as quickly as possible, it is an opportunity to redevelop and learn from the mistakes of the past. an immediate concern is to take advantage of the media attention that will have placed the resort destination in the world headlines, by demonstrating that the crisis has passed and life is returning to normal. it is quite likely that the global public has been presented an inaccurate and exaggerated picture of local devastation, which needs to be remedied as quickly as possible. for example, when hurricane iwa struck the hawaiian island of kauai in november some international news media were reporting that part of the island had sunk and thousands of people had died, which was far from the truth, although the hurricane caused a lot of physical damage (murphy and bayley, : ) . such stories need to be refuted, and information about the undamaged areas and recovery put in their place wherever possible. when it comes to repairing the damage an opportunity is presented to upgrade a resort's infrastructure and facilities. there will always be improvements (real or imagined) that the consumer society has developed since the original building of a resort destination which can and should be integrated into the new resort. there will be lessons learned from the disaster or crisis that can be incorporated into the design of the new resort which will make it more disaster-proof in the future. one example of how a disaster can be turned into a positive for tourism occurred with the mount st helens eruption. prior to the eruption mount st helens was a relatively quite tourist attraction, appealing mostly to outdoor recreationists and offering mainly basic facilities. the publicity of the eruption, including dramatic television coverage, increased interest in the volcano to the extent that 'a national monument was created by setting off acres from the existing national forest to commemorate the eruption . . . a new visitor center was opened in december , with illustrations and other graphics that depict the events and the subsequent natural regeneration of the devastated areas' (murphy and bayley, : ) . this new visitor centre has good access to the local interstate freeway and now many more visitors are drawn to the area, incorporating a wider range of tourist types and market segments than before. as has been mentioned, life is a risk and as we modify the earth's environment we are creating new and uncharted conditions that will bring increased risk. signs that business conditions are changing come in various guises. nature seems to be going through a period of instability, with evidence of climate change beginning to take on more significance as scientific evidence points more to a global shift in weather patterns rather than normal climatic cycles. climate change is a serious and urgent issue. while climate change and climate modeling are subject to inherent uncertainties, it is clear that human activities have a powerful role in influencing the climate and the risks and scale of impacts in the future. all science implies a strong likelihood that, if emissions continue unabated, the world will experience a radical transformation of its climate. (stern, : ) even the conservative periodical the economist has come to the conclusion that 'the chances of serious consequences are high enough to make it worth spending the 'not exorbitant' sums needed to try to mitigate climate change' (the economist, b: ). resort tourism is particularly vulnerable to climatic change given that many resorts are located in high risk areas like mountains and tropical beaches, and it uses high levels of energy drawing in its guests and on-site water to keep them happy. war has been joined by global terrorism as a major disruption and deterrent to travel, with tourists seen as 'soft targets' bringing maximum exposure to the terrorist cause. an evercrowded world with over-stretched medical systems appears to be waiting for the next pandemic, with the recent outbreaks of sars ( ) and avian flu ( ) revealing a certain lack of control and openness in dealing with global health crises. under these circumstances one of the most direct business signs of change has been the dramatic increase in insurance premiums that everyone seems to have faced in this new millennium. increased liability insurance has put some single owner peripheral tourism operations out of business, regular security insurance as well as liability insurance has risen dramatically for resorts, and resort destinations in vulnerable locations are facing either dramatic increases in premiums or the loss of direct insurance. after a disastrous , with insured losses of $ billion in the us, of which $ billion was caused by hurricane katrina,american insurers 'are cutting back their exposure in coastal areas . . . home owners who can get insurance coverage face sharply higher rates. some premiums have risen by as much as % . . . many residents cannot get private coverage at all. as a result, state -backed insurance plans, meant to provide coverage as a last resort, are being inundated' (the economist, a: ) . this is only the tip of the iceberg according to figures provided by winn and kirchgeorg ( : ) who quote table . from the topics geo report, which shows 'the number of natural catastrophes rose nearly five fold (and) economic losses nearly fold over the last five decades'. winn and kirchgeorg use such information to suggest business in general needs to rethink its strategic approach to the environment and the business of resort management sustainable development. they view past and present management interest in environmental management and sustainable development as an 'inside-out' approach, 'one in which the primary perspective is to look from the firm out at the external environment' (winn and kirchgeorg, : ) that includes ecological and social considerations. but given the dramatic external forces in nature, politics and health which are leading to new levels of uncertainty in the ecological and societal realms, they see the need for 'a radical departure from the inside-out perspective of environmental management and its more systems theory-informed cousin from sustainability management' to one where sustainability management should be 'expanded and complemented, and may even need to be substituted by conceptual frameworks fairly new to organization theories, such as "resilience management" or "discontinuity management"' (winn and kirchgeorg, : ) . this is because if we are facing significant shifts in environmental and political conditions, the balancing nature of sustainable development will no longer apply in an unstable world. rather, business will need to take on board the possibility or probability of structural shifts and the prospect of facing several global emergencies during their lifetime. 'since ecological global systems cannot be affected significantly by actors in the short-term (the inside-out approach), broader adaptive behaviors that secure the survivability of the economy and society become increasingly relevant. crisis management, risk management, and emergency responses need to be supplemented with long term management for survival' (winn and kirchgeorg, : ) . to put such thoughts into practice will require guidelines that incorporate all the knowledge that has been accumulated to date on risk and crisis management to be supplemented by a broader and more collaborative decade - - - - -last approach to business survival and sustainability. given the noted exposure of tourism to the environmental, political and medical forces that seem to be in flux, it is not surprising to find some are already thinking along these lines. santana ( : ) considers that if decision-makers acknowledge that in these complex and unpredictable times in which we live and operate, anything is possible, including a major crisis that may prove devastating to their organizations, management will be in the 'right frame of mind' to accept the contention that forms the basic foundation of crisis management; proper advanced planning. as santana points out, with the increasing impact of external forces on tourism operations, crisis should be looked upon as an evolving process in itself, one that develops its own logic and consequences, rather than be treated as an isolated event. 'it is the degree to which management heeds the warning signals and prepares the organization (that) will determine how well it responds to the impending crisis' (santana, : ) . likewise, hall et al. ( : ) note that tourism and destinations are 'deeply affected by the perceptions of security and the management of safety, security and risk'. they think the concept of security has broadened significantly since the end of the cold war, with a dominant single political enemy being replaced by terrorism, wars of independence, indigenous rights, and religious differences. 'security ideas now tend to stress more global and peoplecentered perspectives with greater emphasis on the multilateral frameworks of security management' (hall et al., : ) . one of the few at this point to provide practical guidelines for sustainable crisis management in tourism is de sausmarez ( ) . de sausmarez maintains that many future crises will require careful detection and collaborative efforts to minimize their impact, and she has outlined a six step approach to tackle such major external threats. we, as students of tourism, know tourism and resorts are important socio-economic functions for many people, communities and nations, but we cannot assume others give tourism the same degree of importance in the bigger picture and more comprehensive view of events, including crises. hence, the first step in the establishment of a national or regional crisis management policy is to determine and demonstrate the relative importance of the tourism and resort sectors. until this has been done, it is impossible to prepare any sound strategy for the response to a crisis. this was well illustrated by sharpley the business of resort management and craven ( ) who show that even though tourism contributes substantially more to the british economy than agriculture does, the british government's response to the foot and mouth crisis in was to slaughter rather than vaccinated animals and to close the countryside to visitors, moves which favoured the agricultural sector rather than the tourism sector and cost the taxpayer substantially more than was necessary. (de sausmarez, : ) it is only when tourism in general and the resort component in particular are shown to be significant local and regional socioeconomic activities that governments and planners will consider them seriously and integrate their needs into macro-crisis management planning. if resorts and tourism are to integrate crisis management with their sustainable development philosophy they will need to identify the anticipated areas of greatest risk. in the literature and this chapter the emphasis has been on natural disasters, which are essentially supply side characteristics as they change or eliminate the attractiveness of a destination. however, just as important are demand side characteristics such as international political relations affecting visa requirements, economic conditions affecting the ability to travel, world health and safety, and competition from other destinations and leisure activities. although none of these supply and demand risks will fall under the direct control of resort management, knowledge of their existence and development will be essential for future strategic planning, and should be used to lobby government. while it is important to scan the environment continuously it is important to be able to measure trends in a relevant and timely manner. the evidence of global warming is building momentum, but it is often sending out confusing and at times conflicting information, little of which has any bearing on a single location or site. managers and owners of resort properties need to know what this impending crisis means for them specifically. de sausmarez ( : ) maintains tour operators and travel agents, along with government agencies, are in a 'strong strategic position to monitor and assess changes in the tourism status quo as they have access to data on both supply and demand'. she notes that the world tourism organisation's ( ) recommendation after the asian financial crisis of was that destinations should develop three categories of indicators, to warn of impending crises. i. short-term indicators of up to three months, that include advance bookings from key markets, or an increase in the usual length of time needed to settle accounts. ii. medium-term indicators, with a lead time of - months such as that needed for tour operator allocations and take-up to be recorded. iii. long-term indicators, with a lead time of a year or more that include planned capacity developments, international currency valuations and trends in gdp, interest rates and inflation in key markets. to which sustainability crisis management would add a fourth category: iv. future indicators, with a lead time of - years which covers the life of most mortgages and leases and provides sufficient time to determine whether the current climatic experiences are long-term phenomena or cyclical aberrations. these indicators would subjectively convert the environmental, political, business and health trends into local and more useful indices. they would be subjective because it would depend on local knowledge to disaggregate the global information meaningfully, and that process would be influenced by the outlook of the assessor -be they an optimist or pessimist. the type of global crises that tourism may be facing will be sufficiently large scale and evolving that they will require collaboration to implement an effective management strategy. this means that responsibilities and coordination plans need to be drawn up at an early stage and should cover three essential areas: a speedy response, appropriate measures in terms of the local needs of impacted areas and communication and coordination between different levels of jurisdiction and different sectors. . the development of a crisis plan. the development of a national crisis management plan is itself an example of macro-level proactive crisis management (de sausmarez, : ) , and a considerable achievement in itself. such plans need to be flexible as we can expect a series of different crises in the future, with varying local and regional impacts within national jurisdictions. an important part of any large scale crisis management plan will be media relations, relying on the various forms of media to distribute the relevant information as quickly and effectively as possible and being transparent about the severity of the crisis and remedies being undertaken. in some countries there may already be plans in place to cope with anticipated natural crisis such as cyclones (fiji) or earthquakes (pacific north west of america) that can be extended to include other forms of possible crisis. such plans would need regular re-assessment by government departments and the private sector, but can build an invaluable data bank and procedural map. in an asian context de sausmarez ( : ) feels communication and inter-agency cooperation needs to overcome the perceptual association between a crisis and 'loss of face', as is claimed to have occurred with the sars outbreak in east asia in . in terms of global warming and its associated crisis no single country or person is to blame, we all need to take joint responsibility. . the potential for regional cooperation. although de sausmarez focusses on the creation of national crisis management she recognizes that global issues like climate change require an even larger operational scale. no single country can be isolated from its neighbors, as 'was clearly illustrated by the decline in tourism to southeast asia following the bali bombings in october ' (de sausmarez, : ) . she points out that the combined effort of the association of southeast asian nations (asean) was able to effectively contain the sars epidemic through regional preventative action in , and that success has been repeated with the later outbreak of avian flu in east asia. the six steps outlined by de sausmarez do not follow a natural linear sequence, but should be viewed more as a continuous dynamic process which has been divided up to permit closer examination and appreciation of its component parts. the whole process depends on continual learning and adjustment, so as to be responsive and flexible in the face of future crises. for resorts which have survived as a separate form of tourism since the early days it becomes imperative to embrace risk and crisis management as a central part of their business strategy. this chapter has discussed the growing importance of risk management to resorts as our business and natural environments have changed. although financial risk has been a constant within business it is only in recent times, with the rise of a litigious society and a less stable natural environment, that it has become a more general and important issue for management. its increased prominence in business and society now means resorts should make it a key feature of their strategic management, and possibly their central concern. risk management does make a logical central theme for resort management in that it provides a focussed context for its past, present and future directions. the past experiences and business literature (part a) provide a guide as to what management may expect today, and the general level of risk associated with most options. present management must consider both external factors (part b) and internal strategies (part c) to create the most viable and sustainable options for today's resorts. the future can be extrapolated from the present if global business conditions change slowly and in a familiar manner, as predicted in the forecast for a growing senior's market for resorts. but what if we are experiencing major changes to the physical well-being of our planet and in human behaviour to one another? the risk factors that we have calculated from the past and present may no longer work so well or even apply, and we will need to enlarge our risk management process to incorporate more fluid business and environmental situations (part d). the purpose of this chapter and book is to encourage the reader to think about the wonderful legacy that has been provided by resorts; how we should strive to ensure resorts continue to delight our senses and educate us about our planet and its various cultures; and how we can achieve this through appropriate business management, even in this era of global change. a risk management focus would not only assist with the general sustainability objectives of a resort business, it can help position resorts at the forefront of monitoring and adjusting to the predicted changes in our natural and human environments. the chapter and book closes with an examination of one recent global crisis, which had a direct impact on resorts throughout a large area of the world, and one resort which learned a great deal from one hurricane season. the indian ocean tsunami of illustrates how we can still be caught unawares by a natural disaster, how such disasters can become international in scale, and thanks to rising sea levels may have even more significance in the future. walt disney world resort received its first hurricane direct hit in more than years in mid-august , only to have it followed by three others in the space of six weeks. in the process it learned some invaluable lessons. the indian ocean tsunami, also known in some quarters as the boxing day tsunami, occurred on december .this tsunami was generated by an earthquake under the indian ocean near the west coast of the indonesian island of sumatra, and is estimated to have released the energy of hiroshima-type atomic bombs. by the end of that day 'more than people were dead or missing and millions more were homeless in countries, making it perhaps the most destructive tsunami in history' (national geographic news, : ). these figures were subsequently revised upward, so that now the indian ocean tsunami is estimated to have 'left people dead or missing' (guardian unlimited, : ) . if this terrible natural disaster is examined using the threefold strategic action template of table . certain key crisis management lessons emerge. at the pre-crisis stage little formal preparation had been undertaken at either government or resort levels of responsibility. this is understandable because there had been little history of major tsunamis in the indian ocean, the last being associated with krakatoa's eruption in , but unforgivable for tsunamis are still a risk in oceans with volcanic and tectonic activity. what was missing was both an early warning system of seismic buoys and a way to convey that information to potentially threatened areas, so they could instigate evacuation plans. while the 'pacific tsunami warning centre in hawaii had sent an alert to countries, including thailand and indonesia, (it) struggled to reach the right people.television and radio alerts were not issued in thailand until a.m. local time -nearly an hour after the waves had hit' (global security, : ) . in this case there had been no regional forecasting or risk analysis and there was no internationally coordinated contingency plan to deal with such a situation. the result was that even if a coastal resort had its own evacuation plan there was nothing to trigger it until the arrival of the first wave, and by then it was too late. the actual crisis stage was viewed by millions of us around the globe, as we were able to view tourists' video camera images of this spectacular and unusual sunday morning feature on our television screens. the world press immediately brought us these graphic images to go along with the rising death and damage statistics, so that once again the selective reporting of a natural disaster convinced many that the whole region had been devastated. this was particularly the case with phuket island, where the images of destruction at patong beach on the west coast were transformed to represent the whole island in the minds of many, even case studies though phuket is a large island with many separate resort enclaves scattered around its varied shoreline and many of them were untouched by the tragedy. this confirms the need for control over communications, to ensure reporting remains factual and in proportion, rather than sensational and exploitive. the post-crisis stage represents an opportunity to learn from the crisis and to rebuild. this is certainly the case with the indian ocean tsunami. the biggest weakness was the lack of information and warning, which prevented the implementation of effective contingency planning. this is now being addressed with the building of the indian ocean tsunami warning system in .this system has been coordinated by the united nations' educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) and consists of new seismographic stations, supplemented by three deep-ocean sensors to provide the required early warning. but this is just the start, for the information needs to get to the areas around the indian ocean that are likely to be affected and the people in those areas who need to know what actions to take. therefore, unesco is continuing to work on international coordination and with governments to provide grassroots preparedness (terra daily, ) . unesco is providing expertise to assist with the redevelopment of mangrove, sea grass and coral reef rehabilitation; it is strengthening disaster preparation for cultural and heritage sites and integrating this into its reconstruction processes; and it is teaching tsunami awareness in schools, training decision-makers and broadcasters and staging local practice drills. the recovery is well underway around much of the indian ocean. in phuket where the damage was highly localized, patong beach showed no outward sign of the tsunami by october , when the author paid a visit. the local tourism industry and english newspaper reported that while business had been slow in the months immediately following the tsunami, things had started to pick up around june and 'we expect it will be per cent to per cent from new year ( ) to the end of march (high season)' (phuket gazette, : c) . another example of crisis recovery is provided in the maldives. like all low-lying islands the maldives are particularly susceptible to this form of disaster; thousands of local inhabitants lost their homes and were killed in the tragedy. however, only two tourists lost their lives and although most resorts were damaged their 'higher construction standards (meant they) withstood the waves much better than local housing did' (travel wire news, : ) . consequently, it did not take most resorts long to rebuild and re-open, but in the process local businesses and government wanted to be better prepared for the future. five months after the tsunami swept across these islands in the indian ocean, the tourism sector and government agencies are cooperating to ensure that low-lying resorts and the nation's airport are better equipped to handle any type of emergency. (travel wire news, : ) among the changes proposed are improving communications through the installation of satellite telephones on each island and a centralized emergency information command. new resort regulations will require evacuation plans and emergency supplies. a higher seawall around the airport and safeguards for electrical power supplies are also being considered. these and other accounts of the indian ocean tsunami indicate the challenges facing the resort sector with today's concerns over global warming and the negative impact of news coverage for such disasters. major tsunamis are fortunately rare events, but this case has demonstrated the need for some international warning system, so that regional and local contingency plans can be put into operation to minimize the impact. this will clearly require coordination at government levels and the will to maintain vigilance and training over long time periods between natural disaster events -something that will test human nature to the full. one also has to ask, if future tsunamis are associated with the rising sea levels of global warming will such improvements be enough? this is the type of question that some academics and researchers are asking us to consider, and should certainly be examined in terms of the sustainability and risk management of many resorts and their relevance in an era of possible climatic shifts. this case is based on an article by barbara higgins ( ) who was director of operations integration for walt disney world resort when four hurricanes impacted the resort's operations in , providing an invaluable learning opportunity for them and other resort operations. walt disney world's hurricane plans, as part of its general emergency planning, had definite priorities and procedures. priorities included (higgins, : ) : ■ keep guests safe; ■ keep employees safe; ■ have a thoughtful plan for tie-down, ride-out and recovery; and ■ provide the ability to get our parks open and operating as soon as possible after the storm. the procedures were designed to account for varying hurricane strengths, and whether the hurricane involved a direct hit or a near miss in terms of its path across central florida. to prepare for this walt disney world has instituted a five-phase approach to its hurricane preparedness, with each phase being selected in consultation with the national hurricane centre and local authorities. reviewing hurricane plans and verifying contact numbers for employees. further review of plans and beginning of preparation for possible shutdown of long-lead-time operations. predetermined emergency supplies are delivered, the site is cleared of loose materials and where relevant lightweight equipment and buildings are anchored to the ground, and managers evaluate moving to next phase. guests and essential staff take shelter in hurricane-proofed buildings or begin evacuation. all activities closed down, with only essential ride-out crews remaining in designated shelters. despite these plans and the thoroughness of preparation the sequence of four very different hurricanes revealed some additional factors and priorities. one major lesson from that summer's hurricane experience is that no two hurricanes are alike, so a resort can only prepare for hurricanes in general and not the specific one(s) that come its way.'the first lesson we learned was that our rigorous plans were only guidelines that needed to be flexible enough to adjust to changes dictated by our circumstances' (higgins, : ) . the most important elements in the general emergency plans turned out to be: ■ maintaining guest and employee communication, letting them know about the impending storm and providing the relevant information regarding each phase's action plan; ■ operating the food service, with the provision of hot meals being the biggest priority; ■ offering in-resort entertainment to guests who were room-bound for many hours; ■ preparing guests for confinement in their rooms over long periods, which is not what they came to the resort to do; ■ arranging for the ability to use news media to give (information on park closures and re-openings) and to get (weather details and various local government announcements regarding schools, police and emergency services). one 'important lesson to be learned in the face of a crisis is to show compassion for your employees and the toll the situation has had upon them, their families and their loved ones' (higgins, : ) . it is important to release unessential staff from their duties as soon as possible so they can attend to the safety of their family and homes as the hurricane approaches. likewise, in the aftermath it is likely some employees will require shelter and hot meals due to the hurricane damage. 'one lesson many floridians learned in the wake of these storms was the high deductible (excess) associated with hurricane insurance claims . . . (as a consequence) we anticipate providing more than $ million to as many as ninety-five hundred employees who desperately need the funds to recover from the damage to their homes' (higgins, : ) . thus, in the end we have a reaffirmation that the business of resort management is 'to think globally but act locally'. although the driver is business and financial concerns, there needs to be an appreciation of the importance of the local environment and community to the long-term success of a resort. furthermore, if resorts are to continue to survive by adjusting to changing social and technical circumstances, they will need to become more proactive with regard to the current climate and cultural changes that face us all. crisis management in the australian tourism industry: preparedness, personnel and postscript six guilty in swiss canyoning trial adventure tourism legal liability and risk management in adventure tourism the business of adventure tourism risk management for tourism: 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disasters: a strategic approach to crisis management in the tourism industry crisis management and tourism: beyond the rhetoric the foot and mouth crises -rural economy and tourism policy implications: a comment stern review on the economics of climate change. london: h.m. treasury.www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_ economics_climate disaster management: exploring ways to mitigate disasters before they occur indian ocean tsunami warning system up and running the price of sunshine: hurricanes and insurance. the economist the heat is on: a survey of climate change maldives takes steps to improve crisis response risk management for scuba diving operators on australia's great barrier reef the siesta is over: a rude awakening from sustainability myopia impacts of the financial crisis on asia's tourism sector. madrid: world tourism organisation key: cord- - hlwwdh authors: quarantelli, e. l.; boin, arjen; lagadec, patrick title: studying future disasters and crises: a heuristic approach date: - - journal: handbook of disaster research doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: hlwwdh over time, new types of crises and disasters have emerged. we argue that new types of adversity will continue to emerge. in this chapter, we offer a framework to study and interpret new forms of crises and disasters. this framework is informed by historical insights on societal interpretations of crises and disasters. we are particularly focused here on the rise of transboundary crises – those crises that traverse boundaries between countries and policy systems. we identify the characteristics of these transboundary disruptions, sketch a few scenarios and explore the societal vulnerabilities to this type of threat. we end by discussing some possible implications for planning and preparation practices. disasters and crises are as old as when human beings started to live in groups. through the centuries, new types have emerged. for instance, the development of synthetic chemicals in the th century and nuclear power in the th century created the possibility of toxic chemical disasters and crises from radioactive fallouts. older crisis types did not disappear: ancient types such as floods and earthquakes remain with us. the newer disasters and crises are additions to older forms; they recombine elements of old threats and new vulnerabilities. the literature on crisis and disaster research suggests that we are at another important historical juncture with the emergence of a new distinctive class of disasters and crises not often seen before (ansell, boin, & keller, ; helsloot, boin, jacobs, & comfort, ; tierney, ) . in this chapter, we discuss the rise of transboundary crises and disasters. we seek to offer a heuristic approach to studying these new crises and disasters. we offer a heuristic approach to understanding the disasters and crises of the future. it is presented primarily as an aid or guide to looking further into the matter, hopefully stimulating more investigation on conceptions of disasters and crises in the past, the present, and the future. unlike in some areas of scientific inquiry, where seemingly final conclusions can be reached (e.g., about the speed of light), the basic nature of the phenomenon we are discussing is of a dynamic nature and subject to change through time. the answer to the question of what is a disaster or crisis has evolved and will continue to do so (see perry' s chapter in this handbook). human societies have always been faced with risks and hazards. earthquakes, hostile inter-and intra-group relationships, massive floods, sudden epidemics, threats to take multiple hostages or massacre large number of persons, avalanches, fires and tsunamis have marked human history for centuries if not eons. disasters and crises requiring a group reaction are as old as when human beings started to live in stable communities. the earliest happenings are attested to in legends and myths, oral traditions and folk songs, religious accounts and archeological evidence from many different cultures and subcultures around the world. for example, a "great flood" story has long existed in many places (lang, ) . as human societies evolved, new threats and hazards emerged. to the old there have been added new dangers and perils that increasingly have become potentially dangerous to human groups. risky technological agents have been added to natural hazards. these involve chemical, nuclear and biological threats that can accidentally materialize as disasters. intentional conflict situations have become more damaging at least in the sense of involving more and more victims. the last years have seen two world wars, massive air and missile attacks by the military on civilians distant from battle areas, many terrorist attacks, and widespread ethnic strife. genocide killed one million persons in rwanda; millions have become refugees and tens of thousands have died in darfur in the sudan in africa. while terrorism is not a new phenomenon, its targets have considerably expanded. some scholars and academics have argued that the very attempt to cope with increasing risks, especially of a technological nature, is indirectly generating new hazards. as the human race has increasingly been able to cope with such basic needs as food and shelter, some of the very coping mechanisms involved (such as the double edged consequences of agricultural pesticides), have generated new risks for human societies (beck, ; perrow, ) . for example, in , toxic chemicals were successfully used to eradicate massive locust infestations affecting ten western and northern african countries. those very chemicals had other widespread negative effects on humans, animals and crops (irin, ) . implicit in this line of thinking is the argument that double-edged consequences from new innovations (such as the use of chemicals, nuclear power and genetic engineering) will continue to appear (tenner, ) . we cannot say that the future will bring more disasters, as we have no reliable statistics on prior happenings as a base line to use in counting (quarantelli, ) . at present, it would seem safer to argue that some future events are qualitatively different, and not necessarily that there will be more of them in total (although we would argue the last is a viable hypothesis that requires a good statistical analysis). societies for the most part have not been passive in the face of these dangers to human life and well-being. this is somewhat contrary to what is implicit in much of the social science literature especially about disasters. in fact, some of these writings directly or indirectly state that a fatalistic attitude prevailed in the early stages of societal development (e.g., quarantelli, ) . this was thought because religious beliefs attributed negative societal happenings to punishments or tests this seems to have occurred about five to six thousand years ago (see lenski, lenski, & nolan, ) . however, recent archeological studies suggest that humans started to abandon nomadic wanderings and settled into permanent sites around , years ago (balter, ) so community recognized disasters and crises might have an even longer history. by supernatural entities (the "acts of god" notion, although this particular phrase became a common usage mostly because it served the interests of insurance companies). but prayers, offerings and rituals are widely seen as means to influence the supernatural. so passivity is not an automatic response to disasters and crises even by religious believers, an observation sometimes unnoticed by secular researchers. in fact, historical studies strongly indicate that societal interpretations have been more differentiated than once believed and have shifted through the centuries, at least in the western world. in ancient greece, aristotle categorized disasters as the result of natural phenomena and not manifestations of supernatural interventions (aristotle, ) . the spread of christianity about , years ago helped foster the belief that disasters were "special providences sent directly" from "god to punish sinners" (mulcahy, , p. ) . in the middle ages, even scholars and educated elites "no longer questioned the holy origins of natural disasters" (massard-guilbaud, platt, & schott, , p. ) . starting in the th century, however, explanations started to be replaced by "ones that viewed disasters as accidental or natural events" (mulcahy, , p. ) . this, of course, also reflected a strong secularization trend in western societies. perhaps this reached a climax with the lisbon earthquake which dynes notes can be seen as the "first modern disaster" ( , p. ). so far our discussion has been mostly from the perspective of the educated elites in western societies. little scholarly attention seems to have been given to what developed in non-western social systems. one passing observation about the ottoman empire and fire disasters suggests that the pattern just discussed might not be universal. thus, while fire prevention measures were encouraged in cities, they were not mandated "since calamities were considered" as expressions of the will of god (yerolympos, , p. ) . even as late as an ottoman urban building code stated that according to religious writing "the will of the almighty will be done" and nothing can and should be done about that. at the same time, this code advances the idea that nevertheless there were protective measures that could be taken against fires that are "the will of allah" (quoted in yerolympos, , p. ) . of course, incompatibility between natural and supernatural views about the world are not unique to disaster and crisis phenomena, but that still leaves the distinction important. even recently, an australian disaster researcher asserted that in the southwestern asian tsunami most of the population seemed to believe that the disaster was "sent either as a test of faith or punishment" (mcaneney, , p. ). or as another writer noted, following the tsunami, religiously oriented views surfaced. some were by: "fundamentalist christians" who tend to view all disasters "as a harbinger of the apocalypse". others were by "radical islamists" who are inclined to see any disaster that "washes the beaches clear of half-nude tourists to be divine" (neiman, , p. ) . after hurricane katrina, some leaders of evangelical groups spoke of the disaster as punishment imposed by god for "national sins" (cooperman, ) . in the absence of systematic studies, probably the best hypothesis that should be researched is that at present religious interpretations about disasters and crisis still appear to be widely held, but relative to the past probably have eroded among people in general. the orientation is almost certainly affected by sharp cross-societal difference in the importance attributed to religion as can be noted in the religious belief systems and practices as currently exist in the united states and many islamic countries, compared to japan or a highly secular western europe. apart from the varying interpretations of the phenomena, how have societies behaviorally reacted to existing and ever-changing threats and risks? as a whole, human groups have evolved a for an interesting attempt to deal with these two perspectives see the paper entitled disaster: a reality or a construct? perspective from the east, written by jigyasu ( ) an indian scholar. variety of formal and informal mechanisms to prevent and to deal with crises and disasters. but societies have followed different directions depending on the perceived sources of disasters and crises. responses tend to differ with the perception of the primary origin (the supernatural, the natural or the human sphere). for example, floods were seen long ago as a continuing problem that required a collective response involving engineering measures. stories that a chinese emperor, centuries before christ, deepened the ever-flooding yellow river by massive dredging and the building of diversion canals may be more legend than fact (waterbury, , p. ) . however, there is clear evidence that in egypt in the th century bc, the th dynasty pharaoh, amenemher ii completed southwest of cairo what was probably history's first substantial river control project (an irrigation canal and dam with sluice gates). other documentary evidence indicates that dams for flood control purposes were built as far back as b c in greece (schnitter, , p. , - ) . such mitigatory efforts indicate both the belief that there was a long-term natural risk as well as one that could be coped with by physically altering structural dimensions. later, particular in europe, there were many recurrent efforts to institute mitigation measures. for example, earthquake resistant building techniques were developed in ancient rome, although "they had been forgotten by the middle ages" (massard-guilbaud et al., , p. ) . the threats from floods and fires spurred mitigation efforts in greece. starting in the th century, developing urban areas devised many safeguards against fires, varying from regulations regarding inflammable items to storage of water for firefighting purposes. in many towns in medieval poland, dams, dikes and piles along riverbanks were built (sowina, ) . of course, actions taken were not always successful. but, if nothing else, these examples show that organized mitigation efforts have been undertaken for a long time in human history. there have been two other major behavioral trends of long duration that are really preventive in intent if not always in reality. one has been the routinization of responses by emergency oriented groups so as to prevent emergencies from escalating into disasters or crises. for example, in ancient rome, the first groups informally set up to fight fires were composed of untrained slaves. but when a fire in a.d. burned almost a quarter of rome, a corps of vigiles was created that had full-time personnel and specialized equipment. in more recent times, there are good examples of this routinization in the planning of public utilities that have standardized operating procedures to deal with everyday emergencies so as to prevent them from materializing into disasters. in the conflict area, there are various un and other international organizations, such as the international atomic energy agency and the european union (eu), that also try to head off the development of crises. in short, societies have continually evolved groups and procedures to try to prevent old and new risks and threats from escalating into disasters and crises. a second more recent major trend has been the development of specific organizations to deal first with wartime crises and then with peacetime disasters. societies for about a century have been creating specific organizations to deal first with new risks for civilians created by changes in warfare, and then improving on these new groups as they have been extended to peacetime situations. rooted in civil defense groups created for air raid situations, there has since been the evolvement of civilian emergency management agencies (blanchard, ) . accompanying this has been the start of the professionalization of disaster planners and crisis managers. there has been a notable shift from the involvement of amateurs to educated professionals. human societies adjusted not only to the early risks and hazards, but also to the newer ones that appeared up to the last century. the very existence of the human race is testimony to the social coping mechanisms of humans as they face such threats. here and there a few communities and groups have not been able to cope with the manifestations of contemporary risks and hazards (diamond, ) . but these have been very rare cases. neither disasters nor crises involving conflict have had that much effect on the continuing existence of cities anywhere in the world. throughout history, many cities have been destroyed. they have been: "sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated and poisoned", but in almost every case they have phoenix-like been reestablished (vale & campanella, , p. ) . around the world, from the th to the th century, only cities were "permanently abandoned following destruction" (vale & campanella, , p. ) . the same analysis notes that large cities such as baghdad, moscow, aleppo, mexico city, budapest, dresden, tokyo, hiroshima and nagasaki all suffered massive physical destruction and lost huge numbers of their populations due to disasters and wartime attacks. all were rebuilt and rebounded. at the start of the th century, "such resilience became a nearly universal fact" about urban settlements around the world (vale & campanella, , p. ) . looking at these cities today as well as warsaw, berlin, hamburg and new orleans, it seems this recuperative tendency is very strong (see also schneider & susser, ) . in the hiroshima museum that now exists at the exact point where the bomb fell, there is a -degree photograph of the zone around that point, taken a few days after the attack. except for a few piles of ruins, there is nothing but rubble as far as the eye can see in every direction. there were statements made that this would be the scene at that location for decades. but a visitor to the museum today can see in the windows behind the circular photograph, many signs of a bustling city and its population (for a description of the museum see webb, ) . hiroshima did receive much help and aid to rebuild. but the city came back in ways that observers at the time of impact did not foresee. early efforts to understand and to cope with disasters and crises were generally of an ad hoc nature. with the strong development of science in the th century, there was the start of understanding the physical aspects of natural disasters, and these had some influence on structural mitigation measures that were undertaken. however, the systematic social science study of crises and disasters is about a half-century-old (fritz, ; kreps, ; quarantelli, quarantelli, , schorr, ; wright & rossi, ) . in short, there is currently a solid body of research-generated knowledge developed over the last half century of continuing and ever increasing studies around the world in different social science disciplines. to be sure, such accounts and reports are somewhat selective and not complete. there are now case studies and analytical reports on natural and technological disaster (and to some extent on other crises) numbering in the four figures. in addition, there are numerous impressions of specific behavioral dimensions that have been derived from field research (for summaries and inventories see alexander, ; cutter, ; dynes, demarchi, & pelanda, ; dynes & tierney, ; farazmand, ; helsloot, boin, jacobs, & comfort, ; mileti, ; oliver-smith, ; perry, lindell, & prater, ; rosenthal, boin, & comfort, ; rosenthal, charles, & 't hart, ; tierney, lindell, & perry, ; turner, ) . what are the distinctive aspects of the newer disasters and crises that are not seen in traditional ones? to answer this question, we considered what social science studies and reports had found about behavior in disasters and crises up to the present time. we then implicitly compared those observations and findings with the distinctive behavioral aspects of the newer disasters and crises. one issue that has always interested researchers and scholars is how to conceptualize disasters and crises. there is far from full agreement that all disasters and crises can be categorized together as being relatively homogeneous phenomena (quarantelli, ; perry & quarantelli, ) . this is despite the fact that there have been a number of attempts to distinguish between, among and within different kinds of disasters and crises. however, no one overall view has won anywhere near general acceptance among self-designated disaster and crisis researchers. to illustrate we will briefly note some of the major formulations advanced. for example, one attempt has been to distinguish between natural and technological disasters (erikson, ; picou & gill, ) . the basic assumption was that the inherent nature of the agent involved made a difference. implicit was the idea that technological dangers or threats present a different and more varying kind of challenge to human societies than do natural hazards or risks. most researchers have since dropped the distinction as hazards have come to be seen as less important than the social setting in which they appear. in recent major volumes on what is a disaster (quarantelli, ; perry & quarantelli, ) , the distinction was not even mentioned by most of the two dozen scholars who addressed the basic question. other scholars have struggled with the notion that there may be some important differences between what can be called "disasters" and "crises". the assumption here is that different community level social phenomena are involved, depending on the referent. thus, some scholars distinguish between consensus and conflict types of crises (stallings, tries to reconcile the two perspectives). in some research circles, almost all natural and most technological disasters are viewed as consensus types of crises (quarantelli, ) . these are contrasted with crises involving conflict such as are exemplified by riots, terrorist attacks, and ethnic cleansings and intergroup clashes. in the latter type, at least one major party is either trying to make it worse or to extend the duration of the crisis. in natural and technological disasters, no one deliberately wants to make the situation worse or create more damage or fatalities. now, there can be disputes or serious disagreements in natural or technological disasters. it is almost inevitable that there will be some personal, organizational and community conflicts as, for example, in the recovery phase of disasters, where scapegoating is common (bucher, ; drabek & quarantelli, cf. boin, mcconnell, & 't hart, ) . in some crises, the overall intent of major social actors is to deliberately attempt to generate conflict. in contrast to the unfolding sequential process of natural disasters, terrorist groups or protesting rioters not only intentionally seek to disrupt social life, they modify or delay their attacks depending on perceived countermeasures. apart from a simple observable logical distinction between consensus and conflict types of crises, empirical studies have also established behavioral differences. for example, looting behavior is distinctively different in the two types. in the typical disaster in western societies, almost always looting is rare, covert and socially condemned, done by individuals, and involves targets of opportunity. in contrast, in many conflict crises looting is very common, overt and socially supported, undertaken by established groups of relatives or friends, and involves deliberately targeted locations (quarantelli & dynes, ) . likewise, there are major differences in hospital activities in the two kinds of crises, with more variation in conflict situations. there are differences also in the extent to which both organizational and community-level changes occur as a result of consensus and conflict crises, with more changes resulting from conflict occasions (quarantelli, ) . finally, it has been suggested that the mass media system operates differently in terrorism situations and in natural and technological disasters (project for excellence in journalism, journalism, , . both the oklahoma city bombing and the - world trade center attack led to sharp clashes between different groups of initial organizational responders. there were those who saw these happenings primarily as criminal attacks necessitating closure of the location as a crime for a contrary view that sees terrorist occasions as more or less being the same as what behaviorally appears in natural and technological disasters (fischer, ) . scene, and those who saw them primarily as situations where priority ought to be on rescuing survivors. in the - situation, the clash continued later into the issues of the handling of dead bodies and debris clearance. all this goes to show that crises and disasters are socially constructed. whether it is by theorists, researchers, operational personnel, politicians or citizens, any designation comes from the construction process and is not inherent in the phenomena itself. this is well illustrated in an article by cunningham ( ) where he shows that a major cyanide spill into the danube river was differently defined as an incident, an accident, or a catastrophe, depending on how culpability was perceived and who was doing the defining. still other distinctions have been made. some advocate "crisis" as the central concept in description and analysis (see the chapter of boin, kuipers and 't hart in this handbook). in this line of thinking, a crisis involves an urgent threat to the core functions of a social system. a disaster is seen as "a crisis with a bad ending" (boin, ) . this is consistent with the earlier expressed idea that while there are many hazards and risks, only a few actually manifest themselves. but the crisis idea does not differentiate among the manifestations themselves as the consensus and conflict distinction does. this is not the place to try and settle conceptual disagreements and we will not attempt to do so. anyone in these areas of study should acknowledge that there are different views and different proponents should try to make their positions as explicit as possible so people do not continue to talk past one another. it is perhaps not amiss here to note that the very words or terms used to designate the core nature of the phenomena are etymologically very complex with major shifts in meaning through time. we are far from having standardized terms and similar connotations and denotations for them. a conceptual question that has come increasingly to the fore in the last decade or so is the question: have new kinds of crises and disasters began to appear? we think it is fair to say that there are new types of risks and hazards. there are also structural changes in social settings. together, they raise the prospect of new types of disasters and crises. for example, we have seen the breakdown of modern transportation systems (think of the volcanic ash crisis that paralyzed air traffic in ; kuipers & boin, ) . there have been massive information system failures either through sabotage or as a result of technical breakdowns in linked systems. there have been terrorist attacks of a magnitude and scale not seen before. we are living with the prospect of widespread illnesses and health-related difficulties that appear to be qualitatively different from traditional medical problems. we have just lived through financial and economic collapses that cut across different social systems around the world. many of these "new" disruptions have both traditional and non-traditional features: think of the heat waves in paris (lagadec, ) and chicago (klinenberg, ) , the ice storms in canada (scanlon, ) , but also the genocide-like violence in africa and the former yugoslavia. the chernobyl radiation fallout ( ) led some scholars and researchers to start asking if there was not something distinctively new about that disaster. the fallout was first openly measured in sweden. officials were mystified in that they could not locate any possible radiation source in their own country. later radiation effects on vegetation eaten by reindeer past the arctic circle in northern sweden were linked to the nuclear plant accident in the soviet union. the mysterious origins, crossing of national boundaries, and the emergent involvement of see safire ( ) who struggles with past and present etymological meanings of "disaster", "catastrophe", "calamity" and "cataclysm"; also see murria ( ) who looking outside the english language found a bewildering set of words used, many of which had no equivalent meanings in other languages. many european and transnational groups was not something researchers had typically seen together in other prior disasters. looking back, it is clear that certain other disasters also should have alerted all of us to the probability that new forms of adversity were emerging. in november , water used to put out fire in a plant involving agricultural chemicals spilled into the river rhine. the highly polluted river went through switzerland, germany, france, luxembourg and the netherlands. a series of massive fire smog episodes plagued indonesia in and . land speculations led to fire-clearing efforts that, partly because of drought conditions, resulted in forest fires that produced thick smog hazes that spread over much of southeast asia (barber & schweithelm, ) . these disrupted travel, which in turn affected tourism as well as creating respiratory health problems, and led to political criticism of indonesia by other countries as multi-nation efforts to cope with the problem were not very successful. both of these occasions had characteristics that were not typically seen in traditional disasters. in the original version of this chapter, we spoke about "trans-system social ruptures". this term was an extension of the earlier label of "social ruptures" advanced by lagadec ( lagadec ( , . the term "transboundary" has since become the more conventional way to describe crises and disasters that jump across different societal boundaries disrupting the social fabric of different social systems (ansell et al., ) . the two prime and initial examples we used in the original chapter were the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) and the sobig computer f virus spread, both of which appeared in . the first involved a "natural" phenomenon, whereas the second was intentionally created. since there is much descriptive literature available on both, we here provide only very brief statements about these phenomena. the new infectious disease sars appeared in the winter of . apparently jumping from animals to humans it originated in southern rural china, near the city of guangzhou. from there it moved through hong kong and southeast asia. it spread quickly around the world because international plane flights were shorter than its incubation period. at least infected persons died. it hit canada with outbreaks in vancouver in the west and toronto far away in the east. in time, persons died of the several hundred that got ill, and thousands of others were quarantined. the city's healthcare system virtually closed down except for the most urgent of cases with countless procedures being delayed or cancelled. the result was that there was widespread anxiety in the area resulting in the closing of schools, the cancellation of many meetings and, because visitors and tourists stayed away, a considerable negative effect on the economy (commission report, , p. ) . the commission report notes a lack of coordination among the multitude of private and public sector organizations involved, a lack of consistent information on what was really happening, and jurisdictional squabbling on who should be doing what. although sars vanished worldwide after june , to this day it is still not clear why it became so virulent in the initial outbreak and why it has disappeared (yardley, ) . the sobig computer f virus spread in august (schwartz, ) . it affected many computer systems and threatened almost all computers connected to the internet. the damage was very costly. a variety of organizations around the world, public and private, attempted to deal with the problem. initially uncoordinated, there eventually emerged in an informal way a degree of informational networking on how to cope with what was happening (koerner, ) . what can we generalize from not only these two cases, but also others that we looked at later in may , the so-called wannacry virus affected millions of computers across the world with ransomware. many hospitals were affected. (ansell et al., ) ? the characteristics we depict are stated in ideal-typical terms; that is, from a social science perspective, what the phenomena would be if they existed in pure or perfect form. first, the threat jumps across many international and national/political governmental boundaries. it crosses functional boundaries, jumping from one sector to another, and crossing from the private into public sectors (and sometimes back). there was, for example, the huge spatial leap of sars from a rural area in china to metropolitan toronto, canada. second, a transboundary threat can spread very fast. cases of sars went around the world in less than hours with a person who had been in china flying to canada quickly infecting persons in toronto. the spread of the sobig f virus was called the fastest ever (thompson, ) . this quick spread is accompanied by a very quick if not almost simultaneous global awareness of the risk because of mass media attention. third, there is no known central or clear point of origin, at least initially, along with the fact that the possible negative effects at first are far from clear. this stood out when sars first appeared in canada. there is much ambiguity as to what might happen. ambiguity is of course a major hallmark of disasters and crises (turner, ) . it is more pervasive in transboundary crises as information about causes, characteristics and consequences is distributed across the system. fourth, there are potentially if not actual large number of victims, directly or indirectly. the sobig computer virus infected % of email users in china, that is about million people and about three fourths of email messages around the world were infected by this virus (koerner, ) . in contrast to the geographic limits of most past disasters, the potential number of victims is often open ended in disruptions that span across boundaries. fifth, traditional "solutions" or approachesembedded in local and/or professional institutions will not always work. this is rather contrary to the current emphasis in emergency management philosophy. the prime and first locus of planning and managing cannot be the local community as it is presently understood. international and transnational organizations must typically be involved very early in the initial response (boin, ekengren, & rhinard, ) . the nation state may not even be a prime actor in the situation. sixth, although responding organizations and groups are major players, there is an exceptional amount of emergent behavior and the development of many informal ephemeral linkages. in some respects, the informal social networks generated, involving much information networking, are not always easily identifiable from the outside, even though they are often the crucial actors at the height of the crisis. in this section, we sketch several future scenarios that most likely would create transboundary disasters. even though some of the scenarios discussed might seem to be science fiction in nature, the possibilities we discuss are well within the realm of realistic scientific possibilities. the most obvious scenario revolves around asteroids or comets hitting planet earth (di justo, ) . this has, of course, happened in the past, but even more recent impacts found no or relatively few human beings around. there are two major possibilities with respect to impact (mcguire, ; wisner, ) . a landing in the ocean would trigger a tsunami-like impact in coastal areas. just the thinking of the possibility of how, when and where ahead of time coastal population evacuations might have to be undertaken, is a daunting thought. statistically less likely is a landing in a heavily populated area. but a terrestrial impact anywhere on land would generate very high quantities of dust in the atmosphere, which will affect food production as well as creating economic disruption. this would be akin to the tambora volcanic eruption in , which led to very cold summers and crop failures (post, ) . the planning and management problems for handling something like this would be enormous. the explosion of space shuttle columbia scattered debris over a large part of the united states. this relatively small disastercompared to a comet or asteroid impactinvolved massive crossing of boundaries, a large number of potential victims, and could not be managed by local community institutions. the response required that an unplanned effort coordinating organizations that had not previously worked with one another and other unfamiliar groups, public and private (ranging from the us forest service to local red cross volunteers to regional medical groups), be informally instituted over a great part of the united states (beck & plowman, ; donahue, ) . a second scenario is the inadvertent or deliberate creation of biotechnological disasters. genetic engineering of humans or food products is currently in its infancy. the possible good outcomes and products from such activity are tremendous (morton, ) and are spreading around the world (pollack, ) . but the double-edged possibilities mentioned earlier are also present. there is dispute over genetically modified crops, with many european countries resisting and preventing their use and spread in their countries. while no major disaster or crisis from this biotechnology has yet occurred, there have been many accidents and incidents that suggest that this will be only a matter of time. for example, in , starlink corn, approved only for animal feed is found in the food supply, such as taco shells and other groceries. the same year farmers in europe learned that that they had unknowingly been growing modified canola using mixed seed from canada. in , modified corn was found in mexico even though it was illegal to plant in that country. that same year, experimental corn that had been engineered to produce a pharmaceutical that was found in soybeans in the state of nebraska. in several places, organic farmers found that it was impossible for them to keep their fields uncontaminated (for further details about all these incidents and other examples, see pollack, ) . noticeable is the leaping of boundaries and uncertainty about the route of spreading. it does not take much imagination to see that a modified gene intended for restricted use, could escape and create a contamination that could wreak ecological and other havoc. perhaps even more disturbing to some is genetic engineering involving human beings. the worldwide dispute over cloning, while currently perhaps more a philosophical and moral issue, does also partly involve the concern over creating flawed human-like creatures. it is possible to visualize not far-fetched worst-case scenarios that could be rather disastrous. it should be noted that even when there is some prior knowledge of a very serious potential threat, what might happen is still likely to be as ambiguous and complex as when sars first surfaced. this can be seen in the continuing major concern expressed in to mid- about the possible pandemic spread of avian influenza, the so called "bird flu" (nuzzo, ; thorson & ekdahl, ) . knowledge of the evolution and spread of new pandemics, their effects and whether presently available protective measures would work, may well be very limited. knowledge that it might occur provides very little guidance on what might actually happen. it is possible to imagine the destruction of all food supplies for human beings either through the inadvertent or deliberate proliferation of very toxic biotechnological innovations for which no known barriers to spreading exists. these potential kinds of global disasters are of relatively recent origins and we may expect more such possibilities in the future. the human race is opening up potentially very catastrophic possibilities by innovations in nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics (barrat, ; joy, ; makridakis, ) . a potential is not an actuality. but it would be foolish from both a research as well as a planning and managing viewpoint to simply ignore these and other doomsday possibilities. the question might be asked if there is a built-in professional bias among disaster and crisis researchers and emergency planners to look for and to expect the worst (see mueller, for numerous examples). in the disaster and crisis area, this orientation is reinforced by the strong tendency of social critics and intellectuals to stress the negative. it would pay to look at the past, see what was projected at a particular time, and then to look at what actually happened. the worldwide expectations about what would happen at the turn of the century to computers are now simply remembered as the y k fiasco. it would be a worthy study to take projections by researchers about the future of ongoing crises and disasters, and then to look at what actually happened. in the s, in the united states, scholars made rough analyses about the immediate future course of racial and university riots in the country. their initial appearances had not been forecasted. moreover, there was a dismal record in predicting how such events would unfold (no one seemed to have foreseen that the riots would go from ghetto areas to university campuses), as well as that they rather abruptly stopped. we should be able to do a better job than we have so far in making projections about the future. but perhaps that is asking more of disaster and crisis researchers than is reasonable. after all, social scientists with expertise in certain areas, to take recent examples, failed completely to predict or forecast the non-violent demise of the soviet union, the peaceful transition in south africa, or the development of a market economy in communist china (cf. tetlock, ) . a disaster or crisis always occurs in some kind of social setting. by social setting we mean social systems. these systems can and do differ in social structures and cultural frameworks. there has been a bias in disaster and crisis research towards focusing on specific agents and specific events. thus, there is the inclination of social science researchers to say they studied this or that earthquake, flood, explosion and/or radioactive fallout. at one level that is nonsense. these terms refer to geophysical, climatological or physical happenings, which are hardly the province of social scientists. instead, those focused on the social in the broad sense of the term should be studying social phenomena. our view is that what should be looked at more is not the possible agent that might be involved, but the social setting of the happening. this becomes obvious when researchers have to look at such happenings as the southeast asia tsunami or locust infestations in africa. both of these occasions impacted a variety of social systems as well as involving social actors from outside those systems. this led in the tsunami disaster to sharp cultural clashes regarding on how to handle the dead between western european organizations who came into look mostly for bodies of their tourist citizens, and local groups who had different beliefs and values with respect to dead bodies (scanlon, personal communication with first author). the residents of the andaman islands lived at a level many would consider "primitive". at the time of the tsunami in southeast asia, they had no access to modern warning systems. but prior to the tsunami, members of the tribal communities saw signs of disturbed marine life and heard unusual agitated cries of sea birds. this was interpreted as a sign of impending danger, so that part of the population got off the beaches and retreated inland to the woods and survived intact (icpac report, ) . there is a need to look at both the current social settings as well as certain social trends that influence disasters and crises. in no way are we going to address all aspects of social systems and cultural frameworks or their social evolution, either past or prospective. instead, we will selectively discuss and illustrate a few dimensions that would seem to be particularly important with respect to crises and disasters. what might these be? let us first look at existing social structures around the world. what differences are there in authority relationships, social institutions and social diversity? as examples, we might note that australia and the united states are far more governmentally decentralized than france or japan (bosner, for example, rees ( ) , a cosmologist at cambridge university, gives civilization as we know it only a - chance of surviving the st century. schoff, ) . this affects what might or might not happen at times of disasters (it is often accepted that top-down systems have more problems in responding to crises and disasters). but what does it mean for the management of transboundary disruptions, which require increased cooperation between and across systems? will decentralized systems be able to produce "emergent" transboundary cooperation? as another example, mass media systems operate in rather different ways in china compared with western europe. this is important because to a considerable extent the mass communication system (including social media) is by far the major source of "information" about a disaster or a crisis. they play a major role in the social construction of disasters and crises. for a long time in the former soviet union, even major disasters and overt internal conflicts by way of riots were simply not openly reported (berg, ) . and only late in did chinese authorities announce that henceforth death tolls in natural disasters would be made public, but not for other kinds of crises (kahn, ) . another social structural dimension has to do with the range of social diversity in different systems (bolin & stanford, ) . social groupings and categories can be markedly different in their homogeneity or heterogeneity. the variation, for instance, can be in terms of life styles, class differences or demographic composition. the aging population in western europe and japan is in sharp contrast to the very young populations in most developing countries. this is important because the very young and the very old incur disproportionately the greatest number of fatalities in disasters. human societies also differ in terms of their cultural frameworks. as anthropologists have pointed out, they can have very different patterns of beliefs, norms, and values. as one example, there can be widely held different conceptions of what occasions disasters and crises. the source can be attributed to supernatural, natural, or human factors as indicated earlier. this can markedly affect everything from what mitigation measures might be considered to how recovery and reconstruction will be undertaken. norms indicating what course of action should be followed in different situations can vary tremendously. for example, the norm of helping others outside of one's own immediate group at times of disasters and crises ranges from full help to none. thus, although the kobe earthquake was an exception, any extensive volunteering in disasters was very rare in japan (for a comparison of the us and japan, see hayashi, ) . in societies with extreme cross-cultural ethnic or racial differences, volunteering to help others outside of one's own group at times of disasters or crisis is almost unknown. social structures and cultural frameworks of course are always changing. to understand future disasters and crises, it is necessary to identify and understand trends that may be operative with respect to both social structures and cultural frameworks. in particular, for our purposes, it is important to note trends that might be cutting across structural and cultural boundaries. globalization has been an ongoing force. leaving aside the substantive disputes about the meaning of the term, what is involved is at least the increasing appearance of new social actors at the global level. with respect to disaster relief and recovery, there is the continuing rise of transnational or international organizations such as un entities, the european union, religiously oriented groupings, and the world bank (boin et al., ) . with the decline of the importance of the nation state (guéhenno, ; mann, ) , more and new social actors, especially of an ngo nature, are to be anticipated. the rise of the information society has enabled the development of informal social networks that globally cut across political boundaries. this trend will likely increase in the future. such networks are creating social capital (in the social science sense) that will be increasingly important in dealing with disasters and crises. at the cultural level, we can note the greater insistence of citizens that they ought to be actively protected against disasters and crises (beck, ) . this is part of a democratic ideology that has spread around the world. that same ideology carries an inherent paradox: the global citizen may not appreciate government interference in everyday life, but expects government to show up immediately when acute adversity hits. finally, there has been the impact of the / attacks especially on official thinking not just in the united states but elsewhere also. this happening has clearly been a "focusing event" (as birkland, uses the term) and changed along some lines, certain values, beliefs and norms (smelser, ; tierney, ) . there is a tendency, at least in the us after / , to think that all future crises and disasters will be new forms of terrorism. one can see this in the creation of the us department of homeland security, which repeated errors in approach and thinking that over years of research have shown to be incorrect (e.g., an imposition of a command and control model, assuming that citizens will react inappropriately to warnings, seeing organizational improvisation as bad managing, see dynes, ) . these changes were accompanied by the downgrading of fema and its emphasis on mitigation (cohn, ) . valid or not, such ideas influence thinking about transboundary disasters and crises (and not just in the united states). the ideas expressed above and the examples used were intended to make several simple points. they suggest, for instance, that an earthquake of the same magnitude in france to one in iran will probably be reacted to differently. a riot in sweden will be a different phenomenon than one in myanmar. to understand and analyze such happenings requires taking into account the aspects just discussed. it is hard to believe that countries that currently have no functioning national government, such as somalia and the democratic republic of the congo or marginally operatives ones such as afghanistan, will have the same reaction to disasters and crises as societies with fully functional national governments. different kinds of disasters and crises will occur in rather different social settings. in fact, events that today are considered disasters or crises were not necessarily so viewed in the past. in noting these cross-societal and cross-cultural differences, we are not saying that there are no universal principles of disaster and crisis behavior. there is considerable research evidence supportive of this notion. we would argue, for example, that many aspects of effective warning systems, problems of bureaucracies in responding, the crucial importance of the family/household unit are roughly the same in all societies. to suggest the importance of cross-societal and cross-cultural differences is simply to suggest that good social science research needs to take differences into account while at the same time searching for universal principles about disasters and crises. this is consistent with those disaster researchers and scholars (e.g., oliver-smith, ) who have argued that studies in these areas have badly neglected the historical context of such happenings. of course, this neglect of the larger and particularly historical context has characterized much social science research of any kind (wallerstein, ) ; it is not peculiar to disaster and crisis studies. one trend that affects the character of modern crises and disasters is what we call the social amplifications of crises and disasters. pidgeon, kasperson, and slovic ( ) described a social augmentation process with respect to risk. to them, risk not only depends on the character of the dangerous agent itself but how it was seen in the larger context in which it appeared. the idea that there can be social amplification of risk rests on the assumption that aspects relevant to hazards interact with processes of a psychological, social, institutional, and cultural nature in such a manner that they can increase or decrease perceptions of risk (kasperson & kasperson, ) . it is important to note that the perceived risk could be raised or be diminished depending on the factors in the larger context, which makes it different from the vulnerability paradigm which tends to assume the factors involved will be primarily negative ones. we have taken this idea and extended it to the behaviors that appear in disasters and crises. extreme heat waves and massive blizzards are hardly new weather phenomena (burt, ) . there have recently been two heat waves, however, that have new elements in them. in , a long lasting and very intensive heat wave battered france. nearly , persons died (and perhaps , - , in all of europe). particularly noticeable was that the victims were primarily socially isolated older persons. another characteristic was that officials were very slow in accepting the fact that there was a problem and so there was very little initial response (lagadec, ) . there was a similar earlier happening in chicago not much noticed until reported in a study seven years later (see klinenberg, ) . it exhibited the same features, that is, older isolated victims, bureaucratic indifference, and mass media uncertainty. at the other temperature extreme, in , canada experienced an accumulation of snow and ice that went considerably beyond the typical. the ice storm heavily impacted electric and transport systems, especially around montreal. the critical infrastructures being affected created chain reactions that reached into banks and refineries. at least municipalities declared a state of emergency. such a very large geographic area was involved that many police were baffled that "there was no scene", no "ground zero" that could be the focus of attention (scanlon, ) . there were also many emergent groups and informal network linkages (scanlon, ) . in some ways, this was similar to what happened in august , when the highly interconnected eastern north american power grid started to fail when three transmission lines in the state of ohio came into contact with trees and short circuited (townsend & moss, ) . this created a cascade of power failures that resulted in blackouts in cities from new york to toronto and eventually left around million persons without power, which, in turn, disrupted everyday community and social routines (ballman, ) . it took months of investigation to establish the exact path of failure propagation through a huge, complex network. telecommunication and electrical infrastructures entwined in complex interconnected and network systems spread over a large geographic area with multiple end users. therefore, localized disruptions can cascade into large-scale failures (for more details, see townsend & moss, ) . such power blackouts have occurred among others in auckland, new zealand in (newlove, stern, & svedin, ) ; in buenos aires in (ullberg, ); in stockholm in and in siberian cities in (humphrey, ; in moscow in (arvedlund, ; in brazil in (brooks, ); in bangladesh in (al-mahmood, , and in sri lanka in (lbo, ). all of these cases initially involved accidents or software and hardware failures in complex technical systems that generate severe consequences creating a crisis with major economic and often political effects. these kinds of crises should have been expected. a national research council report ( ) forecast the almost certain probability of these kinds of risks in future network linkages. blackouts can also be deliberately created either for good or malevolent reasons having nothing to with problems in network linkages. employees of the now notorious enron energy company, in order to exploit western energy markets, indirectly but deliberately took off line a perfectly functioning las vegas power plant so that rolling blackouts hit plant-dependent northern and central california with about a million residences and businesses losing power (egan, ) . in the earliest days of electricity in new york city, the mayor ordered the power cut off when poor maintenance of exposed and open wires resulted in a number of electrocutions of citizens and electrical workers (jonnes, ) . one should not think of blackouts as solely the result of mechanical or physical failures creating chain-like cascades. most disasters are still traditional ones. for example, four major hurricanes hit the state of florida in . we saw very little in what we found that required thinking of them in some major new ways, or even in planning for or managing them. the problems, individual or organizational, that surfaced were the usual ones, and how to successfully handle them is fairly well known. more important, emergent difficulties were actually somewhat better handled than in the past, perhaps reflecting that officials may have had exposure to earlier studies and reports. thus, the warnings issued and the evacuations that took place were better than in the past. looting concerns were almost non-existent and less than ten percent indicated possible mental health effects. the pre-impact organizational mobilization and placement of resources beyond the community level was also better. the efficiency and effectiveness of local emergency management offices were markedly higher than in the past. not everything was done well. long known problematical aspects and failures to implement measures that research had suggested a long time ago were found. there were major difficulties in interorganizational coordination. the recovery period was plagued by the usual problems. even the failures that showed up in pre-impact mitigation efforts were known. the majority of contemporary disasters in the united states are still rather similar to most of the earlier ones. what could be seen in the hurricanes in florida was rather similar to what the disaster research center (drc) had studied there in the s and the s. as the electronic age goes beyond its birth and as other social trends continue, new elements may appear creating new problems that will necessitate new planning. if and when that happens, we may have rather new kinds of hurricane disasters, but movement in that direction will be slow. as the famous sociologist herbert blumer used to say in his class lectures a long time ago, it is sometimes useful to check whatever is theoretically proposed against personal experience. in , an extensive snowstorm led to the closing of almost all schools and government offices in the state of delaware. this was accompanied by the widespread cancellations of religious and sport events. there was across the board disruption of air, road and train services. all of this resulted in major economic losses in the millions of dollars. there were scattered interruptions of critical life systems. the governor issued a state of emergency declaration and the state as well as local emergency management offices fully mobilized. to be sure, what happened did not fully rival what surfaced in the canadian blizzard discussed earlier. but it would be difficult to argue that it did not meet criteria often used by many to categorize disasters. what happened was not that different from what others and we had experienced in the past. in short, it was a traditional disaster. finally, at the same time we were thinking about the florida hurricanes and the delaware snowstorm, we also observed other events that many would consider disasters or crises. certainly, a bp texas plant explosion in would qualify. it involved the third largest refinery in the country. more than a hundred were injured and persons died. in addition, there was major physical destruction of refinery equipment and nearby buildings were leveled. there was full mobilization of local emergency management personnel (franks, ) . at about the same time, there were landslides in the state of utah and california; a stampede with hundreds of deaths in a bombay, india temple, train and plane crashes in different places around the world, as well as large bus accidents; a dam rupture which swept away five villages, bridges and roads in pakistan; recurrent coal mine accidents and collapses in china; recurrent false reports in asia about tsunamis that greatly disrupted local routines; sinking of ferries with many deaths, and localized riots and hostage takings. at least based on press reports, it does not seem that there was anything distinctively new about these occasions. they seem to greatly resemble many such prior happenings. unless current social trends change very quickly in hypothetical directions (e.g., marked changes as a result of biotechnological advances), for the foreseeable future there will continue to be many traditional local community disasters and crises (such as localized floods and tornadoes, hostage takings or mass shootings, exploding tanker trucks or overturned trains, circumscribed landslides, disturbances if not riots at local sport venues, large plant fires, sudden discoveries of previously unknown very toxic local waste sites, most airplane crashes, stampedes and panic flights in buildings, etc.). mega-disasters and global crises will be rare in a numerical and relative sense, although they may generate much mass media attention. for example, the terrorist attacks in european cities (madrid in ; london in ; paris in ; brussels, nice, munich berlin in ; stockholm and manchester in ) were certainly major crises and symbolically very important, but numerically there are far more local train wrecks and car collisions everyday in many countries in the world. the more localized crises and disasters will continue to be the most numerous, despite the rise of transboundary crises and disasters. what are some of the implications for planning and managing that result from taking the perspective we have suggested about crises and disasters? if our descriptions and analyses of such happenings are valid, there would seem to be the need for new kinds of planning and preparation for the management of future crises and disasters (ansell et al., ) . non-traditional disasters and crises require some non-conventional processes and social arrangements. they demand innovative thinking "outside of the box" (boin & lagadec, ; lagadec, ) . this does not mean that everything has to be new. as said earlier, all disasters and crises share certain common dimensions or elements. for example, if early warning is possible at all, research has consistently shown that acceptable warnings have to come from a legitimately recognized source, have to be consistent, and have to indicate that the threat or risk is fairly immediate. these principles certainly pertain to the management of transboundary disruptions. actually, if traditional risks and hazards and their occasional manifestations were all we needed to be worried about, we would be in rather good shape. as already said several times, few threats actually manifest themselves in disasters. for example, in the , plus tornadoes appearing in the united states between and , there were casualties in only of them, and of these occasions accounted for almost half of the fatalities (noji, ) . similarly, it was noted in that while about . million people had been killed in earthquakes since , over % of them had died in only occurrences (jones, noji, smith, & wagner, , p. ) . we can say that risks and hazards and their relatively rare manifestations in crises and disasters are being coped with much better than they ever were even just a half-century ago. for example, there has been a remarkable reduction in certain societies of fatalities and even property destruction in some natural disaster occasions associated with hurricanes, floods and earthquakes (see scanlon, for data on north america). in the conflict area, the outcomes have been much more uneven, but even here, for example, the recurrence of world wars seems very unlikely. but transboundary crises and disasters require some type of transboundary cooperation. for example, let us assume that a health risk is involved. if international cooperation is needed, who talks with whom about what? at what time is action initiated? who takes the lead in organizing a response? what legal issues are involved (e.g., if health is the issue, can health authorities close airports?)? there might be many experts and much technical information around; if so, and they are not consistent, whose voice and ideas should be followed? what should be given priority? how could a forced quarantine be enforced? what of ethical issues? who should get limited vaccines? what should the mass media be told and by who and when? at a more general level of planning and managing, we can briefly indicate, almost in outline form, a half dozen principles that ought to be taken into account by disaster planners and crisis managers. first, a clear connection should be made between local planning and transboundary managing processes. there usually is a low correlation between planning and managing, even for traditional crises and disasters. but in newer kinds of disasters and crises, there are likely to be far more contingencies. planning processes need to be rethought and enhanced to help policymakers work across boundaries. second, the appearance of new emergent social phenomena (including groups and behaviors) needs to be taken into account. there are always new or emergent groups at times of major disasters and crises, but in transboundary events they appear at a much higher rate. networks and network links have to be particularly taken into account. third, there is the need to be imaginative and creative. the response to hurricane katrina suggests how hard it can be to meet transboundary challenges. but improvisation can go a long way. a good example is found in the immediate aftermath of / in new york. in spite the total loss of the new york city office of emergency management and its eoc facility, a completely new eoc was established elsewhere and started to operate very effectively within h after the attack. there had been no planning for such an event, yet around , persons were evacuated by water transportation from lower manhattan (kendra & wachtendorf, ; kendra, wachtendorf, & quarantelli, ) . fourth, exercises and simulations of disasters and crises must take into account transboundary contingencies. most such training and educational efforts along such lines are designed to be like scripts for plays. that is a very poor model to use. realistic contingencies, unknown to most of the players in the scenarios, force the thinking through of unconventional options. even more important, policymakers need to be explicitly trained in the management of transboundary crises and disasters. fifth, planning should be with citizens and their social groups, and not for them. there is no such thing as the "public" in the sense of some homogenous entity (blumer, ) . there are only individual citizens and the groups of which they are members. the perspective from the bottom up is crucial to getting things done. this has nothing to do with democratic ideologies; it has instead to do with getting effective and efficient planning and managing of disasters and crises. related to this is that openness with information rather than secrecy is mandatory. this runs against the norms of most bureaucracies and other organizations. the more information the mass media and citizens have, the better they will be able to react and respond. however, all this is easier said than done. finally, there is a need to start thinking of local communities in ways different than they have been traditionally viewed. up to now, communities have been seen as occupying some geographical space and existing in some chronological time. instead, we should visualize the kinds of communities that exist today are in cyberspace. these newer communities must be thought of as existing in social space and social time. viewed this way, the newer kinds of communities can be seen as very important in planning for and managing disasters and crises that cut across national boundaries. to think this way requires a moving away from the traditional view of communities in the past. this will not be easy given that the traditional community focus is strongly entrenched in most places around the world (see united nations, ) . but "virtual reality communities" will be the social realities in the future. assuming that what we have written has some validity, what new research should be undertaken in the future on the topic of future disasters and crises? in previous pages, we suggested some future studies on specific topics that would be worthwhile doing. however, in this section we want to outline research of a more general nature. for one, practically everything we discussed ought to be looked at in different cultures and societies. as mentioned earlier, there is a bias in our perspective that reflects our greater familiarity with and awareness of examples from the west (and even more narrowly western europe, the united states and canada). in particular, there is a need to undertake research in developing rather than only developed countries. and that includes at least some of these studies being undertaken by researchers and scholars from the very social systems that are being studied. the different cultural perspectives that would be brought to bear might be very enlightening, and enable us to see things that presently we do not see, being somewhat a prisoner of our own culture. second, here and there in this chapter, we have suggested that it is important to study the conditions that generate disasters and crises. but there has to be at least some understanding of the nature of x before there can be a serious turn to ascertaining the conditions that generate x. we have taken this first step in this chapter. future work should focus more on the generating conditions. a general model would involve the following ideas. the first is to look at social systems (societal, community and/or organizational ones), and to analyze how they have become more complex and tightly coupled. the last statement would be treated as a working hypothesis. if that turns out to be true, it could then be hypothesized that systems can break down in more ways than ever before. a secondary research thrust would be to see if systems also have developed ways to deal with or cope with threatening breakdowns. as such, it might be argued that what ensues is an uneven balance between resiliency and vulnerability. in studying contemporary trends, particular attention might be given to demographic ones. it would be difficult to find any country today where the population composition is not changing in some way. the increasing population density in high risk areas seems particularly important. another value in doing research on this topic is that much demographic data are of a quantitative nature. we mentioned financial and economic collapses cutting across different systems. how can financial collapse conceivably be thought of as comparable in any way to natural disasters and crises involving conflict? one simple answer is that for nearly a hundred years, one subfield of sociology has categorized, for example, panic flight in theater fires and financial panics as generic subtypes within the field of collective behavior (blumer, ; smelser, ) . both happenings involve new, emergent behaviors of a non-traditional nature. in this respect, scholars long ago put both types of behavior into the same category. although disaster and crisis researchers have not looked at financial collapses, maybe it is time that they did so. these kinds of happenings seem to occur very quickly, are ambiguous as to their consequences, cut across political and sector boundaries, involve a great deal of emergent behavior and cannot be handled at the community level. in short, what has to be looked for are genotypic characteristics not phenotypic ones (perry, ) . if whales, human beings, and bats can all be usefully categorized as mammals for scientific research purposes, maybe students of disasters should also pay less attention to phenotypic features. if so, should other disruptive phenomena like aids also be approached as disasters? our overall point, is that new research along the lines indicated might lead researchers to seeing phenomena in ways different than they had previously seen. finally, we have said little at all about the research methodologies that might be necessary to study transboundary ruptures. up to now, disaster and crisis researchers have argued that the methods they use in their research are indistinguishable from those used throughout the social sciences. the methods are simply applied under circumstances that are relatively unique (stallings, ) . in general, we agree with that position. but two questions can be raised. first, if social scientists venture into such areas as genetic engineering, cyberspace, robotics and complex infectious diseases, do they need to have knowledge of these phenomena to a degree that they presently do not have? this suggests the need for actual interdisciplinary research. social scientists ought to expand their knowledge base before venturing to study certain disasters and crises, especially the newer ones. there is something here that needs attention. in the sociology of science there have already been studies of how researchers from rather different disciplines studying one research question, interact with one another and what problems they have. researchers in the disaster and crisis area should look at these studies. our view is that the area of disasters and crises is changing. this might seem to be a very pessimistic outlook. that is not the case. there is reason to think, as we tried to document earlier, that human societies in the future will be able to cope with whatever new risks and hazards come into being. to be sure, given hazards and risks, there are bound to be disasters and crises. a risk free society has never existed and will never exist. but while this general principle is undoubtedly true, it is not so with reference to any particular or specific case. in fact, the great majority of potential 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authors: martin, susan f. title: forced migration and refugee policy date: - - journal: demography of refugee and forced migration doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: yvx gyp this chapter focuses on international, regional and national legal norms, policies, organizational roles and relations and good practices that are applicable to a broad range of humanitarian crises that have migration consequences. these crises and the resulting displacement differ by their causes, intensity, geography, phases and affected populations. the chapter examines movements stemming directly and indirectly from: persecution, armed conflict, extreme natural hazards that cause extensive destruction of lives and infrastructure; slower onset environmental degradation, such as drought and desertification, which undermine livelihoods; manmade environmental disasters, such as nuclear accidents, which destroy habitat and livelihoods; communal violence, civil strife and political instability; and global pandemics that cause high levels of mortality and morbidity. demographic trends are themselves drivers of displacement in conjunction with other factors. this can play out in two ways—demography as a macro-level factor and demographic composition as a micro-level driver of movement. the chapter compares the paucity of legal, policy and institutional frameworks for addressing crisis-related movements with the more abundant frameworks for addressing the consequences of refugee movements. the chapter discusses the policy implications of the findings, positing that state-led initiatives such as the nansen and migrants in countries in crisis initiatives are useful mechanisms to fill protection gaps in the absence of political will to adopt and implement more binding legal frameworks. it also argues that, in the context of slow onset climate change, in particular, there is a need for better understanding of how population density, distribution and growth as well as household composition affect vulnerability and resilience to the drivers of displacement. since , the international refugee regime has faced dozens of both traditional and non-traditional challenges in identifying and implementing policies for the protection of refugees and displaced persons. the massive displacement in and from syria has garnished the most attention but large scale movements in the context of conflicts in south sudan, central african republic, ukraine and elsewhere merit consideration as well. earlier in the decade, the famine and long-term conflict in somalia sent hundreds of thousands across the border into kenya and ethiopia while the crisis in libya and political instability throughout north africa caused more than one million to flee across international borders, some seeking asylum while others (mostly contract workers) tried to get to their own home countries as violence erupted in their destination countries. typhoon haiyan in the philippines displaced millions in , leaving many in a situation of protracted upheaval. migration resulting from these natural and man-made events may correspond to current international, regional and national frameworks that are designed to protect and assist refugees-that is, persons who flee across an international boundary because of a well-founded fear of persecution-but often, these movements fall outside of the more traditional legal norms and policies. yet, they have many characteristics in common with refugee movements. for example, they often take place in the context of political instability, countries of origin may not have the capacity or political will to protect their citizens from harm, an international response may be needed because of the scale of the migration, and the need for humanitarian assistance will likely overwhelm local capacities. s.f. martin (*) school of foreign service, georgetown university, washington, th and o streets, n.w, washington, dc , usa e-mail: susan. martin.isim@georgetown.edu this chapter focuses on international, regional and national legal norms, policies, organizational roles and relations and good practices that are applicable to the broader range of humanitarian crises that have migration consequences. the chapter examines movements stemming directly and indirectly from: persecution, armed conflict, extreme natural hazards that cause extensive destruction of lives and infrastructure; slower onset environmental degradation, such as drought and desertification, which undermine livelihoods; manmade environmental disasters, such as nuclear accidents, which destroy habitat and livelihoods; communal violence, civil strife and political instability; and global pandemics that cause high levels of mortality and morbidity. these crises lead to many different forms of displacement, including internal and cross border movements of nationals, evacuation of migrant workers, sea-borne departures that often involve unseaworthy vessels, and trafficking of persons. while the majority of those displaced from humanitarian crises move internally, a significant portion migrates cross borders to other countries. the chapter will compare the paucity of legal, policy and institutional frameworks for addressing these other crises with the more abundant frameworks for addressing the consequences of refugee movements. part introduces the concepts of the chapter, defining the types of humanitarian crises that have migration consequences. it will have subsections discussing briefly the range of crises referenced above, describing the types of forced migration that occur as a result of each category of crisis. part focuses on the legal frameworks and policies available at the international, regional and national levels for addressing the migration consequences of these crises. part will discuss institutional arrangements for addressing the types of migration under review. part will present the conclusions of the chapter and discuss the policy implications of the findings. it also discusses the important role that demography can play in helping to improve responses to forced migration in the context of humanitarian crises. this section presents a typology for analyzing the nature of forced migration. the migration consequences-and the resulting policy frameworks-will differ along five principal dimensions: the precipitating drivers or causes of forced migration, the intensity of these drivers, the geography of the displacement, the phase of displacement, and the affected populations ( fig. . ) . first, forced migration-producing events differ by their causes. some are primarily generated by natural causes whereas others are human made. in most cases, however, a governance failure is at the heart of the crisis whether the trigger is natural or human. among examples of the drivers of displacement are: • persecution, torture and other serious human rights violations. the precipitator of forced migration that, as we will see, fits best into current legal and policy norms involves persecution of individuals or groups on the basis of such factors as race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group (often used to address gender), and political opinion. persecution can affect individuals or it can affect groups of people as defined by what are often referred to as immutable characteristics shared by large numbers of people. it often occurs in contexts in which there are no safeguards to protect racial, ethnic, religious, and other minorities who may be targeted by other groups. persecution can involve serious physical or psychological harm (e.g., rape or torture), deprivation of one's liberty (e.g., imprisonment), forced removal or ethnic cleansing, severe economic deprivation, and other mechanisms that result in serious harm to the individual. • armed conflict. one of the principal drivers of forced migration is armed conflict. although most displacement today occurs in the context of internal armed conflict, significant levels of forced migration accompany international armed conflict as well. displacement may be a form of collateral damage as civilian populations get out of harm's way but in many conflicts forcing the relocation of civilians is an overt aim of one or another of the warring parties. • political instability and violence. the recent events in north africa and the middle east fit into this category, with millions fleeing violence perpetrated by the islamic state (isis) and other terrorist and insurgent groups. violence following contested elections in kenya ( ) , zimbabwe ( ) and cote d'ivoire ( ) is another example of political instability that has generated violence that has resulted in large-scale displacement. communal violence that does not rise to the situation of armed conflict, but nevertheless displaced large numbers, has occurred in and from the karamoja region of uganda, bangladesh, ethiopia and elsewhere. the violence can be between clans, ethnic groups, economic fig. . typology of forced migration competitors, religious groups or pastoralists claiming the same land. violence can also be the product of drug cartels and gangs that fight each other or government authorities. • natural hazards. recent examples of crises resulting from extreme natural hazards that have had migration impacts include hurricanes/cyclones (e.g., hurricanes mitch and stan in central america and cyclone nargis in burma/ myanmar), tsunamis (e.g., indonesia, sri lanka and somalia in and japan in ), flooding (e.g., pakistan in ), earthquakes (e.g., haiti in ); and prolonged droughts (somalia in ). generally, the hazard itself does not cause the crisis; a lack of national and local governance, lack of emergency preparedness, lack of adequate building codes, high levels of poverty and similar weaknesses in local and national capacity lead to crisis conditions. experiences with mass displacement after hurricane katrina show that even very wealthy countries are not immune to such disasters, but stable, more economically advanced countries generally have greater capacity to assist their citizens. the differences in deaths and displacement from earthquakes in haiti and chile in are indicative. although the seismic level of the chilean earthquake was much greater than that in haiti, the level of destruction was much greater in haiti, which is one of the poorest countries in the world and suffered from decades of political instability. the earthquake in mexico is another case in point. an albeit more intense earthquake in led to tens of thousands of deaths, but the recent experience demonstrated that new building codes, emergency preparations and timely response could reduce casualties to a handful. • man-made environmental crises. man-made crises include nuclear/chemical/ biological accidents and attacks, accidental or deliberate setting of fires, and similar situations that make large areas uninhabitable and cause displacement. the accident at the chernobyl nuclear plant in , for example, resulted in the evacuation of more than , people within days. the earthquake and tsunami in japan led to further crisis when nuclear power plants lost their capacity to cool reactors, forcing the evacuation of thousands. this classification system, though useful in understanding the causes of crises with migration impacts, is not composed of pure types because there are often overlaps among the factors that create disasters. for example, an acute natural hazard and political instability may intersect to drive people from their homes. in fact, as stated above, an absence of good governance is almost always one of the factors that is present when forced displacement occurs. demographic trends, while not usually directly linked to displacement, also intersect with each of these causes to increase or decrease a population's vulnerability or resilience. the demographic composition of the affected population also helps determine whether specific households or individuals will need to migrate. these may differ, however, depending on the causation. for example, adolescent and young men may be at particular risk of forced recruitment in conflict situations, necessitating flight if they do not wish to participate in the fighting. on the other hand, the elderly and young children may be at higher risk of starvation in the case of protracted drought, as discussed below. a second dimension of the typology is the intensity of the driving factors. the division is broadly between acute crises and slow-onset emergencies. the former often lead to emergency displacements that are readily defined as "forced migration" because conditions in home countries or communities are seen as the primary reasons that people leave. by contrast, the displacement generated by slow-onset situations is often seen as voluntary and often anticipatory migration and may have elements of labor migration. slower-onset crises arise in a number of different contexts. prolonged drought is a principal cause of displacement for millions who are reliant on subsistence agriculture and pastoralist activities. recurrent droughts undermine livelihoods when crops fail and livestock are sold or die because of inadequate rain and depletion of other water sources. when markets do not function in a manner that allows a redistribution of food to drought-affected populations, migration becomes one of the principal ways to cope with losses caused by the environmental change. since many of the affected populations resemble others who migrate to obtain better economic opportunities, it may be difficult to distinguish those whose loss of livelihood is environmentally-related. in worse case examples, when (for example) drought combines with conflict or other political factors to preclude food distribution in communities of origin, famine may be in the offing. when affected populations have exhausted all of their other coping capacities, they may be forced to migrate or suffer starvation. often, children, the elderly and those with pre-existing illnesses are among the first to succumb to famine in the absence of alternatives. they are also the least likely to be able to migrate without assistance. the third dimension is geography-where and how the displacement takes place. in almost all of the situations that are discussed above, most migration is internal or into neighboring countries that share a contiguous border. a smaller proportion of the movements are to countries outside of the immediate region of the crisis. currently, those who cross international borders are designated as 'refugees ' or 'international migrants' whereas those who remain within their national borders are 'internally displaced persons' or 'internal migrants. ' how migrants leave their own countries, pass through transit countries, and enter destination countries also affect designations. some migrants may have received permission to enter another country while others travel without documentation or otherwise on an "irregular" basis. sea-borne migrants, particularly those in small, unseaworthy boats, face dangers not only from variability in the weather but also from pirates and others who prey on them. migrants using smugglers may be routed through multiple countries before reaching their final destination. those crossing difficult land terrains may find themselves endangered as they attempt irregular entry across deserts and mountains. while these irregular means of transit may be common when there is political instability or natural disasters, pandemics present another geographic challenge. airports and seaports often become the focal point for action, especially when governments establish policies to quarantine those who may be carrying the disease. the fourth dimension relates to timing. the migration consequences of crises take different forms and must be addressed through different mechanisms depending on the phase of displacement or movement and its duration. some of the causes discussed above produce protracted crises whereas others lead to more temporary dislocations. for example, some cases of political instability are quickly resolved and new governments put in place but others drag on for years with no resolution in sight. similarly, reconstruction after some extreme natural hazards moves ahead quickly and people are able to return to their homes with little loss of livelihoods, but in other cases, return is delayed or impossible because governments have too little capacity to implement reconstruction programs, there is such great likelihood of recurrence of the same type of natural hazard, and/or the home community has been damaged beyond repair. in extreme cases, an entire country may become uninhabitable (for example, montserrat after the volcano and potentially, small island states as a result of climate change). in these cases, return may be impossible. these phases may play out differently for different populations affected by the same triggering event depending on their personal or household circumstances. they are also not necessarily linear; for example, those who return may find themselves engulfed in new crises and experience new displacements. needs and frameworks differ depending on the stage of the crisis. the first stage is pre-crisis, when actions to prevent, mitigate and help individuals adapt to the causes that may force them to move take place. of particular importance is disaster risk reduction, which involves "systematic efforts to analyse and manage the causal factors of disasters, including through reduced exposure to hazards, lessened vulnerability of people and property, wise management of land and the environment, and improved preparedness for adverse events" (unisdr ). disaster risk reduction does not prevent the extreme natural hazard from occurring but it helps communities to cope with their damaging effects. in some worse case examples, the only option to reduce the risk of disaster may be relocation from fragile areas. identifying and addressing demographic and socio-economic vulnerabilities is essential since the "characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset … make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard" (unisdr ). meeting the sustainable development goals would have positive impact in enhancing the ability of people to cope with crises in situ. more broadly, economic, social and human development-with the aims of reducing poverty, increasing access to livelihoods, education and literacy, improving health outcomes, maintaining sustainable environments, etc.-will reduce long-term emigration pressures while giving people increased human security. appropriate interventions will depend on the demographics of the affected populations. equally important, given the highly political nature of many of these emergencies, are efforts to improve governance in countries that are prone to crises. effective governance not only helps mitigate the risks associated with natural and human made hazards (through such preventive actions as earthquake-resistant building codes or public health measures to lessen pandemic risks) but it also helps reduce tensions that can escalate into conflict. early warning mechanisms can help trigger conflict resolution and mediation processes to reduce the potential for communal or political violence. the second stage is the migration itself, with rights and needs differing depending on the form and stage of migration as well as the demographic and socioeconomic composition of those who move. those who have recently migrated will generally have greatest need for such basics as housing, employment, orientation to the social, cultural and political norms of the destination, and some knowledge of the host country's language. over time, those who remain in the destination may have need for assistance to integrate more fully into the host community-for example, skills training to move up the economic ladder, language training and civics education if required for citizenship, services for their children, etc. those who return to their home countries or communities may have needs very similar to what they had at the early stages of their movement. the decision as to whether return is possible involves a range of variables, including the extent, for example, to which the causes-either direct or through other channels-are likely to persist. policies in the receiving communities and countries, depending on whether the migration is internal or international, will also affect the likelihood for return or settlement in the new location. in addition to immigration policies, the policies affecting return and settlement include land use and property rights, social welfare, housing, employment and other frameworks that determine whether individuals, households and communities are able to find decent living conditions and pursue adequate livelihoods (brookings institution ) . the final stage of the life cycle involves (re)integration into the home community or new location. the issues outlined above regarding the potential for solutions will be key determinants of integration, influencing the access of displaced populations to housing, livelihoods, safety and security. these needs will vary depending on the demographic and socio-economic composition of the groups returning home or settling in new locations. integration is also affected by plans and programs to mitigate future dislocations from the hazards that caused the movements, coming full circle on the life cycle to a focus on prevention, adaptation and risk reduction. the fifth dimension of this typology refers to the affected populations. responses may differ in terms of scale-that is, how many people are affected by the crisis. they also differ by the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the affected populations. generally, those most vulnerable to the harms associated with crises of the type described are already in difficult economic situations, with few financial resources to get them through the crisis. unaccompanied and separated children, women at risk of gender and sexual based violence, adolescents at risk of forced recruitment into gangs and insurgencies, ill and disabled persons, the elderly and other vulnerable groups may require specific approaches to ensure their safety. trafficking in persons is often associated with crises, with criminal elements preying on the desperation of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods. this section focuses on laws and policies for addressing the migration consequences of the types of crises discussed previously. the section focuses on frameworks governing migration across borders, including general human rights instruments as well as migration-specific instruments. it also discusses legal frameworks for protection and assistance of internally displaced persons as they provide useful guidance for issues related to protection and assistance for those who move across international borders (fig. . ). states possess broad authority to regulate the movement of foreign nationals across their borders. although these authorities are not absolute, states exercise their sovereign powers to determine who will be admitted and for what period. the authority of states is limited by certain rights accorded foreign nationals in international law. the principal constraints on state authority are the non-refoulement provisions of the un convention relating to the status of refugees and its protocol and the convention against torture. some migrants in the scenarios described above may be covered under these instruments. the refugee convention defines refugees as persons who were unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of their home countries because of a "well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group." states have no obligation to admit refugees, but they do have an obligation not to refoule (return) a refugee to "frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." in each of the crises discussed above, a subset of migrants may meet the refugee definition although the majority are unlikely to be able to demonstrate that they fear persecution on account of a protected characteristic (that is, race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion), rather than a more generalized harm. the refoulement provision of the convention against torture applies to persons who face "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acqui-escence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." particularly in the situations in which political instability and violence precipitate displacement, a subset of migrants may well meet this definition even if the majority does not have a well founded reason to fear torture upon return. in africa, the scope of coverage for refugees is greater because the oau (now au) refugee convention includes those who, "owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality (emphasis added), is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality." the cartagena declaration (a non-binding agreement) offers a similar expanded definition of refugees in latin america: "persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order." to the extent that a crisis involves generalized violence, massive violations of human rights or seriously disturbs public order, persons forced to leave their homes because of the crises described above may be covered under the au and cartagena instruments, while they would not be under the convention. the new au convention on internally displaced persons goes even further in specifying that those displaced by natural and human made disasters are covered. those who are forced to migrate, but who are not considered to be refugees or potential torture victims, have certain basic rights even if they are not covered under these specific instruments. the universal declaration of human rights, the international covenant on civil and political rights and the international covenant on economic and social rights, for example, define certain rights that accrue to all persons, not just citizens. importantly, the universal declaration article , which is enshrined in article of the international covenant on civil and political rights, declares that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including one's own, and to return to one's own country." the universal declaration article states that "everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." in neither situation, however, is there a corresponding obligation on the part of states to admit those who exercise their right to leave or to seek asylum. other applicable human rights conventions include the international covenant on social, economic and cultural rights, the convention on the rights of the child, the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. these instruments and relevant articles of the geneva conventions on armed conflict form the basis for the guiding principles on internal displacement. although not legally binding, the guiding principles provide a critical framework for defining and promoting idp protection. under the guiding principles, idps are described as: persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized stated border. the guiding principles identify the rights and guarantees relevant to the protection of idps in all phases of displacement. they provide protection against arbitrary displacement, offer a basis for protection and assistance during displacement, and set forth guarantees for safe return, resettlement and reintegration. they also establish the right of idps to request and receive protection from national authorities, and the duty of these authorities to provide protection. african leaders adopted the au convention for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons (idps) in africa at a summit in . it went into force in . forced migrants who use irregular means of exit or entry may be covered under the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children and the protocol against the smuggling of migrants by land, sea and air, both of which supplement the united nations convention against transnational organized crime and went into force in december and january , respectively. within a few years of their adoption, the trafficking and smuggling protocols have garnered considerable support, with more than signatories and and parties, respectively. these instruments apply respectively to "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation" and "the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a state party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident." trafficking requires coercion or deception as well as exploitation of the labour of the trafficked person, whereas smuggling is usually a voluntary agreement between the migrant and the smuggler in which the migrant gains irregular entry and the smuggler gains a financial benefit. under certain conditions-for example, when the smuggled migrants is placed in bondage to pay off his or her smuggling fees-smuggling may turn into trafficking. those affected by crises are often more vulnerable to exploitation by both smugglers and traffickers, particularly if they are desperate to leave dangerous places with few options to support themselves and their families. the un convention on the law of the sea has provisions applicable to persons in distress at sea, which can include sea-borne migrants. under the convention, "state shall require the master of a ship flying its flag, in so far as he can do so without serious danger to the ship, the crew or the passengers: (a) to render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost; (b) to proceed with all possible speed to the rescue of persons in distress, if informed of their need of assistance, in so far as such action may reasonably be expected of him; (c) after a collision, to render assistance to the other ship, its crew and its passengers and, where possible, to inform the other ship of the name of his own ship, its port of registry and the nearest port at which it will call." the convention also has provisions that outlaw piracy, defined as "any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed: (i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft; (ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state." the rights of those displaced by natural hazards have not been spelled out in international or regional law as has been the case with those affected by political events. nevertheless, un guidance provided to state authorities regarding displacement due to natural disasters, while not binding international law, is relevant to the issues covered in this chapter. conversely, those who are internally displaced by natural disasters (who have freedom of movement within their borders) should not be required to return to areas in which their safety may be compromised: "persons affected by the natural disaster should not, under any circumstances, be forced to return to or resettle in any place where their life, safety, liberty and/or health would be at further risk" (brookings-bern project ) . also relevant are the provisions of the sendai framework for disaster risk reduction: - that encourages greater cooperation in reducing the risks associated with disasters. the disaster risk reduction (drr) strategies adopted in the sendai framework do not provide great specificity with regard to displacement from disasters aside from recommending that development actors include displaced persons in efforts to "promote the incorporation of disaster risk management into post-disaster recovery and rehabilitation processes, facilitate the link between relief, rehabilitation and development, use opportunities during the recovery phase to develop capacities that reduce disaster risk in the short, medium and long term." (unisdr ) . nevertheless, the overall concept of disaster risk reduction would significantly lessen displacement by providing the tools with which people could remain in situ or return quickly when acute natural hazards strike. progress was made in and in filling some of the protection gaps. in , the conference of the parties (cop) of the un framework convention on climate change (unfccc) authorized establishment of a task force with its processes to identify ways to mitigate and respond to displacement. the state-led nansen initiative on cross-border disaster displacement issued an agenda for protection that spells out actions that governments can take today to provide humanitarian relief to persons requiring either admission or non-return in these contexts. its successor, the platform for disaster displacement, funded by the german government, is helping willing states adopt some of the proposed policies and programs. another state-led process, the migrants in countries in crisis (micic) initiative adopted principles, guidelines and effective practices to respond to the needs of non-nationals who are displaced by natural disasters and conflict. the un high level meeting on large-scale movements of refugees and migrants acknowledged the nansen and micic initiatives, recommending them as models for filling other gaps in protection for vulnerable migrants. taken together, however, the provisions in international law do not constitute a comprehensive framework for addressing forced migration that does not fit within the refugee context. they are particularly weak in reference to those who cross international borders during crises. rather, each displacement tends to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. whether there should be a stronger international legal framework to address non-refugee forced migration is a point that would certainly generate debate. there are a number of reasons that such a framework would be difficult to achieve. trying to identify legal standards for a broad range of potential drivers of forced migration which may have little in common with one another would present challenges, particularly in setting out appropriate criteria for determining who among forced migrants would merit specific forms of protection. see conclusions for further discussion of these issues. the immigration policies of most destination countries are not conducive to receiving large numbers of forced migrants, unless they enter through already existing admission categories or meet refugee criteria. typically, in non-crisis situations, destination countries admit persons to fill job openings or to reunify with family members. employment-based admissions are usually based upon the labour market needs of the receiving country, not the situation of the home country. family admissions are usually restricted to persons with immediate relatives (spouses, children, parents and, sometimes, siblings) in the destination country. at the same time, most overtly humanitarian admissions are generally limited to refugees and asylum seekers. many, if not most forced migrants, however, will be unlikely to meet the legal definition of a refugee since their lives are endangered for reasons that do not involve persecution on the basis of a protected characteristic such as race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. despite these limitations, there are both legislative and ad hoc policies that do permit governments to respond when there are crises that provoke migration. they fall into three categories: ( ) policies that permit migrants already on the territory of the destination country to remain for at least a temporary period; ( ) policies to respond to new movements of people leaving either directly or indirectly as a result of the crisis; and ( ) evacuation of citizens and selected others from crisis affected countries. some countries and the european union have established special policies that permit individuals whose countries have experienced natural disasters, conflicts, pandemics or other severe upheavals to remain at least temporarily without fear of deportation. the united states, for example, enacted legislation in to provide temporary protected status to persons "in the united states who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions." environmental disaster may include "an earthquake, flood, drought, epidemic, or other environmental disaster in the state resulting in a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions in the area affected." in the case of environmental disasters, as compared to conflict, the country of origin must request designation of temporary protected status ("tps") for its nationals. those granted tps are eligible to work in the united states. they are not considered to be residing under color of law, however, for purposes of receiving social benefits and they are not able to bring family members into the country to join them. importantly, tps only applies to persons already in the united states at the time of the designation. it is not meant to be a mechanism to respond to an unfolding crisis in which people seek admission from outside of the country. it also only pertains to situations that are temporary in nature. if an environmental disaster has permanent consequences, for example, a designation of temporary protected status is not available, even for those presently in the united states, or it may be lifted. when the volcano erupted in montserrat in , tps was granted to its citizens and was extended six times. in , however, it was ended. us citizenship and immigration services in the department of homeland security explained "that the termination of the tps designation of montserrat is warranted because the volcanic activity caus-ing the environmental disaster in montserrat is not likely to cease in the foreseeable future. therefore, it no longer constitutes a temporary disruption of living conditions that temporarily prevents montserrat from adequately handling the return of its nationals. similarly, the conditions are no longer "extraordinary and temporary" as required by section (b)( )(c) of the act." another significant factor is that the designation is discretionary, to be made by the secretary of homeland security in consultation with the secretary of state. countries or parts of countries are designated, allowing nationals only of those countries (or affected regions within them) to apply. a further issue is the difficulty of ending the status. although some early proponents of tps argued that it was temporary in the sense that it would allow time to determine whether those granted the status could return or should be granted legal permanent residence, the legislation makes it difficult for them to remain permanently with full rights of immigrants. if individuals granted tps otherwise meet the criteria for legal admissions as an immigrant, they are eligible to obtain permanent residence without leaving the united states. if it were determined, however, that as a group they cannot return home, special legislation would be needed to allow them to remain permanently. the legislation specifies that such legislation would require a super-majority (threefifths) of senators for passage. tps has proven to be a flexible mechanism for responding to a range of crises, from conflict (somalia, sudan, south sudan, syria and yemen) to acute natural disasters (el salvador, haiti honduras, nepal and nicaragua) to pandemics (guinea, liberia and sierra leone). at the same time, lifting temporary protected status has proven to be very difficult as well. tps was originally triggered by the earthquakes in el salvador ( ) and hurricane mitch ( ) in honduras and nicaragua, meaning that some of the beneficiaries have been in 'temporary' status for almost years. canada may declare a temporary suspension of removals "when a country's general conditions (for example, war or a natural disaster) put the safety of the general population at risk." according to regulation, "the guiding principle of generalized risk is that the impact of the catastrophic event is so pervasive and widespread that it would be inconceivable to conduct general returns to that country until some degree of safety is restored. the suspension order is lifted when country conditions improve and the public is no longer in danger." for example, the suspension of removal was lifted in for nationals of burundi, rwanda and liberia. recognizing that some had been in canada for an extended period, these nationals were given the opportunity to apply for humanitarian and compassionate consideration for permanent residence in canada. such considerations as the best interests of any child directly involved, establishment in canada, integration into canadian society, and other factors put forward by the applicant are taken into account in determining if an applicant will be permitted to remain in canada. canada also undertakes a pre-removal risk assessment in determining if persons denied asylum would be at risk of other serious harm if removed to their country of origin. a number of other countries provide exceptions to removal on a group or case by case basis for persons whose countries of origin have experienced significant disruption because of natural disasters, conflict and violence. after the tsunami, for example, switzerland, the united kingdom and malaysia suspended deportations of migrants from such countries as sri lanka, india, somalia, maldives, seychelles, indonesia and thailand. a number of governments announced similar plans after the earthquake in haiti (martin ) . germany uses the "duldung," a toleration permit when emergent conditions preclude immediate return (schönwälder and vogel ) . these actions are generally ad hoc, allowing governments to respond differentially to crises. the decisions to trigger such responses is based on a combination of factors, including the intensity of the crisis, geographic proximity, the assessment of whether stays of removal will become a magnet for new arrivals, the presence of a strong constituency group within the destination country that calls for stays of removal and other similar factors. return of migrants granted temporary stays of removal remains problematic in many crises. protracted crises are common, particularly in countries without the fiscal resources and governance structures necessary to reintegrate their citizens after an emergency. moreover, over time, migrants begin to integrate into the new destination country, developing equities and ties that make the decision to return difficult. this is particularly the case when migrants granted temporary stays have children who attend school, learn the host country language and develop friendships and ties with local populations. some efforts have been made to facilitate or assist return when conditions permit. after the dayton peace accord, for example, a number of countries offered aid to bosnians who had been granted temporary protection if they chose or were required to repatriate. for example, denmark and sweden funded bosnians to take 'look and see' visits home to determine if conditions had improved sufficiently to return permanently. these countries and other eu members provided financial assistance to help those who voluntarily returned and provided information services about the right to remain or return. similar programs were used in assisting kosovars to return home. at the european union level, the temporary protection directive dated july establishes temporary protection during "mass influxes." with crises in bosnia and kosovo freshly in mind, the european council meeting in tampere urged swift action in addressing the issue of "temporary protection for displaced persons on the basis of solidarity between member states." the directive itself notes that "cases of mass influx of displaced persons who cannot return to their country of origin have become more substantial in europe in recent years. in these cases, it may be necessary to set up exceptional schemes to offer them immediate temporary protection." the purpose of the directive is twofold: to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection and "to promote a balance of effort between member states in receiving and bearing the consequences of receiving such persons." temporary protection applies to persons who have fled areas of armed conflict or endemic violence and persons at serious risk of, or who have been the victims of, systematic or generalized violations of their human rights. member states may apply temporary protection more broadly to other categories of persons affected by crises. unlike tps in the united states, temporary protection in the eu is envisioned as a mechanism to address mass influxes, not to protect already resident migrants from removal. it can apply to those who spontaneously arrive as well as to those who are evacuated from situations in which they face serious harm. it is seen as a substitute for asylum in cases when "the asylum system will be unable to process this influx without adverse effects for its efficient operation." since its adoption in , temporary protection has not been invoked, at least in part because of different views among member countries concerning what constitutes a mass influx and of concerns about whether it will be practicable to return those granted this status when it expires. on april , , the european commission set out criteria under which it would ask for its use: "the commission would also be ready to consider proposing the use of the mechanism foreseen under the temporary protection directive ( / /ec), if the conditions foreseen in the directive are met. consideration could only be given to taking this step if it is clear that the persons concerned are likely to be in need of international protection, if they cannot be safely returned to their countries-of-origin, and if the numbers of persons arriving who are in need of protection are sufficiently great." however, in the context of the mass movements in from syria, afghanistan, iraq and elsewhere, the eu refrained from triggering a response under this directive and sought, often unsuccessfully, to negotiate responsibility-sharing agreements outside of the framework (akkaya ) . nevertheless, some of the provisions of the directive are worth considering for future policymaking. individuals who would be granted the status are to receive a residence permit for the duration of the grant. member states are to ensure access to suitable accommodations, social benefits and education. those granted temporary protection are eligible to work or be self-employed but states may give priority for employment to eu citizens, citizens of the european economic area and legally resident third country nationals who receive unemployment benefit. there is also access to family reunification as long as the family relationship predated the grant of temporary protection. while the temporary protection directive addresses mass influx situations, asylum law and policies govern individual applications for protection. eu directive allows for subsidiary protection for a person who does not qualify as a refugee but in respect of whom "substantial grounds have been shown for believing that the person concerned, if returned to his or her country of origin … would face a real risk of suffering serious harm." serious harm includes situations in which there is a serious and individual threat to a civilian's life or person by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict. those granted subsidiary protection have a less secure status than those granted convention protection (for example, their residence permit is for one instead of three years). the eu-wide provisions do not explicitly address crises caused by natural or human made hazards but individual countries have adopted legislation that protects some categories. sweden includes within its asylum system persons who are unable to return to their native countries because of an environmental disaster. the decision is made on an individual, not group basis. although many recipients of this status are presumed to be in temporary need of protection, the swedish rules foresee that some persons may be in need of permanent solutions. similarly, in the finnish aliens act, "aliens residing in the country are issued with a residence permit on the basis of a need for protection if […] they cannot return because of an armed conflict or environmental disaster." finnish law also allows use of transit centres for a fixed term, not to exceed three months, if the number of displaced persons entering the country is exceptionally high, to give time to conduct thorough processes for registration. this provision has not yet been invoked. governments often anticipate departures during crises and establish policies to deter or intercept migrants leaving countries of origin or transit countries. a common response has been to impose visa requirements on nationals of countries in crisis. visas help to screen out those who purport to be coming as tourists or business travellers but who intend to stay for longer periods. air and other carriers have the responsibility to check that international travellers have proper documentation before they are permitted to board the plane or ship. in numerous cases, migrants attempt to enter destination countries clandestinely, across land borders and by sea. the united states, australia and countries in the european union have intercepted boats that were headed for their shores during crises. in many cases, the boats are unseaworthy and the interception is justified on humanitarian as well as border control bases. what to do with those who are intercepted, particularly those who are rescued at sea, can be a complicated issue. bringing these individuals to the territory of the states that interdict the migrants can serve as a magnet that encourages still more people to risk dangerous crossings. returning them to dangerous situations in their home country could have equally deleterious humanitarian ramifications. obviously, leaving them on unseaworthy vessels would be inhumane. one option that governments have tried is off-shore protection for those who are intercepted. the united states, for example, used guantanamo naval base in the s to provide temporary protection to haitians and cubans, rather than returning them into unsettled conditions. in the case of haiti, most of those provided temporary safe haven returned home when the elected president of haiti was returned to office. by contrast, most of the cubans were eventually resettled into the united states, but cuba and the united states signed a migration agreement that provided alternative mechanisms for legal immigration from cuba and a commitment from the cuban government to curb boat departures. australia has established off-shore processing centres in nauru and papua new guinea with the aim of curtailing access to asylum in australia. those found to have valid refugee claims would remain in those countries or be resettled elsewhere. the un human rights council, among others, has criticized the policy, especially for the harsh treatment and poor living conditions of asylum seekers in these other countries (millar ) . a further range of policies pertain to people who are endangered in the countries in crisis or in neighbouring countries and who are evacuated to other states for safety. the most common form of evacuation is of citizens who are caught in the middle of a crisis. in recent cases, governments have evacuated their citizens from earthquake, tsunami, cyclone and flood affected areas (e.g., japan, haiti, pakistan and indonesia) or conflict zones (e.g., cote d'ivoire, lebanon, libya, syria and yemen). when governments evacuate their nationals, decisions must be made about accompanying family members who are not citizens of the evacuating country. although many countries will evacuate non-national spouses and minor children of citizens, they will not necessarily feel a similar obligation to parents, siblings and other relatives of citizens. nor do they necessarily evacuate persons such as household servants who may be highly dependent on the citizens for their protection and support. immigration authorities use various ad hoc measures to admit the nonnational family members to their territory. in some cases, migrants are working in such countries and an international effort is made to evacuate them to their home countries, either from the country in crisis or a nearby location that they have reached. the evacuation of thousands of migrant workers from libya and cote d'ivoire and their bordering countries are such examples. while the majority of these migrants were able to return safely to their home countries, a minority were unable or unwilling to return because of concerns about their safety in the country of origin. the evacuations share many similarities with other forced migration situations. migrants evacuated home may face problems of reintegration and lost income. those who are unable to repatriate because of unsafe conditions at home will be in need of relocation to other countries. if they do not meet convention refugee criteria (that is, the unsafe conditions do not involve their own fear of persecution), neighbouring countries may be unwilling to provide asylum and there may be limited opportunities for resettlement in third countries. in rare cases, evacuations of large groups of vulnerable persons have been supported by the international community. the clearest case was the humanitarian evacuation of kosovars in . in order to convince the countries of first asylum to keep their doors open to kosovars, other countries agreed to bring some of them to their countries at least temporarily. with the assistance of the un high commissioner for refugees, more than , kosovars were evacuated to countries. many of the participating countries set up reception facilities for the evacuees. when the fighting ended and serb forces withdrew from kosovo, many of the evacuated returned to their homes. the kosovars were admitted without determining if they individually met the refugee definition, distinguishing this program from refugee resettlement initiatives that have been used to support first asylum in other contexts. there are fewer mechanisms for permanent admission of people during nonrefugee crises. a number of countries accelerate or facilitate processing of visas during crises so that those who otherwise would be admissible for permanent residence are able to enter. canada, for example, gave priority to processing visas for persons directly and significantly affected by the haitian earthquake. it also established a satellite office in the dominican republic and sent additional visa and control officers to the region. the united states, canada, the netherlands, and france put in place special provisions that accelerated the entry of haitian orphans who had been approved for adoption prior to the earthquake. in the context of the syrian refugee crisis, the eu has been considering a humanitarian visa through which asylum seekers could enter a member state and have the application heard in situ (neville and rigon ) . finally, a number of governments have permanently resettled discrete categories of vulnerable persons for humanitarian purposes. australia, for example, introduced the locally engaged employee policy, which enabled the permanent resettlement of iraqis and afghans who had been employed by the australian government in their home countries. the united states instituted similar programs that permitted resettlement without regard to whether the employee met refugee criteria. australia and canada also consider applications for humanitarian visas from other persons who consider themselves to be at risk. in australia's program, the individual must show that they are subject to substantial discrimination. just as the legal frameworks for addressing forced migration in all of its manifestations are weak, so are the institutional roles and responsibilities at the international level. with the exception of the refugee regime, in which clear responsibility is given to the un high commissioner for refugees, there is no existing international regime for managing international movements of people. this is not to say that there is a total absence of governance. there are a plethora of international, regional and national organizations that have some responsibilities related to forced migration. the mandates and effectiveness of these institutions in addressing forced migration varies greatly. at the international and regional levels, there is a lack of clear authority for addressing new forms of displacement that do not fit into existing mandates. the institutional arrangements differ somewhat based on whether the displacement is internal and can be addressed within the territory of the affected country or is cross border and affects other countries. as discussed above, most displacement is internal. to the extent that institutional arrangements within countries affected by crises fail to provide adequate protection and assistance, cross-border movements may increase. institutional arrangements to mitigate crises in situ are thus highly relevant to understanding how forced displacement might be mitigated. at present, the international response to humanitarian crises is based on the cluster approach. the un high commissioner for refugees is the cluster lead for protection (focusing on conflict-induced displacement) as well as for the emergency shelter and camp management clusters. the international organization for migration has responsibility for camp management in the context of natural disasters. the situation is less clear cut with regard to protection of those displaced by natural disasters. unhcr, the office of the high commissioner for human rights (ohchr) and unicef have all been designated as having protection responsibilities in natural disasters (global protection cluster ). in practical terms, iom often takes on this responsibility because of its role in camp management. cluster leads have relatively little authority over other international organizations during these crises. the interagency standing committee (iasc) guidance note on using the cluster approach explains; "the role of sector leads at the country level is to facilitate a process aimed at ensuring well-coordinated and effective humanitarian responses in the sector or area of activity concerned. sector leads themselves are not expected to carry out all the necessary activities within the sector or area of activity concerned. they are required, however, to commit to being the 'provider of last resort' where this is necessary and where access, security and availability of resources make this possible" (iasc ) . the note recognizes that "the 'provider of last resort' concept is critical to the cluster approach, and without it the element of predictability is lost" (iasc ) . for agencies with technical leads (e.g., health, nutrition, water and sanitation), the ability of the lead agency to take on responsibility is straightforward. however, the note is more circumspect regarding the leadership for cross-cutting areas such as protection, early recovery and camp coordination: "the concept of 'provider of last resort' will need to be applied in a differentiated manner. in all cases, however, sector leads are responsible for ensuring that wherever there are significant gaps in the humanitarian response they continue advocacy efforts and explain the constraints to stakeholders" (iasc ) . the cluster approach has had mixed results in filling gaps in the institutional framework for addressing the full range of issues pertaining to those who are internally displaced by the type of drivers discussed above. certainly, the willingness of unhcr to be the 'provider of last resort' in the protection of conflict induced idps is a critical issue. the numbers demonstrate a clear increase in unhcr's involvement with idps. unhcr reported that it helped . million of an estimated . million internally displaced persons in , as compared to only . million out of an estimated million in (unhcr ; internal displacement monitoring centre ). nevertheless, there are continuing concerns about the nature of the response. for example, a brookings institution report concluded: "while humanitarian reform has improved operational short-term response, it has had little effect on either protecting people from new displacement or in finding solutions for those displaced. questions of access and staff security continue to be the major limitations in protecting and assisting idps" (brookings institution ). the report called for reinvigoration of efforts to protect idps. during this period, unhcr also began responding, albeit in an ad hoc way, to forced migration stemming from causes other than persecution or conflict. although unhcr has limited its cluster leadership to conflict-induced internal displacement, it has nevertheless been drawn into providing assistance during several notable natural disasters. in the state of the world's refugees, unhcr explained its involvement in tsunami relief: "the sheer scale of the destruction and the fact that many of affected populations were of concern to the organization prompted the move. responding to requests from the un secretary-general and un country teams, unhcr concentrated on providing shelter and non-food relief. in sri lanka, unhcr's presence in the country prior to the tsunami allowed for a comparatively swift and sustained humanitarian intervention -including efforts focused on the protection of internally displaced persons" (unhcr , ) . unhcr also assisted tsunami victims in somalia and aceh, indonesia, pointing out: "the protection of displaced populations was especially urgent in areas of protracted conflict and internal displacement in aceh, somalia and sri lanka. furthermore, there was concern for some affected populations whose governments declined offers of international aid, such as the dalits (formerly known as untouchables) of india and burmese migrant workers in thailand; it was feared they might be discriminated against and their protection needs compromised" (unhcr , ) . unhcr was also involved in the international response to cyclone nargis in burma and china and haiti's earthquakes, providing shelter and supplies. unhcr is the lead international agency with responsibility for refugees who have crossed international borders. founded in , unhcr was charged from the beginning to find solutions for refugees, generally in the form of voluntary repatriation when conditions permitted, integration into a country of asylum, or resettlement to a third country. because those solutions were often not forthcoming, unhcr's day-to-day activity was generally to provide assistance to those who were unable to return, integrate or resettle. unhcr's responsibility for cross-border displacement has grown since its founding, from a focus on refugees and displaced persons from world war ii and the emerging cold war to a focus on delivering humanitarian aid to refugees in developing countries affected by international and internal conflicts. it continued to advocate for protection and solutions for refugees throughout the world. its role has been limited, however, in addressing the situation of those who migrate internationally because of non-persecution or non-conflict reasons. unhcr has, however, demonstrated increased interest in mixed migration. as stated in its point plan, unhcr recognizes that situations "in which people with different objectives move alongside each other, using the same routes and means of transport or engaging the services of the same smugglers, can raise serious protection concerns." the concept of mixed migration seems to be rooted in the assumption that the mix is between refugees and economic migrants and deals very little with other forced migrants. the point plan does not address situations in which people are migrating for a mix of reasons that include extreme natural hazards, except for one mention of migrants from aceh in malaysia, or political or communal violence, except for one mention of mexican migrants leaving because of domestic or other violence. in effect, it does little to help address situations in which crises precipitate movements that do not fit into the refugee framework but raise serious humanitarian considerations. the potential for mass displacement from climate change is also an issue that occupied the then high commissioner antonio gutteres' attention: "when we consider the different models for the impact of climate change, the picture is very worrying. the need for people to move will keep on growing. one need only look at east africa and the sahel region. all predictions are that desertification will expand steadily. for the population, this means decreasing livelihood prospects and increased migration. all of this is happening in the absence of international capacity and political will to respond" (guterres ) . then assistant high commissioner for protection, erika feller, summarized the dilemma before the executive committee: "new terminology is entering the displacement lexicon with some speed. the talk is now of "ecological refugees", "climate change refugees", the "natural disaster displaced". this is all a serious context for unhcr's efforts to fulfill its mandate for its core beneficiaries…. the mix of global challenges is explosive, and one with which we and our partners, government and non-government, must together strike the right balance" (feller ) . thus far, however, there has been no inclination on the part of the executive committee for unhcr to become involved with those who cross borders because of natural disasters or climate change. instead, following the commemoration of the th anniversary of unhcr, the governments of switzerland and norway established the nansen initiative to generate further discussion. the international organization with the longest and most sustained focus on international migration is the international organization for migration. iom's constitution sets out its role as a service organization operating on behalf of states. its first two purposes and functions pertain to its original role in making arrangements for the transfer of migrants, refugees and displaced persons. iom provides, at the request of and in agreement with the states concerned, migration services such as recruitment, selection, processing, language training, orientation activities, medical examination, placement, activities facilitating reception and integration, advisory services on migration questions, and other assistance as is in accord with the aims of the organization. it also assists in voluntary return migration, including voluntary repatriation. iom's constitution also gives it a role to provide a forum to states as well as international and other organizations for the exchange of views and experiences, and the promotion of co-operation and co-ordination of efforts on international migration issues, including studies on such issues in order to develop practical solutions. in respect to this last function, it has launched a policy dialogue with governments on policy issues. importantly, the organization has expanded significantly in terms of both staff and membership, which includes more than member states and observers. iom has been a focal point for discussion of forced migration since when it co-hosted a series of consultations on the interconnections between the environment and migration, in the context of the united nations conference on environment and development (unced) in rio de janeiro. as discussed above, iom has also taken on lead responsibility for camp management in natural disasters. in the area of pandemics, iom's health program offers travel health assistance to manage conditions of public health concern as individuals move across geographical, health system and epidemiological boundaries. these include pre-embarkation checks and pre-departure medical screenings to assess a migrant's fitness to travel and/or to provide medical clearance. these measures also ensure that migrants are linked to and given appropriate referrals to medical services once they have arrived in their destination countries. migrants who need medical assistance and care during travel are escorted by health professionals to avoid complications during transit. iom works in collaboration with the world health organization (who), whose work is guided by resolution . on the health of migrants, adopted by the world health assembly in (world health organization ). the resolution encourages who to improve understanding and capabilities to address issues related to the health needs of migrants. finally, iom takes the lead role in the evacuation of migrants in countries that fall into crisis, as seen in its role in evacuating migrant workers stranded on the libya-tunisian border, cote d'ivoire, yemen and elsewhere. it played a similar role in evacuating migrants from kuwait and iraq in and lebanon in . as discussed above, in the majority of cases, iom assists the migrants to return to their home countries, but it works with unhcr in the relocation of those unable or unwilling to repatriate because of unsafe conditions in the country of origin. until , iom operated outside of the united nations. in the context of the un high level meeting on refugees and migrants in september , iom joined the un as a related organization (that is, in a capacity similar to that of the world trade organization). as a result, iom will now be more fully integrated into the decision-making on migration issues within the un. operationally, the organization was already a member of un country teams and followed most un security and other protocols. there are a number of other international organizations that have responsibilities regarding migration. among the more significant, the ilo has a specialized office, the international migration program, which "provides advisory services to member states, promotes international standards, provides a tripartite forum for consultations, serves as a global knowledge base, and provides technical assistance and capacity-building to constituents." the un population division in the department of economic and social affairs (desa) is responsible for collecting data on international migration and took the lead within the un secretariat for organizing the high level dialogue on migration and development. the division also hosts an annual meeting for coordination of data and research on international migration. the office of the high commissioner for human rights (ohchr) supports the mandates of the un special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and the un special rapporteur on trafficking and services the committee on migrant workers, the treaty body supervising compliance with the international convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families. the un office for drugs and crime (unodc) coordinates activities related to human trafficking and human smuggling, as the key agency responsible for implementation of the un convention against transnational crime and its smuggling and trafficking protocols. none of these agencies have evidenced a particular interest in the interconnections between climate change and the areas of their specific responsibilities. the un maritime organization has responsibilities regarding the suppression of piracy at sea as well as the safety of persons rescued at sea. recognizing the complex set of organizational responsibilities, the global migration group (gmg) was established to promote coordination and identify gaps in the international system. the gmg grew out of an existing inter-agency group, the "geneva migration group", established in april by the heads of the ilo, iom, ohchr, un conference on trade and development (unctad), unhcr and unodc. in membership in the geneva migration group was expanded to include desa, un development program (undp), un population fund (unfpa) and the world bank. following a recommendation by the global commission on international migration for strengthened coordination, the group was renamed the "global migration group" that same year and expanded to include the un regional commissions, unesco, unicef and unitar. other agencies have since joined. while some participants in the gmg have noted that the group has too large and diverse a membership to be effective, the gmg is missing repre-sentatives that would be useful in gaining progress on issues related to forced migration. for example, the office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs is not actively engaged. forced migration has not been a prominent issue on the agendas of regional organizations or regional consultative processes (rcps), except in the area of refugees and asylum-seekers. the european union is a notable exception, particularly in regard to the temporary protection directive. several regional groups have discussed related issues. the inter-governmental authority on development regional consultative process on migration (igad-rcp), established in , includes mixed migratory flows, environmental migration, and movements of pastoralists on its agenda. the dialogue on mediterranean transit migration (mtm) has also focused attention on mixed migration. the inter-governmental asia-pacific consultations on refugees, displaced persons and migrants (apc) was established in to "provide a forum for the discussion of issues relating to population movements, including refugees, displaced or trafficked persons and migrants." the aim of the consultations is to "promote dialogue and explore opportunities for greater regional cooperation" (apc ). although not regional, the intergovernmental consultations on migration, refugees and asylum (igc) brings together participating states , the united nations high commissioner for refugees, the international organization for migration and the european commission to discuss forced migration, among other issues. generally, the rcps are not forums for discussion of emerging crises, even when these crises are within the region of the consultative body. although libya, egypt and tunisia are members along with european countries of the mtm, it does not appear that a meeting was called to discuss the evacuation of migrant workers or the increase in boat departures that corresponded with political events in libya. a expert meeting in malta did address issues related to irregular migration. addressing forced migration at the national level generally requires a 'whole of government' approach because of the complexities involved. often, institutional responses are ad hoc, designed for a specific crisis. they may differ significantly depending on geographic considerations (e.g., the extent to which migrants are likely to reach the shores of the destination countries), the causes of the crisis (e.g., natural hazards versus political instability), the domestic political and economic climate, the extent of humanitarian need, and other similar factors. this presents challenges, particularly related to coordination across ministries and departments that do not necessarily have ongoing reasons to communicate or cooperate in managing movements of people. policies on and responsibilities for implementation on immigration issues generally fall to interior or homeland security ministries or dedicated immigration or border security agencies in destination countries although foreign ministries play important roles. a much wider set of government agencies become involved in responding to humanitarian crises. which ministries are involved depends largely on the type of crisis, but it is not unusual for large scale crises to bring defense, foreign ministry, development, health, emergency response and other ministries into the process. again depending on the nature and scale of the crisis, governments may establish a taskforce within the prime minister or president's office to coordinate actions across multiple ministries. situations vary but the ministries responsible for immigration issues may not initially be part of these taskforces, particularly if the migration ramifications are not clear at the start of a crisis. for immigration ministries that are addressing the impacts of pandemics, natural disasters, and political instability, gaining needed information about, for example, the need for quarantine of travelers or need for temporary protection can be difficult. similarly, migration ministries may not be part of discussions taking place on climate change adaptation funding even though there is increasing recognition that migration is an age-old way in which people adapt to environmental changes. forced migration is unlikely to disappear in the future. in fact, the number and frequency of crises that generate large scale displacement may well increase substantially in the years ahead. climate change is expected to generate substantial internal and international displacement from increases in the intensity and frequency of natural hazards, rising sea levels, persistent drought and desertification, and, potentially, new conflicts over scarce resources. at the same time, recent events demonstrate that the process of political change taking hold in many parts of the world can be destabilizing, causing new movements of people. increased mobility also means greater potential for pandemics to spread quickly throughout the world, as was seen in the sars and h n cases, and for governments to make decisions regarding non-return, as seen in the ebola crisis in west africa. all of these trends mean that governments will likely be facing recurrent crises that spark migration and accompanying humanitarian needs. although much of this forced migration will be internal to countries facing emergencies, movements across borders are likely as well. this review of laws, policies, practices and institutions reveal weaknesses and challenges in the current capacities to respond effectively, efficiently and humanely to the challenges presented by forced migration. although many countries have advanced and tested systems to respond to refugees and asylum seekers, responses to migration emanating from other crises-natural disasters, political instability and violence, pandemics, human made disasters-are ad hoc and, in many cases, untested. most countries have mechanisms to provide temporary suspension of removal if conflicts or natural disasters preclude immediate return. with little underpinning from international and, sometimes, national law, the application of these provisions tends to be uneven and often dependent on factors that have little to do with immigration or humanitarian considerations or the balancing of these two factors. crises that generate greater visibility, such as the earthquake in haiti or ebola pandemic in west africa, may result in suspensions of removal whereas less known but potentially equally dangerous situations may not yield this response. when taken into account, immigration issues can work in different directions in determining whether to suspend removals or provide temporary protection. in some cases, concern that temporary protection may spur new movements of people is determinative in not granting suspension or triggering temporary protection, whereas in others, flow of remittances to countries in crisis may push a government towards the decision to grant the status and provide work authorization. once granted, temporary protection and suspension of removals have proven to be problematic vehicles to manage forced migration. once granted, it is very difficult to lift the designation even if conditions change sufficiently in home countries to permit return. often, the conditions do not change and the temporary grant of protection becomes a protracted one. in the absence of durable solutions, the forced migrants may end up in limbo for many years. as the stay prolongs, return becomes even harder as those granted permission to remain develop equities and connections to the country in which they are residing. temporary protection is an especially weak policy instrument when the conditions that cause flight are permanent. this may be the situation that arises in the context of climate change. nationals from some low-lying island countries may be unable to return to their home countries if some of the projections of rising sea levels prove to be accurate and their countries are submerged. even weaker than policy frameworks for temporarily suspending removals of migrants already in the country are those for dealing with mass migration resulting from crises. as discussed, the european union passed a directive on temporary protection with new flows in mind but it has never been used. the united states had experience with such movements from haiti and cuba in the s, using guantanamo naval base to house the migrants until a determination could be made on their status. the aim of policies adopted in was to provide safe haven but no access to u.s. territory. mixed migration is a challenge in handling mass movements in the context of humanitarian crises. some of those leaving may be bonafide refugees deserving of asylum, others may have serious reasons to fear for their safety though they do not meet the refugee criteria, but still others may be leaving to seek better economic opportunities. distinguishing among these groups is always challenging and, in the context of a mass migration emergency, even more difficult. the absence of effective policy tools is especially troubling because these crises have implications that go well beyond immigration and touch on basic humanitarian and human rights interests. just as refugees are at risk of serious harm if returned to their home countries, migrants from countries experiencing crises may face life threatening situations. they may also have immediate need for humanitarian assistance, including shelter, health care, food and other basic items. the promulgation of guidelines and the development of policies to respond to forced migration will require new modes of international cooperation. given the potential for significant increases in such migration, efforts to build an effective toolkit should begin now. whether a new convention on forced migration is desirable, or, for that matter, is feasible, are questions that beg easy answers. the history of international conventions related to migration is a mixed one. while the refugee convention and trafficking protocol are widely ratified, the conventions on labour migrants have had very low levels of ratification. because the complex categories of forced migration discussed herein will likely have elements of both forms of migration, depending on whether the trigger is slow or rapid onset, the future of such a convention would be questionable. beyond feasibility, a number of other issues would need to be addressed before determining that a new convention is the best way to improve policies to respond to forced migration. first, to what extent can existing legal frameworks be stretched to include a wider range of people who are forced to move? how should forced migrants be defined? for that matter, what term should be used in categorizing this form of migration; this paper has used forced migration and displacement as short hands. in other contexts, the terms crisis migrants and survival migrants have been used to describe those who do not fit current legal categories. even more important, a new framework for protection-whether a new convention or stretching of existing ones-would need to specify who among forced migrants are deserving of international protection-as distinct from those who can rely upon the protection of their own countries. and, the list goes on. in the end, though, international agreements-whether binding or soft law-will not be a substitute for national action. states should prepare for future crisis responses by preparing a menu of policy options that they could choose to implement in the event of large scale displacement that does not fit into current refugee frameworks. this process is already underway with the nansen and micic initiatives and the similar state process on other vulnerable migrants recommended by the high level meeting. these are forms of what sir peter sutherland, the former special representative of the secretary general on international migration has called mini-multilateralism, that is, initiatives by a small set of representative governments to build norms and identify good practices to be adopted more universally. a further opportunity is negotiation of a global compact on safe, regular and orderly migration, an outcome of the high level meeting. sir peter sutherland, in his final report as the special representative of the secretary general, stated that a principal aim of the compact should be to identify mechanisms for "managing crisis movement and protecting migrants in vulnerable situations." (sutherland ) . in developing an appropriate set of policies for responding to forced migration, consideration needs to be given to the following questions: • what policies and practices are needed to address the situation of migrants already in destination countries when return to home countries may be lifethreatening or otherwise inadvisable? what are the criteria for determining to suspend removals? for how long should the suspension be granted? what criteria should determine if the suspension should be renewed or revoked? what information is needed and from whom to make these determinations? • what policies and practices are needed to address individuals arriving from countries in crisis? should individual determinations be made as to whether to allow them to enter or should decisions be made on a group basis? • what policies and practices are needed to address mass migration flows? under what circumstances is interdiction appropriate? what criteria should be used in determining whether to return or relocate interdicted migrants? what criteria should be used in determining whether to admit such persons on to the territory of other countries? what information is needed and from whom to make these determinations? • if new policies are put in place for forced migration, how should these intersect with established refugee and asylum policies and systems? • if there is a determination that conditions have changed and forced migrants can return safely, what if any assistance should be provided? if there is a determination that return will not be possible for an extended period, what steps should be taken to find durable solutions? should third country resettlement, for example, be part of a policy toolkit for addressing the broad range of forced migration discussed herein? if so, what criteria should be used in determining who should be eligible for resettlement? • should forced migrants be granted work authorization? should they have access to social benefits? under what circumstances should authorities use reception centers or camps to provide initial or longer term accommodation? what forms of documentation and registration are needed in managing forced migration? • how should authorities address potential for fraud and security risks resulting from forced migration? • which agencies within government need to be involved in decision making on forced migration? which international and regional organizations should be involved? • what forms of responsibility sharing among countries would be appropriate in managing forced migration? what are the appropriate forums for negotiating such arrangements? finally, governments should also be reconsidering the ways in which they conceptualize, fund and implement programs to help vulnerable populations adapt to changing conditions that may trigger large scale displacement. in these contexts, migration is not just a problem to be addressed. it may also be a solution for many of those who are affected by climate change and other problems. too often, migration is forced because there are no alternatives for those who anticipate future harm but are unable to move in a safe and orderly fashion. they may lack the financial, human and social capital to relocate to where there may be greater long-term opportunities, or government policies do not accommodate their movements. as governments consider national adaptation plans and disaster risk reduction strategies, more attention is needed to ways to incorporate migration as a potentially positive response to pending emergencies. demography can play an important role in improving responses. too little is known about the determinants of forced migration, especially beyond traditional refugee flows. there is consensus among researchers that no one factor-economic, social, political, environmental or demographic-is determinative but how the various drivers interact to produce one form of movement versus another is largely unknown. in this context, demography is important in two respects. first, demographic trends are themselves drivers of displacement in conjunction with other factors. this can play out in two ways-demography as a macro-level factor and demographic composition as a micro-level driver of movement. for example, in the context of slow onset climate change, there is need for better understanding of how population density, distribution and growth as well as household composition affects vulnerability and resilience to environmental change (martin and bergmann ) . understanding the ways in which these demographic and environmental factors intersect with each other and with political and economic drivers would be useful in assessing likely need for planned relocation as environmental conditions worsen. second, the demographic profile of forced migrants often affects the efficacy of policy and programmatic responses. data on demographic as well as socio-economic characteristics of forced migrants are weak in general and, in the case of many types of forced migrants, non-existent. while some progress has been made in compiling aggregate numbers of persons who are displaced by natural disasters (see, for example, idmc's data (idmc )), there are no comprehensive sources of data broken down by age or sex. even in the case of refugees and conflict idps, the demographic breakdowns are lacking, particularly when they spontaneously settle and may not register with unhcr. unhcr reports that it has sex disaggregated data on % of those persons of concern, with sex disaggregated data on refugees at %, idps at % and stateless at only %. age disaggregated data were available for % of the population of concern; while it was available for % of refugees, it was available for only % of idps of concern (unhcr ). improving sex and age disaggregated data on all forms of displacement would help ensure that policies and programs are appropriate for all of those who are forced to move. it is difficult to plan for protection or assistance programs in the absence of such data. this is true in both acute and protracted phases of displacement. an absence of such data is particularly harmful with regard to needs linked to gender and age, including those related to health, education, food distribution, access to livelihoods and gender and sexual violence. demographers could play an extremely important role in helping governments, international organizations and ngos to collect basic data on forced migrants and thereby, improve protection and assistance for some of the world's most vulnerable persons. why is the temporary protection directive missing from the european refugee crisis debate? harvard humanitarian initiative iasc framework on durable solutions for internally displaced persons ten years after humanitarian reform human rights and natural disasters: operational guidelines and field manual on human rights protection in situations of natural disaster statement by unhcr assistant high commissioner for protection, ms. erika feller. the nd meeting of the standing committee available at global estimates : people displaced by disasters inter-governmental asia-pacific consultations on refugees, displaced persons and migrants (apc) environmental change and migration: legal and political frameworks environmental change and human mobility: reducing vulnerability & increasing resilience humanitarian crises and migration: causes, consequences and responses australia's asylum seeker policies heavily criticised at un human rights council review towards an eu humanitarian visa scheme? policy department for citizens' rights and constitutional affairs, european parliament giuseppe sciortino migration and illegality in germany report of the special representative of the secretary-general on migration presidency conclusions, and october global report. geneva: unhcr united nations international strategy for disaster risk reduction (unisdr) united nations international strategy for disaster risk reduction (unisdr) united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) termination of tps for nationals of montserrat the state of the world's refugees : human displacement in the new millennium key: cord- -ytal wog authors: henderson, joan c.; ng, alex title: responding to crisis: severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) and hotels in singapore date: - - journal: nan doi: . /jtr. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ytal wog the sudden outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) in singapore in was a grave crisis for the tourism industry as a whole and highlights the importance of effectively managing and planning for such occurrences. this study looks at the particular consequences of the infectious virus for the hotel sector and reactions to the challenges posed. further health‐related crises seem inevitable in the modern world and some guidelines for dealing with these are proposed, based on the singapore experience and an existing framework for tourism crisis management. copyright © john wiley & sons, ltd. i n an increasingly uncertain world, almost all organisations connected to the tourism industry face the likelihood of experiencing some form of crisis. however, levels of preparedness and the competence with which difficulties are handled vary and the topic of tourism crisis management is attracting greater attention from both academics and practitioners. this study is concerned with severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars), a new and potentially fatal virus, which affected much of the east asian region during early . it focuses on how the epidemic impacted on singapore's hotel sector and management reactions to it, affording insights into the problems caused by outbreaks of infectious disease at destinations and possible responses. after an opening summary of the literature on tourism and crisis, certain features of sars and the implications of its presence in singapore are outlined. steps taken by hotels are reviewed and the paper concludes by presenting proposals for the management of similar hospitality crises which might lie ahead. findings are derived from a sample survey of singapore's largest hotels, supplemented by interviews with managers, and the analysis also draws on secondary data from published sources. crisis and disaster are prevalent nationally and internationally (blakie et al., ) and commentators maintain that it is no longer a question of whether they will arise, but when and how they will be dealt with (barton, ; kash and darling, ) . faulkner ( ) distinguishes between disasters resulting from exogenous catastrophic change and crises due to organisational problems such as weak management. the conditions are closely related, however, and an outside disaster can evolve into an institutional crisis so that the terms are frequently used interchangeably. tourism has proved itself sensitive to a host of internal and external influences that can disrupt operations (faulkner and russell, ; mckercher, ; nankervis, ) , and fink's ( , p. ) observation that 'any time you're not in a crisis, you are instead in a precrisis, or prodromal mode' would seem especially apt. the industry's exposure to crisis has been acknowledged by researchers, its vulnerability revealed by the wave of adverse events that marked the opening years of the st century and their harmful repercussions. terrorist activity has become a primary concern (pizam, ) , but health scares should not be overlooked and have the capacity to inflict serious damage (travel business analyst, ) . the world health organisation (who) warns of the risks of known and unknown communicable diseases, the progress of which could be accelerated by tourism movements (who, ) . members of the world tourism organisation (wto) have also been called on to formulate tourism health policies incorporating mechanisms for reporting conditions at destinations (wto, (wto, , . the expanding literature on the theme of tourism and crisis includes case studies of good and bad practice, with a consensus that planning for various scenarios and allocating responsibilities in advance could be vital in averting crisis or surviving it and even finding new commercial opportunities to exploit (pottorff and neal, ; roberts, ) . the significance of good communications is highlighted in many accounts, and the media is seen to occupy a central role in the dissemination of information and formation of opinions and images (berno and king, ). nevertheless, not every public or private sector tourism organisation is in possession of a plan (cassedy, ; prideaux, ) and those that do exist are often informal and undocumented, addressing only one particular type of hazard (drabek, ) . neglect of such an important area as crisis management is surprising and an untenable position given contemporary global instability. faulkner's ( ) exploration of the dynamics of a tourism disaster is commonly cited by researchers and he traces the disaster process through a series of stages noted in table . although derived from evaluation of a natural disaster, the theory is agreed to have a broader relevance that permits its applicability to other emergencies (ritchie, ) . the model thus provides a suitable framework for examining the ways in which the disruption created by sars was handled by singapore's hotels. appropriate actions to combat a health-related the coronavirus caused a contagious atypical pneumonia, with a mortality rate of - %, which spread rapidly after its discovery. the epidemic centred on east asia and locations such as china, hong kong, singapore and taiwan were amongst the worst hit. fears of infection by the potentially deadly disease were widespread, aggravated by intense media publicity and speculation about its means of transmission, which is now assumed to be through vapour droplets. there is no vaccine or cure as yet, control depending on the identification and isolation of suspects. air travel was seen as facilitating diffusion of the virus and the who advised aircraft disinfection and health screening of outbound travellers from areas with local transmission in a bid to prevent further contagion (who, ) . given the lack of knowledge and limited understanding of sars, singapore was initially unprepared for and unprotected from the disease. this was imported by three residents returning from hong kong and confirmation of their state in early march , accompanied by a wave of infections, precipitated public health and tourism crises. visitor arrivals fell dramatically for the april to june quarter, reaching a nadir in may when figures were over % lower than the previous year (stb, (stb, , a . tourists from around the globe either cancelled or postponed their trips and passenger traffic at singapore's changi airport halved, several airlines halting flights altogether (the straits times, a). travel warnings were issued by the who, as well as governments overseas, and leisure and business travel both slumped. several companies turned to alternatives of video and teleconferencing and prohibited staff from travelling to countries where sars had been reported (the straits times interactive, ) . many locals also chose to avoid public places, thereby contributing to the decline in leisure spending. the unanswered questions originally surrounding the virus should be stressed and these added to anxieties and complicated decision making, nobody knowing how long the outbreak would last and its ultimate extent. as the epidemic ran its course, the number of those who succumbed dwindled and there was growing confidence that the battle was being won. however, the crisis remained acute until late may when singapore was declared free of local transmission of sars by the who and travel warnings were downgraded. the final death toll was , another patients recovered and thousands had been subject to a rigorous system of home quarantining for individuals having contact with sars sufferers. although the wto announcement was an occasion for celebration, the industry sought to guard against complacency. worries persisted at home and abroad that the virus might return and scientists cautioned that total eradication would be impossible, but the downturn in tourist arrivals was arrested and there were signs of a return to normal flows by the end of the year. nevertheless, sars proved an unprecedented tourism crisis and seriously undermined singapore's reputation as a destination synonymous with safety and security (henderson, ) . hotels in singapore have to be registered by law and there are that are formally gazetted, a status determined by features such as the number of rooms, attached bathrooms and food and beverage outlets (hlb, ) . these are liable for cess duty payments, unlike nongazetted units, which are generally very small establishments. of the total gazetted in , were classed as medium sized ( - rooms), as large ( - rooms) and nine as very large (over rooms); these collectively constituted the sample population. the postal questionnaire survey sought details about the consequences of sars for hotels and their attempts to overcome the problems it brought in its wake, being completed at the close of when recovery was well underway. only nine hotels responded, or . %, but the different sized properties were almost consequences of sars for hotels in singapore equally represented and their guests came from all singapore's principal tourist generating countries with an emphasis on asia. the findings thus represent an industry view of the gravity of the crisis and policies pursued during its lifecycle, although the limitations of such a disappointing response are accepted. singapore tourism board (stb) statistics confirm the severity of the situation for the hotel sector as a whole. the average hotel occupancy rate (aor) for the second quarter of was %, compared with . % for the previous year, and average room rates contracted by . %. industry-wide data correspond to those for the surveyed hotels, which had an average aor in april of . %; this dropped to . % in may, before rising to . % in june. there were some contrasts in the performance of individual hotels and one saw occupancies of only % in june (stb, (stb, , a . the respondent hotels tended to rely on corporate clients, who made up over % of customers. demand from both business and leisure travellers was, however, almost equally eroded by an estimated . % and . % respectively. the greatest decreases were recorded by guests from japan and hong kong, followed by those from australia, america and europe; in comparison, the indonesian, thai and indian markets were perceived to be more robust. on average, the hotels surveyed calculated that they would lose at least one-third of their annual revenues because of sars, two hotels expecting to sacrifice % of earnings for . the singapore hotel association expected revenue losses as a result of cancellations and postponements to be in excess of $ million for all singapore's hotels (sha, ) . expressions of government concern reflected an acute awareness of the havoc being wreaked by sars as it reverberated through the economy and also the direct and indirect value of international tourism to the republic, justifying a degree of official intervention to protect the industry during the depths of the crisis. several assistance programmes were assembled, the most prominent being an s$ million relief package aimed at the tourism and transport industries, which included property tax rebates and bridging loans for small and medium enterprises (smes) facing cash difficulties (the straits times, b). a major portion was allocated for hotels, comprising measures such as a halving of the unskilled foreign worker levy and the waiver of television licence fees (the straits times, c) . the stb, together with the standards, productivity and innovation board, also launched a fixed interest rate financing scheme to help smes gain access to short-term funds (stb, b) . the moves were welcomed by hoteliers, although some felt that the amounts of financial support could have been more generous. the sudden onset of the crisis and its nature cut short any pre-event or prodromal stages, with no chance of evasion and very little time to prepare. the crisis cycle thus commenced almost immediately at the emergency period when the principal worry for hoteliers was shrinking revenues linked to falling occupancy, priority being allocated to cost savings and generating income. with regard to human resources, none of the respondents retrenched permanent staff. however, seven terminated the services of contract workers, salaries were reduced at three hotels and all requested employees to go on unpaid leave. multitasking was another popular option. to minimise other operating costs, six respondents took rooms or floors out of service and one shut down for a major renovation and revamp in the middle of the year. at the same time, the crisis was an opportunity to upgrade skills and six respondents accordingly sent members of their workforce for training, taking advantage of the sars relief tourism training assistance (srtta) programme. this was a component of the government aid package designated for the retraining of employees in approved tourismrelated courses, one objective being to minimise redundancies (stb, c) . in the face of mass cancellations and very few new bookings, hotels were anxious to sustain their day to day business and ensure some cash flow. with many foreign visitors j. c. henderson and a. ng shunning singapore, all respondents turned to residents and devised promotional packages targeted at them. this was considered a temporary arrangement only due to a long standing belief that the domestic market was too small to be commercially viable as geographical factors encourage singaporeans to escape to neighbouring malaysia and indonesia for inexpensive breaks, instead of holidaying in their own very urbanised environment. one respondent described adding value through the offer of extra amenities to local and foreign guests, rather than discounts on room charges. half of the respondents engaged in advertising campaigns and seven stated that they had collaborated with airlines, travel agencies and the stb in assorted schemes to attract more tourists. hotels sought to demonstrate a commitment to exemplary standards of hygiene and cleanliness in an effort to reassure customers and build confidence. the tourism board's cool singapore project aimed to communicate the message that singapore was not dangerous and specific venues were uncontaminated by sars, providing guidance for industry participants on keeping the infection out of their premises. hotels that met the criteria were granted cool awards which they could display to try and convince the public that they were sars-free and sars-ready (stb, d) . most hotels surveyed were quick to be certified 'cool' and also abide by ministry of health (moh) instructions. all hotels procured thermometers and daily temperature-taking of employees was conducted in accordance with moh directives, fever being a key and easily identifiable symptom of sars. the stb itself circulated information and proffered advice on practical matters, which hotels complied with, guests too being asked to complete health declaration forms. all but two of the respondents declared that they had crisis management plans prior to sars, but these were not always strictly relevant and covered either eventualities unconnected to such a disease or were generic in scope. a sars manager was appointed from the existing management team by most hotels to be in charge of liaison with the stb and moh, as well as helping the general manager, with final decisions commonly left to the latter. the above measures were in place throughout the emergency, which prevailed until singapore was removed from the who list of countries with local transmission of sars on may. the who declaration propelled the crisis nearer to recovery, judged by respondents to have begun in july. common indicators of progress were an upturn in room occupancy, revenue and reservations and a slowdown in the decline of tourist arrivals. june therefore might be seen as the intermediate month, during which many aspects of the emergency regimes were maintained. initiatives designed to secure and accelerate recovery were introduced after the who decision when attention shifted to marketing. hotels retained certain procedures they had installed at the height of the crisis, with a gradual relaxation of some of the more stringent precautions such as constant screening for fever. five indicated that they had or would be undertaking more advertising in a bid to increase customer awareness and stimulate demand, and six collaborated with other tourism organisations such as airlines and travel agencies in promotional campaigns. only two hotels carried on actively selling to the singapore market. in terms of product development, half the respondents were seeking to improve the quality of their facilities and seven of them to provide superior customer service. business was deemed to have returned to pre-sars levels by the last quarter of when room occupancies averaged . %. as the recovery advanced and resolution seemed closer, there was time for reflecting on the past and looking ahead. most hotels felt better able to cope with another sars epidemic after having survived the first in which positive attributes such as team spirit, adaptability and professionalism had been fostered. in addition, procedures had been devised and tested that could be reintroduced at short notice should the virus resurface. the handling of sars in singapore does not entirely correspond to theories of crisis man-consequences of sars for hotels in singapore agement as there was little advance warning of the virus or appreciation of its significance. the pre-event and prodromal periods, preceding the emergency, were therefore of very short duration. the delisting of singapore by the who marked the cessation of the emergency and start of recovery, separated by a brief intermedial transition. although the hotels surveyed were in possession of crisis management plans before the onset of sars, discussions indicated that these were not entirely apposite and managers were caught unawares and forced to act instinctively. decision makers initially were largely at the mercy of the epidemic's evolution until later when there were opportunities to take the initiative and seek to direct events. responses ranged from reactive and defensive to proactive and offensive, incorporating collaboration with other agencies within and outside the tourism industry. actions undertaken can be categorised as disease and hygiene controls, cost savings, marketing and lobbying for official aid. these tactics were also evident in hong kong where singapore's hotel crisis was repeated (chien and law, ; pine and mckercher, ) and echo measures of 'marketing, hotel maintenance, human resources and government assistance' implemented in other examples of hospitality crises (israeli and reichel, , p. ) , suggesting a common pattern of response. partial recovery in singapore had been achieved by the end of , but resolution was still incomplete in the opening months of because of the threat of a resurgence of sars and a few isolated cases across asia. these circumstances created anticipation of a second outbreak and round of crisis, leading the industry to assume a pre-event stance of intensified vigilance. foreseen damaging developments in the arena of public health were not confined to sars and encompassed the mutation of a strain of avian influenza, which was erupting across asia into an extremely infectious and deadly human virus (the straits times, ) . although the direst predictions about so-called 'bird flu' had not been realised at the time of writing, the fact that it was hailed immediately as a potential tourism crisis indicates that lessons had been learnt from sars. such learning is a crucial final outcome of crisis and should inform and strengthen strategic planning. the singapore experience of sars offers a perspective on the demands made of the hotel sector when dealing with rampant infectious disease. although suggesting the benefits of being in a state of readiness, the study does raise questions about the wisdom of investing scarce resources in formulating plans tied too closely to specific crises. more common incidents such as fire, power failure and food poisoning are relatively easy to plan for, but the uniqueness of certain situations frustrates advance identification and limits the general value of a narrow response strategy. it could be argued that hotels should avoid being overly prescriptive and maintain a flexible approach, giving some attention to drafting a series of protocols that provide broad guidance on structures and procedures to use in order to accommodate the unpredictable. external forces may also be a major influence on the efficacy of any plans, illustrated in this case by the who and the impact of its decisions. the imposition and continuation of advisories are likely to have undermined certain aspects of attempts to manage the sars tourism crisis, not least marketing activity, by setting the pace of recovery. another striking feature of the virus was that it affected both destinations and source markets, bringing tourism throughout much of the region to a halt. it was consequently beyond the ability of any single business or destination to manage comprehensively and, however competently the singapore industry and authorities reacted to conditions in the republic, they were partly dependent on the manner in which public and private organisations elsewhere dealt with their own crises. individual hotels, alongside other enterprises, were thus relatively powerless within the overall picture of the international crisis and its complicated dynamics. nevertheless, outbreaks of existing or new types of infectious disease might be expected to recur and the risks should not be ignored by hoteliers. a set of guidelines to assist in coping with such a scenario is presented in table , drawing on faulkner's tourism disaster directives. the proposals recommend fully utilising the preliminary pre-crisis stages to prepare for the climax of the crisis when a machinery of systems, processes and personnel can be installed with minimum delay and maximum efficiency. meeting immediate needs gives way to a medium term perspective as the emergency recedes, to be replaced by an intermediate step when normal business operations can begin to be restored. recovery requires marketing and development programmes, as well as government involvement if necessary, and a return to regular modes of operation. resolution is a time for review when formal plans can be revised in the light of the knowledge gained from living through one crisis, enhancing their applicability to any of a similar character that might materialise in the future. the epidemic of sars in was an exceptional crisis for singapore's hotels and an exacting test for its managers, in which advances to near normality were dictated by outside developments and agencies as much as their own efforts. the struggle against the virus and its repercussions reveals the importance of being prepared and of devising strategies to provide direction and limit any damage when facing the potentially destructive forces unleashed by a crisis. crisis management planning thus emerges as an essential responsibility of the tourism industry as a whole and it is hoped that this account has contributed to the debate about the principles of crisis management within a tourism context whilst also illuminating good practice in the hotel sector. crisis management: preparing for and managing disasters. the cornell hotel and restaurant administration at risk: natural hazards, people's vulnerability and disasters tourism in fiji after the coups crisis management planning in the travel and tourism industry: a study of three destination cases and a crisis management planning manual the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome on hotels: a case study of hong kong disaster responses within the tourism industry towards a framework for tourism disaster management chaos and complexity in tourism: in search of a new perspective crisis management. american association of management managing a health-related crisis: severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) in singapore hotels licensing board website hospitality crisis management practices: the israeli case crisis management: prevention, diagnosis and intervention a chaos approach to tourism dreams and realities: vulnerability and the tourism industry in southeast asia: a framework for analyzing and adapting tourism management toward the impact of sars on hong kong's tourism industry terrorism and tourism marketing implications for post-disaster tourism destinations the need to use disaster planning frameworks to respond to major tourism disasters: analysis of australia's response to tourism disasters in chaos, crises and disasters: a strategic approach to crisis management in the tourism industry disaster prevention and management consequences of sars for hotels in singapore key: cord- -z bjkl g authors: brossman, charles title: planning for known and unknown risks date: - - journal: building a travel risk management program doi: . /b - - - - . - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: z bjkl g this chapter covers standard definitions of duty of care, example case law where employer duty of care was applicable, a variety of sample risks and concerns that employers and travelers should be aware of, in context with a travel risk management program. legal duty of care-definition "duty of care" stands for the principle that directors and officers of a corporation in making all decisions in their capacities as corporate fiduciaries, must act in the same manner as would a reasonably prudent person in their position. courts will generally adjudge lawsuits against director and officer actions to meet the duty of care, under the business judgment rule. the business judgment rule stands for the principle that courts will not second guess the business judgment of corporate managers and will find the duty of care has been met so long as the fiduciary executed a reasonably informed, good faith, rational judgment without the presence of a conflict of interest. the burden of proof lies with the plaintiff to prove that this standard has not been met. if the plaintiff meets the burden, the defendant fiduciary can still meet the duty of care by showing entire fairness, meaning that both a fair process was used to reach the decision and that the decision produced a substantively fair outcome for the corporation's shareholders. ijet international defines "duty of care" specific to trm as follows: duty of care: this is the legal responsibility of an organization to do everything "reasonably practical" to protect the health and safety of employees. though interpretation of this language will likely vary with the degree of risk, this obligation exposes an organization to liability if a traveler suffers harm. some of the specific elements encompassed by duty of care include: • a safe working environment-this extends to hotels, airlines, rental cars, etc. • providing information and instruction on potential hazards and supervision in safe work (in this case, travel) • monitoring the health and safety of employees and keeping good records • employment of qualified persons to provide health and safety advice • relative to "duty of care" is the "standard of care" that companies are compared to in defending what is "reasonable best efforts" or "reasonably practical," based upon what resources and programs are put into place by an organization's peers to keep travelers safe. prior to , business travelers thought nothing of being able to walk into an airport and meet their loved ones at their arrival gate. no security barriers, no cause for concern because air travel was something that at the time, our collective psyche felt generally safe, with the exception of a hijacking upon occasion. fast forward to a post- / world, and consider what the world's airports look like now and how the processes surrounding airport security have changed the way that we travel, whether for business or pleasure. why would any of us believe that the need for added security, particularly around those traveling for business, begins and ends at the airport? for companies who have been paying attention since / , the ones who, outside of the public eye, have had to deal with critical incidents that had the potential for loss of lives, corporate liability, and damage to their company's reputation, having a structured trm program not only reduced the potential for risk, but heightened the awareness of risk to their travelers. their definition of "travelers" extended beyond employees (transient travelers to expatriates) to contractors, subcontractors, and dependents. keeping travelers aware of imminent dangers takes effort and planning, and isn't something that employers can any longer react to after the fact. in some countries, lack of planning or resources to support business travelers has the potential to be grounds for claims of negligence in a company's duty of care responsibilities, and can lead to a criminal offense, such as with the united kingdom's (uk) corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide act of . what the "business judgment rule" in the above duty of care definition means in layman's terms is that a company must be able to prove that it put forth reasonable best efforts to keep its travelers safe. how this applies in different circumstances, jurisdictions and countries will vary. most countries' duty of care requirements fall under their occupational safety and health laws. for a comprehensive list of occupational health and safety legislation by country, an updated global database is maintained by the international labour organization (www.ilo.org ). simply put, companies cannot afford to no longer have a proactive trm program and just react after an incident takes place. the end result could reflect negligence on behalf of the company. for extensive detail on the uk's definition of duty of care in relation to the corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide act of , visit http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / . because each of the u.s. states is a separate sovereign free to develop its own tort law under the tenth amendment, there are several tests to consider for finding a duty of care under u.s. tort law, in the absence of a federal law. tests include: • foreseeability-in some states, the only test is whether the harm to the plaintiff that resulted from the defendant's actions was foreseeable. • multifactor test-california has developed a complex balancing test consisting of multiple factors that must be carefully weighed against one another to determine whether a duty of care exists in a negligence action. california civil code section imposes a general duty of ordinary care, which by default requires all persons to take "reasonable measures" to prevent harm to others. in the case of rowland v. christian (after and based on this case, the majority of states adopted this or similar standards), the court held that judicial exceptions to this general duty of care should only be created if clearly justified based on the following public-policy factors: • the foreseeability of harm to the injured party; • the degree of certainty that he or she suffered injury; • the closeness of the connection between the defendant's conduct and the injury suffered; • the moral blame attached to the defendant's conduct; • the policy of preventing future harm; • the extent of the burden to the defendant and the consequences to the community of imposing a duty of care with resulting liability for breach; and the availability, cost, and prevalence of insurance for the risk involved; • the social utility of the defendant's conduct from which the injury arose. pioneering companies (often in the energy services sector or government contractors) who were some of the first to adopt and implement forward-thinking programs, recognized early on that a critical incident or "crisis," isn't usually defined as an event impacting large numbers of people. they found that the largest percentages of incidents that required support, involved individual travelers or small groups. so while policies, plans, and readiness exercises are good to have in place for those highly visible incidents impacting large numbers of people, if handled improperly, the smaller incidents can cost companies considerably in damages and litigation costs, should their travelers or their travelers' surviving families prove that the companies in question weren't properly prepared to handle such incidents as they arise. case study-u.s. workers compensation and arbitration khan v. parsons global services, ltd united states court of appeals, district of columbia circuit-decided april , (https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/ dd d dd bce f d/$file/ - - .pdf) • during the course of employment in the philippines, on a day off, mr. khan was kidnapped and subsequently tortured. • employment contract included a broadly worded arbitration clause, and a separate clause specifying "workers compensation insurance" as "full and exclusive compensation for any compensable bodily injury" should damages be sought. • allegations that employer's disregard for mr. khan's safety in favor of minimizing future corporate kidnappings considering the way parsons handled the situation provoked mr. khan's kidnappers to torture him, cutting of a piece of his ear, sending a video tape of the incident to the employer, causing the khans severe mental distress. • mrs. khan alleged efforts by the employer to prevent her from privately paying the ransom, despite threats of torture, may have exposed mrs. khan to guilt of knowing that she could have prevented mr. khan's suffering if the employer had not withheld the ransom details from her. • mr. and mrs. khan filed a lawsuit for parsons' alleged mishandling of ransom demands by the kidnappers, and also alleging negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress in d.c. superior court in . the employer removed the case to the federal district court, arguing on the merits of the new york convention for the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards, and then filed a single motion to dismiss or, as an alternative, to obtain summary judgment to compel arbitration. the employer initially received a summary judgment to compel arbitration. • upon appeal, this judgment was reversed. the court found that the recovery of the khans' tort claims were not limited by mr. khan's contract to workers' compensation insurance. • an additional appeal contended that the initial summary judgment granted by the court denied the khan's discovery requests, and dismissed mrs. khan's claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress • through the appeals process, the court found that the employer had in effect waived their right to arbitration. this case study calls into question legal jurisdiction, u.s. workers' compensation liability limitations for employers, and the value of being prepared for such an incident as kidnapping. this chapter outlines at a high level general categories that all companies must take into consideration when developing a trm program. very often the question is asked, "do i really need to do any of this, because our company hasn't been sued to date?" if you have employees or contractors traveling on your behalf (especially internationally), whereby your company is paying for their time and/or expenses, then the answer is absolutely yes. the level of investment and complexity may vary between companies, but in general, all companies must have a plan for how to address the issues provided herein and others. duty of care is never finite in its definition because companies must consider how laws from one country to the next will apply to travelers, contractors, potential subcontractors, and expatriates and their dependents, as well as any potential for conflict of law. also, as shown in the khan v. parsons global services, ltd. case study listed earlier in this chapter, employer remedies such as worker's compensation insurance in the u.s. aren't absolute; and therefore, warrants additional efforts and protections. consider the following incident types or risk exposures, which in some instances can impact large numbers of travelers, but more commonly impact only one person. according to the u.s. department of commerce international trade administration, only percent of international business travelers receive pretravel health care. pretravel health care can include, but is not limited to things like new or updates to vaccinations or inoculations, general health exams, medical treatment or procedures for a condition that may be risky to travel with, or prescription medicine planning for travel lasting for extended periods (longer than days). the chief operating officer at ijet, john rose, comments that, "a percentage of calls into our crisis response center are for minor, individual medical issues." however, callers may not always know that the situation is minor until they reach someone for support, which is why having an easy-to-identify, easy-to-access, single contact number or hotline for medical and security support is so important to all companies. a contracted crisis support service will know based upon predetermined protocols, which providers will support the traveler in the part of the world where they are traveling for medical issues, and ensure that the traveler gets the immediate advice that they need from a vetted medical professional. sometimes with a brief conversation with a nurse, the parties can determine a minor treatment that the traveler can facilitate, and in other circumstances a referral to a more senior medical official or emergency medical resource may be necessary based upon the initial consultation by the first-level medical support personnel contracted by the traveler's company. as discussed later in the book, who provides the crisis response case management and who provides the medical or security services specific to the traveler in question are not necessarily mutually exclusive. there could be different providers in different parts of the world, used for different reasons that are outlined in company policies and protocols. the consequences of mistakes as a result of a lack of preparation or resources can be costly, from financial loss and traveler productivity loss to the company, to a serious health issue for the traveler, or simply a ruined trip. while clarity via training and policies on who supports traveler medical issues should be very clear to everyone within an organization, the following common medical mistakes should be avoided where possible, as recommended by dr. sarah kohl, md of travelreadymd (http://www.travelreadymd.com): statistically, most medical problems you are likely to experience while traveling overseas cannot be prevented with a vaccine. for example, there are no vaccines for jet lag, diarrhea, blood clots, malaria, or viral infections such as dengue. before you travel overseas, make sure you are educated about these potential problems. most can be prevented with simple measures. information from different sources on the internet can be conflicting and can lead you to believe you need more interventions than actually necessary. as travelers prepare to depart, employers should provide them with access to resources that can advise on medical concerns relative to your destinations. of course, travelers should also discuss any personal medical condition concerns with their own or qualified medical professionals in addition to receiving employer provided risk intelligence regarding their trip. unfortunately, travelers regularly suffer needless medical complications because they fail to take simple steps to avoid predictable issues. simple precautions can save you a lot of discomfort and make your trip safer and more enjoyable. here are some examples: medical compression stockings, if properly fitted, can protect you from a life-threatening blood clot. knowing the right insect spray to choose, from the multitude of choices available, can protect you from insect-borne disease. avoiding seemingly harmless activities in certain locations (ones that a hotel concierge might even recommend) can protect you from parasites, respiratory illness or malaria. travelers often fail to recognize how a common illness such as diarrhea or a respiratory infection can cause a flare-up of an underlying condition. travelers who are good at managing food allergies, asthma, and diabetes at home may experience difficulty finding the resources they need overseas. in addition, these individuals may find themselves looking to a non-english-speaking doctor for help. measles, tuberculosis, and other infections are gaining a foothold in some european countries. low immunization rates within these communities are thought to be the root cause. don't risk becoming ill or bringing an infection home. check with your health care provider before you travel to discuss preventive measures. if you have a chronic health problem that is well under control, you will want to be prepared to self-treat under certain conditions. you may also want to be prepared to access a network of doctors who speak your native language, if needed. lastly, travelers should never assume that a pre-existing condition is covered by corporate-or consumer-based travel insurance or medical membership programs. when in doubt, always ask your human resources department or trm program administrator. companies commonly expect that corporate insurance policies or business travel accident (bta) policies provide enough coverage for travelers, when sometimes they may not. this is why protocols and regular training exercises for internal risk program stakeholders take place, to understand what is covered and what is not, as well as how to handle each situation. whether insured or not, consider the value and cost savings of prevention based treatment as shown in the examples provided below. consider the possibility that anything that an employee or representative comes in contact with during the course of a business trip (during or after hours) that can potentially make them ill or kill them is a liability to the employer. biological hazards or biohazards are pathogens that pose a threat to the health of a living organism, which can include medical waste, microorganisms, viruses, or toxins. toxicity is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism (not exclusively biological, as it could be chemical). brett vollus, a former qantas airline employee of years, filed suit against the airline claiming that his spraying of government-mandated insecticides on planes to prevent the spread of insect-related diseases like malaria, caused him to develop parkinson disease after years of administering the chemicals in the flight cabins. it was also discovered from a brain scan after a tripping incident that vollus had a malignant brain tumor. considering this was a government mandate, it will be interesting to see if the question becomes: what did the government know about the risks of these chemicals? if a precedent is set in this suit, will liability extend to other airlines using or who have used such chemicals for extended periods, against repeat business travelers who regularly flew or fly in markets where such spraying was or is common practice over a long period of time? epidemics are outbreaks of disease that far exceed expected population exposures during a defined period of time. epidemics are usually restricted to a specific area, as opposed to pandemics that cover multiple countries or continents. mature trm programs monitor these more visible outbreaks and recommend vaccinations for travelers going to impacted areas; they also provide access to emergency medical resources when necessary, but also have a large focus on education, training, and prevention. however, employers should always be mindful of other environmental factors in the traveler's workplace both at home or abroad, such as urban or rural environmental factors. examples may include prolonged exposure to pollution, lack of sanitation (particularly when it comes to their expat communities). employers should work towards limiting those exposures or changing the environment through continuous process improvement reviews. according to major medical and security evacuations suppliers, corporate-sponsored evacuations involving one or more travelers happen almost every day when you include both medical and security-related evacuations. it is a mistake to think that just because a case study or example is slightly dated, the instances they represent occur infrequently. it's quite the opposite. however, most incidents are not publicly documented to the degree that they can be reported upon. the five primary things that companies must be concerned with when facing a pandemic situation are: . the potential impact on personnel. . the pandemic, crisis response plan. . the potential impact on business operations. . the potential impact on business supply chain. . the potential impact to share value or price. what many companies don't consider is the potential for shareholder lawsuits against executives for business losses resulting from a lack of planning for situations such as pandemics. from shared sick time policies to work-at-home policies during is your organization pandemic ready? harvard's school of public health recently released survey data showing how deeply concerned u.s. businesses are about the possibility of widespread employee absenteeism that might follow an outbreak of the swine flu (h n ). researchers from the school questioned more than businesses across the country. two-thirds of companies said they couldn't operate normally if more than half of their workers were out for weeks. and four of five organizations predicted severe operating problems if half of their workers missed a month of work. a crisis, being able to quickly communicate a position or a plan, and to answer questions in the event of such an emergency, can not only save money and productivity, but garner employee confidence and calm nerves. chapter elaborates on the relationship between travel risk management (trm) and other aspects of risk management across the enterprise (erm-enterprise risk management). according to the new zealand herald, the country's largest company, fonterra, could lose $ million because of the ebola epidemic. fonterra ceo, theo spierings, noted that when african countries lock down their borders to control the disease, demand dropped for fonterra's products. he commented, "so…movements in west africa become more and more difficult, so that limits movement of food as well, movement of people-people going to the market, doing their groceries-so you see demand really dropping pretty fast." "if the market in west africa slowed down or dropped off that would affect , tonnes of powder," mr. spierings said. "that's about percent, percent of our exports. so you talk…$ million or something like that." these survey results should encourage all organizations to prepare for the worst by developing a crisis management plan. in addition to ample warning, senior management has ample reason to prepare, and no excuse not to. an organization's executives won't be blamed for the outbreak, but they do risk censure if they fail to prepare, respond, and communicate with internal and external stakeholders. this white paper tells how. to help organizations and their leaders prepare for a possible h n pandemic, certain key issues must be addressed to keep operations running as smoothly as possible: • human resource (hr) issues that drive pandemic planning. • planning for steps necessary to keep an organization operating during the pandemic period. • implementing steps needed to create an enterprise-wide crisis management plan. • internal and external issues that crisis communications must address. why bother planning for the h n pandemic? to put it simply, companies and organizations that plan for any type of crisis demonstrate the behavior of responsible citizens. formulating a detailed crisis management plan specifically for h n achieves four things: . protects employees' health and safety. . lessens the chance of a major interruption of your daily business. . protects your company's or your brand's reputation. . allows daily business activity to continue with minimal disruption if you are affected. companies must establish open lines of communication with all audiences while dealing with the effects of the pandemic or other significant events. should one occur, these stakeholders will want to know what you are doing to manage the situation and minimize their risks. if you communicate with these stakeholders openly and promptly, you send four valuable messages: • you are taking charge of the situation. • you take it seriously. • you have the best interests of your staff and customers at heart. • you run a responsible company with nothing to hide. pandemics have a disastrous effect on a company's optimal functioning because they prevent large numbers of critical employees from showing up for work. the resulting interruption to normal operations can have a disastrous cascading effect, affecting nearly every corner of the organization at considerable cost. employees unable to work or prevented from working become anxious and insecure. when they start asking management questions that aren't answered sufficiently or quickly, it exposes the fact that management hasn't developed contingency plans or that management failed to consider what employees need to know. part of the cost of failing to prepare can be measured by the resultant loss of trust in management's capability, judgment, and credibility. we know from experience there are certain predictable questions that employees will ask and hr departments must be prepared to answer. for example: hr departments should, as a matter of urgency, review attendance and sickday policies to ensure they have made allowances for managing the largerthan-normal issues h n creates. some of the policies that will need to be considered for implementing or addressing include: . how/when to start monitoring/screening employees at the workplace to determine if they are sick or pose a risk. how/when sick employees should be sent home to protect colleagues at work or be stopped/prevented from coming to work where they could infect colleagues. . how/when the company should be temporarily closed due to the number of sick employees. . how/when to implement steps to minimize face-to-face contact at work. . how/when to allow certain employees, including senior management, to work remotely from home or another branch/office. . how/when employees should be allowed to stay at home to look after sick family members. . how/when the company's travel policies should be changed/suspended. . how/when to stop employees from coming into contact with suppliers and customers. . how/when to implement and enforce a "wash your hands" and "cover your mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing" policy; this must include making face masks and the use of hand sanitizers mandatory across the company. how/when to change the company payroll policy so that all employees receive electronic payments into their accounts; consider establishing an emergency "employee help" fund. . any and all extensions/additions to your existing payroll and work hours' policies. at the core of your h n crisis plan, your hr department must be fully prepared to explain and communicate any new policies or changes to employees on an ongoing basis in all offices. this includes offices and employees that may not be affected by the pandemic at all. international and regional offices must also be briefed as they, too, could be directly impacted if there is an h n outbreak. employees should also be asked for input and ideas. this may help to highlight potential management or operating aspects that have not been considered. it will also make employees feel part of the pandemic planning process and thus, more accepting of and cooperative with the final plan. if appropriate to your workplace and organizational culture, additional steps can be taken to protect employees by putting up educational posters, using training materials, and even arranging for annual flu shots (under doctor's supervision) to be provided in the workplace for convenience. employees should also be encouraged to learn and do more on their own and away from work. all of these actions send a message to employees that you are looking out for them, their jobs, and the company's well-being. in return, employees are much more likely to "go the extra mile" in order to lessen the business impact of widespread absences. communicating during a crisis is important, but what businesses do is always more important than what they say. making good decisions and providing straightforward, honest and factual information to all employees with frequent updates is one of the most critical actions management can take. ideally, all companies and organizations would have enterprise-wide crisis plans in place before a crisis breaks. but realistically, we know from multiple surveys that at least half don't. too many companies assume an "it can't happen to me" mentality or, in tough business or competitive conditions, they decide not to invest in "insurance" activities. unfortunately, some find out the hard way that you cannot choose your crisis; it chooses you-and almost always at the most inconvenient time. if yours is an organization that hasn't taken the steps necessary to implement crisis preparedness, here are some interim steps that you can take quickly to address h n . remember, the most effective and least costly way to manage a crisis is to prevent it from happening in the first place. you cannot stop h n , but you can take steps to keep it from damaging your operations, your reputation, and your bottom line. here's a quick checklist of things an organization can do, even at this late date: . appoint a pandemic coordinator or team. this individual or team will lead the organization through various steps to become pandemic-ready. have them first conduct a vulnerability and risk assessment. that means identifying areas in which you are at heightened risk of infection or in which your responses or ability to compensate will probably be weak. armed with this knowledge, you should be able to prepare for worst-case scenarios and begin planning accordingly. . get your crisis management team up to speed. a crisis management team consists of senior employees who will deal full time with a crisis while the rest of the organization runs as normally as possible. the most effective crisis teams typically consist of no more than five members who serve as its decision-making leadership. crises are not situations for committees or consensus building. they demand swift and certain decisions and actions be made under "battlefield conditions." we strongly recommend that you have a "five-star general" heading up your team. . a crisis management team must possess sufficient inherent or delegated power to command unrestricted access to a full cross-section of corporate disciplines, including hr, sales, customer service, information technology (it), security, operations, facilities management, communications, department/business unit headsfrom every corner of your organization. the crisis managers must know who from these disciplines are to be brought on to support the crisis management team on an as-needed "on-demand" basis. note that these disciplines are for advice and support, not crisis decision making. give them full authority to carry them out. . the team should also include someone who will be company spokesperson throughout the crisis. ideally, the spokesperson should be a senior company executive. he or she should have received formal media training, and should have the stamina, self-discipline, and inner strength to be able to convey trust and believability when speaking during a time when bad news may need to be delivered to various audiences. . think about including external experts on your team. these could include public health consultants, doctors, hr consultants, and business continuity experts. no organization can hope to be crisis-ready unless it is prepared with messaging ready to be disseminated to audiences on short notice and under pressure. crisis messaging typically consists of fully or partially (fill-in-the-blanks type) prepared statements addressing a range of potential situations anticipated in advance. prepared organizations keep them in a template format. then, as a crisis develops and the actual facts of the situation become known, the relevant template can be rapidly updated with all pertinent information. in a crisis, you simply do not have time to agonize for long over "what are we supposed to say?" remember, it is only during the first minutes of a crisis that you have your one chance to take control of the situation via proactive communication. in that time, messages must be disseminated internally to staff and externally to the relevant audiences, such as customers, stockholders, suppliers, and partners, and possibly the media. businesses that conduct vulnerability and risk assessments will have a better idea of the templates and draft messaging they will need for a flu outbreak. these situations range from temporarily closing a site to announcing an interruption of service. the tone of all messaging must demonstrate that management is taking the situation seriously. employees are your first priority and must receive crisis-related messaging before anyone else. the media and relevant external stakeholders can then receive the same or similar messaging soon after. department heads in your company can be used to communicate directly with employees. employees should also be provided with messaging that they can share with others outside the organization. in today's "always-on" instantaneous online world, whatever employees are told invariably becomes public knowledge within minutes. from time to time, someone will ask a question that cannot be answered using prepared messaging. the crisis team must be prepared to reply "i don't know," and then either explain why, honestly and plainly, or commit to providing the answer at a given time in the future. nothing destroys trust and creates anger more than speculating or guessing at answers that may be proven wrong at a later stage. while you must respond quickly to all questions, you may not be able to answer them all. the crisis team must understand the difference. stakeholders want reassurance you are doing everything possible to manage the situation and communicating without a hidden agenda. if you intend to keep your business open and running during a significant event, say so. for credibility, communicate the steps that you are taking to ensure it is kept open. if you are asked questions and are uncertain about what will take place, acknowledge this honestly. make every effort to find the answer quickly and, when you have it, follow up as soon as possible. plan to work with third parties. adopting a go-it-alone attitude in dealing with a pandemic is needlessly dangerous. organizations are wise to be working with key third-party consultants to make crisis preparedness as robust as possible. key third parties could include: don't overlook your supply chains. companies providing each other with operations-critical products, goods, or services become inextricably linked. a problem in another company may cascade to yours, affecting your ability to meet contractual obligations. steps they take to stay in business may be beneficial or disruptive to you. knowing ahead of time will help you make appropriate arrangements or establish alternatives. cooperating with customers, partners, suppliers, and local governments helps you become pandemic-resilient. expert legal opinion must be obtained on how to address contractual obligations should a full scale pandemic break out. if you're prevented from delivering products or services and thus break legally binding contracts, customers/ partners could hold you liable for failing to plan adequately. such legal action could expand or precipitate a second crisis, when the media reports the legal action and you are forced to deal with a reputational crisis. during a pandemic, organizations must communicate effectively with all internal and external audiences. being ready to communicate proactively and at a moment's notice requires advance preparations. in all cases, employees are the most important communications targets during a crisis. friends and family will contact them along with many of their external business relationships (including the media) to ask "what's really going on?" and we know from experience that poorly briefed employees tend to speculate in the absence of solid information. this could easily precipitate a secondary crisis, forcing you to deal with rumor-mongering by employees and potentially false reporting by the media. either could cause serious damage. thus, you must designate in advance your primary or "official" internal communication channels, and let everyone in your organization know what they are. while face-to-face verbal communication is the best medium for internal audiences during a crisis, it may not be possible if h n strikes. depending on your specific situation, one of the following channels should be considered in order to communicate companywide: remember: what is written and given to employees can be passed on to the media and other parties. communication with all external stakeholders must be timely and accurate, with messages consistent with what is being communicated internally. messaging differences should be determined by relevance to the receiver. but be safe: when in doubt, overcommunicate. in a crisis, everyone wants more information, not less. if you had to communicate with % of your customers within minutes, could you? do you have up-to-date accurate contact information housed in databases that can support mass messaging such as blast e-mail or recorded voice messages with outbound autodialing? blast-fax? cell phone information for texting? nobody has time to build these contact databases once a crisis strikes. assemble them now. the best time to start communicating is when there is no crisis. a proactive information campaign could spearhead the opening of new channels of communication with your various external audiences prior to a crisis. the following external communication channels can be used proactively or reactively depending on the situation: while social media tools such as twitter, facebook, youtube, and blogs can play a role in crisis communication, at this time we believe they are not the tools best suited to be your primary or "official" communication channel to the outside world. especially for business organizations, social media are not yet universally accessible. but more importantly, they are not within your complete control. you must be extremely careful about what you say via social media, as it is very difficult to change anything after it has been sent out. it's the very nature of most crises that the situations and facts change, and change often. social media messages containing old information can too easily recirculate, causing misunderstandings and conflicts precisely at a time when they can do the most damage. a major h n breakout could devastate supply-and-value chains, and possibly close down entire industry sectors. this will prevent companies from providing or delivering much needed services. customers, partners, suppliers, and employees will feel a significant impact. there will also be financial repercussions. in short, a business could be forced to close down if it is not ready for all eventualities. to be truly resilient in a crisis, the organization must have an up-to-date business continuity plan detailing how it will restore its operating functions, either totally or partially, within a certain period of time. to achieve this, key decision makers must: • have an in-depth look at their company to identify essential functions needed to keep doors open. nonessential ones can be temporarily discontinued without impacting day-to-day operations. people with key skills that are important to the business during the pandemic must be identified and protected whenever possible. those with nonessential skills may be told not to report for work during the pandemic. • consider contingency plans to switch operations to other sites, if possible. • identify alternative suppliers that you can switch to at a moment's notice. your primary suppliers of utilities, goods, products and services may suddenly shut down because of poor planning. you should ask current suppliers to disclose what contingency plans they have in place to ensure the provision of uninterrupted service to you. put backup plans in place to switch to other/competing suppliers and contractors if you're the least bit unsure of their preparedness. • determine if their it systems are sufficiently robust so critical technology-dependent business processes would still function. even though more than one billion people travel via commercial aircraft every year, illness as a direct result of air transportation isn't common; however, there are risk exposures associated with air travel that both employers and travelers should be cognizant of in order to mitigate the risks when possible. most modern aircraft are equipped with hepa (high efficiency particulate air) filters, which, according to the european air filter efficiency classification, can be any filter element that has between % and . % removal efficiency. according to pall corporation, for aircraft cabin recirculation systems, the definition has been tightened by the aerospace industry to a standard of . % minimum removal efficiency. most modern aircraft provide a total change of aircraft cabin air to times per hour, passing through these hepa filters, which trap dust particles, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. many airlines have an airflow mix of approximately % outside air, and % recirculated, filtered air whereby the environmental control systems circulate the air in a compartmentalized fashion by pushing air into the cabin from the ceiling area, and taking it in at the floor level from side to side, versus air movement from the front to back of the aircraft. however, most viral respiratory, infectious diseases, such as influenza and the common cold, are transmitted via droplets that are most commonly transmitted between passengers by sneezing or coughing. these droplets can typically only travel only a few feet this way. however, it is their survival rate once they land on seats, seatbelts, tray tables, and other parts of the passenger cabin that can provide additional exposure, which is why sanitation of your personal seating area when traveling, particularly your hands with an alcohol-based sanitizer before eating, is important. surgical masks have been shown to reduce the spread of influenza in combination with hand sanitization, particularly when worn and practiced by the infected individual. viral outbreaks in recent years of concern to business travelers have included middle east respiratory syndrome (mers), severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars), and ebola, h n (swine flu), among others. the international air transport association (iata) has developed an "emergency response plan template" for air carriers during a public health emergency, which can be found at the following link: http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/safety/health/ documents/airlines-erp-checklist.pdf disinsection is the use of chemical insecticides on international flights for insect and disease control. international law allows disinsection and the world health organization (who) and the international civil aviation organization suggest methods for aircraft disinsection, which include spraying the aircraft cabin with an aerosolized insecticide while passengers are on board, or by treating aircraft interior surfaces with a residual insecticide when passengers are not on board. two countries, panama and american samoa, have adopted a third method for spraying aerosolized insecticide without passengers on board. not specific to just air travel, blood clots or dvt (deep vein thrombosis) can be a serious and potentially deadly health risk for any traveler with restricted mobility in an aircraft, car, bus, or train. anyone traveling for more than hours without sufficient movement can be at risk. many blood clots are not necessarily visible and can go away on their own, but when a part of one breaks off, there is the possibility of it traveling to your lungs, creating a pulmonary embolism, which could be deadly. in addition to traveler training on prevention of dvt, companies should take this threat into consideration with regards to international class of service policies or reimbursement consideration for upgrades. according to the u.s. centers for disease control (cdc), the level of dvt risk depends on whether you have any other risks of blood clots in addition to immobility, as well as the length or duration of travel. the cdc also states that most people who develop blood clots have one or more other risks for them, such as: • older age (risk increases after age years) civil unrest generally takes place when a group of people in a specific location is angry, resulting in protests and violence. around the world, there are countless incidents of civil unrest that erupt, which can not only cause inconvenience and safety concerns for business travelers, but can also cause mental and emotional stress for which the employer is ultimately responsible to try to limit the effects of whenever possible, and to treat as early as possible after the incident is over. within the first months of , the world saw civil unrest and protests in turkey, brazil, ukraine, thailand, venezuela, malaysia, cambodia, india, egypt, hong kong, russia, china, and the united states (excluding military acts of war or civil war). in january of , governments and private organizations from around the world began evacuating people from egypt due to civil unrest. approximately , americans lived and worked throughout egypt at the time, and approximately requested evacuation assistance from the u.s. government. such an exercise requires massive planning and resource availability, even for much smaller groups of people. consider the number of other companies competing for the same resources to evacuate their people, as well as the general public trying to leave. companies without a plan in place, along with proper strategic crisis response resources, would have been last in line to evacuate their impacted travelers and at greater risk for someone getting hurt or killed. at one time, civil unrest may have been considered primarily politically motivated, but today, there are many factors that lead to the spark that starts the fires of violence. things such as overpopulation, lack of food and resources, poverty versus wealth (income inequality), crime, lack of jobs and religious persecution, while sometimes related to political causes, are all reasons for the increased violence we see today. with the advent of mobile technology being increasingly available to the middle and lower classes of the world, it doesn't take much or long time-wise, to incite anger or hatred in others who can assemble quickly, sometimes before one has a chance to react. throughout the text of this book, readers should see a common theme about the importance of quality risk intelligence. the previous statement about violence breaking out before one can react, is a perfect example of how real, risk intelligence (not simply recycled news) can often predict these events as they are starting to come together and warn people in advance, so that companies and individuals can take steps to mitigate their exposure. in such examples, would employers and travelers want "cheap information" from a provider that primarily scrapes news wires on the internet, or qualified, vetted security analysts with thousands of sources? if a life depended on it, i'm confident that people would choose vetted intelligence. another way to understand the value of news versus intelligence is that "intelligence" is in effect "analysis + news + context + advice." experienced security analysts specializing in specific geographic areas and subject matter produce quality intelligence. climate change can also drive civil unrest with sea-level risings, damage to property, water shortages, and increased costs associated with lost productivity or infrastructure collapse. people simply go where the goods and the work are provided. when that is lost for various reasons over a large area, there can be mass migrations that sometimes see the intervention of military units to prevent border crossings and an unanticipated drain on other population's resources. property damage and serious violence in vietnam in may , as a result of anti-chinese protests, was experienced not only by chinese businesses, but by other assets owned by companies from additional countries. some manufacturing experienced an interruption to production, causing between percent and percent decreases in company share prices. these figures and insight are intended to support business cases for companies to invest in not just products and programs to avoid business disruptions caused by civil unrest and other factors, but the time required to simply have plans in place to mitigate the risk. imagine being in a foreign country on business and getting pulled over on the road in your rental car by a local police officer. unaware of any laws that you may have broken, after a quick discussion with the officer, you realize that they are extorting you for a bribe and you simply don't have the cash or the training to respond to the situation properly. alternatively, a traveler arrives in foreign country via a commercial flight, carrying marketing collateral and merchandise to give away at a conference that they are attending. the local customs authorities misinterpret part of your merchandise, because the conference is being held in a deeply religious country with harsh laws regarding morality. not only does the traveler fear for their safety, the company doesn't want to cause an international incident, which can be difficult to clean up. does your company provide resources and training to travelers regarding how to handle themselves in such situations? women from western countries may still find it hard to believe how many places in the world where their personal safety, and possibly their lives, can depend upon the length of their skirt and sleeves, or the time of day that they are out and about, particularly without a male escort. in , a woman from new york was found dead in turkey; a turkish man confessed to killing her after allegedly trying to kiss her. according to news reports, she was a first-time international traveler, an avid social media user, and was in constant contact with friends and family. it is reported that she wasn't off the beaten path or doing anything risky, simply taking photographs. sometimes just having some awareness training about your destination can save female travelers the potential for conflict or incident, such as holding one's purse in her lap or at her feet with a thick strap around her leg to secure it, or ensuring that luggage tags do not openly display addresses and have a cover that must be opened to reveal the information. according to joni morgan, director of analytic personnel at ijet international, "in some cultures, for instance, it's not appropriate for a woman to initiate a handshake." "in afghanistan, it's considered an insult to show the bottom of your shoe, so when crossing your legs, you want to be aware of that." female road warriors are learning important skills that are notably helpful in all destinations, but in some more than others, additional care should be taken. indications of when to take additional care is an important part of pretrip travel intelligence provided by an employer's trm program, supported by a vetted travel risk intelligence provider. some considerations for female business travelers while traveling alone or even with peers on business include the following: . always plan your route before going anywhere. never leave your hotel or office without understanding where you are going and appropriate routes. travelers do not want to look lost in the street looking at maps or their mobile devices for directions. . use vetted taxis or ground transportation providers. make an attempt to prebook all transportation with providers that your company has preapproved, and have appropriate security policies and procedures in place, such as identifiable car numbers, driver identification, tracking, and electronic order confirmation. removing the potential for unfamiliar, unvetted ground transportation providers can drastically reduce the potential for assault or abduction. can purchase a device to block the outside view of the inside of their hotel room by assailants who have devices that enable broad visibility inside hotel rooms from the outside via peepholes. in the absence of such a device, place tape or a sticker over the inside peephole opening. . choose your hotels carefully. make it clear to your employer that you take safety seriously and that you expect safety considerations to have been taken into account when designating preferred hotels for employees to stay at. employers should be able to articulate what kinds of safety standards go into their preferred hotel selections, which form the basis for how different incidents can be mitigated or handled should an incident occur. . never stay at hotels or motels where the room door is exposed to the open air (outside). . try to not accept hotel rooms on the ground floor. being on a higher floor makes it more difficult for an assailant to get away or not be seen on surveillance cameras. . never tell anyone your room number verbally. if a hotel employee asks for it, provide them with it in writing and personally hand it to them. do not write it on a check and leave it unattended. you don't want someone in the area to overhear you providing this information verbally or to view it on your check. . alcohol consumption-never leave your drink unattended or out of your sight. a momentary distraction is an opportunity for someone to place drugs into your drink. also, never drink until intoxicated while on business and be mindful of locations where drinking alcohol may even be illegal. . emergency phone numbers-know the equivalent of or the local emergency services phone number and your local consulate or embassy phone numbers and preprogram them into your mobile phone, in addition to your company's provided crisis response hotline. whichever number you are instructed to call first according to your company's policies (if your company provides a crisis hotline), having those numbers handy can save your life when moments count. . never tell anyone that you are traveling alone. avoid solitary situations. try to remain in social situations where plenty of people are around. if you feel uncomfortable, leave. . leave a tv or radio on when you leave your hotel room to provide the perception that someone is in the room. . never hesitate to ask security or someone to escort you to your room, and avoid exiting an elevator on your hotel room's floor when sharing the elevator with a man. if necessary, go back to the lobby level until more people get on the elevator or you can ride it alone. use valet parking. self-parking can often put individuals at risk of assault in unsupervised car parks or garages. . upon arrival at your hotel, take a hotel business card or postcard and keep it with you at all times. if ever you are away and need to return, and you either don't remember the address, or your driver doesn't know where it is, or you don't have a signal on your mobile device, you can use the card to provide address details (usually in the local language). . do not use door-hanging room service order forms (typically for breakfast), as they often note how many guests you are ordering for. . make sure you have adequate insurance. just because you are on a business trip, doesn't mean that your employer has obtained enough insurance or services to support you in the event that a crisis occurs. hopefully, employer-provided insurance and support services are adequate and have been effectively communicated, but don't travel for business without a thorough understanding of what kind of coverage and support you have. in particular, any medical coverage should guarantee advance payment to local service providers and not require travelers to pay for services and file for reimbursement upon their return home. most people don't have access to the many thousands of dollars that might be necessary to procure sufficient treatment and support. . travel with smart travel accessories. travel with a small, high-powered flashlight and one or more rubber door stops for the inside of your hotel room (be aware of the downside of using in case of a fire). . leave copies of your passport with someone at home who can easily get a copy to you if you need it. having a copy can expedite the replacement of a lost or stolen passport if needed. an honor killing is a homicide of a family member, typically by another family member, based upon the premise that the victim has brought dishonor or shame to the family, in such a way that violates religious and/or cultural beliefs. again, as with religious or cultural restrictions on modest clothing, honor killings are not exclusive to women, but within the cultures and countries where honor killings are more generally accepted, men are more commonly the sources or perpetrators of the revenge or honor killings, very often charged by the family to watch over and police female family member behavior, restricting or prohibiting things such as adultery, refusal to accept an arranged marriage, drinking alcohol, or homosexuality. honor killings are not exclusive to any one country or religious faith, because they are found in a broad scope of cultures, religions, and countries. although more common in places such as the middle east and asia, there have been documented cases of honor killings in the united states and europe. if honor killings were based largely on the premise of family honor, why would nonfamily members or business travelers need to be concerned? honor killings have been known to happen to nonfamily members in strict, culturally conservative countries. perceived inappropriate behavior, typically with a female member of a conservative family, could result in the killing of the female family member and the nonfamily suspect. such killings can even take place in broad daylight. in lahore, pakistan in , one such incident occurred involving multiple participants while the police looked on. the victim killed for marrying a man that she loved without family consent. often these crimes are hard to document or record because they are disguised as suicides or, in some latin american countries, as "crimes of passion." the united nations fund for population activities (unfpa) estimates that as many as women fall victim to honor killings each year. article of qatar's constitution states that it is a "duty of all" who resides in or enters the country to "abide by public order and morality, observe national traditions and established customs." this means that wearing clothing considered indecent or engaging in public behavior that is considered obscene is prohibited to all, including visitors. in qatar, the punishment could be a fine and up to months in prison. with kissing or any kind of physical intimacy in public, as well as homosexuality, being outlawed under sharia law, all travelers to or via the middle east for business or tourism purposes (e.g., to attend the world cup), should take heed. the qatar islamic cultural centre has launched the "reflect your respect" social media campaign to promote and preserve qatar's culture and values. posters and leaflets advise visitors, "if you are in qatar, you are one of us. help preserve qatar's culture and values, please dress modestly in public places." while research finds no definition in qatar's article for modest clothing, campaigns such as this suggest that people cover up from their shoulders to their knees and avoid wearing leggings. they are not considered pants or modest dress. an example of the campaign leaflet can be found in "qatar launches campaign for 'modest' dress code for tourists" published by the independent (uk newspaper). modest dress applies to both men and women. of course, strict laws, preferences or rules regarding dress expectations for women are not exclusive to any one country. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / what-is-appropriate-attire-for-women-in-muslim-countries/. while each employer may have specific approaches to handling an incident such as sexual assault, there must be a defined process for reporting such an event that involves crisis response resources that can intervene and provide advice on how to handle the situation with local authorities, perhaps first by contacting diplomatic contacts before contacting the police. facing local authorities alone in a foreign country for such a sensitive issue as sexual assault can be daunting and intimidating nbc news, "family stones pakistani woman to death in 'honor killing' outside court," may , , http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/family-stones-pakistani-woman-death-honor-killing-outsidecourt-n . united nations, resources for speakers on global issues, "violence against women and girls: ending violence against women and girls," http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/endviol/. lizzie dearden, "qatar launches campaign for 'modest' dress code for tourists," independent, may , , http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/qatar-launches-campaign-for-modest-dresscode-for-tourists- .html. without a company or diplomatic representative being there to assist. crisis response suppliers should be equipped with necessary contacts, recommended protocols, and resources to help the victim and employer to address the situation and get help as soon as possible. this is another good example of why employers should have a single global crisis response hotline for any crisis that a traveler may encounter while on business travel. sexual harassment can happen anywhere. what happens if you require a traveler to use a supplier per the company's travel policy, and a representative of that supplier sexually harasses the traveler? in addition to standard protocols within the workplace, considerations must be given to business travel, which from many perspectives today is an extension of the workplace. a hate crime is a criminal act of violence targeting people or property that is motivated by hatred or prejudice toward victims, typically as part of a group, based upon creed, race, gender, or sexual orientation. a critical component of any trm program is disclosure of potential risks to the traveler prior to taking a trip to a destination. in consideration of laws and cultural beliefs in select countries or regions that sanction the persecution, imprisonment or killing of members of the lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community, specific races, religions, or sex (mainly women), travelers must be prepared a female business traveler, over the course of several months on a project, travels during the week, returning home on weekends. over time, a car rental clerk at the location she rented from weekly, began making comments to her about her appearance each time she checked-in or returned a car. eventually, the rental clerk began calling her mobile phone to share how he liked what she was wearing and began sending her text messages while she was in town, using the mobile number she provided at check-in. not responding and scared, the traveler canceled all future reservations and books rental cars with another provider. shortly thereafter, the clerk began calling and texting her, asking why she canceled and when she would be coming back. a concerned colleague of the traveler brought the situation to the company's travel manager, who intervened with their human resources and legal departments to proactively address the situation with the authorities and the supplier, and to provide appropriate support for the traveler as best they could. the end result, after much investigation, was the issuance of restraining orders against the clerk and termination of his employment. it turned out that the supplier hadn't done sufficient background checks on its employees and the clerk in question had a history of similar behavior. with information and training on acceptable behavior when traveling to these destinations and understand how to get help should they find themselves in a difficult position or a potential victim of a hate crime. saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or wearing something inappropriate, or acting a certain way that isn't culturally acceptable in some parts of the world, can put travelers in real danger. how does your company prepare your travelers for facing these challenges as they travel? while some laws that promote discrimination that can lead to hate crimes are more notable in the press, such as the antigay propaganda law put into place in russia prior to the sochi olympics, some are less obvious to the average business traveler, such as up to years in prison in nigeria for simply being gay, or india's supreme court ban on gay sex, or the execution of homosexuals in saudi arabia. in april , an -year-old man wearing islamic dress was attacked and killed while walking home from his mosque in birmingham, uk, by a -year-old ukrainian student who told police that he murdered the victim because he hated "nonwhites." according to "one in six gay or bisexual people has suffered hate crimes, poll reveals," a article in the the guardian (uk), some , gay and bisexual people in the uk have been victims of hate crimes in the previous years, prompting police to take the problem more seriously. such examples continue to support the notion that a crisis doesn't need to be an incident that impacts large numbers of people at once. quite often they involve one person at a time, and they don't need to take place in a high-risk destination, thus discounting the argument by some companies that trm isn't necessary for those who don't travel to high-risk destinations. a crisis can happen anywhere for many different reasons, affecting as few as one person at a time. although privacy laws generally prohibit companies from asking employees about sexual orientation, making sure that all employees (of any sexual orientation) understand the dangers that face lgbt travelers, can help to mitigate risks for themselves (if lgbt, traveling with an lgbt person, or if perceived as lgbt) or their fellow travelers, considering that there are many countries still in the world where homosexuality is a crime. • in mauritania, sudan, northern nigeria, and southern somalia, individuals found guilty of "homosexuality" face the death penalty. the last five years have witnessed attempts to further criminalize homosexuality in uganda, south sudan, burundi, liberia, and nigeria. • south africa has also seen at least seven people murdered between june and november in what appears to be targeted violence related to their sexual orientation or gender identity. five of them lesbian women and the other two were non gender-conforming gay men. • in cameroon, jean-claude roger mbede was sentenced to three years in prison for 'homosexuality' on the basis of a text message he sent to a male acquaintance. • in cameroon, people arrested on suspicion of being gay can be subjected to forced anal exams in an attempt to obtain 'proof' of same-sex sexual conduct. • in most countries, laws criminalizing same-sex conduct are a legacy of colonialism, but this has not stopped some national leaders from framing homosexuality as alien to african culture. • a cave painting in zimbabwe depicting male-male sex is over years old. • historically, woman-woman marriages have been documented in more than ethnic groups in africa, including in nigeria, kenya, and south sudan. • in some african countries, conservative leaders openly and falsely accuse lgbti (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) individuals of spreading human immunodeficiency virus (hiv)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids) and of "converting" children to homosexuality and thus increasing levels of hatred and hostility towards lgbti people within the broader population. lgbti individuals are more likely to experience discrimination when accessing health services. this makes them less likely to seek medical care when needed, making it harder to undertake hiv prevention work for, and to deliver treatment where it is available. in many government programs they are not identified as an "at risk" same-sex marriage laws restricting freedom of expression and association kidnapping and ransom activities targeting military enemies and employees of multinational companies who are from countries considered to be enemies to terrorist causes, are the primary fundraising strategies of organized terrorist groups. even for companies that do not routinely visit high-risk locations, having some sort of policy in place for proof of life, which is the means for verifying that a captive is in fact who the captors say they are and that the captive is still alive, such as by providing information that only the alleged victim would know, can save valuable time in a sensitive situation and perhaps someone's life. additionally, a kidnap and ransom insurance policy is something for all companies to consider, with an understanding that kidnappings happen at anytime around the world, and largely go unreported. according to the guardian news and media (uk), approximately % of fortune companies have kidnap and ransom (k&r) insurance. k&r insurance originates from , when it was first offered by insurance provider lloyd's of london, after the kidnapping and murder of american aviator charles lindbergh's infant son. in , the uk's home secretary, theresa may, supported and passed the uk's "counter-terrorism and security act of ," which prohibits insurers from paying claims used to finance payments to terrorist groups. the uk is where many of the world's k&r insurers operate. many insurers insist that it shouldn't matter because they claim to not pay or finance ransoms, but instead pay claims for services and expenses related to negotiating the release of the captives in question, medical and counseling treatment, along with things such as employee salaries while in captivity. it's difficult to obtain information from clients who hold such policies, because most policies have strict cancelation provisions to prevent a company from disclosing the fact that it has such a policy. details specific to restrictions on insurance related payments associated with terrorist related ransoms in the uk's counter-terrorism act of can be found at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ / /section/ /enacted. companies with any travel to high-risk destinations have a responsibility to provide some kind of survival training for those travelers, in addition to access to resources and provision of current intelligence before, during, and sometimes after their travel is complete. to complicate matters, based upon a g summit, an agreement was made to not pay ransoms to kidnappers for fear that the money was directly funding terrorist organizations; therefore, some countries, such as the uk, are enacting laws to prohibit the transfer of funds for hostages in certain circumstances or locations. senior foreign and commonwealth office (fco) officials in the uk estimate over $ million has been paid in ransoms to terrorists during the years leading up to the report. it isn't safe to assume that your government will help bankroll your hostages' release if you find yourself in such a situation, and you may face criminal prosecution if you offer a ransom to specific groups. people who commit kidnappings do so for a variety of reasons, including political or religious views, but most often they are purely financially motivated. perception is everything, so identifying traveling employees of large or multinational companies, makes them an easy target, thus the reason for using code names for arriving ground transportation signs. of course, how one dresses and where one goes, also have an impact on how victims are targeted (i.e., wearing expensive jewelry, standing out from the crowd in expensive clothing or making it clear that you work for a large multinational company [clothing with logos or meeting drivers with company names on greeting placards]). later in this book, kidnappings are explored in greater detail. some statistics will be presented that both companies and travelers should find serious enough to change their perception about the possibility of kidnapping happening to them. kidnapping incidents should be accounted for in all corporate crisis response plans. while some medical emergencies may require the need for evacuation, it is more common to receive calls for assistance involving acute or preexisting conditions that can be diagnosed and treated locally. lost or stolen medication, allergic reactions to food or the environment, and unexpected illnesses, are common occurrences when calling a corporate crisis response hotline. however, in some instances, individuals must be quickly assessed to determine if adequate medical care can be obtained locally, and if not, a decision must be made to evacuate that person to the closest logical facility capable of treating the individual. many domestic health insurance plans do not provide coverage for individuals traveling abroad, and often when they do, they require out of pocket expenditures for services; in other words upfront payment by the patient, leaving the patient to file for reimbursement upon the patient's return. more often than not, in these circumstances, this equates to thousands of dollars that most people do not have immediate access to, especially on short notice. the cdc recommends that if domestic u.s. coverage applies, and supplemental coverage is being considered, the following characteristics should be considered when examining coverage for planned trips: • exclusions for treating exacerbations of preexisting medical conditions. the company's policy for "out of network" services. • coverage for complications of pregnancy (or for a neonate, especially if the newborn requires intensive care). • exclusions for high-risk activities such as skydiving, scuba diving, and mountain climbing. • exclusions regarding psychiatric emergencies or injuries related to terrorist attacks or acts of war. • whether preauthorization is needed for treatment, hospital admission, or other services. • whether a second opinion is required before obtaining emergency treatment. • whether there is a -hour physician-backed support center. additionally, one should have coverage for repatriation of mortal remains, should someone covered unfortunately die while away from their home country. because so many domestic healthcare plans do not provide for international coverage and evacuations services, companies must provide comprehensive coverage for their employees globally and employees should be fully aware of what is included in said coverage. employees may decide that what the company offers is not enough by their personal standards and consider purchasing additional coverage to supplement what the company provides. when purchasing different types of travel-related insurance, it's important to understand the differences between the different products offered in the marketplace, especially the differences between consumer and business travel products. options can include: . travel insurance, which provides trip cancellation coverage for the cost of the trip, delays or interruptions, and lost luggage coverage. it can and often does provide some amount of emergency medical and evacuation coverage, but often requires payment of medical expenses by the insured in the country where services are rendered (versus direct payment by the insurer), and the filing of paperwork for reimbursement upon the insured's return home. buyers should be mindful of whether or not the policy provides guaranteed payment directly to the suppliers in question. . generally, some consumer based travel health insurance pays for specified or covered emergency medical expenses while abroad; however, such insurance (and others) may require that the individual pay any medical expenses in the country where services are rendered and file for reimbursement upon the individual's return home. insured parties should always check whether guaranteed payment to providers is included in coverage, as with some consumer-based travel insurance. medical evacuation coverage is for medical transport to either the closest available treatment facility or the insured's home country for medical attention, depending upon the policy and the situation or medical condition. considering the cost of medical evacuations, depending upon the distance and the services required for the transport, expenses can vary greatly, but can be very costly. it is recommended that policies have greater than us$ , in coverage (some provide up to us$ , or more), and include transportation support for an accompanying loved one or family member. policies with less than us$ , in coverage should be reconsidered for possibly not providing enough coverage. buyers should note that these products cover primarily just the evacuation and not medical services or treatments. . medical membership programs can cater to individual travelers on a per-trip or annual basis or on a companywide basis. these programs can vary widely by provider and membership type, but can potentially provide access to network services resources with separate liability for payment, or network access with some coverage for payment of specified services rendered based upon premiums and policy guidelines. the lii at cornell university law school provides a third-party overview of workers' compensation. variable forms of this type of coverage are provided at both the state and federal levels in the united states, with similar forms of workers' compensation laws also in place in select countries around the world. these laws are typically intended to provide some form of medical benefits and wage replacement for employees who are injured on the job. this coverage is often provided to employees in exchange for releasing their right to sue their employer for negligence, sometimes with fixed limits on payment of damages. employers need to understand whether the workers' compensation coverage that is applicable and in place for their and their employees' protection, covers international travel. in some cases, additional policies or riders will be required to provide coverage for travel outside of the traveler's home country or state. additional considerations to this kind of coverage should be as to "when" and "where" the coverage is in effect outside of a company office or facility (e.g., business travel). in some cases this may limit employer liability, but whether it does varies by jurisdiction and circumstance. considering how workers' compensation benefits have been reduced in recent years, especially in the united states, much consideration needs to be given to assessing what coverage is needed for traveling employees above and beyond workers' compensation, and coordinated with crisis response protocols and risk management support providers for efficient case management, claims, and documentation. all of these considerations provide a strong business case for why employers should have unique and specific programs in place for medical services and evacuations for employees and contractors traveling abroad in addition to their standard domestic health care plans and workers' compensation plans. no traveler should embark on a business trip without the complete confidence that medical coverage and resources not requiring their personal, out-of-pocket expenditure is being provided by their employer. a study that included disclosures from institutional investors, representing us$ trillion in assets, provided by sustainable-economy nonprofit gross domestic product (gdp), stated that in addition to increased physical risks that are being caused by climate change, climate change is already impacting their bottom line. one major uk retailer has stated that percent of its global fresh produce is already at risk from global warming. according to the french foreign minister, commenting at a un conference in japan, two-thirds of disasters stem from climate change. comments were made days after the -year anniversary of the fukushima nuclear disaster that killed approximately , people in from an earthquake and tsunami. margareta wahlstrom, the head of the un disaster risk reduction agency, stated that preventative measures provided a very good return as compared to reconstruction. un secretary general ban ki-moon asked world nations to spend us$ billion dollars a year on prevention. an important aspect of both a company's trm and business continuity plan is to determine what are the unique dangers or risks associated with where your offices or facilities are located, as well as where you travel to on a regular basis, making emergency evacuation and safety plans in the event that a unique incident occurs, such as the following case study related to the japanese earthquake and tsunami. it is important to know what local governments have made available in close proximity to your travelers' or expats' locations in terms of resources, or something that your company itself may provide, such as "vertical evacuation points" to escape rising tsunami flood waters. these vertical evacuation points may be in a building that is tall enough to support large numbers of the local population at a high water level, with ample support systems and supplies. not understanding and communicating these plans to your people when appropriate could exact a cost in lives, money, and corporate reputation. * american red cross, "japan earthquake and tsunami: one year update, march ," http:// www.redcross.org/images/media_customproductcatalog/m _japanearthquaketsunami_ oneyear.pdf. on march , , a . magnitude earthquake created a -foot tsunami. more than , people died or were presumed dead, with more than , people evacuated and more than . million people impacted across the country.* for the first time in more than years, iceland's eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted on march , , with massive lava flows and ash clouds that closed most of europe's commercial air space for several days, but then the ashcloud spread to other parts of the world, stranding millions of air travel passengers. based upon the composite map from the london volcanic ash advisory centre for the period april to , , one can clearly see the massive geographic scale of this incident, and why almost all commercial and private air transportation was prohibited and severe shortages of lodging and emergency shelters occurred. whether or not you believe in climate change and the reasons behind it, the statistics demonstrating the depletion of the world's ice sheets and glaciers, warmer ocean waters, and consistent year-over-year sea-level increases, will touch most multinational companies profoundly in the st century. the new york times states that sea levels worldwide are expected to rise to feet by the year , but rates are not occurring evenly worldwide. the times' referenced study states that the atlantic seaboard could rise by up to feet, with boston, new york, and norfolk, virginia, named as the three most vulnerable areas. if current warming trends and rising sea levels continue, cities such as london, bangkok, new york, shanghai and mumbai could eventually end up under water according to greenpeace, displacing millions of people and causing massive economic damage. consider a weather event the size of 's hurricane sandy, which tips the scales of expected water levels in a low-lying urban city, and results in the displacement of thousands or millions of people, with your travelers or expatriates stuck in the middle of it. when evacuation is not an immediate option, questions regarding the availability of safe accommodation, power, food, and water become priorities as demand far outweighs supply under such circumstances. these occurrences are much more common now than in our recent past. whether working in their local office or manufacturing facility, or traveling for business, many companies have employees with disabilities. although building or facility laws and rules may require designated escape routes, ramps, and elevators/lifts in the event of an emergency such as a fire, what about plans for when a disabled traveler is in transit or at a hotel? special considerations need to be made for disabled travelers in the event of a medical or security-related evacuation, such as: the need to relocate travelers can be caused by any number of factors, but before the decision to evacuate is made (usually at considerably more expense than traditional commercial air travel), someone with access to quality intelligence has to make the call as to whether to "shelter in place," assuming safe shelter is available, or to evacuate to the closest safe location. nonmedical causes for evacuation could be biohazards (e.g., the fukushima nuclear facility damage in japan), or civil unrest, or incoming natural disasters. to evacuate or not to evacuate requires thoughtful planning and resources, in order to insure that companies aren't competing with the rest of the world in a reactive situation where many others were caught off guard as well. ijet case study-ijet and the south sudan evacuations in december , ijet international provided continuous monitoring, intelligence, and analysis of the situation involving heavy ethnic fighting in south sudan to existing clients with operations in the country. support included providing real-time situational updates, establishing direct lines of communications with client personnel, and arranging for safe havens and security evacuations. on december , , the situation worsened to include the closure of the juba international airport. during the first days of fighting, prior to the airport closure, more than people were killed and more than wounded in the violence. during this time, several client personnel traveled across the country's borders to safe havens, but soon after the airport closure, with mounting concerns about large numbers of refugees, those borders quickly closed. ijet successfully evacuated its clients within the first hours of the airport's reopening, bringing in a -seat light-passenger aircraft from nairobi, kenya, performing some of the first successful group evacuations from this incident without injury. the ijet case study excerpt is an example of why a company's trm program cannot consist of technology alone, and discounted news being marketed as intelligence. in situations like these, quality intelligence is what saves people's lives. in this instance, quality intelligence was critical to the coordination of ijet's incident management team's on-the-ground services and support, which lead to not only evacuating its clients, but knowing when was the right time to move its clients to the airport and into the air. some medical evacuation services do not provide security-based evacuations, while some can offer both. companies should consider that one provider for both medical and security services and support, intelligence and insurance, might not always be the best solution. some companies select one provider for their terms and coverage for medical services, support, and evacuations, but another provider for security-related intelligence, services, and evacuations. there are even those companies with multiple providers for each medical and security service in different parts of the world, working with completely separate insurance providers to pay for the services rendered. each company must consider the coverage and resources currently available to them via their existing insurance relationship, and then solicit proposals for coverage based upon a clear outline of what the company needs are based upon claims history. ultimately, companies need a program that can coordinate with all contracted services and insurers, providing a seamless experience for travelers and administrators, and consolidated documentation. the term "open booking" refers to a booking made by a traveler that was made outside of their managed corporate travel program, avoiding usage of any contracted travel management company (tmc). technical advances have found ways to incorporate reservations data from multiple websites or suppliers for a traveler's trips into one place for reporting and calendar population. however, to properly capture this data, there are two primary methods available. the first is to allow the applications the ability to scan our inbox for travel-related e-mails and import the data accordingly. the second method is having travelers or independent suppliers e-mail reservation confirmations to an application or "parser," which can parse the data into a standardized database. with some major travel suppliers (such as airlines, for example) there are "direct connections" from their websites to some of these applications. however, in the absence of a direct connection, if you cannot get beyond the security concerns of a third-party application scanning your inbox, one cannot guarantee the automatic capture of percent of open booking data because of human error. for that reason and many others relative to policy and program management, and because of the high probability of human error, for effective trm, open booking should not be promoted as a primary booking method within a managed travel program. however, there is a place for open booking technology within a managed travel program: to help capture data from travel data normally considered "leakage," which is often not collected for reporting. such data can originate from conference-or meeting-based bookings made via housing authorities or meeting planners, or perhaps for travel that is booked and paid for by a client. companies who allow open booking for all travel struggle to effectively locate travelers in a crisis, disclose any potential risks or alerts, or provide services to some travelers in the event of a crisis. outside of suppliers with direct connections to open booking applications or parsers, even when your travelers are trained to e-mail those open booking itineraries to the required application for data capture, employers have no control over when they do this. within a managed program (via most tmcs), all new bookings, modifications and cancelations are usually updated in the database in real time or close to it, providing employers with ample opportunities to mitigate risk in a number of ways when time is of the essence. some well-known companies, offering travel-related solutions, claim that open bookings equate to more traveler choice and that their solutions can bridge the gap for any potentially missing data. when using an open booking application's itinerary data for security purposes, changes and cancelations can be a major issue. some applications require user intervention to manually delete trips that have been canceled, or to resubmit trips for changes unless an update can be e-mailed or picked up by an e-mail scan. consider a situation where a trip is booked and ticketed via an airline website, the itinerary is e-mailed to the traveler, who either allows their inbox to be scanned or they forward the e-mail to the open booking application. days later, the traveler needs to cancel that booking and rebook with another airline to travel with someone else from the company. the arrangements are made with the new airline, but the traveler forgets to delete the original trip in the open booking application. now there are two trips in the system for the traveler. imagine the confusion this could cause with employers if similar circumstances impacted multiple employees at the same time? a good managed travel program can still provide a variety of options, including easy methods of making reservations, yet still capture critical reservations data needed to effectively manage risk for business travelers. trying to manage risk with a completely unmanaged booking process for the sake of open booking, even if it did offer more traveler choice, is not worth the risk, considering that in a crisis you have a higher likelihood of inaccurate data unlike if the traveler had booked via your managed program (via a contracted tmc working in conjunction with your trm provider). does that mean that managed program data is perfect? no, but if implemented properly, reservations data can be more tightly controlled. on january , , when us airways flight went down in the hudson river in new york city, a regional office for an employer received a phone call from an employee's relative who was hysterical, insisting that his family member was on that plane. the office in question contacted their tmc, but was unable to obtain any information on the traveler, so they then turned to the travel manager. by this time, the inquiring family member had intentions of coming into the office because he wanted "some answers," for which there were none at the time. human resources suggested that the relative contact the crisis response hotline, while dispatching security to the office in question to protect the facility and its personnel. human resources also advised the person to stay home for any communications, and for their safety, considering the person was so upset. it turns out that the traveler in question was on a legitimate business trip, but that the traveler had purchased the trip online (outside of the employer's managed program), with the traveler's personal credit card, and without using an open booking application for itinerary data capture. because of this situation, it was difficult or nearly impossible to get helpful intelligence to the traveler or the traveler's family or to provide adequate resources and support, and had there been a death or severe bodily injury involved, the traveler wouldn't have been eligible for their corporate credit card's accidental death and dismemberment (ad&d) coverage. consider the personal losses of a business traveler whose hotel room was just broken into. what if as a result of such a theft, the traveler's identity was stolen? will your company support the needs of the traveler to ensure that the traveler's assets and identity are preserved? the traveler wouldn't have been where the traveler was if it weren't for the business trip! identity theft has reached epidemic proportions globally, with plenty of statistics published by consumer advocacy groups and government agencies, such as the u.s. federal trade commission. the u.s. federal trade commission's consumer sentinel network data book listed identity theft as the top reported complaint by consumers for the th year in a row, with approximately , complaints. the act of traveling for business presents many opportunities for a traveler to be exposed to scam artists looking to steal the traveler's identity. while taking precautions may be inconvenient and time consuming, there are many things that business travelers can do to reduce their chances of having their personal information stolen, such as: • keep a copy of all account numbers and relative account information in a safe place that is separate from where debit and credit cards are kept. • put mail and newspaper delivery on hold. this can prevent mail theft or an indication that the person is away, which can lead to the person's home being robbed. • don't travel with a checkbook; use only credit cards and cash. • don't use debit cards as pins (personal identification numbers) can be stored in some card reader devices and if the information is stolen, criminals could steal all of the cash available in the account(s) linked to the debit card. • notify credit card issuers prior to travel, especially if traveling internationally, so that they can authorize legitimate charges and notify the card holder promptly if activity on the account doesn't match their records. • use vpns (virtual private networks) when using the internet. if the traveler's company doesn't provide one, the traveler should purchase their own annual subscription. what if your employee had prescription medicine that may have black market value and it got taken as well? now, a theft has turned into a potential medical issue. ask yourself the following: • some medicines cannot be refilled before their due date, and other medicines are not easily refilled before their due dates. do you have the resources and support available globally ( × × ) to get those medicines replaced? • do you have the means to get the traveler replacement medicine before the traveler experiences any serious medical issues? • what kind of medical support do you have available, particularly outside of the traveler's home country, should the traveler need immediate medical attention? having someone steal property from your hotel room or safe is bad enough, but when theft has happened, the event itself ends quickly. but if your computer is hacked, the problem could linger in many ways. hotels are ideal places for business travelers to fall victim to hackers who not only may want access to some of your intellectual property, but to your identity as well. referenced in subsequent chapters, there are tips about using hotel and public access wi-fi, if you must use them. however, by whatever means you access the internet while on business travel (e.g., personal hotspot, or wi-fi with vpn, or other tools), try to not conduct any financial transactions or to log into financial-related websites while traveling. losing personal passwords to e-mail accounts or other personal use websites can not only be financially damaging to the individual, but can occasionally be humiliating when private information is made public. the most important thing to remember when faced with a mugging or pickpocketing incident is to not resist in the event of any confrontation and do not pursue assailants. things can be replaced, but not your life or well-being. your first priority should be to get away to a safe place, typically a business or well-lit public place with lots of people, where you can contact the authorities. according to the united states cdc (centers for disease control and prevention), the percentage of adults aged - , during the years to : • percent of persons using - prescription drugs in the past days: . % • percent of persons using five or more prescription drugs in the past days: . % source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus .pdf# according to a report by cbs news atlanta, approximately in americans use prescription drugs. consider that with such a large percentage of the working population taking prescription medications regularly, people taking medications need a basic understanding and awareness to always do their research prior to international travel about bringing the drugs with them into another country. in general, most countries allow up to a -day supply of legitimately prescribed medications, in their original bottle. more than days of prescription medication on a traveler can be considered a violation of many country's laws, particularly when it comes to controlled substances, such as narcotic pain medication or psychotropic drugs. in some cases, it simply isn't enough to carry the original prescription bottles with medication in them; travelers may be required to carry additional documentation along with having filed advance approval forms to be in compliance with the jurisdiction in question. in particular, narcotics or psychotropic drugs must have extensive paperwork prepared by your doctor and submitted to the government of the country that you are visiting well in advance of travel, in order to process your paperwork for approval. employers must consider providing this kind of information to travelers with their pretrip briefings or risk reports, where applicable. the possibility of medicine being confiscated and/or criminal charges filed against someone for lack of approval to transport controlled substances into some countries is very real, and could cost someone their life if stranded on international travel without their medicine. tclara, a travel data analytics firm, has developed a scoring system to track how much wear and tear each traveler accumulates from his or her travels. the goal is to predict which road warriors are at the highest risk of burnout, so that management can intervene in a timely manner. the system uses a company's managed travel data to score a dozen factors found in each traveler's itineraries. trip friction points are assigned to factors such as the length of the flight, the cabin, the number of connections and time zones crossed, the time and day of week of each flight, etc. this allows for traveler-specific and companyspecific benchmarking, which in turn helps senior executives to influence travel policy, procurement strategy, and traveler behavior to optimize a managed travel program. push travelers through too many pain points, and the traveler may soon find reasons to not take the next trip. for example, think about flying coach from chicago to singapore, or taking a short haul connection for a lower fare. tighten the travel policy too much, and you could have recruiting and retention problems, which could have serious cost or business implications. companies shouldn't focus solely on minimizing the transaction cost of their trips; instead, they should focus on minimizing the total cost of traveling. that's the sum of the trip's transaction cost plus the cost of traveler friction (the black curve in the figure below) or the "total cost paradigm." to put trip friction into perspective, tclara provides two trip examples (refer to the figure below) showing a low level of trip friction in "trip a" versus a higher level in "trip b." according to tclara (refer to the figure below), their data shows a correlation between trip friction and higher numbers of road warrior or frequent traveler turnover. trip friction is clearly correlated with higher road warrior turnover. while strong travel policies under managed corporate travel programs are critical to successful trm (versus unmanaged, open booking allowances), there is a delicate balance between cost savings, safety, traveler satisfaction, and, very importantly, business continuity. trip friction and traveler friction are good examples of the link between trm and operational risk management (see chapter ), which shows how losses of productivity or employees managed under the guise of trm can impact company production and/or success. personal well-being of travelers might be the most surprising of topics for consideration, but it certainly is relevant in context with trm programs today. believe it or not, employers must be as cognizant of their employees' or contractor's mental wellbeing as of their physical safety. stressed out, tired, or even unhappy employees can represent lower productivity and a higher threat of risk. from something as simple as knowingly requiring someone to work in a stressful environment without trying to make it better, or just working them to excess, can cause an employee to suffer various forms of posttraumatic stress or depression. however, it can also be as extreme as requiring employees to work in a stressful situation without being properly trained or counseled, as was the case with some flight attendants who may have been forced to immediately fly again out of new york after witnessing the / attacks, when the commercial flights began operating again, without consideration of stress or trauma, proper treatment, and counseling. to the extent that employers monitor and evaluate the physical safety of employees or contractors in the workplace, they must now take notice of the level of employee/contractor stress and contribute to overall happiness. it turns out that employees with high states of well-being have lower health care costs. it's unfortunate that employers must usually see a financial benefit associated with such things before implementing them, but in addition to health care costs, if people are happier and healthier, it stands to reason that they are also more productive. the cwt solutions group conducted a study to shed light on the hidden costs of business travel caused by travel-related stress. their aim was to understand and measure how and to what extent traveler stress accumulates during regular business trips. they defined a methodology and a set of key performance indicators (kpis) to estimate the impact that this travel-induced stress has on an organization (see "the carlson wagonlit travel solutions group study"). the scope of the study includes data from million business trips booked and recorded by carlson wagonlit travel (cwt) over a -year period. they followed a divide-and-conquer approach: each trip was conceptually broken down into potentially stressful activities covering pretrip, during trip (transportation-and destination-related elements), and posttrip. associated stress was measured based on the duration and the perceived stress intensity for each activity. in essence, each of the steps of the trip was viewed as having two components: stress-free time and lost time. to quantify the effects of stress, we introduced the following kpis [key performance indicators]: the travel stress index (tsi) across all trips booked through cwt is %. our results show that the actual lost time is . hours per trip, on average. the largest contributions to this lost time arise from flying economy class on medium and long-haul flights ( . hours) and getting to the airport/train station ( . hours). the financial equivalent of this . hours is us$ . the lost time greatly depends on the type of trip taken: an increase in the transportation time typically generates an increase in the lost time. the average actual lost time values by trip type are: finally, the study indicates that the impact of stress can be reduced, but not entirely eliminated. they analyzed the tsi on a client-by-client basis and found out that companies can expect to control, on average, percent of the actual lost time. in a previous publication [ref . ] , cwt solutions group presented the perceived stress reported for activities related to a typical business trip. the current study incorporates of these factors (table . ), including nine of the be provided directly to suppliers for services as needed, or will prepayment be required by the family or loved ones, only to request reimbursement later? if it can be avoided, such understanding can reduce stress associated with paperwork, authorizations, and payment. according to the cornell university law school, in general terms, intellectual property is any product of the human intellect that the law protects from unauthorized use by others. the ownership of intellectual property inherently creates a limited monopoly in the protected property. intellectual property is traditionally comprised of four categories: patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets. in summary, if you are in business, you likely have some intellectual property to protect. it could be an idea, or simply a process that you use, which gives you a competitive edge. most people think of a stolen laptop or mobile phone when they think of vehicles for stolen intellectual property, but a far more common vehicle is a flash drive, which most business travelers carry with them today on business trips and aren't monitored or regulated in the same manner as phones, computers, or tablets. companies should either limit the use of flash drives to those drives that have some level of fips (u.s. federal information processing standard) to encrypt the data and/or destroy the data should the drive be tampered with physically in an attempt to access its contents. information on current fips standards (fips - ) and announcements regarding the upcoming fips - standard, can be found by visiting http://csrc.nist.gov/ groups/stm/cmvp/standards.html# . many companies have policies specific to certain countries whereby, when travelers intend to visit the countries in question, the travelers either cannot take laptops or standard mobile devices with them, or the travelers must take "clean machines" or hardware designed for travel specifically to countries with high numbers of intellectual property theft. some of this hardware may have special configuration or software to add layers of protection, in addition to not storing important files locally (i.e., cloud computing), or transportation of valuable files is done via one-time-use usb flash drives. because there are times when identifying intellectual property thieves can be nearly impossible, one might not have the opportunity to take advantage of any legislation or treaties. however, it is good to know that programs are developing and in place to try and protect intellectual property owners, such as the trips (trade related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreement from the wto (world trade organization). trips was designed to set some standards for how intellectual property rights are protected around the world under common international rules. these trade rules are seen as a way to provide more predictability and order, and a system for dispute resolution, providing a minimum level of protection for all wto member governments. for more details on the trips agreement, see https://www.wto.org/english/ thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/agrm _e.htm. as of may , countries place various forms of restrictions for the entry, stay, and/or residence of people who are hiv-positive. in , the united states removed its entry restrictions for people living with hiv, which received considerable media coverage and is believed to have had an influence on many another country's legislation on the matter, as the number of countries with such restrictions has declined from in to in . restrictions vary from country to country, but are broken down into the following categories: reminder: although this text provides various reference materials found on the internet, there is no substitute for or comparison to the quality of medical and security intelligence created, monitored, and provided by qualified risk intelligence providers, which are at the core of employer-managed trm programs. one specific reason for the importance of risk intelligence providers is because guidelines, laws and requirements regularly change. what is surprising to realize is that some of the countries from which an hivpositive traveler could be deported if the traveler's hiv status were known, are countries that are common destinations for many business travelers today. imagine a security check that uncovers prescription hiv treatment medication in a country where there are entry restrictions? this is a difficult position for employers because of the privacy concerns of employees or travelers and their medical records, which are not typically the kinds of records or information that a person shares with employers. however, just as with prescription medications that people can travel with, employers need to provide appropriate training and information to travelers going to places where hiv concerns may be an issue. while adding this kind of information on top of standard risk and policy disclosures may be an extensive and painfully large amount of information to read and understand prior to travel, employers have a duty to provide it, and travelers have a duty to understand it and act accordingly if one or more of any disclosed travel restrictions apply to them. in some of the more strict countries with legislation that allows deportation of hiv-positive travelers, deportation often doesn't apply to travelers connecting or in transit only. however, employers and travelers have to decide whether or not they want to take such a chance. some countries require medical exams for those who intend to stay longer than days, and if hiv is discovered, doctors are required to report it to the government, and the law will be administered relative to the country in question. exploding the myths: pandemic influenza center for infectious disease research and policy (cidrap) -point framework for pandemic influenza business preparedness pandemic planning and your supply chain four-fifths of businesses foresee severe problems maintaining operations if significant h n flu outbreak pandemic influenza planning: a guide for individuals and families at the time of this publishing, the following countries maintain strict regulations for travelers with restricted medications (see full list in the incb "yellow list measuring traveler wear and tear too much travel can burn many a road warrior out. the costs of this burnout are well known: lost productivity, increased safety risks, poor health, increased stress at work and home, unwillingness to travel, and, ultimately, increased attrition. top -those with scores above / . the remaining factors are either challenging to quantify (e.g., "eating healthily at destination") or require certain data that was not available at this time. several stress factors, such as flight delays, mishandled baggage, and traveling to a high-risk destination, require the usage of external data stress triggers for business travel is a leading publisher of flight information to travelers and businesses around the world sita (www.sita.aero) com) is an intelligence-driven provider of operational risk management solutions, working with more than multinational corporations and government organizations . having adequate medical supplies available during and after evacuation transportation. . an accessible method of handicap transport. . addressing any additional criteria needed to determine whether the disabled traveler should be transported or be sheltered in place. a. deciding who makes the call about whether it is safer to "stand by for assistance." . determining whether the transport destination is handicap accessible. . determining whether the transport destination has adequate food, shelter, and supplies for any special needs. . determining whether employers prepared to incur any additional costs relative to evacuating disabled travelers. a. determining whether adequate resources are available. b. identifying the risks or costs for lack of planning.the adoption of this convention is regarded as a milestone in the history of international drug control. the single convention codified all existing multilateral treaties on drug control and extended the existing control systems to include the cultivation of plants that were grown as the raw material of narcotic drugs. the principal objectives of the convention are to limit the possession, use, trade in, distribution, import, export, manufacture, and production of drugs exclusively to medical and scientific purposes and to address drug trafficking through international cooperation to deter and discourage drug traffickers. the convention also established the international narcotics control board, merging the permanent central board and the drug supervisory board. article , penal provisions of single convention on narcotic drugs, , as amended by the protocol amending the single convention on narcotic drugs, , provides: . a. subject to its constitutional limitations, each party shall adopt such measures as will ensure that cultivation, production, manufacture, extraction, preparation, possession, offering, offering for sale, distribution, purchase, sale, delivery on any terms whatsoever, brokerage, dispatch, dispatch in transit, transport, importation and exportation of drugs contrary to the provisions of this convention, and any other action which in the opinion of such party may be contrary to the provisions of this convention, shall be punishable offences when committed intentionally, and that serious offences shall be liable to adequate punishment particularly by imprisonment or other penalties of deprivation of liberty. b. notwithstanding the preceding subparagraph, when abusers of drugs have committed such offences, the parties may provide, either as an alternative to conviction or punishment or in addition to conviction or punishment, that such abusers shall undergo measures of treatment, education, after-care, rehabilitation and social reintegration in conformity with paragraph of article . unfortunately, people sometimes die while away from home on business. making arrangements to transport their remains across international borders can be complicated and expensive, as legislation and protocols vary greatly from country to country, as do suppliers who will provide such services. don't assume that your tmc will or can handle this for you. usually these situations are handled by medical emergency or insurance providers. the following items should be covered in repatriation of mortal remains insurance:• if passing takes place outside of a medical facility, adequate transportation (ambulance, airplane, or helicopter) equipped with proper storage and handling capabilities for the body during transport to the closest appropriate medical facility prior to international transport.• treatment costs incurred (including embalming).• legally approved container for shipment of the remains.• transportation costs for the deceased and an accompanying adult to the country of residence.• cremation if legally required (conditional).other coverage may be included for things such as hotel accommodations preor posttreatment prior to the passing of the insured, but coverage will vary widely between providers. under such stressful circumstances, it is very important for the insured's family to understand the claims process and coverage, such as will payment key: cord- -nezgzovk authors: henderson, joan c. title: tourism and health crises date: - - journal: managing tourism crises doi: . /b - - - - . - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: nezgzovk nan health and tourism are connected in many ways and there are several distinct areas of study which include the physical and psychological benefi ts of vacation travel, the pursuit of improved health being a major motivator for tourism. however, there are dangers to health arising from participation in tourism and they can result in the emergence of tourism crises. such situations and approaches to their resolution represent the subject of this chapter in which health risks when traveling and on arrival at destinations are considered, with a section devoted to infectious diseases affecting humans and animals and birds. a distinction is made between involuntary and voluntary health threats, the latter illustrated by sexually transmitted illnesses and adventure tourism, which are also examined. responses to these various types of tourism crises are then reviewed and detailed case studies of the outbreak of sars and airline policy regarding deep-vein thrombosis (dvt) are presented at the end of the chapter. these examples afford insights into the impact of health-related tourism crises and their management at an international and national, and industry and corporate level, respectively. health is a major public and private concern in general and a key element in destination choice and visitor satisfaction, with individuals and the tourism industry likely to shun environments where there might be a risk to tourist well-being. while tourism's contribution to an enhanced state of mind and body is widely accepted, many health hazards confront overseas and domestic travelers (clift and grabowski, ; ncbi, ; who, ) . these hazards have the potential to become crises for organizations and destinations when problems are severe and impact on a place's reputation and arrivals (thompson et al., ) . some studies have concluded that the health of as many as % of participants is impaired by the experience of international tourism (dawood, ) and the rise in foreign travel has been accompanied by an increased incidence of disease, especially that of a tropical nature (connor, ) . an ageing population also means elderly travelers who are often more vulnerable to health risks. tourism has additional repercussions for the health of destination residents (rodriguez-garcia, ) who tend to be neglected in any discussion (bauer, ) , but this theme is not explored here. government and commercial tourism agencies must therefore face the likelihood of health-related crises occurring and manage their consequences, as well as undertake preventive action where possible. tourists themselves also have a part to play in terms of seeking information, taking precautions and behaving in an appropriate manner. the act of travel poses dangers, detailed in the next chapter within the context of technological failure, and each mode is distinctive from fl ying to cycling (nikolic et al., ) . there may be accidents due to mechanical failures, human error and adverse weather either independently or in combination and public vehicles are popular targets for terrorist attack, crises which are examined more fully in other chapters. air travel in particular has attracted considerable publicity with regard to both such events as well as its relationship with dvt and other medical conditions (see case one). it is not just tourists who are transported, but animal life which is a source of infection. the presence of rodents on planes, also a practical hazard, has been recorded as well as mosquitoes. shipping ports and airports may be infested by rats and insects, with implications for the health of those exposed to them and inhabitants of countries where the diseases they carry are imported (gratz, ) . cruising is a means of transport, although ships can be seen as fl oating resorts, and outbreaks of gastrointestinal illnesses on cruise liners are regularly logged (cdc, ) . even the most luxurious cruises are not immune from health problems which are aggravated by the higher age profi le of the cruise market, close proximity of passengers and the popularity of group activities. norwalk-like viruses, with symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting, infected about , passengers and crew members on two florida-based lines in late . the operators abandoned voyages so that the ships could be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. there was a similar instance the following year, although the cruise proceeded as scheduled (see boxed case one). other reported maladies on board cruise ships are infl uenza, e. coli infections and shigellosis, which is a bacteria causing diarrhea (schlagenhauf, a) . the aurora was on a -day mediterranean cruise in when there was an outbreak of a very contagious norwalk-like virus. there were , passengers on board, over of whom fell ill with sickness and diarrhea alongside of the crew. the company maintained that everyone had recovered when the cruise ended at the british port of southampton. the virus is believed to be transmitted by personal contact and a "no touch" regime was imposed on the ship in a bid to contain its spread. shared utensils and condiments were withdrawn from eating areas and furniture in public spaces was carefully cleaned after use. passengers described how they had avoided touching surfaces like door handles. the usual medical complement of two doctors and four nurses was augmented by another doctor and nurse. the greek authorities refused to let the ship into the port of piraeus and spain sealed its border with gibraltar following its arrival there, despite offi cial protests. there were mixed reactions among the passengers on returning home about their experiences. some expressed themselves satisfi ed with the vacation and the company's response to the problems on board, believing that fellow passengers were embellishing the situation with a view to obtaining compensation. others were critical of the company for being slow to act in the initial stages of the outbreak and demanded refunds for expensive cruises which were priced between £ , and £ , . the managing director accepted that the circumstances had been unparalleled and exceptionally demanding for the medical and other staff. with regard to the compensation issue, he said that all the relevant correspondence would have to be considered and each case would be assessed individually. after docking and the disembarkation of passengers, the aurora was thoroughly disinfected by cleaners who had donned face masks. it then sailed away for a short channel islands cruise, having been booked for a conference. source: the guardian, . having survived the journey, tourists then face the possibilities of sickness and accidental injury on their arrival at destinations. the most prevalent forms of sickness resulting from tourism are often connected to standards of hygiene at destinations. poor sanitation and inadequacies of water supply and sewage disposal may cause intestinal infections like gastroenteritis, with contaminated seafood another source. diarrhea is a particular concern among travelers and one of the most common of travelers' complaints (ericsson et al., ) . these infections can strike and spread rapidly at venues where tourists gather such as hotels. malaria, yellow fever, cholera and dengue are more serious and can have fatal consequences. there are also bites, stings and skin infections to contend with as well as unaccustomed sun and high or low temperatures (keystone et al., ; zuckerman, ) . the severity of health hazards and sensitivity to them partly depends on location, activity and the tourist's physical fi tness. for example, those traveling off the beaten track in regions such as south east asia, the south pacifi c and amazon basin are in danger from endemic ailments (rudkin and hall, ; shaw and leggat, ) . it seems probable that more tourists will succumb to both common and rarer diseases as peripheral areas of the world become accessible, a trend fueled by enthusiasm for ecotourism and other manifestations of alternative tourism in which travelers seek to escape the trappings of the mass industry. articles in the journal of travel medicine portray a rather alarming picture of medical perils awaiting visitors in remote places, although these perils also lurk in mainstream centers (schlagenhauf, b) . cities too pose "myriad" threats which are especially acute in the developing world. they include "infectious diseases, trauma, air pollution, heat illness, crime and psychiatric illness" (sanford, , p. ). the catalogue extends to "sexually transmitted diseases" and "recreational drug use" which perhaps belong to the category of volitional risk. these circumstances could be a principal or secondary cause of tourism crises and indicate how certain classes of tourism crisis overlap as environmental and socio-cultural factors are also at work. threats are not confi ned to developing countries or tropical climates and can be found in temperate zones in the developed world. legionnaire's disease is contracted when mist is inhaled from tainted water sources such as air conditioning cooling towers, central plumbing machinery and whirlpool spas. it can therefore be caught within accommodation properties and conference centers and on cruise ships. there is a chance of tourists falling ill with respiratory viral infections like infl uenza, especially older people and those on organized group tour packages. poor food hygiene gives rise to food poisoning, cholera, e. coli infections, hepatitis a and salmonellosis. pathogens can be transmitted by food and ensuring food safety is an urgent task both currently and for the future (kaferstein and abdussalam, ) . discussions about health and tourism tend to focus on sickness and disease, additionally, accidents must not be overlooked, although empirical data are limited (page and meyer, ) . health considerations at destinations thus extend to personal accident and injury, vulnerability to these is perhaps greater overseas when tourists fi nd themselves in unknown environments. those injured may also not have easy access to appropriate facilities and treatment, aggravating the damage and impeding their recovery. unintentional injury is a universal health issue, but its prevalence can be partly explained by the extent of new travel opportunities in the current era when unprecedented numbers are on the move (mcinnes et al., ) . particular problems unrelated to tourist behavior and culpability are partly determined by the features of the destination. a bbc television program quoted by page and meyer ( ) examined some risks met by british holidaymakers in the mediterranean. these risks were often due to building construction and maintenance faults like improperly serviced gas fl ues in self-catering accommodation units, unsatisfactory fi re safety provision and swimming pool defi ciencies. any resulting crisis could therefore also be defi ned as technological in another example of crisis convergence. engaging in new pastimes may be risky and even familiar pursuits like driving can be dangerous, with statistics dominated by motor accidents. traffi c accidents involving hired vehicles are routine occurrences and may not always be the fault of the driver. resulting injuries and fatalities refl ect badly on any commercial operators implicated and, should they recur, on the location which could be tainted by perceptions that it is unsafe and regulations are lax. infectious or communicable diseases can be caught when traveling or after arrival and some have the ability to advance at great speed. rapid diffusion is facilitated by modern travel patterns and is diffi cult to control. containment is especially challenging for countries which lack resources, expertise and an adequate health-care infrastructure. any epidemics are not just a crisis for tourism, but for society at large and can assume a global signifi cance. resultant fears among tourists may be magnifi ed out of proportion, but the industry has to react to perceptions and not realities. although few tourists were directly in danger, pneumonic plague in india in led to a "global alarm which escalated in meteoric fashion" (clift and page, , p. ) . there was a % drop in arrivals and companies in overseas markets canceled their indian tours. reference has already been made to established diseases, but there are new fears about those which are emerging such as west nile fever and sars. there have been outbreaks of the former in the usa and sars had a devastating effect in , severely damaging tourism in parts of canada and across much of east asia despite the relatively small numbers affl icted (see case two). the virus led to health warnings being published by governments and offi cial bodies, the damaging infl uence of such advisories having already been discussed in chapter , and their revocation was a major step on the road to recovery. questions of health may impact on tourism in a more indirect manner as evidenced by agriculture and food industry emergencies which infl uence the attractive-ness of destinations and visitor volumes. one example is foot and mouth disease, which affects cloven-hoofed livestock and not humans, but can be carried on the soles of their shoes and vehicle wheels so that curbs on movement are a key instrument in fi ghting the disease. there was a particularly severe and prolonged bout of foot and mouth in the uk in when it was also detected in some countries in continental europe (horwath consulting, ) . news and photographs of the mass slaughter of herds of cattle and their incineration portrayed an unattractive picture of the british landscape, an offi cial report condemning "sensationalist" and "hysterical" media reporting at home and overseas (uk parliament, ) . restrictions imposed on access to farmland and misunderstanding about personal safety were other disadvantages with which the industry had to contend. footpaths in rural areas and some roads in national parks were closed, making it diffi cult to reach certain visitor attractions. fears that the uk was being depicted as a "disease-ridden hellhole" prompted a senior government offi cial to promote inbound tourism at a meeting he was attending in new york, and there was a wider campaign to assure visitors that britain was safe and "open for business." tourism suffered, with estimated losses of about £ billion (the financial times, ) , but the effect was concentrated in the countryside. hotels and attractions responded by intensifi ed marketing, price discounting and cost cutting and several businesses demanded assistance from government to alleviate their fi nancial plight. the ramifi cations of foot and mouth were felt elsewhere due to anxieties about its being unwittingly exported. busch gardens in tampa bay, florida, directed foreigners away from susceptible animals like giraffes and gazelles. visitors with a history of travel to infected areas were requested to desist from joining the optional tours, the highlight of which was close proximity to wildlife, and offered alternatives such as half-price entry to the water park (the business journal, ). immigration procedures were also modifi ed in an attempt to prevent the disease invading countries such as the irish republic where livestock farming is a key economic sector. international arrivals were asked to complete declaration forms concerning their travels and walk across disinfected mats when entering countries. avian infl uenza or bird fl u is a more serious illustration as humans can catch it from infected birds and now it appears endemic in parts of asia. cases in hong kong discouraged tourism in the late s and have the potential to do so elsewhere. an especially virulent strain was discovered in several east and south east asian countries in late . subsequent years saw further eruptions and its appearance in other continents, leading to the widespread culling of birds and attempts at immunization. there were also a number of human infections and several deaths. although most victims in cambodia, china, hong kong, indonesia, thailand and vietnam had been in contact with sick poultry, there are forecasts that it is only a matter of time before the potentially lethal virus mutates into a form which will allow human-to-human transmission among populations that have no immunity (who, ) . this could trigger a global infl uenza pandemic with millions of casualties and is a subject of grave anxiety for both health and tourism authorities. some countries have discussed closing their borders in a bid to protect nationals and it seems that international tourism would almost come to a halt and the international industry effectively cease to function if the worst scenarios were to be realized. the above health threats are largely involuntary, although certain measures can be taken to reduce their magnitude and possibly avert a crisis. however, other types of risk can be classed as voluntary and tourists frequently engage in careless behavior which endangers their health. it has also been noted that individuals perceive risks differently depending on personality and social circumstances (carter, ; lepp and gibson, ) . irresponsibility fi nds expression in several ways such as carelessness over food consumption, underestimation of dangers and a corresponding absence of preparedness and protection (casteli, ) . traffi c accidents and drowning account form a signifi cant proportion of deaths and injuries among international tourists (mcinnes et al., ) and many cases are attributable to thoughtlessness. drivers may be reckless, over-tired, insuffi ciently knowledgeable about local conditions, diverted by the passing sights, under the infl uence of alcohol and not using seat belts (wilks et al., ) . sexual activity is one important high risk area described in the next section, followed by an account of adventure tourism which can also be seen as a type of willing engagement with danger. some tourists may abandon their personal inhibitions when traveling and ignore norms to which they conform at home, thereby exposing themselves and those with whom they have contact to harm (wickens, ) . such an attitude applies to sexual adventures with a heightened chance of catching or perhaps communicating a sexually transmitted disease, including hiv/aids, unless appropriate precautions are taken. the hiv/aids epidemic has been linked to international travel and sex tourism based on prostitution, traffi cking in women and children and pornography is regarded as one vehicle for its spread. cheaper air fares and the marketing of more third world countries have favored sex tourism and the internet has also created more opportunities for tourists in search of sexual gratifi cation abroad, advertising adult and child pornography internationally. such tourism is now a worldwide phenomenon which has benefi ted from inadequate laws in certain regions, especially regarding the welfare of minors. studies of sex tourism emphasize its complexity and variety (bauer and mckercher, ; clift and carter, ) , sex tourists shown to exhibit contrasting expectations from lonely individuals seeking a holiday "romance" to more commercial relationships (oppermann, ) . provision also varies in terms of legality, offi cial regulation and conditions and attitudes of sex workers. the morality of adult prostitution and its capacity to demean the sellers of services are topics for debate, although the view of prostitutes as naïve and innocent victims of more powerful tourists has been contested (cohen, ; ryan and kinder, ) . nevertheless, all casual sex carries certain health risks for both parties. the participation of children cannot be defended and has been widely condemned for the physical and emotional damage it infl icts. a save the children report maintained that about two million children aged between three and in africa, south east asia, latin america and eastern europe are being used for sex. tourists come principally from france, italy, germany, belgium and spain and number about . million (the lancet, ) . it should, however, be remembered that customers are not confi ned to western tourists and include asians and local residents. opposition to such practices is intensifying and offi cial organizations and pressure groups are trying to raise awareness and encourage action by the tourism industry and governments. two examples are epcat (end child prostitution, child pornography and traffi cking of children for sexual purposes) and unescap (united nations economic and social commission for asia and the pacifi c). there have been some advances with signs of willingness in south east asia to deal more rigorously with the sexual exploitation of children and pursue court convictions for organizers and offenders. in terms of demand, there have been endeavors in the uk to restrict overseas travel by certain groups of known sex offenders. prosecutions can also now be conducted in the country of residence of the accused, not just where the alleged offences took place. the negative connotations of sex tourism, particularly child prostitution, may discourage visits by many tourists to destinations where it is known to be rampant. associated high rates of hiv/aids may also be a deterrent. locations which have acquired a seedy and unsavory image could have diffi culty promoting themselves to particular markets such as families, provoking a crisis for parts of the industry. one such example is thailand. the tat has been seeking to position the country as more exclusive with an emphasis on its natural and cultural heritage. at the same time, the authorities are faced with the realities of a thriving commercial sex sector in tourist hubs such as bangkok, pattaya, koh samui and chiang mai. the tat has tried to resolve this dilemma by publicly professing an abhorrence of sex tourism and its pursuit of the eradication of the worst excesses. it asks its overseas offi ces to report companies selling sex tours to thailand and claims to be enforcing the country's anti-prostitution laws, together with the police. these laws impose penalties of fi nes and imprisonment on customers, procurers, brothel owners and those forcing children into prostitution who are sometimes parents (tourism authority of thailand, ). an end to illegal and unregulated sex tourism in thailand and elsewhere is, however, problematic because of the economic rewards. it represents a major industry in some places and can be a vital source of income; for example, over % of young female cambodian prostitutes may be the principal family breadwinner. many commentators also question the commitment of offi cials to the drive against prostitution in general and involving children in particular. there is a lack of political will and changes will require immense effort. campaigns do not always receive the full support of the local police and other bodies, corruption being a major obstacle. sexual exploitation has socio-economic roots and is a product of poverty, lack of education and drug addiction. until these issues are addressed, it seems that the more unacceptable manifestations of sex tourism in the developing world will continue to thrive (bbc news, ; unescap, ) . adventure tourism is perhaps worthy of note as a kind of tourism in which participants deliberately search out danger, often taking part in what are described as "extreme sports." such forms of tourism are popular in australia, new zealand and north america and have seen worldwide growth in recent years (ryan, ) . there are a variety of motives for taking part and the concept of adventure is subjective, reaching beyond specifi c recreational pursuits to encompass more passive groups taking part in overland tours (weber, ) . however, the term usually applies to physically demanding activities such as caving, white water rafting, canyoning (the entering of gorges and body surfi ng without a raft down the rapids and waterfalls which fl ow through them), climbing, sea kayaking and horse riding. participants thus expose themselves to accident and injury, although these are unlikely to be welcomed or desired. a degree of organization and commercialization is implied and operators are expected to protect their customers from undue risk with an assumption that they have given proper attention to safety matters (bentley and page, ; hall, ) . it is impossible, however, to guarantee absolute safety and accidents do occur (see boxed case two). another tragedy happened in when two american divers died at sea after being mistakenly left behind on the australian great barrier reef (wilks and davis, ) . the skipper of the vessel concerned was later charged with manslaughter on the basis of criminal negligence. it is not just the major catastrophes which are of relevance; minor incidents such as "slips, trips and falls" account for many injuries and insurance claims (bentley et al., ) . again, events of this nature damage individual companies, the industry as a whole and possibly the destinations where they take place. authorities in new zealand have expressed concern over the number of adventure sports deaths there and the consequences they might have for tourist demand. there is thus great diversity in the characteristics and intensity of tourism crises arising from health and many cases of illness and personal accidents are limited in their scope and outcome. this makes any emergent crisis easier to manage, although instances such as the death of airline passengers from dvt or adventure holiday could pose serious challenges to particular businesses and destinations. other situations have the capacity to become major crises and this applies especially to disease which attracts intense media interest and may raise doubts about the competence of responsible authorities. travel is an agent of globalization which can assist in the dissemination of communicable disease and many destinations are inadequately equipped to meet the ensuing demands on health services. the tourism industry cannot ignore such developments as offi cials are predicting the recurrence and intensifi cation of epidemic-prone viral and bacterial diseases which do not respect territorial boundaries. there have also been warnings about a total of people, tourists and three guides, were killed in a fl ash fl ood in july . the accident happened on a canyoning trip near interlaken in central switzerland which had been organized by a swiss adventure company. the dead tourists, from to years of age, came from australia, britain, new zealand, south africa and switzerland and belonged to a larger party of tourists accompanied by eight guides. the guides failed to evacuate them from a gorge which fi lled with water during a fl ash fl ood and many were washed away. the trial in lasted seven days and was attended by the families and friends of the deceased. lawyers defending the company, which was then no longer in business, argued that the accident could not have been predicted and was the outcome of exceptional weather. those who survived claimed that arrangements had been rushed and there were no clear explanations. the judge said in court that employees had not been appropriately trained and safety procedures were completely unsatisfactory. the fatal trip should have been canceled as there had been clear warnings of a storm, the progress of which could easily be seen. he ruled that six staff members had been guilty of negligent manslaughter and declared two junior guides innocent. the three directors were fi ned us$ , and received fi ve-month suspended prison sentences while the three senior guides faced lower fi nes and reduced sentences. there had been an earlier trial involving the same company in when two staff had also been convicted of negligent manslaughter and received suspended sentences of fi ve months. the case related to the death of an american in his early s whose bungee jump cord was defective. the incident had contributed to the company's end. partly in response to these events, switzerland launched a code of conduct for extreme sports operators and introduced education programs for guides. source: bbc news, b. an increase in new infections and drug-resistant pathogens. in addition, there is the possibility of a coalescence of the threats to tourism from terrorists and ill health due to speculation that disaffected groups may gain samples of deadly viruses and toxic substances. these substances could then be employed as instruments of terror, perhaps specifi cally aimed at tourists, by such "bioterrorists." rampant infectious disease is not the only concern and there may be numerous other health risks at certain locations which are extremely attractive to tourists. transportation and some leisure activities also have inherent dangers. tourists and the industry will shun places where there is a known threat to visitor health, but may fi nd themselves caught up in unexpected events. coping with the worst of these situations is a daunting exercise for the tourism industry, but readiness is essential in view of the inevitability of health-related tourism crises. preventive steps can help to avert the evolution of a full-scale tourism crisis, but the industry has sometimes shown itself reluctant to deliver appropriate health warnings because of fears about scaring customers away and losing business (lawton and page, ; stears, ) . analysis of australian travel brochures (bauer, ) and international commercial travel websites (horvath et al., ) reveals that little useful information is provided and that which is available is insuffi cient. authors of these studies advise that customers should be fully informed about problems and advised to take precautions and purchase travel insurance. destinations could also be classifi ed on the basis of risk and overall awareness promoted through education. there are opportunities for greater collaboration between medical workers, health educators and the travel trade with advice and guidelines channeled by way of travel agents. specifi c information about sexually transmitted diseases can be distributed to tourists before departure, counseling about safe sex and condom use. in terms of child prostitution, the abuse of minors represents a crisis of ethics for the industry, which must acknowledge and act upon its responsibilities regarding the transgressions of customers. there has been some progress in this direction and epcat has cooperated with the french hotel group accor in an initiative against child prostitution in asia. it is also liaising with the wto to promote acceptance of a code of conduct among industry members (epcat, ) , although campaigners argue that much more needs to be done. with regard to accidents, travel health professionals can again try to educate the traveling public through material covering active and passive protection (hartgarten, ) . the industry has ethical obligations regarding the safety of its customers and there are additional legal reasons for giving due regard to health and safety matters. the european commission directive on package travel, for example, insists that travel organizers and agents must provide health and safety details for their clients and may be liable for any harm they suffer. some initiatives to minimize unnecessary dangers and avoid serious injuries in the fi eld of adventure tourism are operator accreditation schemes, strict health and safety rules, codes of conduct, staff training and the education and prior assessment of participants (bentley and page, ) . risk management is also critical (wilks and davis, ) . such moves are still voluntary in most countries and statutory regulation might be deemed imperative, extending to other areas such as general road safety. it is unfortunate that tragic loss of life, such as that in switzerland, is often the catalyst for long-overdue reforms. promoting a culture of safety would also reduce the number of more common minor incidents (bentley et al., ) which collectively constitute a crisis. the industry can also cooperate with destination authorities in upgrading utilities and public services for the benefi t of the whole community. investment in water supply and sewage disposal facilities would alleviate sickness arising from poor hygiene and training in food handling and regular inspection and monitoring of premises could be introduced. many countries lack basic health-care provision and priority should be allocated to improving the lives and health of residents as well as to meeting tourist needs, an approach in correspondence with the philosophy of sustainable tourism development. such displays of corporate social responsibility will assist in reducing the likelihood of another type of crisis, those derived from resentment toward tourists among residents when the former are believed to be receiving preferential treatment. action is thus required at a company and industry level, with governments and tourists also having a vital contribution to make. the wto has stressed the significance of health as an aspect of tourist safety and proposes that member states pursue the following program to enhance their capabilities in dealing with diffi culties (wto, ) : identifi cation of risks to tourists related to particular activities, locations and sites. introduction and strict enforcement of safety standards and practices at facilities and venues. establishment and distribution of operator guidelines. provision of information to the public about possible health hazards, protective steps and sources of assistance. proper staff education and training. clarifi cation of liability issues and formulation of rules and regulations. development of national tourism health policies, including systems of reporting to inform the international community. at a caribbean tourism organization seminar (cto, ) , a wto representative cited four critical considerations pertaining to the effective handling of health crises. they were the allocation and acceptance of responsibilities, transparency, assistance mechanisms and management of fear. the tourism sector was urged to improve its responses by being more proactive and there were calls for greater global cooperation. eradication or minimization of both health and safety risks at resorts is a collective effort involving stakeholders of owners, operators, staff, visitors, offi cials and medical experts (phillip and hodgkinson, ) . however, some damage to tourism is to be expected even when such systems are in place. sars, and to a lesser extent foot and mouth, overwhelmed the industry, which had little scope to react or room for maneuver. tourism was at the mercy of the epidemic dynamics and initiatives to generate business were thus constrained. it was only when the health crisis abated that advertising campaigns and product development started to yield signifi cant results, although discounting and a focus on domestic markets did generate some revenue prior to the onset of recovery. questions of health therefore represent a potential source of tourism crises, although their severity varies considerably. the magnitude of any crisis will depend partly upon the numbers involved and whether there are any fatalities, dimensions which determine the amount of publicity generated. media coverage is a critical infl uence on popular opinion and handling external communications is a core element of crisis management. the examples cited in the chapter suggest that prompt efforts to enhance safety and security systems following a critical incident are essential to demonstrate a commitment to safeguard tourists and inspire confi dence that the event will not be repeated. matters of compensation also need to be resolved in a fair manner and this is related to questions of liability and obligations to next of kin when there have been fatalities. negligence must be seen to be punished and companies to make amends for their shortcomings if an organization and its reputation are to survive the crisis. these issues are returned to in chapter , which deals with transport accidents as an illustration of technological failure. health is perhaps an arena of crisis which is more amenable to avoidance than some others. while certain contagious diseases and their progress are unpredictable and uncontrollable, the likelihood of other illnesses and accidents occurring may be minimized by increased awareness, changed behavior and better hygiene and safety standards. these goals are easier to achieve within controlled environments such as cruise ships, individual hotels, attraction sites and aircraft cabins, but are more formidable and costly tasks for destinations. the latter cannot be left to the tourism industry alone, but demands intervention by governments and relevant international agencies as well as responsible behavior from tourists themselves. medical reports indicate that as many as % of long-haul fl yers could be at risk from dvt, or so-called "economy class syndrome." some experts believe that sitting for long periods in the cramped seating of an aircraft cabin encourages the formation of blood clots in the legs which can break away and travel to the lungs, leading to potentially deadly pulmonary embolism. there may also be a relationship between reduced cabin air pressure and blood oxygen which could promote dizziness, nausea and fainting on long-haul fl ights. several victims of dvt and their families have sued airlines, contending that air travel caused the malady. american airlines, united airlines, delta, northwest, japan airlines, qantas, singapore airlines, british airways, klm and virgin air were among a total of carriers named in a lawsuit. a london court concluded that blood clots were a "serious personal injury" and could not be defi ned as an "accident" under the warsaw convention; the treaty recognizes that airline liability regarding damages applies only to the latter. the supreme court in the australian state of victoria, however, decided in favor of the plaintiffs in a parallel case, permitting a landmark lawsuit to proceed. american airlines, the world's largest carrier, reportedly reached an out-of-court settlement in a blood clot dispute at the end of . analysts were watching for any court judgment in the united states where the award of damages would probably be very high and perhaps set a precedent. following the london ruling, british airways said that it sympathized with dvt sufferers. however, it also stated its belief that any link with air travel was uncertain and this would inform its position on other claims. it had, nevertheless, introduced a new manual of infl ight medical care in late to assist crew in looking after passengers who became ill during fl ights. the manual provided instructions on dealing with many scenarios and was complemented by staff training and a cd-rom version, the company's intranet used for additional training purposes. these materials are supplemented by a telephone link to a -hour advice center on the ground. other measures to minimize the risks of dvt had been in operation for some time. sources of information and advice included the corporate website, phone lines, in-fl ight videos and magazines and ticket wallets. a healthy journey leafl et recommended that passengers drink plenty of fl uids, eat moderately and limit their intake of alcohol and caffeine. they were also advised not to remain seated for the whole of a long-haul fl ight and appropriate exercises were suggested. it was announced in early that british airways would be cooperating with the medical school of birmingham university in a study of dvt. travelers drawn from a sample of about , members of its frequent fl yer loyalty program were to be surveyed. respondents would be asked about any precautions they took regarding dvt, attitudes toward the disease and extent of alarm. it was considered a signifi cant step, being the fi rst occasion that a british airline had been willing to participate directly in such a research project. the company's support for the research study was welcomed, especially as there had been reports that a similar world health organization (who) project was facing funding problems. critics and campaigners had been arguing that the industry was refusing to acknowledge dvt risks and evading its responsibilities regarding informing passengers. reporters suggested that britain's airline industry was anxious to avoid any further damaging news stories about deaths resulting from fl ying in the aftermath of september. sources: bbc news, a; the observer, ; one news, ; travel telegraph, . a new virus which initially surfaced in the south of china in was given the name of severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars). it is a type of pneumonia which seems to be transmitted by vapor droplets and close personal contact, although little was known about its characteristics in the early months. while knowledge has subsequently increased, there is still no vaccine or cure and control depends upon the rapid identifi cation of sufferers and their isolation. any people they have been in association with also need to be quarantined in order to interrupt transmission. authorities in china were caught by surprise and slow to inform the international community about the disease so that preventive measures were not taken immediately. infected travelers were thus free to carry the virus abroad to locations such as toronto in canada, hong kong, singapore, taiwan and vietnam. these locations recorded the highest numbers, but there were isolated cases found elsewhere in countries altogether. despite fears of a global pandemic, the virus proved less contagious and fatal than originally feared and the outbreak had essentially ended by mid- . there had been a total of , infections and deaths, the majority of these in asia. initial ignorance and the speed at which sars was advancing created great anxiety and a degree of panic among resident populations and tourists. governments and international agencies such as the who identifi ed places affected by sars and advised against visits to where it was spreading in the community due to risks of contraction. the who intervention was unprecedented and its pronouncements carried considerable authority. offi cials were concerned about the importation of the disease and inbound arrivals from sars states were monitored. the who also recommended certain procedures for airlines and airports to follow and sars came to be associated with air travel, with some airline crew donning face masks. the virus dominated the headlines in much of asia and received extensive publicity around the world. the media broadcast disturbing accounts of a mysterious deadly illness on the rampage and pictures of deserted streets and locals wearing masks. tourism was immediately affected as people were unwilling to travel, especially by plane, for fear of catching sars. the worst hit areas were shunned by inbound tourists and outbound travelers faced various restrictions. countries saw falls of over % in arrivals during the worst months and there was also a slump in domestic tourism and consumer spending in general. the transport, accommodation, attraction and retail sectors all lost business and the survival of some companies was threatened. recovery was dictated by the progress of the epidemic and the lifting of the who travel advisories was a major turning point for individual countries. nevertheless, worries about a return of the virus persisted and fi gures for the year were depressed with declines of . % for china, . % for hong kong, . % for taiwan and . % for singapore. the wttc estimated that the industry's contribution to gdp would drop by . % in china, . % in hong kong and % in singapore. vietnam had only cases and fi ve sars deaths, all confi ned to a hanoi hospital, but tourism there too was forecast to be worth . % less in terms of its gdp contribution. the reverberations were felt in countries where there were very few or no cases of sars such as thailand and the contraction in travel throughout the asia pacifi c region of . % in was attributed to the outbreak. outside asia, toronto was estimated to be losing c$ every day in april due to the cancellation of major conventions. there was a common pattern of reaction among offi cial institutions and private enterprises which included the gathering and communication of information, marketing aimed at reassurance, efforts to sell to domestic markets, price cutting, a search for cost savings and greater effi ciency, rationalization, capacity reduction and staff redundancies. a great deal of attention was also given to the devising and implementation of health and safety regimes designed to convince customers that the industry was prepared and particular sites were safe. governments were also active in support of tourism businesses and in initiatives to enhance standards of public hygiene. it proved very diffi cult to combat the adverse impacts of sars when it was still spreading and even after it had been contained, but marketing efforts were intensifi ed when places had been formally declared free of sars. the who announcement was the occasion for re-launching affected destinations such as hong kong and singapore in a bid to generate maximum publicity. sources : euromonitor, ; henderson, ; mckercher and chon, ; who, ; wttc, . adventure tourism: a form of tourism involving participation in physically demanding activities which expose the tourist to risks of injury. economy class syndrome: another name for dvt (deep-vein thrombosis), potentially lethal blood clots which may be caused by seating conditions in commercial passenger aircraft. sex tourism: tourism in which the primary motivation is the satisfaction of sexual needs, often met by prostitutes and seen as a source of sexually transmitted disease. tourist health risks: factors and forces which threaten the physical and psychological well-being of tourists. . what preventive strategies can be employed by the tourism industry regarding the contracting of illness and disease by tourists and what will their success depend on? . have airlines responded appropriately to the risks of dvt among passengers? . was there an over-reaction to the threat of sars by tourists and the tourism industry in generating countries and could this have been avoided? additional readings castelli, f. ( ) . human mobility and disease: a global challenge. journal of travel medicine, ( ) in what ways are issues of health a major concern for the tourism industry? . what are the principal types of health-related crises that accommodation how do health questions impact on the work of destination marketing organizations? health advice in australian travel brochures the health of host communities: missing from printed travel health advice sex and tourism: journeys of romance, love and lust asia's child sex tourism rising airlines face legal action over dvt scoping the extent of adventure tourism accidents the safety experience of new zealand adventure tour operators disease daunts tourism tourists' and travellers' social construction of africa and asia as risky locations human mobility and disease: a global challenge vessel sanitation program tourism and sex: culture, commerce and coercion tourism and health: risks, research and responses health and the international tourist open-ended prostitution as a skillful game of luck: opportunities, risk and security amongst tourist-oriented prostitutes in bangkok trends in travelers tourism sector responsiveness to health crises tourists' health: could the travel industry do more? tourism management annual report travelers' diarrhea travel and tourism in canada uk tourism : open for business cruise ship health alert exaggerated, say passengers adventure, sport and health tourism injury prevention: a crucial aspect of travel medicine managing a health-related crisis: sars in singapore travel health information at commercial travel websites foot and mouth crisis hits hotels in the veluwe food safety in the st century travel medicine spain makes plan to combat sex tourism evaluating travel agents' provision of health advice to travellers tourist roles, perceived risk and international tourism unintentional injury during foreign travel: a review the over-reaction to sars and the collapse of asian tourism medical problems in cycling tourism ba hauls in fl yers to check dvt risk one news website at http: onenews.nzoom.com/onenews sex tourism tourist accidents: an exploratory analysis the management of health and safety hazards in tourist resorts. world tourism organization the health-development link: travel as a public health issue off the beaten track: the health implications of the development of special interest tourism activities in south east asia and the south pacifi c linkages between holiday taking travel risk and insurance claims: evidence from new zealand sex, tourism and sex tourism: fulfi lling similar needs? tourism management urban medicine: threats to health of travelers to developing world cities focus on cruise ship travel travel-associated infectious diseases life and death on the amazon: illness and injury to travelers on a south american expedition travel health promotion: advances and alliances incidence of health crises in tourists visiting jamaica, west indies tat supports fi ght against child prostitution select committee on culture, media and sport. tourism-the hidden giant-and foot and mouth united nations economic and social commission for asia and the pacifi c website at outdoor adventure tourism: a review of research approaches health risk-taking and tourism risk management for scuba diving operators on australia's great barrier reef international tourists and road safety in australia: developing a national research and management programme international travel and health. geneva: world health organization avian infl uenza recommended measures for tourism safety madrid: world tourism organization principles and practice of travel medicine key: cord- -li eqy authors: liu, junhua; singhal, trisha; blessing, lucienne t.m.; wood, kristin l.; lim, kwan hui title: crisisbert: a robust transformer for crisis classification and contextual crisis embedding date: - - journal: nan doi: nan sha: doc_id: cord_uid: li eqy classification of crisis events, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks and pandemics, is a crucial task to create early signals and inform relevant parties for spontaneous actions to reduce overall damage. despite crisis such as natural disasters can be predicted by professional institutions, certain events are first signaled by civilians, such as the recent covid- pandemics. social media platforms such as twitter often exposes firsthand signals on such crises through high volume information exchange over half a billion tweets posted daily. prior works proposed various crisis embeddings and classification using conventional machine learning and neural network models. however, none of the works perform crisis embedding and classification using state of the art attention-based deep neural networks models, such as transformers and document-level contextual embeddings. this work proposes crisisbert, an end-to-end transformer-based model for two crisis classification tasks, namely crisis detection and crisis recognition, which shows promising results across accuracy and f scores. the proposed model also demonstrates superior robustness over benchmark, as it shows marginal performance compromise while extending from to events with only . % additional data points. we also proposed crisis vec, an attention-based, document-level contextual embedding architecture for crisis embedding, which achieve better performance than conventional crisis embedding methods such as word vec and glove. to the best of our knowledge, our works are first to propose using transformer-based crisis classification and document-level contextual crisis embedding in the literature. crisis-related events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and train or airliner accidents, often stimulate a sudden surge of attention and actions from both media and the general public. despite the fact that crises, such as natural disasters, can be predicted by professional institutions, certain events are first signaled by everyday citizens, i.e., civilians. for instance, the recent covid- pandemics was first informed by general public in china via weibo, a popular social media site, before pronouncements by government officials. social media sites have become centralized hubs that facilitate timely information exchange across government agencies, enterprises, working professionals and the general public. as one of the most popular social media sites, twitter enables users to asynchronously communicate and exchange information with tweets, which are mini-blog posts limited to characters. there are on average over half a billion tweets posted daily [ ] . therefore, one can leverage on such high volume and frequent information exchange to expose firsthand signals on crisis-related events for early detection and warning systems to reduce overall damage and negative impacts. event detection from tweets has received significant attention in research in order to analyze crisis-related messages for better disaster management and increasing situational awareness. several recent works studied various natural crisis events, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and artificial disasters, such as terrorist attacks and explosions [ , , , ] . these works focus on binary classifications for various attributes of crisis, such as classifying source type, predicting relatedness between tweets and the crises, and assessing informativeness and applicability [ , , ] . on the other hand, several works proposed multi-label classifiers on affected individuals, infrastructure, casualties, donations, caution, advice, etc. [ , ] . crisis recognition tasks are likewise conducted such as identifying crisis types, i.e. hurricanes, floods and fires [ , ] . machine learning-based models are commonly introduced in performing the above mentioned tasks. conventional linear models such as logistic regression, naive bayes and support vector machine (svm) are reported for automatic binary classification on informativeness [ ] and relevancy [ ] , among others. these models were implemented with pre-trained word vec embeddings [ ] . several unsupervised approaches are also proposed for classifying crisis-related events, such as the clustop algorithm utilizing community detection for automatic topic modelling [ ] . a transfer-learning approach is also proposed [ ] , though its classification is only limited to two classes. the ability for cross-crisis evaluation remains questionable. more recently, numerous works proposed neural networks (nn) models for crisis-related data detection and classification. for instance, alrashdi and o'keefe investigated two deep learning architectures, namely bidirectional long short-term memory (bilstm) and convolutional neural networks (cnn) using domain-specific and glove embeddings [ ] . nguyen et al. propose a cnn-based classifier with word vec embedding pretrained on google news [ ] and domain-specific embeddings [ ] . lastly, parallel cnn architecture was proposed to detect disaster-related events using tweets [ , ] . while prior works report remarkable performance on various crisis classification tasks using nn models and word embeddings, no studies are found to leverage the most recent natural language understanding (nlu) techniques, such as attention-based deep classification models [ ] and document-level contextual embeddings [ ] , which reportedly improve state-of-the-art performance for many challenging natural language problems from upstream tasks such as named entity recognition and part of speech tagging, to downstream tasks such as machine translation and neural conversation. this work focuses on deep attention-based classification models and document-level contextual representation models to address two important crisis classification tasks. we study recent nlu models and techniques that reportedly demonstrated drastic improvement on state-of-the-art and localize for domain-specific crisis related tasks. overall, our main contribution of this work includes: • proposing crisisbert, an attention-based classifier that improves state-of-the-art performance for both crisis detection and recognition tasks; • demonstrating superior robustness over various benchmarks, where extending crisisbert from to events with . % of additional data points only results in marginal performance decline, while increasing crisis case classification by %; • proposing crisis vec, a document-level contextual embedding approach for crisis representation, and showing substantial improvement over conventional crisis embedding methods such as word vec and glove . . . to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose a transformer-based classifier for crisis classification tasks. we are also first to propose a document-level contextual crisis embedding approach. in this section, we discuss the recent works that propose various machine learning approaches for crisis classification tasks. while these works report substantial improvement in performance over prior works, none of the works uses state of the art attentionbased models, i.e., transformers [ ] , to perform crisis classification tasks. we propose crisisbert, a transformer-based architecture that builds upon a distilled bert model, fine-tuned by large-scale hyper-parameter search. various works propose linear classifiers for crisis-related events. for instance, parilla-ferrer et al. proposed an automatic binary classification, based on informative and uninformative tweets using naive bayes and support vector machine (svm) [ ] . a svm with pretrained word vec embeddings approach was also proposed [ ] . besides linear models, recent works also propose deep learning based methods with different neural network architectures. for instance, alrashdi and o'keefe investigated bidirectional long short-term memory (bilstm) and convolutional neural figure) and passed into a distrilbert model. since we are performing classification task, the cls token vector, i.e. the first output vector, is then passed into a linear classifier for detection or recognition task, whereas the remainder of the output vectors are average-pooled to create crisis vec embeddings. network (cnn) models using domain-specific and glove embeddings [ ] . nguyen et al. proposed a cnn model to classify tweets to get information types using google news and domain-specific embeddings [ ] . in , vaswani et al. from google introduced transformer [ ], a new category of deep learning models which are solely attention-based and without convolution and recurrent mechanisms. later, google proposed the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (bert) model [ ] which drastically improved state-of-the-art performance for multiple challenging natural language processing (nlp) tasks. since then, multiple transformer-based models have been introduced, such as gpt [ ] and xlnet [ ] , among others. transformer-based models were also deployed to solve domain specific tasks, such as medical text inferencing [ ] and occupational title embedding [ ] , and demonstrated remarkable performance. the bidirectional encoder representation of transformer (bert), for instance, is a multi-layer bidirectional transformer en-coder with attention mechanism [ ] . the proposed bert model has two variants, namely (a) bert base, which has transformer layers, a hidden size of , attention heads, and m total parameters; and (b) bert large, which has transformer layers, a hidden size of , attention heads, and m total parameters. bert is pre-trained with self-supervised approaches, i.e., masked language modeling (mlm) and next sentence prediction (nsp). while transformers such as bert are reported to perform well in natural language processing, understanding and inference tasks, to the best of our knowledge, no prior works propose and examine the performance of transformer-based models for crisis classification. in this work, we investigate the transformer approach for crisis classification tasks and propose crisisbert, a transformer-based classification model that surpasses conventional linear and deep learning models in performance and robustness. [ ] , optimizers, learning rates, and batch sizes. table shows the breakdown of the search space and the final hyper-parameters for crisisbert. each set of parameters is randomly chosen and ran with epochs and two trials. in total, we evaluate over hyper-parameters sets using a nvidia titan-x (pascal) for over , gpu hours. taking into consideration of performance and efficiency trade-off, we select the distilbert model for our transformer lm layer. distilbert is a compressed version of bert base through knowledge distillation. with utilization of only % of the layers of bert, distilbert performs % faster while preserving % of the capabilities in language understanding tasks. the optimal set of hyper-parameters for distilbert includes an adamw [ ] optimizer, and initial learning rate of e- , and a batch size of . output layer. the output layer of distilbert lm is a set of -d vectors led by the class header vector. since we are conducting classification tasks, only the [cls] token vector is used as the aggregate sequence representation for classification with a linear classifier. the remainder of the output vectors are processed into crisis vec embeddings using mean-pooling operation. as discussed in section . , crisis vec embedding is a byproduct of crisisbert, where the embeddings are constructed based on a pre-trained bert model, and subsequently fine-tuned with three corpora of crisis-related tweets [ , , ] to be domain-specific for crisis-related tweet representation. crisis vec leverages the advantages of transformers, including ( ) leveraging a self-attention mechanism to incorporate sentencelevel context bidirectionally, ( ) leveraging both word-level and positional information to create contextual representation of words, and ( ) taking advantage of the pre-trained models on large relevant corpora. to the best of our knowledge, we are the first who propose a document-level contextual embedding approach for crisis-related document representation. upon convergence, we construct the fixed-length tweet vector using a mean-pooling strategy [ ] , where we compute the mean of all output vectors, as illustrated in algorithm . in this work, we conduct two crisis classification tasks, namely crisis detection and crisis recognition. we formulate the crisis detection task as a binary classification model that identifies if a tweet is relevant to a crisis-related event. the crisis recognition task on the other hand extends the problem into multi-class classification, where the output is a probability vector that indicate the likelihood of a tweet indicating specific events. both tasks are modelled as sequence classification problems that are formally defined below. we define the crisis detection task d = (s, Φ), which is specified by s = {s , ..., s n } a finite sample space of tweets with size n. each sample s i is a sequence of tokens at t time steps, i.e., s i = {s i , ..., s t i }. Φ denotes the set of labels that has the same sequence as the sample set, Φ = {φ , ..., φ n } and φ i ∈ { , } where φ i = indicates that sample s i is relevant to crisis, and φ i = indicates otherwise. a deterministic classifier c d : s → φ specifies the mapping from sample tweets to their flags. our objective is to train a crisis detector using the provided tweets and labels that minimizes the differences between predicted labels and true labels, i.e., where j d denotes some cost function. similarly, we define a crisis recognition task r = (s, l), where sample space s is identical to that in crisis detection. l denotes a sequence of multi-class labels that have the same sequence as s, i.e., l = {l , ..., l n }, and l i ∈ r m for m number of classes. a deterministic classifier c r : s → l specifies the mapping from the sample tweets to the crisis classes. the objective of the crisis classification tasks is to train a sequence classifier using the provided tweets and labels that minimizes the differences between predicted labels and true labels, i.e., where j r denotes some cost function for classifier c r . in this section, we discuss the experiments performed and their results in order to propose a highly effective and efficient approach for text classification. three datasets of labelled crisis-related tweets [ , , ] are used to conduct crisis classification tasks and evaluate the proposed methods against benchmarks. in total, these datasets consist of close to million tweets, where overall . k are labelled. these data sets are in the form of: ( ) k labelled tweets on crises [ ] , ( ) . k labelled tweets for crises [ ] , and ( ) . k labelled tweets for crises [ ] . table describes more detail about each dataset and their respective classes. for our experimental evaluation, the . k labelled crisis-related tweets are organized into two datasets, annotated as c and c . in particular, c consists of k tweets from classes of crises, whereas c comprises all . k tweets in classes. both datasets are split into training, validation and test sets that consist of %, % and % of the original sets, respectively. crisisbert. we evaluate the performance of crisisbert against multiple benchmarks, which comprise recently proposed crisis classification models in the literature. these works include linear classifiers, such as logistic regression (lr), support vector machine (svm) and naive bayes [ ] , and non-linear neural networks, such as convolutional neural network (cnn) [ ] and long short-term memory [ ] . furthermore, we investigate the robustness of crisisbert for both detection and recognition tasks. this is achieved by extending the experiments from c to c , which comprise and classes respectively, but with only . % additional data points. we evaluate the robustness of the proposed models against benchmarks by observing the compromise in robustness performance, while realizing the drastically improved classification performance. as described in section . , we use the optimal set of hyper-parameters for crisisbert in the experiments, which include the use of a bert model with distillation (i.e. distilbert), an adamw [ ] optimizer, an initial learning rate of e- , a batch size of , and a word dropout rate of . . crisis vec. to evaluate crisis vec, we choose the two classifiers with the aim to represent both traditional machine learning approaches and the nn approaches. the two selected models are: ( ) a linear logistic regression model, denoted as lr c v , and ( ) a non-linear lstm model, denoted as lst m c v . we evaluate the performance of crisis vec with the two models by replacing the original embedding to crisis vec, ceteris paribus. we use two common evaluation metrics, namely accuracy and f score, which are functions of true-positive (tp), false-positive (fp), true-negative (tn) and false-negative (fn) predictions. accuracy is calculated by: for a f -score of multiple classes, we calculate the unweighted mean for each label, i.e., for n classes of labels as: where p recision = t p t p + f p and recall = t p t p + f n we select and implement several crisis classifiers proposed in recent works to serve as benchmarks for evaluating our proposed methods. concretely, we compare crisisbert with the following models: • lr w v : logistic regression model with word vec embedding pre-trained on google news corpus [ ] • sv m w v : support vector machine model with word vec embedding pre-trained on google news corpus [ ] • n b w v : naive bayes model assuming gaussian distribution for features with word vec embedding pre-trained on google news corpus [ ] • cn n gv : convolutional neural network model with convolutional layers of hidden units, kernel size of , pool size of , filters, and glove for word embedding [ ] • lst m w v : long short-term memory model with layers of hidden states and a word vec-based crisis embedding [ ] models overall, the experimental results show that both proposed models achieve significant improvement on performance and robustness over benchmarks across all tasks. the experimental results for crisisbert and crisis vec are tabulated in table . robustness. comparing crisis detection task between c and c , crisisbert shows . % and . % decline for f -score and accuracy, which is much better than most benchmarks, i.e., from . % to . %, except cnn. however, when we compare the more challenging crisis recognition tasks between c and c , the performance of crisisbert compromises marginally, i.e., . % for f -score and . % for accuracy. on the contrary, all benchmark models record significant decline, i.e. from . % to . %. discussion. based on experimental results discussed above, we observe that: ( ) crisisbert's performance exceeds state-of-theart performance for both detection and recognition tasks, with up to . % and . % respectively, ( ) crisisbert demonstrates higher robustness with marginal decline for performance (i.e. less than . % in f -score and accuracy), and ( ) crisis vec shows superior performance as compared to conventional word vec embeddings, for both lr and lstm models across all experiments. related work event detection from tweets has received significant attention in research in order to analyze crisis-related messages for better disaster management and increasing situational awareness [ , , , ] . parilla-ferrer et al. proposed automatic binary classification of informativeness using naive bayes and support vector machine (svm) [ ] . stowe et al. presented an annotation scheme for tweets to classify relevancy and six [ ] . furthermore, use of pre-trained word vec reportedly improved svm for crisis classification [ ] . lim et al. proposed clustop algorithm utilizing the community detection approach for automatic topic modelling [ ] . pedrood et al. proposed to transfer-learn classification of one event to the other using a sparse coding model [ ] , though the scope was only limited to only two events, i.e. hurricane sandy ( ) and supertyphoon yolanda ( ). a substantial number of works focusses on usign neural networks (nn) with word embeddings for crisis-related data classification. manna et al. [ ] compared nn models with conventional ml classifiers [ ] . alrashdi and o'keefe investigated and showed good performance for two deep learning architectures, namely bidirectional long short-term memory (bilstm) and convolutional neural networks (cnn) with domain-specific glove embeddings [ ] . however, the study had yet to validate the relevance of model on a different crisis type. nguyen et al. applied cnn to classify information types using google news and domain-specific embeddings [ ] . kersten et al. [ ] implemented a parallel cnn to detect two disasters, namely hurricanes and floods, which reported a f -score of . . the cnn architecture was proposed earlier by kim et al. [ ] . word-level embeddings such as word vec [ ] and glove [ ] are commonly used to form the basis of crisis embedding [ , ] in various crisis classification works to improve model performance. for context, word vec uses a neural network language model (nnlm) that is able to represent latent information on the word level. glove achieved better results with a simpler approach, constructing global vectors to represent contextual knowledge of the vocabulary. more recently, a series of high quality embedding models, such as fasttext [ ] and flair [ ] , are proposed and reported to have improved state of the art for multiple nlp tasks. both word-level contextualization and character-level features are commonly used for these works. pre-trained models on large corpora of news and tweets collections are also made publicly available to assist in downstream tasks. furthermore, transformer-based models are proposed to conduct sentence-level embedding tasks [ ] . social media such as twitter has become a hub of crowd generated information for early crisis detection and recognition tasks. in this work, we present a transformer-based crisis classification model crisisbert, and a contextual crisis-related tweet embedding model crisis vec. we examine the performance and robustness of the proposed models by conducting experiments with three datasets and two crisis classification tasks. experimental results show that crisisbert improves state of the art for both detection and recognition class, and further demonstrates robustness by extending from classes to classes, with only . % additioanl data points. finally, our experiments with two classification models show that crisis vec enhances classification performance as compared to word vec embeddings, which is commonly used in prior works. natural disasters detection in social media and satellite imagery: a survey situational awareness enhanced through social media analytics: a survey of first responders processing social media messages in mass emergency: a survey earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors crisislex: a lexicon for collecting and filtering microblogged communications in crises semi-supervised discovery of informative tweets during the emerging disasters identifying and categorizing disaster-related tweets extracting information nuggets from disaster-related messages in social media online public communications by police & fire services during the hurricane sandy on semantics and deep learning for event detection in crisis situations verifying baselines for crisis event information classification on twitter automatic classification of disaster-related tweets distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality clustop: a clustering-based topic modelling algorithm for twitter using word networks mining help intent on twitter during disasters via transfer learning with sparse coding deep learning and word embeddings for tweet classification for crisis response robust classification of crisis-related data on social networks using convolutional neural networks convolutional neural networks for sentence classification robust filtering of crisis-related tweets attention is all you need sentence-bert: sentence embeddings using siamese bert-networks glove: global vectors for word representation bert: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding language models are unsupervised multitask learners xlnet: generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding ncuee at mediqa : medical text inference using ensemble bert-bilstm-attention model ipod: an industrial and professional occupations dataset and its applications to occupational data mining and analysis distilling the knowledge in a neural network what to expect when the unexpected happens: social media communications across crises analysing how people orient to and spread rumours in social media by looking at conversational threads effectiveness of word embeddings on classifiers: a case study with tweets a deep multi-modal neural network for informative twitter content classification during emergencies a neural probabilistic language model applications of online deep learning for crisis response using social media information enriching word vectors with subword information contextual string embeddings for sequence labeling key: cord- -dpftawj authors: boin, arjen title: the transboundary crisis: why we are unprepared and the road ahead date: - - journal: nan doi: . / - . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: dpftawj modern societies rely on complex technological systems that are deeply intertwined with other complex systems that stretch across geographical, judicial and administrative borders. when threats emanate from this transboundary space, national governments are often surprised and discover that existing crisis management arrangements do not suffice. this article describes the political and administrative challenges that accompany transboundary crises. it argues that arrangements and processes that work reasonably well for “bounded” crises are unlikely to work in the case of transboundary crises. it formulates an agenda for political debate and academic research. the bottom line is that we need to rethink traditional crisis management arrangements in order to prepare for these increasingly common type of threats. much has been done in recent decades to prepare modern society for all sorts of crises and disasters. one might say that many societies have never been as prepared for crises and disasters as they are today. that is a good thing. but here is the bad news: modern societies are woefully underprepared for dealing with a type of threat that is on the rise. this is what i refer to as the transboundary crisis. the transboundary crisis effortlessly exceeds geographical, policy, cultural, public-private and legal boundaries that normally enable public managers to classify, contain and manage a crisis. it escalates rapidly and mutates constantly, creating confusion about causes and possible consequences. it ends up on many administrative tables, but it is not obvious which of those tables is or should be "in the lead." these features make a fast and adequate response difficult, to say the least. the transboundary crisis comes in many guises: • in , a mysterious virus spread from china, via hong kong, to countries causing hundreds of deaths. the sars virus caused a major health crisis in toronto. in all these examples, national governments were confronted with a crisis that had origins in faraway domains. however well prepared they may have been for traditional crises, they soon discovered that their response repertoire was insufficient in the face of the transboundary challenges. when the state has no answer to a crisis, consequences follow. in times of crisis, the public expects representatives of the state to take charge. it is, after all, a core task of the state to protect its citizens against the consequences of threat and calamity. if the state fails in this core task, the legitimacy of public institutions and the especially when the legitimacy of public institutions is already under question. the transboundary crisis is the ultimate nightmare for crisis managers. it marks the moment they discover their traditional crisis arrangements do not suffice in the light of the political-administrative challenges that this crisis brings. it sheds light on a structural governance deficit, which presents politicians with a pressing design, let alone management, challenge. this study offers a roadmap for a discussion about possible solutions. this roadmap hinges on a strategic choice between two options that emerge from our discussion of theory: move backward by decoupling from modern systems or move forward by strengthening transboundary crisis management capacities. transboundary crises may come in different guises, but they share common characteristics that make them difficult to manage: the transboundary crisis reaches across multiple countries and/or multiple policy areas. there is no defined geographical location (a "ground zero") or policy sector around which to organize. that creates diversity in perspective: what in one domain is experienced as a problem of scarcity may become a matter of public safety in another; what in one country is considered a local matter is chefsache in another country. the transboundary crisis brings a critical challenge to any administrative system that is based on boundaries and demarcation. by crossing borders, the transboundary crisis challenges borders. in a democratic state that is based on the principle of political accountability and makes use of the bureaucratic organization form, most organizations are organized around demarcated areas of expertise and authority. the bureaucratic organization is based on boundaries among task fields, responsibilities, divisions, departments and policy sectors. two mechanisms have been traditionally used to address blurring of borders: coordination (negotiating boundaries) and centralization (transcending boundaries). these mechanisms can be problematic in the best of times; they are especially problematic in a transboundary crisis. coordination mechanisms may work fine for complex problems and the traditional crisis. the mechanisms, however, do not work in the world of the transboundary crisis for two reasons. first, in a transboundary crisis, it is not clear who the critical actors are or should be, and what their authority in the matter is. second, it is hard to establish or negotiate ownership in a short time frame (time is always scarce in a crisis). we may thus say that the transboundary crisis robs bureaucracy of its most effective tool. centralizing emergency powers in the hands of a leader or a central body is the traditional catch-all solution. in the roman empire, unlimited powers were placed in the hands of a dictator. in modern democracy, crisis centralization is still a valued mechanism. but it comes with constraints: it is not easy to centralize power, and it does not happen often. moreover, the "high command" is not always defined clearly enough, and the mechanisms that should regulate such a concentration of power are cumbersome. a quick look at the legal terms that condition the authorization of exceptional violence (the deployment of special police units) makes clear that a tension exists between legal considerations and the required speed of action. this tension can often only be circumvented in an environment in which political actors know and trust each other. in a transboundary crisis, the nation state may not be the only actor. but how to centralize power in an international context? governments are reluctant to shift decision-making authority to international institutions. think, for example, of eu agencies, which in principle could play a decisive role during a transboundary crisis. but these organizations were never endowed with decision-making powers. we should, then, not be surprised that an eu agency such boin | as frontex accomplished so little during the immigration crisis that peaked in . in sum, transboundary crises pose a wide and deep challenge to the standing governance arrangements of democratic states. that is problematic. the state is left rudderless in a time when citizens look to their elected leaders and trusted institutions to navigate them through the storm. a transboundary crisis can thus rapidly become a crisis of legitimacy. a vicious cycle threatens. the effectiveness of the crisis response relies to a large extent on legitimacy. but the legitimacy of public institutions is already under attack. if institutions do not function effectively during a crisis, they lose even more legitimacy. the transboundary crisis makes vulnerable institutions even more vulnerable. what can be done to protect our country, our prosperity and our well-being in a world of new, unprecedented crises that effortlessly bypass existing lines of defence? to answer this question, we must understand the underlying drivers of the transboundary crisis. two books, both classics, provide a great starting point: barry turner's ( ) man-made disasters and charles perrow's ( ) normal accidents. both authors focus on the relentless modernization of socio-technical systems. we build increasingly complex systems that we connect to other complex systems with one goal: to enhance the efficiency of critical processes (such as food supply, transport, production chains, internet and energy), that is, to increase the speed of service delivery at ever-lower costs. the thesis that emerges from both books can be summarized as follows: these "highways of efficiency" become the "highways of failure" that allow, if not actually enable, routine disruptions to travel very quickly from one system to another. perrow's argument is simple and convincing. if a system becomes evermore complex, it also becomes evermore difficult to understand. when something goes wrong, it is not immediately clear for system operators what is happening. if a complex system is tightly connected with other systems, we know that even a small disturbance can affect the functioning of these other systems. by the time the problem is recognized in one system, others may have been infected. complexity and tight coupling create fertile ground for small incidents to jump from one domain to another and thus escalate into larger-scale crises. new threats exploit these "highways of failure." the rise of revolutionary technologies-artificial intelligence, dna editing, drones, d-printing, self-propelled cars, the "internet of things"-brings happiness and economic prosperity, but they also speed up failure and create unknown shortcuts for unprecedented threats. from this theoretical perspective, two options emerge. a country can move backward by decoupling from the modern complexity ecology or move forward by a strategy of protecting complexity. perrow opted for the way back: simplify and unbundle critical systems. if complexity and tight coupling are the problem, perrow's solution-decoupling-is the obvious solution: return to simpler systems that are isolated from other systems. by decoupling from modernity, many crises simply cannot happen. the choice for decoupling does not come free, however. withdrawal entails a decoupling from the benefits that complex systems generate. it is a costly affair, as economists are fond to explain. but this rational argumentation collides with the growing unease about the negative effects of modern systems. in times of uncertainty, the call for entrenchment behind hard borders may not be evidence based, but it is intuitively convincing and politically attractive. we should therefore expect that "decoupling" remains an option as long as modern systems generate uncontrollable hazards. an alternative (or complimentary) strategy is prepared in the face of complexity. if we accept that disturbances can and will emerge, perhaps we are better off investing in early detection and timely intervention. aaron wildavsky ( ) argued that enhanced resilience through a trial-and-error strategy, relying on the human capacity for innovation and learning, is a much more fruitful strategy than a short-sighted focus on prevention through entrenchment. resilience became a dominant feature of many policy efforts in the domain of safety and security. governments that are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens against systemic risks appeal to the ability of citizens (also organizations and communities) to "absorb shocks" and "bounce back" after a disruptive event. the underlying idea is that citizens know what is good for them. in this line of thinking, it is not necessary that government arranges full protection for all citizens from all those complex systems surrounding them. begins with understanding the many ways in which incidents can develop into cross-border threats. how are systems connected? how can a system be infected by a disruption in another system? how can one system be protected against another without undermining the fruits of the existing connection? we need to understand the vulnerabilities of complex and tightly coupled systems. vulnerability thinking is still in its infancy. intelligence services seek to recognize potential threats in a timely manner. hedge funds bet on "big data" to foresee political upheavals. the eu has more than detection and early warning mechanisms in place (but nobody knows if they are effective). research funded by the eu (horizon ) focuses on understanding escalation mechanisms in critical infrastructures. complexity researchers study "tipping points." other researchers focus on the ability of people in control rooms to detect early aberrations in critical processes. the need for detection mechanisms is clearly and widely acknowledged, but we await major breakthroughs. the transboundary crisis will continue to surprise us for the time being. the transboundary crisis is difficult to comprehend. the causes are hidden in system complexity and pile up when the dominoes start falling. to understand how a threat unfolds, where exactly and how quickly, it is necessary to bring together as much relevant information as possible, that is, to authorize, analyse and share it with the right parties-quickly and effectively. where critical information about the broken levees in new orleans disappeared. it took the federal authorities more than hours to understand that the city was under water. the solution does not lie in the development of new technologies. what is needed is an approach that helps information managers to quickly collect information from a variety of organizational domains. they must learn to locate sources of critical information; they must also learn to make sense of that information, which is likely to be difficult as the information emanates from very different sources. it is a truism that critical decisions must often be made quickly on the basis of very little information when in a crisis. from a legitimacy perspective (see below), it is important that those critical decisions are made by the appropriate officials or institutions. the transboundary crisis makes this quite tricky, as it challenges the underlying logic of bureaucracy (where responsibility is tied to a person, position or institution). when a crisis involves multiple actors, each with their own responsibilities, interests and working methods, it must be clear who is authorized to decide what. this rarely has been determined beforehand, as a transboundary crisis tends to involve a unique constellation of actors. as we have seen, the typical solution to this type of problem involves a combination of centralization and coordination. centralization is hard enough for the more routine crises; it is even less likely to work in the international arena. national governments do not lightly cede authority to international organizations (certainly not during a crisis where so much is at stake). the international arena has produced some innovative solutions: think of nato's article five boin | (centralization in case of defined threats) and the european central bank (centralization by stealth). the most important problem is that crisis centralization tends to create serious legitimacy issues. if the ownership on critical issues is allocated to an official or institution, and thus not allocated somewhere else or taken away from someone, it is crucial that the "crisis owner" can rely on political and public support. if this is not the case, the legitimacy of public institutions may come under pressure. without a solid legitimacy basis, effective crisis management becomes difficult. centralization that has not been subjected to processes of democratic deliberation and control is risky in this regard. the european central bank became increasingly powerful during the financial crisis and is hardly subject to democratic control. the impotence of the european parliament is telling. the european central bank has made decisions that large groups of citizens perceive as unjust. the lack of democratic control opens the door for politicization of the crisis response. coordination, on the other hand, may work. but that requires a degree of "instant trust" that is often lacking between actors that have never worked together before. promising initiatives can be found at the interface of public and private. for instance, the netherlands has the ict response board in which private parties work with government to prepare for cyber disasters. the louisiana business emergency operations center is another innovative example. the question is whether such practices can be scaled to the international level. theoretical progress is being made. by formulating transboundary crisis management as a collective action problem, we can apply theoretical insights from this body of research. this type of research may provide a view of the conditions under which crisis cooperation is possible, and the strategies that may be helpful. one such strategy, for example, is based on that idea of "instant trust"-unilaterally taking the first step, without being sure of reciprocity (majchrzak, jarvenpaa, & hollingshead, ) . but, overall, we can state that mechanisms for the delineation of authority are lacking for transboundary crises. in the absence of serious political discussion, real progress will likely only happen after a disastrous encounter with a transboundary crisis. the transboundary crisis is, of course, not a new phenomenon. crises have always traversed boundaries. think of the plague sweeping across europe, the flu epidemic, food shortages in the roman empire or the two world wars. the optimist may claim that the western world has managed the really big threats in the postwar era. the pessimist may argue that the connections among international systems have spectacularly increased, problems have become more complex, and the number of actors has increased dramatically. even if the pessimist is only half right, we may justifiably ask whether we are sufficiently prepared. the good news is that crisis management has professionalized in the past few decades. since the beginning of this century (after the millennium computer bug and / ), western countries have heavily invested in crisis management capacity, both in the public and private sectors. municipalities, schools, hospitals, businesses-crisis management is now firmly on the radar just about everywhere. more, even though public bureaucracies are not designed to deal with exceptional situations, "work arounds" have been created to deal with routine crises. i have argued, however, that these existing crisis management structures are no match for the transboundary crisis. when the system under threat becomes spread too far, and workarounds do not we leave it to the national crisis institutions. we can instruct these institutions to pay more attention to the transboundary dimensions of crises. it will not be easy to introduce a new way of working in institutions that are built around traditional practices that work for traditional incidents and crises. these organizations do not have to unlearn standing practices; they must learn to deal with the transboundary crisis. we must, in other words, make those institutions "ambidextrous." this will require a lot of work, because national crisis institutions have little affinity with transnational and cross-border crisis management. perhaps it is better to invest in organizations that are already active in cross-border domains. nato and the european union have in recent years developed crisis management capabilities which, in principle, are intended for cross-border crises. the eu, in particular, has developed in embryonic form abilities needed for a transboundary crisis. but these capabilities and assets are scattered across the many agencies and commission parts of the eu. and the crisis performance of the eu is not always considered effective or legitimate. in particular, the response to the financial crisis and the immigration crisis has become sources of controversy. the eu will need time to become an effective and legitimate actor in the crisis domain. . build transboundary crisis management institutions. think in terms of a new organization, with new people, a respected leadership, real powers and a realistic budget. an institute that invents and tests new forms of crisis management practices. new processes and forms of organization that can effectively address the transboundary crisis. the advantage is that a brand new institution can devise novel methods or ways of thinking from scratch. that is, at the same time, the downside: it will take a long time and the outcome is by no means guaranteed. we conclude by setting out a research challenge. it is important to study the different guises in which the transboundary crisis comes, which allow for classification. it may well turn out that some types of transboundary crises are more amenable to certain interventions (such as centralization and coordination, decoupling or resilience) than others. it may well be that certain types are more politically or analytically challenging. the research challenge is to find out how characteristics relate to preparatory and management efforts. we may discover that certain types are intractable, whereas others may lend themselves to early detection and intervention. by studying cases of actual crises and near misses, we should be able to enhance our understanding of the transboundary crisis. acknowledgment i wish to thank emery roe for his extensive and constructive comments, which greatly improved this article. this study has benefitted from funding provided by the european union's horizon research and innovation programme under grant agreement no (transcrisis). the politics of crisis management managing hurricane katrina: lessons from a megadisaster coordinating expertise among emergent groups responding to disaster man-made disasters searching for safety how to cite this article: boin a. the transboundary crisis: why we are unprepared and the road ahead key: cord- -l jzpxi authors: topper, benjamin; lagadec, patrick title: fractal crises – a new path for crisis theory and management date: - - journal: nan doi: . / - . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: l jzpxi this paper is a modest contribution to the vast exploration to be embarked upon as our maps appear increasingly outdated. we will first explore some outmoded ‘taken for granted’ assumptions and visions: this section aims to clarify why the crisis management world has profoundly changed and how the current understanding of crises and theoretical frameworks is becoming increasingly less adequate. then, we will try to meet the second challenge of this special issue, by suggesting innovative approaches that will contribute to elaborate the building blocks of a theory of crisis management. we will propose a new theoretical framework, through the use of a fractal approach, following the footsteps of benoit mandelbrot, in order to rethink and capture the essence of the new theatre of operations that must be dealt with. throughout, we will show how this original framework could be put into practice and what its limitations and perspectives are. n ormality is our natural nest, stability our beloved home and certainty our paramount aspiration. decision makers ask for action, but properly mapped. business people ask for risk, but properly controlled. wild weather is the friend of no one. academics -sons of descartes, so 'delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings' (descartes, ) -are eager to understand the world and its laws, but within proper limits. as alvin weinberg put it:'science deals with regularity; art deals with singularity' (weinberg, ) . alas, from time to time, some big storm, disaster or 'situation' rears its ugly head to disturb, for a moment, the so-called 'normal' world. a dominant tendency is just to ignore such improper outbreaks, and to concentrate on the 'normal' game plans.yet, some bold thinkers -philosophers, doctors, strategists, lawyers, mathematicians and economist -have always been captivated by such strange quirks of 'nature' and history. ever since the ancient greeks, 'crisis' has received special attention: how to envision and deal with such difficult trials sent by the gods or nature? the quest has always been seen as foolish: how to study the exception to the rule, the 'irrational'? and dubious too: those studying such disturbances were incapable of providing a clear definition of their elusive 'object'.and probably blasphemous into the bargain: you do not question the gods nor the laws of nature and science. in a sense, the very idea of a 'theory' of crisis appeared and still appears as a contradiction in terms, both inconsistent and suspect (béjin & morin, ) . however, in addition to isolated thinkers who dared to explore such fields of experience, others succeeded in developing real schools of thought and even 'best practices' for such ordeals. the s and s witnessed the remarkable development of sociological studies devoted to communities confronted with natural disasters (quarantelli & dynes, ) and studies of international crises were prolific (hermann, ; allison, ) . in the late s, and increasingly in the s and s, the field was opened up to take stock of the new kinds of shocks that impact complex technological societies, beyond natural disasters alone. a profusion of severe turbulences were examinedinternational shocks, factory explosions, product tampering, prison protests, urban riots, football stadium tragedies, train or plane hijackings, specific financial crises, etc. case studies multiplied and sustained efforts were made to consolidate theoretical perspectives and models (rosenthal, charles, 't hart, ; lagadec, ) . in parallel, much was done to clarify number of 'best practices' to deal with these events and their ripple effects (fink, ; ten berge, ) . many disciplines were mobilized to open up new lines of thought and to lend their support to the development of knowledge. yet a lingering plea was made to consolidate, beyond mere case studies, some better 'theory' of crisis. then came the turn of the millennium, with a host of new challenges to address. it was patently clear that new kind of crises had to be considered, that a broad new ocean of complexity and 'inconceivability' had yet to be explored:'what we learn about the development and management of past crises may have limited value for improving the management of tomorrow's crises' (rosenthal, boin, & comfort, , vii) . ten years later, such a warning appears more urgent than ever. climate change and environmental issues, increasingly risk-prone vital networks, massive terrorist threats, huge increases in the cost of disasters due to global coupling and just-in-time production methods, global civil unrest, financial and economic meltdowns show that we have to deal, not with something more, but with something else (boin & lagadec, ) . the time of mega shocks (oecd, ) has come. in response, the concept of mega crisis has been put forward and is now trying to get its head around a whole set of questions and theoretical challenges (helsloot, boin, jacobs, & comfort, ) . but scale is certainly not the most difficult factor of rupture. crises appear to have taken on an entirely new dimension: they are no longer isolated accidents capable of threatening large subsystems -the core of our theoretical fabric of crisis theory in use. they have increasingly become opportunistic expressions of global turbulences impacting our social fabrics, while at the same time our bedrocks are losing their firmness of footing by being exposed to violent liquefaction processes. all the various isolated currents of vulnerability seem to be meshing to produce a global volatile, chaotic, incomprehensible theatre of operations. a quarter of a century after the blossoming of crisis studies, the need for a decisive breakthrough appears crucial in the present world, where crisis is no longer the marginal exception but the core engine. hence, tough questions arise. is the paradigm in which our practices (boin & mcconnel, ) and theories are anchored still valid? if not, kouzmin's perspective must be taken on board -'crisis management in crisis' (kouzmin, ) .what can be put forward at the theoretical level to ensure that analytical tools are able to grasp present realities -which are no longer those of last century? in the light of such questions and proposals, how can we develop our action repertoires, and what are the avenues of research that need to be consolidated today? this does not mean that we throw all known practices overboard, but that we must open new windows, to shed new light upon challenges poorly addressed by existing theories. the aim of this contribution is to try to tackle this formidable theoretical and managerial challenge. in the first part, we will revisit our references in the field of crisis -those fixed in recent decades: an overview of the facts, which have effectively slipped the net of our conventional theoretical fields, followed by a critical analysis of the essential roots of our crisis theories. then, in the second part, we will suggest a specific theoretical path, inspired by fractal geometry -which we will show to be well suited to grasping today's volatile realities. finally, we will look at how this original framework can lay the theoretical basis for effective crisis management. clearly, this contribution will not settle all the problems or clarify all the theoretical questions. the aim is only to open new doors, to suggest new approaches, understandings and grammars. it will take many years to build a satisfying theory and to forge new practices for the new world of crises. indeed, our field of experience is witnessing too many upheavals to leave our visions, hypotheses and tools unquestioned, and these same visions, hypotheses and tools have to be reforged if we still want to be in a position to grasp and deal with the realities that are now shaping and overwhelming our history. it is common to reject any idea of novelty, especially in the disaster and crisis area -'nothing new under the sun'. it is traditional to recall the cataclysmic events that have marked history or prehistory (without referring to myths like the deluge) from the extinction of the dinosaurs by a meteorite, the end of the minoan civilization due to a volcanic eruption, the black death ( - ) which decimated europe, the laki eruption ( ) and its contribution to the french revolution, up to the great flu ( ) which killed more human beings than the great war, the crisis, and so on and so forth. not forgetting 'near misses' such as the cuban missile crisis ( ), when the future of mankind was in the balance only to be saved from the brink by the intelligence of a few -or, according to the latest analyses by robert mcnamara (morris, ) -by sheer luck. theories developed in the last decades of the previous century, has commonly been rejected. but, just over years into this century, too many cases have arisen that demand a new vision (lagadec, ) . beyond immediate 'facts' -from katrina to fukushima, from the global financial and economic meltdown to global outbursts of civil unrest -we need to clarify structural factors that change the whole territory of crises, and call for a decisive upgrade of crisis theory. • from large-scale to off-scale: major events are not new, but they have got denser, and appear to affect greater numbers, even entire continents and the entire planet, threatening millions, hundred of millions -because of blackouts, pandemics, economic upheavals and social implosions. multiplication and concomitance of such mega shocks lead to situations where the means are overwhelmed, where everyone or almost, is under the threat. • from complexity to the unreadable: everything can be qualified as complex, but such events as hurricane katrina ( ) have shown how today mega shocks can trigger tremors that are impossible to categorize and map. the case of hurricane irene ( ) striking the east side of the american continent is a warning sign: it is impossible to know in advance the potential multiple-head strikes and disruption dynamics -airports, stock exchange, vital networks, military capacities, etc. -of such mega shocks.the field of the complex event gives way to the totally elusive global situation. • from tightly-coupled to total interdependence: much has been said, in the th century, on critical infrastructures and coupled interdependent systems (perrow, (perrow, , . we are now switching to another picture: there is no longer a mere chain of interactions, but 'piles' of activities, 'biologically' entangled and intertwined. hence, shocks trigger swells that swallow up 'totalities', beyond the idea of incremental transmission. reverberation dynamics are unfolding, not only on the ground and from one place to another, but from one network to another, one hub to another, one underlying fabric to another -locally, nationally and globally.this was a characteristic of fukushima ( ): the plant, the adjacent territory, the province, the nation and the world (with the partial loss of key electronic components, becoming more severe after the additional flooding inthailand).we have clearly switched from complex problems to something else. • from high speed to instantaneity: case studies in the th century had always underlined the speed factor, especially when it dealt with media coverage. we are now switching to something else and with a qualitative leap: in , the sars virus travelled from hong kong to toronto within a few hours, and the capital city of ontario was deep in crisis before the world health organization sounded the worldwide alert; in , wall street witnessed the 'disappearance' of billion us $ in just milliseconds. more radical still: electronic media coverage is now totally in real time, globally. during the top secret operation against bin laden, the news of the attack was already on twitter as the core strategic group was following the assault from the west wing war room; during the shootings in liege (belgium, december ), one tweet said that the gunman was in police uniform: and one sees the crowd fleeing from the police, the police not being aware of that item of news. • from local events to in-depth dislocation: this is the most decisive watershed. until now, we were focused on the specific event striking its target and the direct or indirect 'vicinity' of that target. in addition, such a strike occurred within a closed field, naturally robust and stable. studies tried to explain how the event could affect a large territory, step by step, and how the environment could finally absorb the shocks coming from the initial 'ground zero'. now, due to global interdependences, shockwaves are finding a milieu favourable to instant chain effects without 'watertight compartments'.as arjen boins underlines: 'the modern crisis does not confine itself to a particular policy area (say health or energy); it jumps from one field to the other, unearthing issues and recombining them into unforeseen mega-threats' (boin, , p. ) . moreover, fundamental fabrics (environment, economy, culture, etc.) are often in a state of preliquefaction, already very fragile.the slightest quiver can develop into extreme tremors.the event itself does not unfold in an absorbent milieu, but in a resonance chamber. this milieu is prone to triggering rogue waves through the combination-recombination of single shocks. hence, it becomes quasi impossible to trace an event on a graph, along predefined lines. the paradigm has shifted. we are just now witnessing the conflagration triggered in the arab world by a film posted on internet: a low cost weapon of mass dislocation. • from uncertainty to ignorance: there is no such thing as a risk or a crisis without uncertainty, but we are now driven into 'voids' of understanding and action that epitomize a loss of fundamental reference points. instantaneity, absorption of large parts of realities until then isolated, abundance of reverberations, rogue wave multiplication, loss of fundamental anchors and bedrocks . . . all this casts us adrift far beyond our familiar theatres of operations, be they intellectual or managerial. the challenge is no longer to grasp uncertainty at the margins of a strong core of knowledge. one is instantly confronted with the unknown, with territories where cardinal hypotheses no longer have purchase. indeed, one could argue that not one recent event adequately translates such a model. however, it is easy to plead when considering fukushima -economic and social dislocation, the environmental and energetic challenges, etc. -that the picture sketched above is beginning to emerge. the concept of 'wicked problems', introduced by rittel and webber as early as is probably the most appropriate one to translate such realities (rittel & webber, ) . when proposed, it applied to a few difficult issues; it now appears useful and even necessary to grasping the vast majority of our challenges in the crisis field.the basic idea is that the bulk of our conceptual and operational toolbox is designed to deal with tame problems: those that can be precisely defined, whose causes can be specified, that can be resolved by gathering additional data, by breaking them down into smaller problems, and by applying specific remedial techniques (camillus, ) . the basic vision is of the engineering type: the challenge is to find the best technical responses. in the conventional line of thinking, crisis issues do not trigger intractable societal discussion. wicked issues do not fall into any of these 'normal' niches, which are essential to us.there is no consensus on the definition of the problem-the very idea of a 'definition' is even irrelevant. the search for solutions never stops, there is no ultimate test of a solution since any response generates unexpected consequences, and each implemented solution has consequences that cannot be undone. every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. rittel and webber put it bluntly: 'the classic paradigm of science and engineering -the paradigm that has underlain modern professionalism -is not applicable to the problems of open societal systems' (rittel & webber, , p. ) uncertainty is global on every single component of the issue, with regard to all the outcomes of any action. judgment becomes crucial. fundamental values also become part of the problem, and elusive when called upon to ground a given analysis, decision or implementation. the probabilistic approach becomes ineffective. every single move triggers possible global mutations within the system and within its global context, trial and error strategies are no longer appropriate: every move is a one off move. these are indeed the core characteristics of mega crises, qualitatively different from 'traditional' eventfocused crises.the starting point can no longer be the event -the crisis field must clearly depart from the emergency domain, which has been the original niche of crisis analyses and practices. the structural issue must be the global dynamics of dislocation.we are no longer dealing with specific crises, but with crisis stages where everything is linked and mutating. dynamics are not so much mechanical chain reaction effects as engulfing global vortices. hence, we could put forward a tentative definition of the mega crisis as -the embedded engine of an overly complex world that evolves and mutates through global dynamics whose texture is made up of unstable webs of ongoing, major dislocations. (lagadec, ) since the turn of the century, and particularly since / , the motto of the crisis world has been 'think outside the box'. that already constituted a serious challenge for our descartes-inherited habits of thinking. the current reality, on all fronts, opens a new landscape: as mike granatt puts it: 'there is no box anymore' (granatt, ) . outstanding constant features have marked our reflections on the notion of crisis since the end of the s: the vigorous calling for the absolute necessity of a solid theorization so that crisis study could be recognized as a genuine science; frustration due to the extreme difficulty encountered in satisfying conventional demands to secure a grading of academic excellence; hesitation between the addition of case studies, giving way to ever more data, but poor additive knowledge and an extraordinarily difficult theorization, impossible indeed within the usual and normative codes.the whole leading to a contrasted situation made up of undeniable advances in the building of a reference body and in case-study publication, but with repeated calls for a better theorization capable of observing the canons of a noble discipline, well recognized by the scientific world. there is something pathetic in this frantic race. the demands to be satisfied in order to secure a degree of recognition are in effect essentially incompatible with the substance of the crisis phenomenon and the kind of intelligence it requires. as the issue of crises becomes increasingly more strategic, it is urgent to understand and to establish as a founding principle the fact that crisis studies cannot satisfy the requirements of classical theoretical models. crisis studies must not beg for recognition by simply trying to play into paradigms that are not and cannot be theirs; they must open their own fields and routes. if not, crisis intelligence will exhaust itself, and miss its target by the same token. this supposes, first and foremost, accepting to break, however painfully, with the past so as to escape the usual pitfalls -and to open new routes. instead of requoting here, the ever mentioned founding texts (hermann, ; béjin & morin, ; rosenthal et al., ) , rewriting pages now become classic (lagadec, , pp. - ; dayton, ) , citing the conventional references (the greek tradition, medicine, economic references, psychology, etc.), or trying to embrace the whole of organization theory literature -we will focus on a critical handful of stumbling blocks that must be decisively revisited. • definition. the literature is marked by a ritual: emphatic regret for the lack of 'really scientific' definition of the crisis concept has become a matter of course. such a preliminary confession appears to be essential to acquiring a kind of scientific royal warrant. take, for example, james a. robinson, who scathingly opens his article 'crisis' in the international encyclopedia for social sciences with: ' "crisis" is a lay term in search of a scholarly meaning' (robinson, , p. ) .the bill of indictment is well known: a term 'gutted from within' (morin, , p. ) , an 'empty shell, a ready-to-use catch-phrase' (béjin & morin, , p. ),'a convenient cliché' (starn, , p. ) ,'a vulgar and hollow little word' (morin, , p. ) ;'a very useful word in the age of mass media' since 'it creates emotion without requiring reflection'. (starn, , p. ) . nothing here is all that new. historian randolf starn points out that as early as , an italian lexicographer decried the abuse of the medical term 'crisis' (starn, , p. ) . however, such accusations and regrets are not false, especially with the growing importance of the mass media, so fond of the little word. as mike granatt ( ) put it recently: 'the word "crisis" has replaced "emergency" just because it is shorter, hence a much better fit for the media format'. but it is necessary to go beyond these basic condemnations: they tell us more about the limits of our understanding of crises than about the intrinsic limits of the concept itself. the core of crisis is precisely the fact that an event, a dynamic, does not fit into the conventional references, formats and codes -and moreover, is threatening to destroy those very references, formats and codes. demanding that crisis should fit into univocal, nonhybrid, clear-cut definitions, accepted by all and quietly settle into fixed nomenclatures, is just one more sign showing how we refuse to accept and enter crisis territory. mitroff, murat, and green ( , p. ) . are right when they underline: 'it is our contention that crisis management deals with problems that are inherently ill-structured. . . .to insist, therefore, on agreement as a precondition for studying ill-structured problems, is to ignore and to deny their basic nature. it is to misinterpret them ontologically. when crisis management experts call for agreement on the definition of basic terms, in effect, they are committing the same kind of error that we accuse practitioners of making when they ignore the complexity of crises' inherently, the crisis field is the world of the ill-structured, the intractable and the 'wicked'. even if it is useful to explore, find and use formulations that help to shape and consolidate approaches of the crisis phenomenon, it is necessary to state a preliminary and basic condition:'crisis' will resist any attempt to be 'defined'. moreover, the underlying principle to be laid down should be that any request for a definitive, clear and univocal definition of the concept should be understood as a cognitive and psychic refusal to genuinely accept and explore crisis territory. • classification. crisis literature is marked by constant efforts to deliver typologies (natural, technological, social), segmentations (internal, external, technical, organizational), time scaling (before, during, after), categories (from product defects to international crises, etc.) and myriads of crisis components, in a kind pointillist picture helping to fix at least some part of this elusive reality. all these attempts to characterize the crisis phenomenon are interesting and useful, if only they do not strive to reach an erroneous objective. in crisis territory, more than in any other,a typology can help to clarify -a little -the theatre of operations, but must not dream of locking it down. mutating, elusive realities do not let themselves be taken prisoner. in essence, crisis is, and will remain, a wild and maverick reality, impossible to understand and grasp within frameworks shaped, built and stamped to contain stable and repeated phenomena. obviously, this is extremely tiring for us, as if we were still the disciples of the naturalists of the th century: 'causes which result in effects which are rare, violent and sudden must not affect us, they are not part of the ordinary process of nature. our causes and reasons are the effects that occur each day, movements that follow one another, effects that are continually renewed and endlessly repeated' (buffon, ). • measure. crisis studies and theory of crisis management have developed in the wake of risk analysis. the conventional view is that crisis develops when risk control has failed, when 'residual risks' have taken their toll. the good news is that the whole is clearly measured, with probabilities. and crisis lies in a residual territory, limited in essence. the new theatre of operations in the risk domain compels us to step outside of this vision of 'residual accidents'.the ingredients of a new vision are pointed up, but with caution, in bernstein's ( ) 'remarkable story of risks'.the conquest of the crepuscular territory of risks has been extraordinary throughout the centuries but many 'details' that could have been ignored in the past now rush back to centre stage as we enter a much more complex, turbulent, volatile world. dice throwing follows regularities . . . 'if the dice is honest' (cardano, p. ) . nature follows regularities, but . . . 'only for most of the part' (leibnitz, p. ). 'players can anticipate processes, as long as . . . they stick to the rules upon which they agreed at the outset.' (pascal, p. ). the issue is that such difficulties, marginal in a stable, controlled and compartmentalized world, are capable of overwhelming the whole landscape in a globalized, volatile and turbulent world. this is exactly bernstein's ultimate point: the cosmology of risks, and hence of crises, could mutate since 'discontinuities, irregularities and volatilities seem to be proliferating rather than diminishing' (p. ) -which justifies the title of the conclusion: 'awaiting wildness' (p. ). if, as it is the case today, the world is mutating and is now shaped around volatility, discontinuity and nonlinearity, then our whole cosmology based on regularity measurement and modelling appears suddenly outmoded and leaves a huge theoretical void. how to think, model and handle instability, shifting dynamics and the intrinsically mutating? the age of the unthinkable (cooper ramo, ) demands a radically new science and new theoretical foundations. crisis theorists cannot develop their endeavour through normalization but only through invention. crisis is a specific 'object', which demands a specific, different, theoretical universe. but cognitive habits, academic recognition constraints, the difficulties of any discovery process and probably above all,the great ordeals that accompany any exploration of the unknown -'it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built' (einstein,in kuhn, ,p. ) -tend to lead to 'normal thinking' rather than invention. an illuminating example of such recoil has been given in a book recently written on the subject of cataclysmic risks.the author of one of the chapters rightly underlines that, for such off-scale risks, it would be necessary to change our paradigm; but his whole contribution is strictly embedded in 'normal science, normal knowledge'. he explains: 'the challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophe being so huge, people snap into a different mode of thinking. . . . i thought it better that this essay should focus on the mistakes well documented in the literature -the general literature of cognitive psychology, because there is not yet experimental literature specific to the psychology of existential risks' (yudkowsky, , p. ) . the fundamental challenge for academics is to understand and confront the violent negative reaction to any attempt to produce, or even to admit the necessity of, new theoretical ground and practices. just as engineers, or decision makers have difficulty in thinking outside the normally formulated hypotheses, rules and practices. the preliminary necessity is then to accept the difference between science and technique. science evolves in the unknown, and on the frontier between the known and the unknown. and there is a cardinal responsibility in science: understanding the moment when a dominant paradigm, which inspired and structured scientific and operational activity until then, begins to show signs of inadequacy. such a requirement becomes a failing if evidence accumulates to indicate that the hypotheses, visions and tools of reference no longer fit, while people stubbornly remain -out of habit, myopia or terror of change -within outmoded maps.that scientific demand is all the more extreme in the risk and crisis arena: theoretical fault lines rapidly and inevitably lead to collective tragedies. the intellectual fault line has been a decisive driver of failures and repeated fiascos in crisis territory. being a 'war behind' is a sure way of being 'defeated in every battle' as sunzi ( ) put it in his art of war. it is well known, after thomas kuhn ( ) , how such strategic vigilance with regard to tired paradigms is not the norm: 'normal science' (p. ), which imposes its norms and bans is more than reluctant to wander beyond usual closed-in and reassuring frameworks.the usual day-to-day accepted work consists of documenting 'residual ambiguities' (p. ), very far from disturbing the 'residual validity' of conventional hypotheses. the obstacle is all the more unyielding in the crisis field because, precisely, the very prospect of going beyond 'signed and sealed' schemes often triggers an instant and irrepressible need for protection and negationwhich leads to further entrenchment in conventionaloutmoded, yet so comfortable -practices and theories. within this line of thinking, any questioning of the dominant paradigm is an immediate ordeal for anyone trying to open up the approach. the burden of proof, with very rare exceptions, has to be borne by the dissenter, never by the obedient servant of the codes in place -which guarantee a solid margin of security for established theories. moreover, the dissenter will be asked to provide proofs judged and measured according to the previous paradigm -which, as kuhn underlines, is an impossible condition to satisfy. hence, the leap to the new paradigm will necessarily happen too late, when major events, impossible to hide or negate any longer, will have overwhelmed the entire field of analysis and action. in the words of hegel ( ): 'the owl of minerva takes its flight only as the shades of night are gathering'. the issue of the effective relevance of our reference models is however, crucial and must be subject to repeated auditing, all the more rigorous and frequent, given that the stakes are high, and the environments mutating and turbulent.that is precisely the case now as we enter the second decade of the st century. as thomas kuhn ( ) has underlined, when a current theory encounters more and more difficulties in its attempt to encapsulate reality, the time is ripe for a paradigm shift.this appears to be the case in the crisis world -and in management science globally. we must confront the unknown, and prepare a scientific leap, even if going beyond 'normal science' is always a difficult path to pursue. it requires the acceptance of the risk of trial and error, the acceptance of great discomfort. after all, exploration beyond known paradigms is a vertiginous affair. it requires acceptance of denial: it is impossible to convince people of the validity of a new paradigm with the arguments of the previous paradigm; moreover: any paradigm shift will be a source of anxiety, and blunt refusal is the usual initial response. there are numerous new pathways to be explored, tested, rejected or elicited. thus, in the second section we are going to modestly open up a few avenues and propose a number of signposts from the field of fractal geometry. this theoretical body of knowledge has frequently been referred to, but most often only in passing, or by way of a gloss, without a genuine understanding of the theory itself. it is important to go further, yet with caution. fractal geometry, formalized and developed by benoit mandelbrot, has shown its importance in areas subject to crisis such as finance, a domain also well known for its great complexity, volatility and discontinuity (mandelbrot, ) . it is therefore natural to wonder whether this body of concepts could be used in the field of contemporary crises, which also show these same features. this line of thought in terms of fractal geometry is not entirely new (sornette, ) , but it is worth giving it a second look as mega crises (helsloot et al., ; lagadec & topper, ) are more than ever becoming the norm. the first challenge is to master the scientific use of a foreign set of concepts in order to apply them to the field considered here. the idea is not to propose a 'miraculous key' or a ready-to-use toolbox but rather to initiate new thinking, innovative perspectives for the field of crises, through the understanding of the potentials and limitations of this approach. when one happens upon the need for a paradigm shift in the theory of complex societal phenomena, as is the case today in the theory of contemporary crises, the temptation exists to import apparently attractive, but sometimes illusory, 'theories' from elsewhere -especially from the world of physics and mathematics. in recent years, chaos theory for example has often been put forward -but, if one looks closely, its use has always been more metaphorical than genuinely useful for understanding societal phenomena. moreover, such concepts and theories cannot be extended to social sciences simply because they cannot, by definition, be translated from mathematical language to that of the social sciences (thiétart & forgues, ) . if such imports are to be made, it is only provided that: • the underlying assumptions of the imported theoretical concepts and ideas are effectively understood (beyond the mere attractiveness of the words and images used); • the contribution is not put forward as a solution or an explanation to everything, but as a means to open up new avenues that will bring new theoretical perspectives and operational avenues. in this paper, we argue that it is possible to develop the new concept of fractal crises and show how the principles it is based upon can be of real help in deepening our understanding of crisis theory and in offering ways -among other new avenues -to renew crisis management theory. we will also underline the limits of the proposition: fractal geometry cannot answer all the challenges that contemporary crises bring up and shall not be applied without a careful reflection on its practicability. mandelbrot suggested that the underlying mathematics behind market prices is based on fractals (mandelbrot, ) . a fractal can be defined as 'a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reducedsize copy of the whole', a property called self-similarity, which itself is a subset of a larger class called invariance principles. hence, fractals and invariance principles are strongly linked. such invariance principles are beloved of physicists and mathematicians, because finding an invariant means finding a key to grasping the way the system is behaving, as this property is intrinsic to the system under study. what we will be doing here is not only basing ourselves on invariance principles, but it going beyond mandelbrot's approach by looking at how complexity can be reframed using fractals, founding our approach on the various scales and the complex dynamics that are at play in a crisis event. the existence of unchanging properties in market prices was, at first, not given much weight by most statisticians in finance. but mandelbrot managed to prove that his way of thinking was more adequate to model the behaviour of the financial markets, especially in times of crisis and high volatility. the classical financial model follows a gaussian distribution, and is therefore blind to extreme events. to be more precise, the mathematics underlying portfolio theory handles extreme phenomena with benign neglect: it regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter or as impossible to take into account.therefore, the theoretical approach in itself does not allow working on extreme phenomena. if portfolio theory can account for what occurs % of the time in the market, the picture it presents does not reflect reality, and is biased towards a downscaling of major events. if the weather is moderate % of the time, can the mariner afford to ignore the possibility of a typhoon? the introduction of invariance principles by mandelbrot, thus proving the link between the volatility that can be tracked every day in market prices and massive market crashes, allowed a return of the exceptional to the theoretical field. the use of fractal geometry does not come closer to forecasting a price drop or rise on a specific day on the basis of past records, but it provides adequate estimates of the probability of what the market might do and allows one to prepare for the larger scale changes, for extreme events. in other words, mandelbrot came up with an approach that allowed bringing the extreme phenomena into the scientific field. it was no longer necessary to label them as 'exceptional' and leave them aside.they were taken into consideration, and as we are seeing today, % of the extraordinary can have more weight than the conventional %. the theoretical leap, not only had relevance, but it became crucial. the power of this approach and its potential application in crisis theory is to allow us to work in universes of high volatility, with extremes being the norm, multiple domains interacting at high speed, etc. these characteristics are not considered as aberrations on the margins any more, but as an intrinsic dynamic of the identity of the new paradigm. the efficient use of fractal geometry to model the extreme events in the stock market is a strong argument for applying it to the world of crises, as it also deals with complex interactions and unpredictable shocks.we, therefore, suggest here a modest contribution, and will try to show how it is possible to build a new path for crisis theory in terms of fractal geometry, and in turn build a new path to crisis management through the search of key parameters that we call 'invariants' as they will prove to be a useful toolkit for grasping a large spectrum of crisis events. looking for invariants not only means looking for elements that are common in different crisis events, it also means being able to understand what remains unchanged and what is dynamic, what is part of the solution and what is part of the problem. our new conceptual approach is based on looking for underlying principles that allow a better understanding of global catastrophic events, in the same way that invariants can represent fundamental keys to understanding fractals and volatility. a number of methods are available for identifying complex realities in terms of fractals. in most cases, fractal theory is described through invariance principles, i.e., considering what is common in universes where crises happen on different scales. but we can also go in complementary directions, where one seeks to understand the specific properties of each level. invariants are then the key to analyzing the more important interactions, the potential tipping points, the weak signals that allow one to anticipate possible turbulence, etc. many papers have documented how the world has become global or interconnected, but very little exists on a deeper conceptualization of what that implies.the introduction by n. taleb ( ) of the concept of black swans, i.e., the rare events that have dramatic consequences, was a first step towards making people understand that rare does not mean inexistent and that a rare but destructive event is not to be neglected. although his point was a very interesting conceptual advancement, it did not in itself imply a rethinking of how the world has changed. it was merely remembering people that gaussian statistics are just an approximation of reality, the tip of the iceberg. a useful approximation, as long as everything is normal, i.e. in the smooth %. a precise definition of a crisis has always been difficult to give. our approach allows us to go beyond classic definitions, by approaching crisis events as the transition from one state of equilibrium to another through a massive disruption. our contribution here is a new way of thinking, based on a simple, new, principle: looking for fundamental principles of action and identifying their effects.we aim to show that invariants are a general characteristic of modern crises, a pattern that has been long hidden in the fabric of crises and that those invariants have very observable effects, some of which are already well documented, as we shall see. the path we are suggesting is not the only possible one, and although it has some very appealing features, it does suffer numerous limitations that we shall explain in the next section. our first steps into this new world imply a new set of tools to characterize crises. we will be looking at different features of crises, not limiting ourselves to invariance principles but going beyond that by looking at the intrinsic complexity of crises and its key parameters: global effects, high speed, deep complexity and weak signals. the shift from small, localized events to global impact catastrophe has become a common feature of modern crises.this widespread feature is commonly referenced in the literature (körnert, ) as the 'domino effect'. we can for example think about the fukushima event and its impact on world energy policies, but numerous other examples can be documented. modern means of communications and transportation has shortened the characteristic time of all events to its strict minimum. trading is reduced to the millisecond (high-frequency trading), communications from one side of the world to the other are almost instantaneous, etc. in turn, crisis has spread from a short-term event to a long-term impact crisis. the observable effect is most commonly known as the 'magnifier effect', for example in finance where microsecond trading (birraux, ) leads to market crashes (the example given earlier of the th may market crash being a perfect illustration of it).any discrepancy, any error, any rigidity propagates extreme volatility and turbulences to the entire deck of cards. the third feature we are introducing is rank invariance, which is linked to how individuals act one towards the other. it is very similar to the domino effect, but this time it is not places that are affected, but people through their interactions.this invariance explains why modern crises can start by impacting one single individual on one side of the world and turn it into a global changing event. the observable consequence of this invariance principle is commonly documented as the 'aggregation effect'.the best recent example of such an effect is mohamed bouazizi's self-immolation that led to the arab spring (mc kay, ). the fourth characteristic at play is sense-making (weick, ) invariance. understanding this key prin-ciple allows a better understanding of why, during modern crises, the loss of control affects equally the isolated individual, who does not understand what is happening, and the state leaders, who fail to grasp the magnitude of the ongoing crises, leading to global dislocation.this sense-making invariance is best illustrated (smallman & weir, ) , by the well-known blur effect, which has been used to explain how absurd decisions were taken not only by common individuals but also by eminent leaders. it leads to what we like to call 'information asymmetry', i.e., the loss of information when one goes up or down the decision ladder, which we shall explain more in depth in the next section. with this set of rules, we have built a grammar of reading that provides common guidelines for crisis theory, relying on a small number of dimensions (space, time, rank and sense).this classification allows for more powerful tests to establish a generic mapping of crisis and avoids entering immediately into hierarchical classifications, which cannot grasp the power of systemic crises. moreover, instead of building a theory designed for the 'normal world' and trying to map it to crisis situations, we immediately built its roots a vision that contains complexity. it goes far beyond taleb's principles and the possibility of a black swan. here, we are in a world where normality is not the norm, where the black swan is no longer the outlier and where the search for invariants is especially relevant in a world built from variability and stress. we have laid the ground to a new understanding of crisis theory,showing that well-documented phenomena can be linked to a set of simple principles that can trace stability and instability in the context of crisis events, which is already a big step forward.this new conceptualization of crises can bring theoretical foundations to crisis management techniques that are already being implemented and can help to provide a deeper understanding of conceptual and practical problems. the power of the fractal approach is that it allows you to get rid of a linear and stable vision of the world, an approach inconsistent with the field of crisis.as long as it remained in the realm of low scale emergency it was possible to keep our unified approach, where consequences are additive and relatively simple to control.yet we must go beyond simple adjustment when we enter global, volatile worlds. fractal theory opens up the possibility of envisioning and navigating multiple, unsettled domains, multiple layers and dynamics. . from a spatial point of view, it becomes possible to work separately on the hyperlocal, local, regional, national, continental and global.we can multiply the fields considered, each with their relevance, specificity and dynamics.we work at the outset, where the vision is plural and where one must be able to operate multiple levers of action at the same time. . from a temporal point of view, it becomes possible to work on speed and evolutions, even mutations, in new ways. for example, instantaneous dynamics (type social networks) and fast dynamics (radio and television), can all be linked to the same building blocks. one is not limited to a single timeline approach, but is allowed to immediately think of many overlapping timelines that have different dynamics and fundamental building blocks such as contradictions, oppositions, factors of evolution and mutations, that blur the view of actors who have different perspectives. . from an actor's point of view, the individual, family, organization, country, etc., find their place, taking into account that everyone has different information, different perceptions of the same information or different information. . from the point of view of 'making sense', one can also escape reductive simplistic visions and make room for multiple subjective 'sense making processes'. these are just a few well-known dimensions, but there could be many others: the multiplicity, interaction and volatility of fields and dimensions are basically included in the code of the fractal approach. let us work out an example where information is minimal, where there are only weak, wild signals, where there is no warning light, no simple data to analyze and where only vigilance, examination of blind spots and informed assumptions based on fractal crisis theory can give a clue as to what the dynamics at play is really is about. for decades, disaster literature has highlighted the limitations and problems hazards caused by the 'command and control' vision, the centralized top-down approach (rodriguez, quarantelli, & dynes, ; drabek, ) . the approach developed here escapes from these dilemmas and conflicts of vision.there is no overriding principle that is able to support a global dynamic in which each component has autonomy, an impulse and a specific variability. one must go beyond top-down and bottom-up; simply because as information gets diluted and transmitted along the decision chain, it gets distorted and reinterpreted. the specificity of a crisis event is the amount of distortion that a 'piece of information' (in its broad meaning) can suffer: during a crisis event, one piece of information is received differently by the actors (partial transmission, mutation, distortion, etc.) and every single actor interprets it differently based on his local reality and acts differently. thus, talking about bottom-up or top-down approaches is largely insufficient because there are multiple realities at play. the common practice has most often been to centralize the decision-making process and to concentrate on a top-down approach, with the strategic oversight of the highest people in the hierarchy often conflicting with what is happening on the ground.that practice in a crisis situation can be easily understood as a response to the top-down approach needed for our judicial and governance system which needs to have a clear chain of command to attribute responsibilities during and after the crisis. one of the most disturbing facts during a crisis event is how information, or misinformation, circulates and propagates. when a leader at the top of the decision chain tries to give an order to someone at the other end of the chain, he thinks that his decision can and will be understood. but in reality, while his decisions seem to be properly transmitted, with everyone in the decision chain thinking they have all understood the same thing, they all end up interpreting the decision in different ways, thus leading to incoherent, conflicting and sometimes absurd action. fractal crises theory teaches us that crises happen on all scales and that the built-in invariants imply that leaders and decision makers will be impacted by effects just as those who are closer to the situation area.that is to say, taking the decision power away from those closest to the ground, best able to evaluate their needs, and giving it to people far from ground level and supposedly less impacted by the crisis is a fallacy. what is at play here is the conflict between the way decisions circulate and the way information flows. that is why a full top-down or a full bottom-up approach cannot work. it all happens exactly as for a fractal pattern: every time you switch to a different scale, you have the sensation of seeing the same thing, but in reality the resolution has changed and what looks the same is in fact different. the blur effect created by sense-making invariance forbids someone on one step of the decision ladder to communicate freely with someone on another step. as fractals teach us, the information flowing, at any scale, that is to say going up or down the ladder, gets distorted. what one gains in overview one loses in micromanagement, and therefore, one interprets information received in a different way. the current situation, with the decision process being top-down and the information flow going both ways with losses, is incoherent.this realization means that there is something wrong with the conception of crisis management where decisions can be taken on one end of the decision chain to be put into action by someone else at the other end of the chain. we have decided to call this situation, where no one has access to the full, undistorted deck of cards, information asymmetry. it is well known that information is a key to the resolution of any crisis, not only to reduce its impact but also in terms of communication to the public, hence such asymmetry is not a minor problem. we argue that one must not restrict oneself to a top-down approach and open one's minds to broader perspectives. in other words, if the top-down approach allows a better distribution of responsibilities for the after-crisis, it completely destroys efforts to limit the impact of the crisis. thus, fractal crisis theory pleads for a more pluralistic approach based not only a selective distribution of responsibilities and better trust in the personnel on the ground. the goal is, therefore, to grasp the information as early as possible, at its point of origin, and to dispatch it to the one closest to it. it should not have to go up the decision ladder, as the information going up and the decision going down would both get distorted. thus, the one in charge of dealing with the new information would be the one that has had access to the least disturbed information. dispatching the information would require an 'information over-watch' team.this special group would be in charge of collecting all new information, evaluating its credibility and importance, and delivering it with the appropriate context to the right person on the ladder. this organizational innovation would thus reduce the loss of information from bad contextualization or improper priority rating. we here, base our work on previous key approaches such as that developed by mike granatt (granatt & paré-chamontin, ) , going beyond the top-down/bottom-up discussion. each layer has its own dynamics; none can have a steering role and one needs to step back to understand the complexity of the system.we need people who can master the broad view and act within an intensely connected and susceptible world. thus, the decision shall then be taken by the person who receives the information, whatever his or her position in the current 'normal' decision process. the role of this information over-watch team is therefore crucial. in our system, responsibility and decision making would therefore be distributed throughout the decision chain, and the one closest to the new information is the one that acts according to it. the goal is not to produce people who can apply pre-planned answers; we need people who expect and embrace the new and the novel. we need them to accept strange signals and 'impossible' scenarios, to enter strange seas without being paralyzed by the absence of maps. we need people who relish the challenge of creative thinking and action, even in the most inconceivable and rapidly developing contexts. the concept and method of the rapid reflection force (béroux, guilhou, & lagadec, ; béroux, guilhou, & lagadec, ) has been suggested, developed and tested to help organizations overcome such challenges. a specific group of people are asked to clarify the high complexity and volatility of a situation, and to suggest new visions and paths of action enabling the whole system to better navigate the turbulence. clearly, these new paths into the unknown are still in a very preliminary form. every single facet of crisis theory and management should now be revisited within this framework of fractal theory. for instance, dimensions such as leadership, signal, emergent behaviour, information and communication, sense-making, etc. should now be re-explored. it will take time before we develop more precise specific theories and practical knowledge on all these facets. it does not mean that our more conventional approach to crisis management should be forgotten. our classical knowledge is still valid for relatively limited crises, and should be used. it would be dangerous to switch too swiftly to the mindset we suggest. but we must also underline that it will remain difficult to develop and to strengthen the view developed in this paper. such perspectives are and will remain a source of very deep and severe discomfort. our deep seated cartesian culture is very strong and stronger still in times of crisis, as we tend to immediately reject complexity by calling it 'chaotic'. many decision makers might even find such perspectives disturbing. hence, the idea that we should prepare future leaders to open their minds to such new avenues. if we can overcome these obstacles, we will have embarked upon the exploration of unknown lands: it will remain very difficult, but at least we will be on a relevant track. the world of crises is facing extreme upheavals. it is not just an extension of accidental phenomena within a system; we are confronted with extreme turbulence, in global and highly unstructured environments. rude surprise will be the name of the game (laporte, a,b) . our crisis management theories and practices were not designed to grasp such 'wicked' environments: they are largely outdated. the first section of this paper documented this challenging situation -in the field as well as in the theoretical arena. in response, there is a growing need for a theoretical leap -obviously resulting from the conjunction of a diversity of inputs.the objective of this contribution has been to consider the possibilities offered by the fractal geometry as a candidate to help those in charge of navigating in unknown, extremely turbulent environments.the path we suggest is one of many ways that can be taken on the road to crisis management theory and operational crisis management. the ideas underlying mandelbrot's mathematical work can be effectively used to better describe modern crises as analogous to fractals, and the underlying invariance principles can be mapped into well-known effects in crisis management. yet beyond mandelbrot's own work, the crucial advance offered by fractal theory is the possibility to envision, capture and handle very unstable, blurred and hypercomplex states of the world. a lot remains to be done to test the feasibility of this approach, to assess what it can bring to the field, and last but not least, to detect the limitations of this line of thought.we are only at the beginning of the intellectual brainstorming required by the age of mega crises. on the research agenda, we will modestly plead for launching research projects -case studies, training methods, operational guidelines, theoretical lines of thought, seminars and workshops -to shed some additional light and to promote innovative knowledge in the field of emerging mega crises. after all, tackling the unknown is the very object of research and theory. the essence of decision: 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technologies the next catastrophe -reducing our vulnerabilities to natural, industrial, and terrorist disasters response to social crisis and disaster dilemmas in a general theory of planning crisis handbook of disaster research managing crises -threat, dilemmas, opportunities coping with crises.the management of disasters, riots and terrorism communication and cultural distortion during crises', disaster prevention and management critical phenomena in natural sciences : chaos, fractals, self-organization and disorders « métamorphose d'une notion. les historiens et la «crise the art of war, library of chinese classics the black swan -the impact of the highly improbable the first hours.a comprehensive guide to successful crisis communications, basil blackwell science and its limits: the regulator's dilemma' cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks key: cord- - cv n bf authors: de weck, olivier; krob, daniel; lefei, li; lui, pao chuen; rauzy, antoine; zhang, xinguo title: handling the covid‐ crisis: toward an agile model‐based systems approach date: - - journal: nan doi: . /sys. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: cv n bf the covid‐ pandemic has caught many nations by surprise and has already caused millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. it has also exposed a deep crisis in modeling and exposed a lack of systems thinking by focusing mainly on only the short term and thinking of this event as only a health crisis. in this paper, authors from several of the key countries involved in covid‐ propose a holistic systems model that views the problem from a perspective of human society including the natural environment, human population, health system, and economic system. we model the crisis theoretically as a feedback control problem with delay, and partial controllability and observability. using a quantitative model of the human population allows us to test different assumptions such as detection threshold, delay to take action, fraction of the population infected, effectiveness and length of confinement strategies, and impact of earlier lifting of social distancing restrictions. each conceptual scenario is subject to + monte‐carlo simulations and yields both expected and surprising results. for example, we demonstrate through computational experiments that maintaining strict confinement policies for longer than days may indeed be able to suppress lethality below % and yield the best health outcomes, but cause economic damages due to lost work that could turn out to be counterproductive in the long term. we conclude by proposing a hierarchical computerized, command, control, and communications (c ) information system and enterprise architecture for covid‐ with real‐time measurements and control actions taken at each level. f i g u r e confirmed deaths per million people as of july , makes it a systemic crisis and not only a pure health crisis. the closest analog we have at a global scale is the h n influenza pandemic of - ("spanish flu") which killed between and million people worldwide. thus, handling the current covid- crisis requires a holistic approach taking into consideration an extremely complex system, ie., society as a whole. another important aspect of the covid- crisis is that the pandemic propagation has been very fast, thus demanding rapid decisionmaking. moreover, and we think that this is a structuring feature of this crisis, the incubation time of the disease introduces a delay-that has been estimated as being up to two weeks according to epidemiologists (refs. , , or )-between the implementation of countermeasures and the observation of their effects. this is compounded by the fact that a significant fraction of the virus carriers appear to be asymptomatic, causing a large difference between the numbers of actual cases and of known or confirmed cases (see refs. , , or ) . this explains why the problem of monitoring the covid- crisis can be seen as a controltheoretic problem with delay in the feedback loop used to stabilize the situation in addition to the problem of low or only partial observability of the true system states. we shall elaborate further on this point. from a system-theoretic perspective, the above characteristics raise several difficult problems. the first one, which is rather expected, regards scalability: can our current systems engineering and modeling methods (cf. for instance, refs. - , or ) be extended to a system, or more precisely a system-of-systems (cf. ref. or ) , as large and as complex as human society as a whole? this question is clearly not easy to solve and appears moreover poorly addressed by the only known models of such scope, ie., the so-called world models, based on generalized volterra equations, that followed the seminal work of forrester in the s (see refs. , , and ) . a second problem is caused by the emergence of local and partial solutions which is significant since the covid- crisis impacts all sectors of society, including the medical, financial, transportation, manufacturing, and overall economic systems. society therefore needs fast and innovative solutions in order to mitigate as much as possible the consequences of the crisis. time pressure favors local and partial solutions, but also a strong coordination among actors in order to avoid contradictory strategies. a central question is therefore how to favor the emergence of bottom-up local actions while, at the same time, ensuring top-down monitoring and coordination of such actions, with short feedback loops. this calls for an agile approach (see refs. , , or ) to the global covid- crisis. stating the above problems, we made a clear choice in this paper: we do strongly believe in the use of models, and more precisely of systemic models to think through and manage the crisis. models as we consider them here are, however, not platonic ideals, but observational models which rely on the observation of the reality of the covid- crisis, including the effects of the decisions made based on them. such models are intended to capture the systemic nature of the crisis in order to achieve a better understanding of the situation and to allow a better communication among stakeholders. in that respect, models have two main roles: first, the concrete calculation of key performance indicators to support the decision-making process through experiments in silico; and a second more metaphorical one, to help us think better about the dynamic evolution of the systems at stake. the remainder of this paper is organized as follows. in section , we discuss which systemic models may support better management of the covid- crisis. then, in section , we advocate for an agile approach for crisis management. section completes the paper with several recommendations. the general impression which emerges from the large and rapidly expanding literature dedicated to the covid- pandemic is that this crisis was first and foremost analyzed as primarily a health crisis (cf. ref. or ) . economic impacts of the crisis were of course quickly understood, but, as far as we could observe, they were rather considered as an inevitable consequence of the health crisis that has to be managed as a second priority. however, the aggressive mitigation measures that were set up in many countries were and are at the same time quite efficient from a health-preservation point of view (see, for instance, ref. or ) and highly inefficient from an economical perspective due to their global economic impact on all of society (see ref. or ) . in this matter, there is-to the best of our knowledge-no rational discussion in the scientific literature on what could be the best tradeoff for jointly minimizing both the health impact and the economic impact of the covid- crisis. perhaps the biggest ethical issue around such trade-offs is that it would require placing an explicit economic value on human lives, as discussed for instance in ref. . this is something that no national or regional government in the world has apparently been willing to do. moreover, what shall one do if the health crisis remains endemic in the near future which is one of the possible scenarios (cf. section . . )? as one can see, thinking from a global rather than a purely local perspective can deeply change the way one addresses the crisis and its consequences. this situation is probably the consequence of the fact that the crisis is mainly observed on daily basis, through for instance the daily covid- reports provided by the world health organization, by other institutions, and by each local government, leading to a rather shortterm vision of the crisis. however, changing the time scale of observation gives us immediately a totally different point-of-view on the covid- crisis. if we are, for instance, observing the crisis at the time step of a quarter of a year (three months), it becomes almost instantaneous and can be considered as an event-in the classical meaning of synchronous modeling -without any duration. thus, the choice of time step and sampling frequency is critical as it is for any control system. this perspective change forces us to think what could be the next state of the system under observation, ie, human society, which may be on its way toward a deep economic crisis, at least in western countries. continuing the analysis at the same coarse time scale, a possible catastrophic evolution scenario would be a financial crisis result-f i g u r e a possible catastrophic scenario that could result from the initial covid- health crisis ing with some delay from an economic crisis initiated by the health crisis, thus generating the specter of a deep and prolonged recession, as pointed out as a possibility by some economists (ref. or ). moreover, this situation could then also lead to more "classical" health crises in the future (see figure ) due to the two-sided coupled interaction between the public health system and the economic system. in such a catastrophic future scenario, extending the duration of people's confinement in western countries in order to minimize the short-term health impact during the initial crisis could, for instance, result in deeply debilitating the health of more or less the same population in the mid-to long-term future. such a possible paradox is typical in optimal control theory where the optimal trajectory of any nonlinear system can never be obtained through local optimizations alone. in order to take into account and to avoid such paradoxical consequences, one must choose a systems approach to analyze the covid- crisis, integrating all existing domains of knowledge into a common understanding of the crisis, in order to obtain a global vision, both in space and time and at different possible observation scales, and thus giving a chance to find the global optimum for human society as a whole. we can thus see that there is another crisis, hidden within the covid- crisis, which is a crisis of models. the global community is indeed focusing on short-term health-specific models to better master the crisis, but these models are inadequate as soon as one wants to address the crisis from a longer-term society-wide perspective which requires systemic models. in this matter, let us recall that a model is an abstraction (in the meaning of abstract interpretation theory ) of reality, but not reality itself, as expressed, for instance, by the famous assertion "a map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness," popularized by korzybski or the well-known "all models are wrong, some are useful" by box. "models" which are not actually reflecting reality within some error bounds are in fact not models in that observational definition and may even have negative impacts on reality since they will lead to wrong decisions or control actions. these negative impacts of wrong "models" can of course be amplified in the context of a systemic crisis such as covid- . our point of view is clearly supported by an analysis of the scientific literature to date. a search of the keyword "covid- " on google scholar in april , revealed that, at this moment of time, only papers-ie., around %-of the first most cited papers on covid- were not discussing primarily health issues (health covering here biology, epidemiology, medicine, and health policy and management), but rather focusing on the societal and economic consequences of the crisis. moreover, in terms of citations, most of these papers were poorly cited: two were cited around times, three around times, and the remaining ones less than times, while the average number of citations per paper was in our sample. only very few health-oriented papers, such as ref. , also discuss mixed strategies involving economic or psychological considerations to fight the coronavirus. it seems therefore that the majority of the scientific effort is focused on the short-term, without taking into account what might be the mid-and long-term societal consequences of the covid- crisis. one may also notice that there is probably another crisis of medical models that can be observed due to the covid- crisis. this other crisis focuses around the merits of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a possible treatment of covid- , as proposed by raoult and his team. this has since then been shown to be a proposal which was not supported by a rigorous methodological approach according to medical methodologists. however, medical statistical methodology (see ref. for an introduction to this domain) appears also to be questionable from a modeling perspective: the frequency-based models used in methodological medicine usually cannot have probabilistic interpretations due to a lack of large series of experiments required to apply the law of large numbers; hence such frequency-based models can only find correlations between proposed medications and observe effects on structurally limited series due to the high costs of clinical studies. but since correlation is not causation, it is just not possible, without any understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms, to scientifically deduce anything from such studies, as long as we agree on the fact that science deals with causal explanations, which does however not prevent using correlation-based results from a practical perspective as soon as they are established in a sound way. in this analysis, the debate around the rigor of the pragmatic and agile approach followed by raoult may just be a new popperian debate opposing different medical methods for addressing an infectious health crisis, similar to the debates that existed in physics around aristotelian theory in the th century or aether theory in the th century. to conclude this initial discussion on the crisis of models, we point out that if the scenario that we highlighted in figure comes true, we may also eventually be forced to deal with another crisis of models, namely, the crisis of mathematical models used in finance. these other "models" are not necessarily models in the observational sense that we are using in this paper since they suffer from many well-known issues such as reflexivity, which refers to the fact that mathematical financial models are essentially observing other mathematical financial models, or more deeply the lack of evidence for the market equilibrium hypothesis, which is at the heart of the probabilistic framework used in mathematical finance, but which is in fact rarely observed in practice (see, for instance, ref. or ), especially in a financial crisis situation where the market is of course highly unbalanced and volatile and therefore out of equilibrium, as pointed out by several researchers. the covid- crisis is thus forcing us to open our eyes and to look for the "right" models to use for effectively managing human society. one should use models that are effectively capturing the reality as it is and not as we would like it to be, if we want to make nondominated decisions in the face of a crisis of such magnitude and have a chance to tackle it successfully. as stated above, there is a crucial need for constructing a realistic observational system model of the covid- crisis. we shall now present the main ingredients of such a systemic model. taking a systems approach leads us naturally to construct first a systemic framework for modeling the covid- crisis. the first step toward that objective is to understand what are the main systems involved in or impacted by the crisis. in that respect, the following ones are quite obvious: • the natural environment from which the coronavirus which initiated the crisis is coming, • the social system, which contains the population that is or can be infected by the coronavirus, • the health system which attempts to cure the people infected by the coronavirus, • the governance system which has to choose the optimal health policy to face the pandemic, • the economic system which may be indirectly impacted by the covid- crisis. note that the impact of the covid- crisis on the economic system depends of course on the health policy choosen by the governance (political) system. if a health policy recommends or forces-as often done -a large fraction of its population to stay home, it causes a double shock, first on the supply side since economic actors which are lacking a work force must reduce their production and secondly on the demand side since people who are not working anymore are usually paid less or not at all and thus are also consuming less. we can now sketch the first item of our generic covid- systemic framework which is the high-level environment that we modeled in figure . this first system view exposes the exchanges of matter, people, information, and money-plus coronavirus here-that exist between the main systems involved in the covid- crisis. note that the overall system taken into account here, ie., human society as a whole, including its natural environment, is a closed system on our home planet earth. as a consequence, the only levers to solve the crisis are internal to this global system. using that technique, the point is thus to be able to construct realistic domain-specific lifecycle scenarios for each system involved in the covid- environment. we first focus only on the social and economic systems, since we are considering here the situation that occurs after the end of the covid- health crisis (see figure ). we can then see that: • the lifecycle of the social system can be analyzed to first order in terms of wealth and health, where these features can be, respectively, in a systems approach, we will thus have to construct the different possible global lifecycle scenarios that can be achieved in this way (see figure for an illustration of this classical process), to evaluate their probabilities and to define means to mitigate the worst consequences. to obtain more detailed models, we shall moreover refine them in terms of space, to capture the geographic dimension of human society, and time, and to make optimal trade-off decisions between the shortand long-term impact of the covid- crisis. note also that these lifecycle scenarios are of course highly country-dependent due to the central role of the governance system in the resolution of the covid- crisis, as well as the susceptibility of the population which is an initial condition. the last element of our covid- systemic framework is finally a mission statement, ie, the core high level requirement regarding human society which expresses the objective that the governance system wants to fulfill. one can indeed understand that the behavior of our system of interest-human society-will be different depending on whether one wants to minimize the impact of the covid- crisis on the social, health, or economic system or to find the best balance between the impacts on these three systems. this is a multiobjective optimization problem for which we provide a sample result below, and that we intend to explore more in details in a forthcoming paper. it is therefore of high importance-as system theory tells us (see refs. , , or )-to be able to clearly define the mission to achieve. taking a systems approach to the covid- crisis requires instantiating our systemic framework per country. each country has its own specificities, associated with its own history and culture, that one must consider in any systems approach: for instance, chinese traditional medicine and rigorous group behaviors are specific to china, while a centralized governance system and poorly followed health rules are specific to france, while a heterogeneous health system that favors more affluent consumers and differentiated laws and policies by state are specific to the united states of america. these types of compartmental models have significant limitations since they only consider the human population in a macroscopic way, reacting globally in a uniform manner to an epidemic, which is not the case in reality. furthermore, in a classic sird model, eventually % of the population is infected, which is never observed in practice. in the covid- pandemic, one can also observe clusters where the epidemic seems to recursively focus, which rather suggests a fractal epidemic propagation, as also mentioned in an older paper by jansse et al in which did not seem to have been further explored by the epidemiology community. such fractal behavior is however not at all captured by the classical sird-like compartmental models. note also that, quite surprisingly, we did not find significant scientific papers studying the geometric multiscale structure of the geography of the covid- pandemic, which also suggests that this dimension has not yet been analyzed in depth. in order to better integrate geography, which is one of the most important features of the human population system, we choose a as, for instance, in ref. . in such an approach, the human population is modeled as a network, that is to say a nondirected graph, where each node of the network represents an individual or a group of people, eg., a family, and each edge represents a connection between people. for the purpose of our study, we used networks randomly generated according to the barabási-albert model, which is believed to capture the most important features of real social networks. we shall recall that the barabási-albert model generates networks by introducing nodes one by one (after an initial step). a degree d is chosen for each new node, which is then connected to d other nodes chosen at random from the nodes already in the network. to simulate a social network, the average value of the degree d is usually chosen between and . the barabási-albert model produces randomized scale-free networks in which most of the nodes have a low degree (below ), but some may have a very high degree. in order to understand how an epidemic propagates in a population modeled in this way, we used networks with nodes and an average degree d for new nodes of . . with these features, the degree of nodes in a social network is typically distributed as shown in table . potential "superspreaders" are individuals with large degree > . to model the propagation of an epidemic in this network, we discretized a classical sird-like model (see refs. and and figure ) which leads us to represent the evolution of the state of each f i g u r e stochastic state automaton modeling the possible evolution of a node in the social network node of the social network that models the human population by a stochastic finite automaton whose possible transitions are described in typically gaussian-for incubation and sickness times. we, however, think that our experiments can give us a better qualitative understanding of epidemic propagation since we believe that this social-network approach better captures the fundamentals of the social system, compared to the simpler compartment-type models. it may thus be helpful for constructing more realistic epidemic propagation models, even if it would require a very significant amount of data collection and fine tuning. the use of contact tracers in health systems is, for instance, a direct, but laborious, way to reconstruct such social networks to quickly identify infected people and to isolate them before they infect others. our first experiment consisted of simulating increasingly virulent epidemics by assuming increasing values of the probability ρ of infecting somebody ( trials were done per value of ρ). our results are described in table . they show a remarkably interesting phenomenon: for all values of the probability ρ, only a tiny fraction π of the population is eventually infected in most of the number ν of simulations (less than of persons in more than % of the cases), or when a significant proportion (greater than %) is infected, the fraction of infected people π depends on ρ. in simpler terms, this can be stated as follows: there are a lot of viruses circulating in the population, but only a few of them give rise to epidemic outbreaks. the reasons for which a virus gives rise to an epidemic outbreak are intrinsic to the virus itself, but ta b l e proportion π of the population that is infected, for different values of the propagation probability ρ. also dependent on external factors such as who is infected first, eg, a person with few contacts and low nodal degree or a superspreader with high nodal degree as shown in table , and also the behavior of the population which impacts ρ. this may explain, at least to some extent, why some countries or regions are more stricken than others, which suggests again a fractal interpretation of the geographical scope of an epidemic, as already mentioned above. the second experiment that we shall report on in this section aimed at studying the effects of the deconfinement of a confined population that has been ordered to shelter-in-place. we studied here different proportions τ of the population that becomes sick before the epidemic becomes observable (ie., roughly between day and in figure ) and different values of the duration γ in terms of days of confinement. we considered that there was a delay δ of days before confinement was put in place and took ρ = . . we also simulated the efficiency of the confinement by reducing the capacity of edges in the social network to propagate the disease by a factor − ε with ≤ ε ≤ . this factor represents the degree of adherence of the population to sanitary guidelines for social distancing, wearing face masks, and so forth. at each step of the simulation, representing one day, an infected node has thus probability ρ × ( − ε) to infect an adjacent healthy node. in our experiment, we took ε = . (= / ). we then reported the computed values of the resulting lethality in table . we assumed that γ is as large as necessary, which is clearly not realistic since confinement cannot be maintained too long for both economic and psychological reasons, but the results give the underlying trend. each measure reported was obtained by means of a monte-carlo simulation of trials. as expected, the longer the confinement, the fewer deaths. note however that, to be fully efficient, the confinement must be rather long, several months (> days) in our virtual experiment. the most interesting part of this experiment comes however from the observation of the total duration of the epidemic outbreak. table shows these durations for the same values of τ and γ as in table . if the confinement is sufficiently long, the lethality drops significantly (in some cases below %), but also the total duration of the epidemic outbreak is shortened. if the confinement is not maintained sufficiently long, it is still partially effective, in that it reduces the lethality, but it has a quite paradoxical consequence: the epidemic outbreak lasts longer than if no countermeasures were taken at all. a short confinement does not prevent the disease from significantly propagating: it just slows down the propagation and avoids the sharp peak of infected shown in figure around day , which seems to be its main motivation in order not to overwhelm the capacity of the health care system. for this reason, when the population is deconfined too early, the disease is still present and remains endemic. the above experiments do not pretend to fully represent reality, but are just to motivate the use of social-network models for epidemic modeling. as pointed out by stattner and vidot, "network models turn out to be a more realistic approach than simple models like compartment or metapopulation models, since they are more suited to the complexity of real relationships." one of the limitations of existing network models is, however, that they do not distinguish between recurring social links with family members and coworkers and casual links based on one-time encounters such as in public transportation or at large events. they should therefore be further refined and integrated into a model-based agile approach for crisis management, while taking into account their limitations. in this section, we model the potential impact of the epidemic as a function of different actions of the governance system on the economic system (see figure ). in order to do so we must expand the prior analysis by not only considering lethality in terms of deaths (see table ), but also the value of lost economic activity during confinement. reverting back to the simplified sird model in figure , but now accounting for the fraction of population ε actually adhering to confinement during a lockdown of duration γ, which is ordered with some delay δ after a critical cumulative threshold τ of the population has become infected, we run a set of simulations. the baseline run of the model shown in figure is considered as scenario with no countermeasures and it is gradually modified using the one-factor-at-a-time (ofat) technique to test a number of actions by the governance system, including reducing the delay δ to order a lockdown, increasing the level of rigor ε of the confinement, as well as its duration γ . table shows the results of a number of numerical experiments to probe these trade-off in terms of the value of human lives lost, versus productive work lost in the economic system. in order to estimate the economic impact of the epidemic a number of assumptions were made: in the baseline scenario , we do not take any countermeasures and the bulk of the $ . b total loss is due to the deaths of % of the population. the $ m in lost work are due to the inability of the infected and sick population to perform work during their illness, which is assumed to last for days. this is the kind of situation we would expect to see in a country with a government that is either unable or unwilling to intervene in the crisis. scenarios - institute a partial lockdown (ε = %) after either or days delay after recognizing the onset of the epidemic and the confinement lasts either or days. the results are not satisfactory, since the total damages exceed the baseline case where no action is taken. this outcome is due to the fact that one-third of the population does not adhere to the confinement and continues to be infected, making the disease endemic. a prolonged partial lockdown for days with only % effectiveness as shown in scenario is the worst case and leads to both a high number of deaths (about ) as well as high economic damages totaling $ . b due to the prolonged shutdown, which ultimately is ineffective. this scenario is representative of the overall situation in the united states in mid . in scenarios - , we shorten the reaction time to trigger the confinement after only five days (quick government action) and we gradually increase the rigor of the confinement to % (strong government enforcement). it turns out that these actions are highly effective, yielding a best-case scenario with only deaths, a short epidemic duration of days and only $ m in damages, mainly due to the strict but short -day confinement in which % of the population participates. this essentially prevents the epidemic from blossoming and quickly snuffs out the disease. the ta b l e scenario analysis with sird model for assessing total human and economic damages: n, number of daily contacts, ρ, probability of infection, τ, fraction of population infected to trigger confinement, ε, fraction of population adhering to confinement, δ, delay to confinement start, γ, confinement duration, t, duration of epidemic, total number of deaths, lost work in millions $m, and total damages including lost human lives and lost work in billions $b, n = , population size figure . this may reflect the situation in countries that the economic analysis shows that the initial conditions, speed of response, and rigor of response by the governance system are crucial in determining the outcome. figures and , respectively, show the sharp contrast between the ratio of human loss (deaths) and economic work loss for scenarios (do nothing) and scenario (rapid and strong government response). there is indeed a trade-off between deaths and lost work, as in sce- in the previous section, we identified a deep crisis of models that has been exposed by the covid- pandemic and proposed to mitigate this issue by constructing a systemic model of the crisis. in this section, we shall deal with some possible solutions to master the crisis using a systems approach. as is well known in any scientific discipline, the solution of a problem highly depends on the clarity and rigor of the way the problem is framed. we will therefore dedicate this short section to the statement of the problem that we need to solve in the context of the covid- crisis. a first characteristic of the covid- crisis is its global impact on human society. this crisis can thus be considered as a common cause failure-in the meaning of system safety theory -for all main systems forming human society. if we are taking a safety approach, the first problem to solve is thus to mitigate the impacts of the crisis on the vulnerable systems forming human society, that is to say the social, health, and economic systems, as results from the system analysis of section . . . a second characteristic of the covid- crisis comes from the need to take into account strong feedback delays. in this matter, a first type of delay comes from the fact that it is most of the time too late for deploying mitigation actions to limit the epidemic propagation when significant numbers of infections are observed somewhere, since the effects of these actions will only be observable two weeks later. this was clearly shown in table in scenarios - . moreover, a secondtotally different type of delay comes from the fact that focusing on short-term health impacts of the crisis may lead to long-term issues of an economic nature, which forces to arbitrate between short-and longterm consequences of a given action. finally, a last characteristic of the covid- crisis is uncertainty. due to the global nature of the crisis and the rather short period of time on which it is concentrated, uncertainty is everywhere. clinical data about the infection are permanently partial, so difficult to interpret. understanding of the real social system network structure is never easy to capture. the exact nature and size of the impact on the economic system are difficult to evaluate. precise data on the capabilities on which to rely may be tricky to obtain. last, but not least, the crisis also results in a massive, heterogeneous and often contradictory amount of data in which the really interesting signals may be either weak or hidden. synthesizing these three features of the crisis, the problem to solve in our context can now be clearly stated: how to optimally mitigate the short-and long-term consequences of the covid- pandemic on human society, taking into account delays and uncertainties that are specific to this crisis? one can notice that this statement is a typical control problemin the sense of control theory -integrating here delay and uncertainty, which can be addressed by many existing techniques (see refs. and ) . consequently, the objective should be to design a new system that can support this controllability objective. based on the closed-loop control principle, which is the only one that allows to achieve a given target behavior along the time axis, such a f i g u r e high-level covid- environment integrating a specific decision-aid system that has yet to be designed covid- decision-aid system (shown as the gray box at the top of figure ) will have to measure the current state of the main systems forming human society in order to provide effective feedback actions on the social system through the governance system, the only legitimate one to make decisions and take control actions. figure depicts how such a decision-aid system could be integrated into the high-level covid- environment. there is at least one domain where making decisions under structural uncertainties on an underlying geographic scope is quite well known since a long time in human history, which is the military domain. architecting a covid- decision-aid system using the typical architectural pattern of a computerized, command, control, and communications (c ) system (see ref. or ) , used in the defense area, seems thus quite a natural idea, as it is also quite often used in a system-of-systems engineering context (see ref. or ) . this leads us to propose an organization for a covid- decision-aid system based on the following three hierarchical layers, that correspond to three natural levels of abstraction associated with a given geographic scope (that may be either the international, country, and local levels or country, region, and city levels in practice), exactly like c systems are organized: . the strategic layer is the place where global situational awareness is required to master the crisis on a given large-scale geographic scope: its mission is to monitor at a high level the crisis and to elaborate strategic decisions based on an overall vision, fed by tactical information; . the operation layer is intended to master the crisis on a given medium-scale geographic scope: it is thus a distributed system which has to capture and synthesize tactical information and make operational decisions on their basis in accordance with the upper strategic decisions; . the tactical layer is intended to master the crisis on a local geographic scope: it is thus again a distributed system which has to capture and synthetize field information and make tactical decisions on their basis in accordance with the upper operational decisions. note that this architecture shown in figure shall be understood as a hierarchical enterprise architecture, which defines how an organizational system, supported by suitable information systems and systemic models as discussed previously, shall be organized and behave. the main idea underpinning it is the principle of subsidiarity: decisions should be taken as close as possible to the level that is the most appropriate for their resolution. this principle means in particular that an upper level shall avoid to make decisions that are too intrusive at a lower level in order to let each local level take always the more appropriate actions depending on the real local conditions that it can observe, while following at the same time global orientations when locally relevant. this is crucial in the military sphere, but even more so in the context of the covid- crisis where speed of decision making is fundamental due to the latency of the epidemic propagation as seen in section . note that one shall also capture weak signals of systemic importance at each level of the proposed architecture: to illustrate that point, the fact that a police officer is infected in a certain area is, for instance, a typical weak signal since we may infer from it that there is a certain probability that the whole police force in the concerned area is or will be infected, at least in the near future (since the number of daily contacts or nodal degree of police officers may exceed n > , see tables and ). proposing the previous hierarchical architectural pattern is, however, of course not enough to specify how a covid- decision-aid system shall work. in this matter, the first point is to organize the systemic model that we sketched out in section . according to the hierarchy that we just presented and which is used to organize the proposed decision-aid system. hence, such a model shall not be mono- last, but not least, the covid- decision-aid system that we sketched here shall behave in an agile way, in the meaning of agility in software or industrial development (see refs. - , or ) . a pending problem is to have a plan, do, check, and act process that can quickly adapt to a quite fast-changing reality. agility allows to solve that issue by structuring in a very rigorous way the analysis, decision, and action processes, while providing a lot of flexibility to all involved actors, which are two mandatory features for addressing a complex crisis like covid- . in practice, an agile covid- decision-aid process has typically to be organized around regular agile rituals-managed in this paper, we draw attention to the core importance of having realistic system models to manage and to mitigate a systemic crisis of the order of magnitude such as the covid- crisis. we also sketched out what could be an agile approach to use in this kind of crisis. our purpose was of course not to propose some definitive solution which is probably impossible. we do, however, think that the ideas contained in this paper are valuable contributions that may be of interest in the context of the covid- crisis, especially due to the fact the underlying health crisis will probably be endemic for a certain period of time (at least for - days according to most of our simulation runs) and be coupled with future short-and mid-term economic outcomes. while there are economic impacts due to strong mitigation actions such as mandated confinements (causing lost economic activity), the value loss due to human deaths at an estimated lethality rate of % would far exceed the economic losses. we have shown that this depends strongly on the average valuation of a human life, which is in itself a highly controversial issue. there are of course many detailed aspects of the proposed covid- decision support system that require further detail and elaboration. we focused on the issue of delay and rigor of action in the overall epidemic control system in this paper. however, as we discover more about the particular nature of this particular coronavirus, the issue of observability of human society (testing) may for instance be an even larger one. the epidemiological characteristics of an outbreak of covid- ) -china report of the who-china joint mission on coronavirus disease (covid- ). who; statistics and research -coronavirus pandemic (covid- ). our world in data covid- ) situation reports the site of origin of the influenza pandemic and its public health implications clinical features of patients infected with novel coronavirus in wuhan, china evolving epidemiology and transmission dynamics of coronavirus disease outside hubei province, china: a descriptive and modelling study a novel coronavirus from patients with pneumonia in china cesames systems architecting method -a pocket guide. cesames strategic engineering -designing systems for an uncertain future. mit the art of systems architecting the systems approach: fresh solutions to complex problems through 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seven scenarios how will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the covid- epidemic? covid- cases per million inhabitants: a comparison. statista confronting the crisis: priorities for the global economy we pay minimum five times as much for a life year with the corona measures than we normal do embedded system design. kluwer adaptive control processes: a guided tour abstract interpretation: a unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixpoints science and sanity-an introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. the international non-aristotelian library pub all models are wrong, but some are useful the publish or perish book. melbourne: tarma software research pty ltd combining behavioral economics and infectious disease epidemiology to mitigate the covid- outbreak hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of covid- : results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial statistical review of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of covid- : results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial clinical research methodology and evidence-based medicine: the basics. anshan ltd an introduction to probability theory and its applications. vols. i and ii clinical trial cost is a fraction of the drug development bill, with an average price tag of m$. outsourcing pharma conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. london and new york: basic books galileo studies. branch line reflexivity in credit markets. california institute of technology the flawed foundations of general equilibrium: critical essays on economic theory financial crisis dynamics: attempt to define a market instability indicator a theory of timed automata a contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics mathematical structure of epidemic systems an introduction to infectious disease modelling lévy-flight spreading of epidemic processes leading to percolating clusters social network analysis in epidemiology: current trends and perspectives the theory of graphs and its applications statistical mechanics of complex networks statistical mechanics of cellular automata cluster-based epidemic control through smartphone-based body area networks system reliability theory-models mathematical control theory: deterministic finite dimensional systems uncertainty and control control of time-delay systems understanding command and control. washington, dc: us department of defense ccrp publication series joint chiefs of staff. doctrine for command, control, communications, and computer (c ) systems support to optimal treatment of an sir epidemic model with time delay agile manifesto a decade of agile methodologies: towards explaining agile software development agile systems engineering national heart institute, national institutes of health, public health service, federal security agency. epidemiological approaches to heart disease: the framingham study. joint session of the epidemiology, health officers, medical care, and statistics sections of the american public health association multiple risk functions for predicting coronary heart disease: the concept, accuracy, and application the authors would like to thank the three anonymous referees for their valuable comments which contributed to a substantial improvement of the paper. we would finally like to stress the fact that systems engineering has an important role to play in the covid- context since it can enable the necessary collaboration of the various disciplines-such as biology, economics, engineering, epidemiology, finance, geography, health policy management, immunology, logistics, manufacturing, medicine, safety, sociology, urban systems, and so forth-that are all providing a piece of the complex puzzle posed by the global covid- crisis. key: cord- -qzg jsz authors: royo, sebastián title: from boom to bust: the economic crisis in spain – date: - - journal: why banks fail doi: . / - - - - _ sha: doc_id: cord_uid: qzg jsz this chapter analyzes the overall economic crisis that started in in spain. it is impossible to disentangle the banking crisis from the overall economic crisis that affected the country at the same time. this chapter looks at the performance of the spanish economy throughout the s and the first decade of the twentieth century. it examines the reasons for the success of the spanish economy in the s and provides an overview of the main causes of the – crisis and the governments’ responses. the economic crisis that hit the country in cannot be separated from the subsequent financial crisis. in order to contextualize the banking games that inform the next chapters and to understand the overall consequences that the economic crisis had on spanish banks and cajas , this chapter examines the economic crisis and analyzes its causes and consequences. yet again, the performance of the spanish banking system was deeply connected to the performance of the spanish economy, and progress in the banking sector was marred by the performance of the spanish economy at large. the economic crisis that started in , part of the great recession that engulfed most countries, had profound consequences for the spanish banking system. this book will show that the financial crises were the result of a political bargain in which incentives and a lax regulatory framework favored developers, property owners, and bankers, thus confirming a central tenant: the crucial importance of domestic political institutions, the rules of the game, and the role of domestic players operating within those institutions. from: sebastián royo, "after austerity: lessons from the spanish experience," in towards a resilient eurozone: economic, monetary and fiscal policies, ed. john ryan (new york: peter lang, ) . the economic crisis, while not fully unexpected, came as a relative surprise given the strong performance of the spanish economy during the first years of the twentieth century. the overall pattern of spanish economic history has been described, crudely, as a graph shaped like an upside-down version of the letter 'v'. that is, the graph rises-bumpily at times, through years under the romans, years under or partly under the moors, and a century of empire-building-to the peak of spanish power in the sixteenth century. after that, the history of the nation goes downhill until the s. a vast empire was gradually lost, leaving spain poor and powerless. and there was much political instability: spain suffered forty-three coup d'états between and , a horrendous civil war between and , followed by thirty-six years of dictatorship under generalísimo franco. after franco's death in , the graph turned upward again. king juan carlos, franco's heir, oversaw the return of democracy to the country. a negotiated transition period, which has been labeled as a model for other countries, paved the way for the elaboration of a new constitution, followed by the first free elections in almost forty years. these developments were followed by the progressive return of spain to the international arena-where they have been relatively isolated during the dictatorship. the following decade also witnessed the socialist party being elected to actual power in , bringing a new aura of modernity to the country. the s also witnessed spain's integration into nato ( ) and the european community ( ). the following two and a half decades were a period of phenomenal growth and modernization. indeed, before the global crisis that hit spain in the spring of the country had become one of europe's most successful economies. while other european countries had been stuck in the mud, spain performed much better at reforming its welfare systems and labor markets, as well as improving flexibility and lowering unemployment. over the decade and a half that preceded the global financial crisis, the spanish economy seemed to had been able to break with the historical pattern of boom and bust, and the country's economic performance was nothing short of remarkable. yet all this came to a halt when the global financial crisis hit spain in . as a result, spain is suffering one of the worst crises since the s (royo ) . following the transition to democracy and the country's european integration, spain was, prior to the crisis, a model country. but then the (debt fueled) dream was shattered and the country's economy imploded after . how did this happen? policy choices and the structure of decision making; the role of organized interest; the structure of the state; and institutional degeneration all played an important role in explaining the severity of the economic crisis in spain; as did the country's membership under an incomplete monetary union. the country had to face a triple crisis: financial, fiscal, and competitiveness. this chapter seeks to provide an overview of the country's evolution since the transition to democracy, and to explain its economic collapse after (see royo royo , royo , . the first section of the chapter outlines the main features of the spanish growth model, and the challenges that it faced. section two describes the scale of the shock it underwent from onward and analyzes the triple crisis in financial, fiscal, and competitiveness performance. the chapter concludes with brief lessons from the spanish experience. european integration was instrumental in the modernization of the country. indeed, before the global crisis that hit spain in the spring of the country had become one of europe's most successful economies (see table . ). propped up by low interest rates and immigration, spain was (in ) in its fourteenth year of uninterrupted growth and it was benefiting from the longest cycle of continuing expansion of the spanish economy in modern history (only ireland in the euro zone has a better record), which contributed to the narrowing of per capita gdp with the eu. indeed, in years per capita income grew points, one point per year, to reach close to % of the eu average. with the eu , spain already reached the average in . the country grew on average . percentage points more than the eu since . unemployment fell from % in the mid- s to . % in the first half of (the lowest level since ), as spain became the second country in the eu (after germany with a much larger economy) creating the most jobs (an average of , per year over that decade). in , the spanish economy grew a spectacular . %, and . % in . as we have seen, economic growth contributed to per capita income growth and employment. indeed, the performance of the labor market was spectacular: between and , % of all the total employment created in the eu- was created in spain. in , the active population increased by . %, the highest in the eu (led by new immigrants and the incorporation of women in the labor market, which increased from % in to % in ); and , new jobs were created. the economic success extended to spanish companies, which expanded beyond their traditional frontiers (guillén ) . in , they spent a total of e billion on domestic and overseas acquisitions, putting the country third behind the uk and france in the eu. of this, e billion were to buy companies abroad (compared with the e billion spent by german companies). in , spanish foreign direct investment (fdi) abroad increased %, reaching e . billion (or the equivalent of . % of gdp, compared with . % in ). in iberdrola, an electricity supplier purchased scottish power for $ . billion to create europe's third largest utility; banco santander, spain's largest bank, purchased britain's abbey national bank for $ billion, ferrovial, a family construction group, concluded a takeover of the british baa (which operates the three main airports of the uk) for £ billion; and telefonica bought o , the uk mobile phone company. indeed, was a banner year for spanish firms: % of them increased their production and . % their profits, . % hired new employees, and . % increased their investments. the country's transformation was not only economic but also social. the spanish became more optimistic and self-confident (i.e., a harris poll showed that spaniards were more confident of their economic future than their european and american counterparts, and a poll by the center for sociological analysis showed that % were satisfied or very satisfied with their economic situation). spain became 'different' again and according to public opinion polls it had become the most popular country to work for europeans. between and , some million immigrants ( , in and , in ) settled in spain ( . % of the population compared with . % in the eu ), making the country the biggest recipient of immigrants in the eu (they represented % of the contributors to the social security system). this was a radical departure for a country that used to be a net exporter of people, and more so because it was able to absorb these immigrants without falling prey (at least so far) to the social tensions that have plagued other european countries (although there have been isolated incidents of racial violence) (see calavita ) . these immigrants contributed significantly to the economic success of the country in that decade because they boosted the aggregate performance of the economy: they raised the supply of labor, increased demand as they spent money, moderated wages, and put downward pressure on inflation, boosted output, allowed the labor market to avoid labor shortages, contributed to consumption, and increased more flexibility in the economy with their mobility and willingness to take on low-paid jobs in sectors such as construction and agriculture, in which the spanish were no longer interested. indeed, an important factor in the per capita convergence surge with the eu after was the substantive revision of the spanish gdp data as a result of changes in the national accounts from to . these changes represented an increase in gpd per capita of % in real terms (the equivalent of slovakia's gdp). this dramatic change was the result of the significant growth of the spanish population since as a result of the surge in immigration (for instance in population grew . %). the key factor in this acceleration of convergence, given the negative behavior of productivity (if productivity had grown at the eu according to the financial times, % of those polled selected spain as the country where they would prefer to work ahead of the uk ( %) and france ( %). see "españa vuelve a ser diferente," el país, february , , and financial times, february , . calativa provides a detailed analysis of the immigration experience in spain and exposes the tensions associated with this development. she also highlights the shortcomings of governments' actions in regard to integration, and the impact of lack of integration on exclusion, criminalization, and radicalization. see . "immigrants boost british and spanish economies," financial times, tuesday, february , , p. . average spain would have surpassed in the eu per capita average by points), was the important increase in the participation rate, which was the result of the reduction in unemployment, and the increase in the activity rate (the proportion of people of working age who have a job or are actively seeking one) that followed the incorporation of female workers into the labor market and immigration growth. indeed between and , the immigrant population has multiplied by threefold. as a matter of fact, most of the , new jobs created in spain in went to immigrants (about %). their motivation to work hard also opened the way for productivity improvements (which in experienced the largest increase since , with a . % raise). it is estimated that the contribution of immigrants to gdp had been of . percentage points in the four years to . immigration represented more than % of employment growth, and . % of the demographic growth (as a result spain led the demographic growth of the european countries between and with a demographic advance of . % compared with the eu average of . %). they also contributed to the huge increase in employment, which was one of the key reasons for the impressive economic expansion. indeed, between and , employment contributed percentage points to the . % annual rise in spain's potential gdp (see table . ). what made this transformation possible? the modernization of the spanish economy in the two and half decades prior to had been intimately connected to the country's integration in the european union. indeed, european integration was a catalyst for the final conversion of the spanish economy into a modern western-type economy. yet, membership was not the only reason for this development. the economic liberalization, trade integration, and modernization of the spanish economy started in the s and s and spain became increasingly prosperous over the two decades prior to eu accession. however, one of the key consequences of its entry into europe was that it consolidated and deepened that development processes, and it accelerated the modernization of the country's economy. indeed, eu membership facilitated the micro-and macroeconomic reforms that successive spanish governments undertook throughout the s and s. spain also benefited extensively from european funds those two decades: approximately billion euros from agricultural, regional development, training, and cohesion programs. moreover, european monetary union (emu) membership was also very positive for the country: it contributed to macroeconomic stability, it imposed fiscal discipline and central bank independence, and it lowered dramatically the cost of capital. one of the key benefits was the dramatic reduction in short-term and long-term nominal interest rates: from . % and . % in , to . % and . % in , and . % and . % in . the lower costs of capital led to an important surge in investment from families (in housing and consumer goods) and businesses (in employment and capital goods). indeed, emu membership (and the stability pact) provided the country with unprecedented stability because it forced successive governments to implement responsible economic policies, which led to greater credibility and the improvement of the ratings of spain's public debt (and consequently to lower financing costs). another important factor to account for the country's economic success was the remarkable economic policy stability that followed the economic crisis of - . indeed, there were few economic policy shifts throughout the s and early s, and this despite changes in government. between and , there were only two ministers of finance, pedro solbes (from to , and from to ) and rodrigo rato (from to ; and the country only had three prime ministers (felipe gonzález, josé maría aznar, and josé luís rodríguez zapatero). this pattern was further reinforced by the ideological cohesiveness of the political parties in government and the strong control that party leaders exercise over the members of the cabinet and the parliament deputies. in addition, this stability was reinforced by the shared (and rare) agreement among conservative and socialist leaders regarding fiscal consolidation (the balance budget objective was established by law by the popular party), as well as the need to hold firm in the application of restrictive fiscal policies and the achievement of budgetary surpluses: as a result, a % budget deficit in became a . % surplus in , and public debt decreased from % of gdp in to . % in . finally, other factors that contributed to this success included the limited corruption and the fact that politics were fairly clean and relatively open; that spain had a flexible economy; and the success of spanish multinationals: there were eight firms in the financial times list of the world's largest multinationals in , and in . the challenges however, this economic success was marred by some glaring deficiencies that came to the fore in when the global financial crisis hit the country, because it was largely a "miracle" based on bricks and mortar. the foundations of economic growth were fragile because the country had low productivity growth (productivity contributed only . percentage points to potential gdp between and ) and deteriorating external competitiveness. over the decade that preceded the crisis spain did not address its fundamental challenge, its declining productivity, which only grew an average of . % during that decade ( . % in ), one whole point below the eu average, placing spain at the bottom of the eu and ahead of only italy and greece (the productivity of a spanish worker was the equivalent of % of a us one). the most productive activities (energy, industry, and financial services) contributed only % of gdp growth. according to data from the world bank governance indicators (http://info. worldbank.org/governance/wgi/sc_chart.asp), spain was ranked in the - th country's percentile ranks in control of corruption, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and voice and accountability. according to martinez-mongay and maza lasierra, "the outstanding economic performance of spain in emu would be the result of a series of lucky shocks, including a large and persistent credit impulse and strong immigration, underpinned by some right policy choices. in the absence of new positive shocks, the resilience of the spanish economy to the financial crisis might be weaker than that exhibited in the early s. the credit impulse has ended, fiscal consolidation has stopped, and the competitiveness gains of the nineties have gone long ago." see martinez-mongay and maza lasierra ( moreover, growth was largely based on low-intensity economic sectors, such as services and construction, which were not exposed to international competition. in , most of the new jobs were created in low-productivity sectors such as construction ( %), services associated with housing such as sales and rentals ( %), and tourism and domestic service ( %). these sectors represented % of all the new jobs created in spain in (new manufacturing jobs, in contrast, represented only %). furthermore, the labor temporary rate reached . % in , and inflation was a recurrent problem (it closed with a . % increase, but the average for that year was . %), thus the inflation differential with the eu (almost point) had not decreased, which reduced the competitiveness of spanish products abroad (and consequently spanish companies were losing market share abroad). competitiveness was further hindered by a deep process of economic deindustrialization, low value added and complexity of exports, and low insertion in global value chains. in addition, family indebtedness reached a record % of disposable income in , and the construction and housing sectors accounted for . % of gdp (twice the eurozone average). house prices rose by % since , and the average price of a square meter of residential property went up from euros in to at the end of , even though the housing stock had doubled. many wondered whether this bubble was sustainable. the crisis that started in confirmed the worst fears, and the implosion of the housing bubble fueled corruption and bad practices in the cajas sector of the financial system. moreover, between and % of the benefits of the largest spanish companies came from abroad. yet, in the years prior to the crisis this figure had decreased by approximately percentage points, and there had been a decline in direct foreign investment of all types in the country, falling from a peak of . billion euros in to . billion euros in . states; imports were % higher than exports and spanish companies were losing market share in the world. hence, the trade deficit reached . % in . while there was overall consensus that the country needed to improve its education system and invest in research and development to lift productivity, as well as modernize the public sector, and make the labor market more stable (i.e., reduce the temporary rate) and flexible, the government did not take the necessary actions to address these problems. spain spent only half of what the organization of european co-operation and development (oecd) countries spent on average on education; it lagged most of europe on investment in research and development (r&d); and it was ranked th by the unctad as an attractive location for research and development. finally, other observers noted that spain was failing to do more to integrate its immigrant population, and social divisions were beginning to emerge. by the summer of , the effects of the global crisis were evident in spain, and between and the country suffered one of the worst recession in modern history. this collapse was not wholly unexpected. the global liquidity freeze and the surge in commodities, food, and energy prices brought to the fore the unbalances in the spanish economy: the record current account deficit, persisting inflation, low productivity growth, dwindling competitiveness, increasing unitary labor costs, excess consumption, and low savings, had all set the ground for the current devastating economic crisis (see royo ) . as we have seen, the imbalances in the spanish economy came to the fore in - when the real estate market bubble burst and the international financial crisis hit spain (see table . ). in just a few months the 'debt-fired dream of endless consumption' turned into a nightmare. by the summer of , spain faced the worst economic recession in half a century. according to government statistics, was the worst year since there has been reliable data: gdp fell . %, unemployment reached over four million people (eventually reaching over % in , with more than million people unemployed), and the public deficit reached a record . % of gdp (up from . % in ). consumer confidence was shattered, the implosion of the housing sector reached historic proportions, and the manufacturing sector was also suffering. initially, the zapatero government was reluctant to recognize the crisis, which was becoming evident as early as the summer of , because of electoral considerations: the country had a general election in march . and after the election, the zapatero government was afraid to admit that it had not been entirely truthful during the campaign. by , there was increasing evidence that the model based on construction was already showing symptoms of exhaustion. yet, the spanish government not only refused to recognize that the international crisis was affecting the country, but also that in spain the crises would be aggravated by the very high levels of private indebtedness. as late as august , , finance minister solbes predicted that 'the crisis would have a relative small effect' in the spanish economy. when it became impossible to deny what was evident, the government's initial reluctance to recognize and address the crisis was replaced by frenetic activism. the zapatero government introduced a succession of plans and measures to try to confront the economic crisis, and specifically to address the surge of unemployment (royo ) (see fig. . ) . the sharp deterioration of the labor market was caused by the economic crisis and the collapse of the real estate sector, and it was aggravated by a demographic growth pattern based on migratory inflows of labor: in , there were . million immigrants in the country, of which . million were employed and , unemployed. in , the number of immigrants increased by almost , - . million (representing % of the growth in the active population), but , of them were unemployed (and . million employed), an increase of , . in the construction sector alone, unemployment increased % between the summer of and . meanwhile, the manufacturing and service sectors (also battered by the global crisis, lower consumption, and lack of international competitiveness) proved unable to incorporate these workers. the pace of deterioration caught policy-makers by surprise. the zapatero government prepared budgets for and that were utterly unrealistic in the face of rapidly changing economic circumstances (as did all other advanced countries, the g- agreed on a plan for fiscal stimulus that would later prove relatively ineffective and dangerous for spain as it increased the country's debt). as a result, things continued to worsen over the new four years. the most significant decline was in consumer confidence, which was hammered by the financial convulsions, the dramatic increase in unemployment, and the scarcity of credit. as a result, household consumption, which represented % of gdp, fell % in the last quarter of for the first time in the last years. according to the bank of spain, this decline in household consumption was even more important in contributing to the recession than the deceleration of residential investment, which had fallen %, driven down by worsening financial conditions, uncertainties, and the drop in residential prices. the government actions had limited effect stemming this hemorrhage, and their efficacy was inadequate. finally, the impact of the global economic crisis was felt well beyond the economic and financial realms. the crisis also had severe political consequences. spain followed in the path of many other european countries (including ireland, portugal, greece, and france) that saw their governments suffer the wrath of their voters and have been voted out of office. the socialist party (psoe) was re-elected in a general election on march , . soon thereafter, economic conditions deteriorated sharply and the government's popularity declined rapidly. between march and march , there were a number of electoral contests in spain at the local, regional, national, and european levels. at the national and european levels, the one common pattern was the outcome: the defeat of the socialist party and the victory of the popular party (pp). and at the regional and local levels the socialists suffered historical losses, losing control of regional government that they ruled for decades (notably, castilla-la mancha and extremadura), and even losing the election for the first time in one of its historical strongholds, andalusia (although they were able to reach a coalition with a smaller leftist party to stay in power). in the end, the economic crisis ignited a pattern of political polarization, instability, and fragmentation of the party system that crystallized in (following the pp's absolute majority) and lasts through today: as of fall of , spain has had general elections in years. one of the most common misinterpretations regarding the crisis in southern europe was attributing it to mismanaged public finances. many policy-makers across europe, especially in the creditor countries (crucially germany), still insist today ( ) that the crisis was caused by irresponsible public borrowing, and this, in turn, led to misguided solutions. in fact, with very few exceptions, notably greece, that interpretation is incorrect. in spain, the crisis did not originate with mismanaged public finances. on the contrary, as late as , spain's debt ratio was still well below the average for countries that adopted the euro as a common currency: while spain stood at less than % of gdp, greece stood at . %, italy at %, portugal at . %, ireland at %, belgium at . %, and france at %. on the contrary, prior to , spain seemed to be in an enviable fiscal position, even when compared with germany. spain ran a budget surplus in , , and . it was only when the crisis hit the country and the real estate market collapsed that the fiscal position deteriorated markedly and the country experienced huge deficits. the problem in spain was the giant inflow of capital from the rest of europe; the consequence was rapid growth and significant inflation. in fact, the fiscal deficit was a result, not a cause, of spain's problems: when the global financial crisis hit spain and the real estate bubble burst, unemployment soared, and the budget went into deep deficit, caused partly by depressed revenues and partly by emergency spending to limit human costs. the government responded to the crisis with a massive e billion public works stimulus. this decision, combined with a dramatic fall in revenue, blew a hole in government accounts resulting in a large deficit. furthermore, the conditions for the crisis in spain were created by the excessive lending and borrowing of the private sector rather than the government. in other words, the problem was private debt and not public debt. spain experienced a problem of ever-growing private sector indebtedness, which was compounded by the reckless investments and loans of banks (including the overleveraged ones), both integral components of the bank bargains that we examine later in the book, that were aggravated by competitiveness and current account imbalances. in spain, the private sector debt (households and nonfinancial corporations) was . % of gdp at the end of ; total debt increased from % of gdp in to % in mid- . yet, although spain entered the crisis in a relatively sound fiscal position, that position was not solid enough to withstand the effects of the crisis, especially being a member of a dysfunctional monetary union with no lender of last resort. the country's fiscal position deteriorated sharply-collapsing by more than % of gdp in just two years. looking at the deficit figures with the benefit of hindsight, it could be argued that spain's structural or cyclically adjusted deficit was much higher than its actual deficit. the fast pace of economic growth before the crisis inflated government revenues and lowered social expenditures in a way that masked the vulnerability hidden in spanish fiscal accounts. the problem is that it is very difficult to know the structural position of a country. the only way in which spain could have prevented the deficit disaster that followed would have been to run massive fiscal surpluses of % or higher during the years prior to the crisis in order to generate a positive net asset position of at least % of gdp. this, for obvious reasons, would not have been politically feasible. there is another way to look at the crisis. many economists argue that the underlying problem in the euro area was the exchange rate system itself, namely, the fact that european countries locked themselves into an initial exchange rate. this decision meant, in fact, that they believed that their economies would converge in productivity (which would mean that the spaniards would, in effect, become more like the germans). if convergence was not possible, the alternative would be for people to move to higher productivity countries, thereby increasing their productivity levels by working in factories and companies there (or to create a full fiscal union to provide for permanent transfers, as argued by oca theory). time has shown that both expectations were unrealistic and, in fact, the opposite happened. the gap between german and spanish (including other peripheral country) productivity increased, rather than decreased, over the past decade and, as a result, germany developed a large surplus on its current account; while spain and the other periphery countries had large current account deficits that were financed by capital inflows. in this regard, one could argue that the incentives introduced by emu worked exactly in the wrong way. capital inflows in the south made the structural reforms that would have been required to promote convergence less necessary, thus increasing divergence in productivity levels. in addition, adoption of the euro as a common currency fostered a false sense of security among private investors. during the years of euphoria following the launching of europe's economic and monetary union and prior to the onset of the financial crisis, private capital flowed freely into spain and, as a result as we have seen, the country ran current account deficits of close to % of gdp. in turn, these deficits helped finance large excesses of spending over income in the private sector. the result did not have to be negative. these capital inflows could have helped spain (and the other peripheral countries) invest, become more productive, and "catch up" with germany. unfortunately, in the case of spain, they largely led to a massive bubble in the real estate market, consumption, and unsustainable levels of borrowing. the bursting of that bubble contracted the country's real economy and it brought down the banks that gambled on loans to real estate developers and construction companies. at the same time, as noted above, the economic boom also generated large losses in external competitiveness that spain failed to address. successive spanish governments also missed the opportunity to reform institutions in their labor and product markets. as a result, costs and prices increased, which in turn led to a loss of competitiveness and large trade deficits. this unsustainable situation came to the fore when the financial shocks that followed the collapse of lehman brothers in the fall of brought "sudden stops" in lending across the world, leading to a collapse in private borrowing and spending, and a wave of fiscal crisis. a third problem had to do with the banks. as we will see in much greater detail later in the book, this problem was slow to develop. between and , the spanish financial system, despite all its problems, was still one of the least affected by the crisis in europe. during that period, of the financial institutions that received direct assistance from brussels, none was from spain. in december , moody's ranked the spanish banking system as the third strongest of the eurozone, only behind finland and france, above the netherlands and germany, and well ahead of portugal, ireland, and greece. finally, santander and bbva had shown new strength with profits of e . billion and e . billion, respectively, during the first half of . spanish regulators had put in place regulatory and supervisory frameworks, which initially shielded the spanish financial system from the direct effects of the global financial crisis. indeed, the bank of spain had imposed a regulatory framework that required higher provisioning, which provided cushions to spanish banks to initially absorb the losses caused by the onset of the global financial crisis. and there were no toxic assets in bank´s balance sheets. nevertheless, this success proved short-lived. in the summer of , spanish financial institutions seemed to be on the brink of collapse and the crisis of the sector forced the european union in june ( ) to devise an emergency e billion rescue plan for the spanish banking sector (see chapter ). when the crisis intensified, the financial system was not able to escape its dramatic effects. by september , the problem with toxic real estate assets forced the government to intervene and nationalize eight financial institutions. altogether, by may , , the reorganization of the banking sector involved e billion in public resources, including guarantees. as we will examine later in the book, there are a number of factors that help account for the deteriorating performance of the spanish banks after . the first was the direct effect of the economic crisis. the deterioration in economic conditions had a severe impact on the bank balance sheets. the deep recession and record-high unemployment triggered successive waves of loan losses in the spanish mortgage market coupled with a rising share of nonperforming loans. like many other countries such as the united states, spain had a huge property bubble that burst. land prices increased % in spain between and , the largest increase among the oecd countries. as a result of the collapse of the real estate sector had a profound effect in banks: five years after the crisis started, the quality of spanish banking assets continued to plummet. the bank of spain classified e billion euros as troubled assets at the end of , and banks were sitting on e billion of mortgages of which . % were classified as nonperforming. a second factor was concern over the country's sovereign debt. as mentioned before, the crisis in spain did not originate with mismanaged public finances. the crisis has largely been a problem of ever-growing private sector debt, compounded by reckless bank investments and loans, particularly from the cajas , as well as aggravated by competitiveness and current account imbalances. to place the problem in perspective, the gross debt of household increased dramatically in the decade prior to the crisis, and by it was percentage points higher than the eurozone average ( % of gdp versus %). but the austerity policies implemented since may aggravated the fiscal position of the country. the ratio of spain's debt to its economy was % before the crisis and reached % in . in sum, spain fell into the "doom loop" that had already afflicted greece or portugal and led to their bailout. the sustainability of the spanish government debt was affecting spanish banks (including bbva and santander) because they had been some of the biggest buyers of government debt in the wake of the ecb long-term refinancing operation liquidity infusions (the percentage of government bond owned by domestic banks reached % in mid- ). again, the doom loop was a result of emu weakness, namely the lack of a banking union with a centralized eu funded mechanism to bail out banks. spanish banks were also suffering the consequences of their dependence on wholesale funding for liquidity since the crisis started, and, in particular, their dependence on international wholesale financing, as % of their balance depends on funding from international markets, particularly from the ecb. borrowing from the ecb reached e billion in , and spanish banks had increased their ecb borrowings by more than six times since june , to the highest level in absolute terms among euro area banking systems as of april . the crisis also exposed weaknesses in the policy and regulatory framework, part of the banking bargains that we will examine later in the book. the most evident sign of failure was the fact that the country had already adopted five financial reforms in three years and had implemented three rounds of bank mergers. the results of these reforms were questionable at best. the fact that spain had five reforms in less than three years, instead of one that really fixed the problem, says it all. they had been perceived largely as "too little and too late," and they failed to sway investors' confidence in the spanish financial sector. finally, the financial crisis can also be blamed on the actions (and inactions) of the bank of spain, one of the key actors involved in the bank bargains. at the beginning of the crisis, the bank of spain's policies were all praised and were taken as model by other countries. time, however, tempered that praise and the bank of spain was criticized for its actions and decisions (or lack thereof) during the crisis. spanish central bankers chose the path of least resistance: alerting about the risks but failing to act decisively. the economic crisis that started in spain was largely a problem of ever-growing private sector debt, aggravated by competitiveness and current account imbalances, and compounded by reckless bank investments and loans, particularly from the cajas , which by over-lending freely to property developers and mortgages contributed to a real estate property bubble. this outcome was a result of the political bargains at the heart of the game of bank bargains focus of this book. the bubble contributed to hide the fundamental structural problems of the spanish economy outlined in the previous sections and had an effect in policy choices because no government was willing to burst the bubble and risk suffering the wreath of voters. furthermore, cheap credit also had inflationary effects that contributed to competitiveness losses and record balance of payment deficits. therefore, three dimensions of the crisis (financial, fiscal, and competitiveness) are interlinked in their origins. the crisis exposed the underbelly of the financial sector and showed that many banks (particularly the cajas ) were not just suffering liquidity problems but risked insolvency, which led to the eu financial bailout of june . the bailout had onerous conditions attached and it limited national economic autonomy (see dellepiane and hardiman ) . finally, the financial and fiscal crises were made worse by the incomplete institutional structure of emu and by bad policy choices at the eu level (excess austerity and refusal to act as a lender of last resort for sovereigns by the ecb) (royo ) . in the end, the crisis exposed the weaknesses of the country's economic model. indeed, despite the previous two decades' significant progress and achievements, the spanish economy still faced serious competitive and fiscal challenges. unfortunately, the economic success the country prior to the crisis fostered a sense of complacency, which allowed for a delay in the adoption of the necessary structural reforms. and this was not a surprise as the spanish economy was living on borrowed time, despite all the significant progress, and the country still had considerable ground to cover, given the existing income and productivity differentials, to catch up with the richer eu countries and to improve the competitiveness of its economy (see royo ) . the sudden collapse of the spanish economy came as a shock. yet, in retrospect it should not have been such a surprise. the policies choices and political bargains taken during the previous decades led to an unsustainable bubble in private sector borrowing that was bound to burst. moreover, as we will examine on chapter , the institutional degeneration that led to systemic corruption and contributed to the implosion of parts of the financial sector made the crisis almost unavoidable. as we have seen, much of spain growth during the s was based on the domestic sector and particularly on an unsustainable reliance on construction. as we will later in the book, this outcome was part of a political bargain in which tax incentives and a lax regulatory framework favored developers, property owners, and bankers (particularly cajas ). the particular regulation of the cajas proved fatally flawed, as it provided incentives that favored local and regional government actors' access to finance at the expense of an environment that would have provided a stable and efficient banking system. on the contrary, it led to a form of crony capitalism spanish style, in which they invested massively in the construction sector in search of rapid growth and larger market share. these decisions proved fatal once the real estate bubble burst, and they led to the nationalization of several cajas , including bankia, and the financial bailout from the european union. membership in the european single currency was not the panacea that everyone expected to be, thus confirming the crucial importance of domestic political institutions and how domestic players operate within those institutions. in spain, the adoption of the euro led to a sharp reduction in real interest rates that contributed to the credit boom and the real estate bubble. however, it also altered economic governance decisions. successive spanish governments largely ignored the implications of emu membership and failed to implement the necessary structural reforms to ensure the sustainability of fiscal policies and to control unitary labor costs. these decisions led to a continuing erosion of competitiveness (and a record current account deficit), and a huge fiscal deficit when the country was hit by the global financial crisis. indeed, the experience of the country shows that eu and emu membership had not led to the implementation of the structural reforms necessary to address these challenges. on the contrary, emu contributed to the economic boom, thus facilitating the postponement of necessary economic reforms. this challenge however is not a problem of european institutions, but of national policies. the process of economic reforms has to be a domestic process led by domestic actors willing to carry them out. the spanish case serves as an important reminder that in the context of a monetary union, countries only control fiscal policies and relative labor costs. spain proved to be weak at both. it failed to develop an appropriate adjustment strategy to succeed within the single currency, and it ignored the imperative that domestic policy choices have to be consistent with the international constraints imposed by euro membership. on the contrary, in spain domestic policies and the imperatives of participating in a multinational currency union stood in uneasy relationship to one another. the crisis was the tipping point that brought this inconsistency to the fore, which led to the worst economic crisis in spanish modern history (before covid- ). next we turn to the elements of domestic bargains that underline the financial crisis. immigrants at the margins ucd geary institute discussion series chapters the rise of spanish multinationals competitiveness and growth in emu: the role of the external sector in the adjustment of the spanish economy from social democracy to neoliberalism royo, sebastián. lessons from the economic crises in spain after austerity: lessons from the spanish experience key: cord- - athnjkh authors: etemad, hamid title: managing uncertain consequences of a global crisis: smes encountering adversities, losses, and new opportunities date: - - journal: j int entrep doi: . /s - - -z sha: doc_id: cord_uid: athnjkh nan more and faster, they faced uncertainties concerning the length of time that the higher demand would continue to justify the additional investments. the phenomenon of newly found (or lost) opportunities and associated uncertainties occupied most smes. generally, smes depend intensely on their buyers, supplies, employees, and resource providers without much slack in their optimally tuned value creation system. a fault, disruption, slow-down, strike, or the likes anywhere in the system would travel rapidly upstream and downstream within a value creation cycle with minor differences in its adverse impact on nearly every member. when a crisis strikes somewhere in the value creation stream, all members would soon suffer the pains. consider, for example, the impact of national border closures on international supplies and sales. generally, disruptions in logistics, including international closures, could stop ismes' flow of international supplies and, after the depletion of inventories, shipping and international deliveries would be forced to stop, which in turn would be exposing nearly all other members of the value-net slow-downs and stoppages indirectly, if not directly, sooner rather than later. in spite of many advantages of smes relying on collaborative international networks, the covid- crisis pointed out that all members will need to devise alternative contingency plans for disruptions that may affect them more severely than otherwise. the rapidly emerging evidence suggests that the capable, far-sighted, and innovative enterprises perceived the slow-downs, or stoppages in some cases, as an opportunity for starting, or increasing, their alternative ways of sustaining activities, including on-line and remote activities and involvements, in order to compensate for the shrinkage in their pre-covid demands, while the short-sighted or severely resource-constrained smes faced the difficult decision of closure in favor of "survival or self-preservation" strategy, thus losing expansion opportunities. the silver lining of the covid darkness is that we have collectively learned invaluable lessons that deserve a review and re-examination from entrepreneurial and internationalization perspectives in order to prepare for the next unexpected crises, regardless of its cause, location, magnitude, and timing. in few words, the world experienced a crisis of massive scale for which it was unprepared and even after some months there is no effective remedial strategy (or solution) for crises caused by the covid- pandemic in sight. the inevitable lesson of the above exposition is that even the most-prepared institutions of the society's last resort nearly collapsed. given such societal experiences, the sufferings of industries and enterprises, especially smaller ones, are understandable and the scholarly challenge before us is what should be researched and learned about, or from, this crisis to avoid the near collapse of smaller enterprises and industries, on which the society depends and may not easily absorb another crisis of similar, or even smaller, scale. the main intention of this introduction is not to review the emergence and unfolding of a major global crisis that inflicted massive damage on smes in general and on ismes in particular, but to search for pathways out of the covid- 's darkness to brighter horizons. accordingly, the logical questions in need of answers are: were there strategies that could reduce, if not minimize, the adverse impact of the crisis. could (or should) smes or isme have prepared alternative plans to protect themselves or possibly avoid the crippling impact of the crisis. why were smes affected so badly. are there lessons to be learned to fight the next one, regardless of location, time, and scale? in spite of the dominating context of the ongoing and still unfolding covid- crises, there is a need to learn about the world's both effective and difficult experiences at this point in time, which are beyond the aims and scope of this journal. rather, it aims to analyze and learn about the bright rays of light that can potentially enlighten entrepreneurial and human innovative ingenuity to find pathways from the darker to the brighter side of this global and non-discriminatory crisis, within the scope of international entrepreneurship. naturally, in seeking those pathways, one is expected to encounter barriers, obstacles, and institutional rigidities that could still pose nearly insurmountable challenges to the society, and especially to smes and ismes, have experienced in the past which were partially due to endemic rigidities (aparicio et al. ; north ). on the positive side of the ledger is that many of the above adverse factors are among the host of smaller crisis-like challenges that entrepreneurial enterprises face regularly and manage to bridge across them to realize fertile and promising opportunities. learning how such bridges are built and maintained not only is entrepreneurial, but also may help the causes of humanity by showing the way out of this, and other similar, crises. this will be a noble objective if it can be accomplished, which should motivate many to take up corresponding challenges in spite of the low chances of its success. we will return to this topic at the end of this article. a cautionary note it is very important to note that the next four articles appearing in this issue were neither invited for this issue nor received any special considerations. they are included in this issue as they offer concepts, contents, contexts, and issues that are relevant to the overriding theme of this issue and may assist smes trying to manage a crisis facing them and scholars interested in investigating related issues. without exceptions, they were subjected to the journal's rigorous and routine double-blind peerreview processes prior to their acceptance. they were then published in the journal website's "on-line first" option waiting for placement in an issue with a coherent theme drawing on the research of each and all the selected articles for that issue. the highlights of the four articles that follow are presented in the next section of this article. they offer promising argument and plausible pathways based on their scholarly research relevant to an emerging or unfolding crisis. structurally, this article comprises five parts. a developmental discussion of uncertainties and their types, causes, and remedies as well as enabling topics relating to crisis-like challenges follows this brief introduction in "developmental arguments." a brief highlight of each of the four articles appearing in this issue, and their interrelationships, will be presented in "the summary highlight of articles in this issue." "discussions" provides discussions related to the overriding theme of this article. conclusion and implications for further research, management, and conducive public policy will appear at "conclusion and implications." the extra-ordinary socio-economic pains and the added stress of the covid- crisis exposed entrepreneurs, smes, larger enterprises, and even national governments to unprecedented conditions and issues. as stated earlier, there is a need for understanding how and why it became such a major world crisis and what factors contributed to expanding and amplifying its impact in the early quarters of the year . although the primary aim of this issue is not reviewing the crippling impact of the covid- crisis, for it is done elsewhere (e.g., etemad ; surico and galeotti ), some of its influential factors emerged and stood out in the early days of that effected international business and entrepreneurial institutions from the very beginning; and yet, it took some time to enact defensive private and public actions against it. although covid- was not the first world-wide health crisis, many enterprises, one-afteranother, were defenselessly affected by it, even after a few months. while we have learned about some of the contributing factors to this expansive crisis, we are still in the dark as to why the broader community, and even resourceful enterprises, had failed to foresee the emergence and unfolding of such a crisis (surico and galeotti ) or prepare potential defenses against it. the crisis' high magnitude and broad scope involved nearly everyone worrying and learning about its impact first-hand as it unfolded; but it appears that top management teams (tmts) had not learned fully from the past or taken precautions against the emergence of potential crises, and for this one, in a timely fashion. however, the literature of managing a major crisis of the past, mainly in the large enterprises, has pointed out a few known forces, or potential factors, and issues that had contributed to past crises and are briefly reviewed below as follows. uncertainties as similar broad world-wide crisis-like challenges involving nearly all institutions have not been experienced in the recent past, enterprises and especially smaller firms found themselves unprepared and encountered high levels of discomfort and taxing uncertainties in their daily lives. generally, such effects are more disabling when enterprises are in the earlier stages of their life cycle when they suffer from lack of rich experience to guide them forward, and they do not have access to the necessary capabilities and resources to support them through (etemad a (etemad , b, . entrepreneurial enterprises that have already internationalized, or aspire to internationalize, encounter the customary risks and uncertainties of "foreignness" (e.g., hymer ; zaheer ; zaheer and mosakowski ) , lack of adequate "experiential experience"(e.g., eriksson et al. ; johanson and vahlne ) , "outsidership" (johanson and vahlne ) , and the liability of "newness" (stinchcombe ) . the covid crisis added risks and uncertainties arising from national lockdowns, unprecedented regulatory restrictions, closure of international borders not experienced since the second world war, the near collapse of international supply chains and logistics, among many others, most of which became effective without much prior notice, and each of which alone could push smaller enterprises to the edges of demise due to the consequent shortages, operational dysfunctions, closure, and potential bankruptcies. survival during the heights of the covid- crisis required rapid strategic adaptations, mostly technological, and use of alternative online facilities, capabilities, and novel strategies to reach stakeholders (customers, supplier, employees, investors, and the likes) to quickly compensate, if not substitute, for their previous arrangements that had become dysfunctional. smaller firms that had prepared alternative contingency plans, supported with reserved dynamic capabilities and resources (eisenhardt and martin ; jantunen et al. ) , viewed the dysfunctionality of rivals as opening opportunities and managed rapidly a successful transition to exploit them in a timely fashion, either through their own or through established others' functional "platform-type operations" (e.g., amazon, alibaba, shopify, spotify, and many similar multi-sided platforms). they were viewed by others as exceptional, progressive, even somewhat "disruptive" (utterback and acee ) and creatively destructive to others (chiles et al. ) in some cases as internationalized firms restrategized and refocused on their domestic markets in reaction to the closure of border and international logistics dysfunctions. however, such adaptations, deploying innovative and additive technologies and other innovative industry . (e.g., additive technologies, artificial intelligence, internet of things (iot), robotic, -d printing, and other i. . technologies) (hannibal , forthcoming) or collaboration with established on-line or off-line establishments, faced their own unexpected operational difficulties nationally, while their counterparts experienced them internationally, including "cross-cultural communication and misunderstandings" (noguera et al. ; mitchell et al. ; mcgrath et al. ) , national and international logistic problems, supply chain disruption, among many others, mostly attributable to covid-related restrictions. among such unexpected international factors were forced rapid change in consumer behavior and national preferences in exporting countries (verging on implicit discriminatory practices ), worsening diplomatic relations, rising international disputes, regulatory restriction, and a host of other well-documented causes, exposing firms to unforeseen risks and uncertainties not experienced for decades. therefore, the concepts of risk, uncertainty, and the way for mitigating, or getting over, true or perceived crises deserve discussion as they are pertinent to resolving crisis-like challenges facing smaller firms, regardless of their particular timing and situation. similarly, factors contributing to, or mitigating against, the experience level(s) of ex-ante unknowns, or "un-knowables" (huang and pearce ) , contributing to uncertainties merit equal reportedly, rapidly growing internationalized medium-sized enterprises reconfigured and redeployed parts of their facilities rapidly to fabricate and provide goods locally to reduce shortages in products previously imported from international markets. for example, canada goose, manufacturer of luxury winter clothing, began making personal protective garments for hospital staff (see an article entitled as "toronto -canada goose holdings inc. is moving to increase its domestic production of personal protective equipment for health-care workers across canada at https://globalnews.ca/news/ /canada-goose-production-medicalppe-coronavirus/ visited on april , ). similarly, many other companies, including ccm sporting equipment and yoga jeans, began producing protective visors, glasses, and gowns for essential workers and hospital staff members (see article entitled as "quebec companies answer the call to provide protective equipments" at https://montrealgazette.com/business/local-business/masks-and-ppes...visited on june , ). for all of the above companies, their sales required very different distribution channels, such as pharmacies and hospital supply companies that are far from clothing and sport equipment. the us-based m was ordered not to ship n face mask to canada in march-april . similarly, some chinese suppliers refused to ship previously placed and paid-for ordered supplies. considerations. nearly all articles appearing in this issue relate to such contributing factors and offer different bridging pathways, if not causeways, over the sea of scholarly challenges faced by international entrepreneurs in quests for their success in entrepreneurial internationalization. in the context of the ongoing crisis, the pertinent discussion of uncertainties is extensive (liesch et al. ; bylund and mccaffrey ; coff ; dimov ; dow ; huff et al. ; liesch et al. ; matanda and freeman ; mckelvie et al. ; mcmullen and shepherd ) and ranges from one extreme to another classic view at the other extreme-namely, from the akerlofian cross-sectional (akerlof ) to the knightian longitudinal uncertainties (knight ) . at the root of both is in the absence of objective, or reliable information and knowledge with very different density distributions. the akerlof's cross-sectional uncertainty relates to a relatively shorter term and the information and knowledge (erikson and korsgaard ) discrepancies (between or among agents) favoring those who have more of them and exposing those who have less, or lack of them. consider, for example, the case of buying a used car (or second-hand equipment). generally, the seller has more reliable, if not near perfect, knowledge about the conditions of his offerings in terms of its age, performance, repairs, faults, and the likes than a potential buyer who will have to assume, predict, or perceive the offer's conditions without reliable information in order to justify his decision to either buy the car (or the equipment) or not. the potential buyer may ask for more detailed information about the offers' conditions or seek assurances (or even guarantees) against its dysfunctions to pursue the transaction or not when he is in doubt. the noteworthy point is that the objective information(or knowledge) is available but the buyer cannot access it to assess it objectively-thus, the cross-sectional uncertainty is due to the asymmetric state of information and knowledge among parties involved in a transaction (townsend et al. ) , which clears soon after the transaction is consummated. in williamson's transaction cost approach (williamson ) , such discrepancies are viewed as transaction frictions between the parties, where at least one party acts opportunistically to maximize self-interest at the cost to the other(s), while the other party(ies) is incapable of securing the necessary objective information to form the required knowledge for enabling a prudent decision. within the uncertain state of covid- crisis, both of the above phenomena (asymmetry and opportunistic behavior) were clearly observable and contributed to creating subsidiary crises of different magnitudes-relatively larger ones for smaller enterprises and smaller ones for the larger companies, some of which were unduly amplified due to the lack of objective information and opportunistic behavior at the time. retrospectively, we collectively learned, for example, that there was no worldwide shortage of health-care equipment and supplies but major suppliers, or intermediaries, withheld their supplies and did not ship orders on time as they usually would have previously done, which created the perception of acute shortages forcing prices higher, knowing well that buyers were incapable of assessing the true availability of inventoried supplies for demanding lower prices, especially when the richer buyers (e.g., national governments) were willing to bid-up prices due to urgency of their situations. this is not far from a discriminating monopolist taking advantage of its uninformed buyers. similar situation happens when a small company fails to plan for contingencies to cover for emerging uncertainties by ordering just sufficient for their regularly needed supplies (e.g., the minimum order quantity) to minimize the short-term costs of holding inventory. the longer term overall costs of over-ordering to build contingency supplies is the cumulative cost of holding excess inventory over time, which could be viewed as an insurance premium for avoiding supply shortages, or stock-outs, while the true costs of such internal imprudent strategies become much higher when, for example, potential customer switch to other available brands, or there are uncertain and adverse external conditions, including artificially created shortages, as discussed earlier. generally, the top management of resource-constrained smaller companies aims to ensure the efficiency of their resources, including supplies, and to preserve adequate cash flows, to avoid short-term uncertainties of insolvency, akin to the akerlofian type (akerlof ) . in contrast, the absence of reliable information (or assurances) about steady supplies may contribute to, if not cause, a change in potential buyers' consumer behavior and further contribute to suppliers' over-estimation of buyers' demand trajectory over a longer time period fearing from facing acute adverse conditions such as those discussed in the previous case. however, such internal (e.g., management oversights) or external (e.g., suppliers withholding shipments or change in consumer behavior) causes due to absence of the required information, reliable forecasts or estimates, and imperfect knowledge over time begin to pertain more to knightian uncertainties than akerlofian types (i.e., across transacting agents, which is comparatively shorter term and more frequently encountered uncertainties). the impact of resources and capabilities naturally, a firm's level of resources (wernerfelt (wernerfelt , barney et al. ) or institutional inadequacies and restrictions (bruton et al. ; north dc ; kostova ; yousafzai et al. ) may play influential roles in mitigation of encountered uncertainties. consider, for example, the difference in abilities of smaller resource-constrained enterprises in continual need of minimizing fixed costs and larger and richer institutions (such as national governments) with higher priorities (than costs) to enforce performance contract(s). the richer resources of larger institutions pose a more credible threat of suing the supplier(s) lateron for potential damages of higher costs or delayed shipments than those of smaller firms, thus reducing the temptation for opportunistic behaviors (williamson ) over time. as the transaction cost theory suggests (williamson ) , the ever-presence of such threats may dissuade suppliers from delaying and withholding shipments for the hope of higher revenues. furthermore, even the opportunists may be exposed as other lower costs suppliers may realize the opportunities and respond with lower prices. time, timing, and longer term uncertainties the above demonstrative discussions point to the critical role of timely-planned acquisition of capabilities and resources over time before emergencies, or shortages, become acute. the time dimension of this discussion relates to knight's ( ) longitudinal uncertainties. the future is inherently uncertain; but one's needs and their corresponding transactions costs are more predictable at the time as, for example, transactions can be consummated at the prevailing prices. delaying a transaction in the hope of buying at lower costs exposes the transaction to longitudinal uncertainties, as the uncertainties' ex-post costs and the true prices are only revealed in the due course of time. similarly, the longer term costs of preparedness and security can minimize the short-term costs to individual employees and other corporate persons. accordingly, the intensity of a crisis, and its cumulative costs, may force national and local authorities to bid-up prices and absorb the much higher short-term costs at the time to ensure acquisition of essential supplies in order to avoid the difficult-to-predict costs of longitudinal uncertainties. for smaller enterprises, however, the state of their resources and the extent of prior experiences may influence their decision at the time. this will be discussed below. past experience and the firm's stages of life-cycle generally, smaller and younger companies are short of excess resources and lack rich experience to provide them with a longer and far-sighted outlook for avoiding longitudinal uncertainties of the knightian types by, for example, keeping a level of contingency inventories for difficult conditions and rainy days. however, even smaller start-ups with experienced serial entrepreneurs at the helm can benefit from the past experiences of their founding entrepreneur(s) through what etemad calls as "the carry-over of paternal heritage" (etemad a) to enable planning and providing for their necessary resources. the state of competition on one extreme, a monopolist can control supplies and create artificial shortages to force prices up in normal conditions. under distress and unusual conditions, customers may bid-up prices to have priority access to the available supplies. in the perfect competition, on the other extreme, many suppliers compete to attract demand and prices remain relatively competitive due to highly elastic demands. practically, however, the state of global competition is likely to be closer to a combination of regional oligopolistic (or monopolistic) competition and global competitive conditions, where suppliers perceive to have certain monopolistic powers to manipulate prices (e.g., due to their brand equity, location, or product quality), while they need to compete in a nearly hyper-competitive state (chen et al. ) with other competitors who provide similar offerings. the knowledge of the competitive and institutional structures (jepperson ; yousafzai et al. ; welter and smallbone ) is, therefore, essential, especially to smes for deciding as optimally as possible, which all depends on both the buyers and suppliers state of information, communication, and knowledge, which is further discussed below. the state of communication and information the advanced state of a firm's information and communication technology (ict) is highly likely to enable it to decide prudently. as discussed earlier, uncertainties depend on one's state of reliable information impacting the achievement of optimality, which in turn depends on the state of information at the time. in short, a small firm's potential exposure to cross-sectional and longitudinal risks and uncertainties is also likely to depend on information on a combination of influential factors, some of which are discussed above; prominent similar arguments apply to national preparedness and national security over time to shield individual and corporate citizens from bearing short-term or long-term high costs-the national costs per capita may pale relative to the immeasurable costs of human mortalities paid by the deceased people and their families, the massive unemployment, or high costs related to shortages in major crises, such as the covid- pandemic. among such influential factors is reliable information about their operating context at the time and its probable trajectory in the near future. furthermore, nearly all of the emerging advances in management and production, including additive technologies, depend heavily on information (hannibal , forthcoming) finally, the next section will seek to discuss the above elements within the articles that follow. this part consists of summary highlights of the contribution of the four double-blind, peer-reviewed articles with relevant materials to an emerging or an unfolding crisis. the second article in this issue is entitled "muddling through akerlofian and knightian uncertainty: the role of socio-behavioral integration, positive affective tone, and polychronicity" and is co-authored by daniel leunbach, truls erikson, and max rapp-ricciard. as discussed earlier, uncertainty and risk-taking propensity have been recognized as integral parts of general entrepreneurship for a long time (e.g., gartner and liao ) and this article focuses on studying them as they relate to individual entrepreneurs' affective socio-behavioral and also the way entrepreneurs function, including how they perceive their situation, manage, progress, and adjust their outlook within the environment(s) that exposes them to perceived risks and uncertainties. from an entrepreneurial perspective, a combined interaction of time and flow of information, or lack thereof, forming a knowledge base, is what entrepreneurial decisions depend. when the entrepreneurs need to make decisions without perfect cognition (based on his information and knowledge about the state of affairs at the time) within a relatively short time period, they and their decisions are exposed to an uncertain state of the world. such uncertainty(ies) within a relatively short time span is (are) termed as crosssectional uncertainty. generally, it is difficult to acquire nearly perfect information due to the shortage of time or the cost of searching for the information. george akerlof ( ) suggested that such perceived uncertainty would not be as much due to lack of pertinent information as it would be due to the asymmetric distribution of information (brown ) and the corresponding knowledge among agents-i.e., those who had more potent information and those who did not but needed it. consider a typical entrepreneur in need of acquiring a good, or service, from a supplier or service provider, who has nearly perfect information about, or the knowledge of, the good or service he offers but does not fully disclose them to the entrepreneur in self-interest, which gives rise to the asymmetric distribution of the information (or knowledge) between the supplier and the potential buyer. generally, this is also termed as "akerlofian uncertainty." time is an important factor in entrepreneurial decisions, and the influence of time is as significant as the state of information. for example, the urgency of a decision deprives the entrepreneur of sufficient time for conducting informative research to enrich his state of information and forces the entrepreneur to decide earlier, rather than later, with some discomfort and reservation due to his insufficient information. with more time for acquiring sufficient information for forming a supportive knowledge base, he can comfortably decide to consummate a particular transaction or not. the time cost of switching to another supplier or conducting research may increase the transaction costs and expose the transaction to longitudinal uncertainties as well. in contrast to the asymmetric distribution of information across individuals in the short term (brown ) , the required time to acquire, or develop, the required information about the relevant state of affairs for forming the corresponding knowledge for portraying the future, or the near future, gives rise to longitudinal uncertainty, as suggested by frank knight's article in (knight ) and is viewed as "knightian uncertainty." generally, the future is uncertain and it is not prudent to assume that it will be a linear extension of the current state of affairs, or alternatively, it will be predictable perfectly. again, both the information and time are influential factors as more pertinent information is revealed over time. entrepreneurial start-ups, and new ventures, for example, suffer from both the shortage of time and information and thus offer fertile context for exploring not only the interaction of time and information, but also how new venture teams (nvts) perceive the gravity of risks and uncertainties facing them. therefore, exploring uncertainty within new venture teams, especially those based on new science and technology, which usually encounter higher uncertainties and commercialization risks, enables a deeper understanding of how uncertainties are perceived and managed by the new venture teams. as discussed in some length in the paper, the authors' research methodology enabled them to observe the impact of nvt's socio-behavioral and psychological characteristic and explore their reactions and response to both the shorter and longer term uncertainties facing them. in the context of a major crisis, smes' top management teams (tmts) suffer from both the inadequacies of information and shortage of time in most cases, neither of which they can control or extend into the future. in a major crisis, there are complex uncertainties with unclear prospects and come without prior warning-e.g., what will have an immediate adverse impact, will it increase or subside, how long will it last, and what will be the magnitude of accumulated damage when the crisis is nearly over? these are among many other questions that have no certain answers at the time. similar to young start-ups, where founder-entrepreneurs suffer from shortages of time, knowledge (or reliable information), and resources, in addition to uncertainties associated with consumer behavior and market reactions as well as regulatory restriction, smes, and especially ismes, suffer from complex uncertainties for which they were not prepared, nor would they have sufficient time and resource to deal with the unfolding crisis satisfactorily. furthermore, the normal sources of previous help and advice, including their social networks and support agencies, such as lenders, service providers, and suppliers, would be facing even larger problems of their own and incapable of assisting them in a timely fashion, which call for adequate alternative contingency plans for the rainy days as discussed earlier and further reviewed in a later section. this discussion points to a need for examining the potential role of environmental context in increasing uncertainties or mitigating against them. the next article examines this very topic next. the third article of this issue examines the context within which entrepreneurial decisions are made. it is entitled "home country institutional context and entrepreneurial internationalization: the significance of human capital attributes" and co-authored by the team of vahid jafari-sadeghi, jean-marie nkongolo-bakenda, léo-paul dana, robert b. anderson, and paolo pietro biancone. nearly all decisions are embedded in a context, and the context for most international entrepreneurship decisions is perceived as more complex than those in the home market, as extensively discussed by internationalization literature. internationalization involves at least two contextsone characterized by formal institutional structures and informal socio-cultural values (hofstede (hofstede , (hofstede , hofstede et al. ) at home, both helpful and restrictive, and the other at the host country environment, where each country's institutional structures differ from the others (chen et al. ; li and zahra ) . even in the european union's (eu) single market, where eu has increasing harmonized intercountry-wide regulatory and institutional requirements ever since , different local socio-cultural and behavioral forces influence decisions differently, especially those affecting consumer behavior and market-sensitive aspects, which are more deeply embedded in their country's institutional structures than others, encouraging or restricting certain entrepreneurial actions. generally, international entrepreneurship and their corresponding entrepreneurial actions are deeply embedded in their more complex contexts (barrett, jones, mcevoy, granovetter ; wang and altinay ; yousafzai et al. ) and highly internationalized smes (ismes), and even larger firms, need to respond sensitively to the various local (i.e., contextual) facets and adapt their practices accordingly (welter ) , which in turn add incremental complexities and expose the firm's early entrepreneurial, and especially marketing, to a higher degree of risk and cross-sectional uncertainties than those at home which is more familiar than elsewhere. however, firms learn from their host environment and also from their competitors as to how to mitigate their risks and remove the information (and knowledge) asymmetries over time in order to operate successfully after their early days in the host county environment. naturally, entrepreneurial activities of innovative start-ups face higher risks and uncertainties at the outset, as discussed earlier. although the cross-sectional methodology of this article's research across european country-environments, using structural equation modeling (sem), could not examine the specific impact of various environmental characteristics on entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial practices at the local levels in each country context over time, the overall indicators pointed to contextual influences strongly affecting various facets of internationalization and international entrepreneurship. it is noteworthy that the entrepreneurial intentions and orientations of "non-entrepreneurs" that portray their context had a significant positive influence on the creation of entrepreneurial businesses and their internationalizations. in summary, the findings of this research strongly support the notion that the true, or perceived, state of the firms' environment influences their strategic management of their regular affairs as well as the management of an emerging or unfolding crisis, regardless of its magnitude and timing. the fourth article in this issue complements the previous article through a deeper examination of institutional impacts from a women entrepreneurs' perspective. it is entitled "the neglected role of formal and informal institutions in women's entrepreneurship: a multi-level analysis" and is co-authored by daniela gimenez-jimenez, gimenez-jimenez, andrea calabrò, and david urbano. this article draws on, and extends, the impact of institutional context, discussed above, to include what the authors termed as "informal institutions' impact on women entrepreneurs." as discussed in the context of european countries earlier, socio-cultural and behavioral aspects of the various societies vary and influence different entrepreneurship initiatives differently. in contrast to the tangible influences and effects of formal institutions, the socio-cultural values of a society remain nearly invisible, but quite influential. what the authors call as neglected "informal institutions" are widely portrayed as a society's "software" by cultural anthropologists, such as geert hofstede, among others (hofstede (hofstede , (hofstede , hofstede et al. ) . in contrast to the "hardware" that is structural and tangible, the "software" remains hidden, if not intangible, neglected, and ignored, that it functions consistent with its socio-cultural values and daily behavioral routine, which act as design parameters woven into the software's programs that control social functions quietly. the underlying multi-level research methodology analyzing the entrepreneurial experience of more than , women in countries in this article suggests that both of the societal formal and informal institutions impact entrepreneurship, and especially women entrepreneurs more significantly and profoundly, and yet they have remained "neglected." in the context of a major crisis, facing society in general, and entrepreneurial smes in particular, the question of how do the formal and informal institutions of a society assist or hamper effective crisis management, especially by women executives, resumes high importance. the casual observation of conditions imposed by the covid- crisis in the past months, or so, suggests that both the society's formal and informal institutions of the affected environments imposed higher expectation, if not more responsibilities, on women than their previous family setting transformed into home and office at the same time, which have adversely affected women's time, effort, and attention in effectively managing their firm's crisis and also attending to their family as they did previously. assuming that crisis management requires management's more intensive attention and effort than those of normal times, the important question for women executives is, how should the required additional efforts by busier women executives be assisted? and if they cannot be, who should be bearing the additional costs and the consequent damages to both the women's family and their firms? specifically, what should be the uncodified, but understood, societal expectations of women executives? are they expected to sacrifice their family's wellbeing or not concentrate fully on managing their enterprises' crisis effectively? naturally, the preliminary answer lies in what is consistent with the society's informal sociocultural value systems as well as those formally codified in the society's laws, regulations, and broadly accepted behaviors. this discussion provides a socio-cultural bridge to the next article. the fifth article of this issue is entitled "market orientation and strategic decisions on immigrant and ethnic small firms" and is co-authored by eduardo picanço cruz, roberto pessoa de queiroz falcão, and rafael cuba mancebo. as the title suggests, this research is about entrepreneurs facing a new and possibly different environmental context than their familiar previous one at home, thus exposing them to the fear, if not the uncertainty, of unknowns, including the hidden and intangible socio-cultural value systems. they need to decide about their overall strategy, including marketing orientation, in their newly adopted environment. immigrant entrepreneurs face the challenges of belonging to two environments, one at home, which they left behind, and the other in their unfamiliar new home (the host country), in which they would aim to succeed (etemad b) . when there are significant differences between the two, they face a minor crisis in terms of the uncertainty of if their innate home strategic orientation or that of their host can serve them best. either of the two strategic choices exposes them to certain uncertain costs and benefits, which are not clear at the time. naturally, their familiarity with their previous home's socio-cultural environment, within which they feel comfort and may need nearly no new learning and adaptation, pushes them to operate in a similar environment to home to give them certain advantages and possibly lower risks and uncertainties. this orientation attracts them towards their ethnic and immigrant community, or enclave, based primarily on the perception that their ethnic communities, enclaves, and their market segments in their adopted home still resemble their home environment's context, which in turn suggest that they can capitalize on them by relying on their common ethnic social capital (davidsson and honig ) , using their home language, culture, and routine practices with minimal cognitive and psychic pain of adapting to the new context. however, that perception, or assumption, may not be valid or functional, where the society's sociocultural values encourage rapid adaption and change so that immigrants become like other native citizens. although the market orientation of concentrating on their ethnic community in their adopted country for its advantages, including a lower perceived short-term uncertainty (e.g., akerlofian type of risk and uncertainty), it may not work or prove to be restrictive in longer term due to, for example, the community may be small, decreasing in size and gradually adapting to their host country prevailing sociocultural values, thus posing an uncertainty of knightian type, where the future state is difficult to predict. in contrast, adopting a strategic and market orientation towards attractive market segments of their new home's socio-cultural values and routine practices may expose the young entrepreneurial firm to the other well-documented risks and uncertainties, which are similar to difficulties encountered by firm starting a new operation in a foreign country (hymer ; vahlne , ; zaheer ; zaheer and mosakowski , among many others) . this strategy may also force the nascent firm to compete with the entrenched competition, both of the immigrant and indigenous origins, unless it can offer innovative, or unique, products (or services) similar to other native innovative start-ups. the noteworthy point, and as discussed earlier (in the "introductions" and "developmental arguments" sections), the state of the firm's resources and the entrepreneur's (or the firm's top management team's) extent of experience, information, and knowledge may make the difference between the ultimate success or mere survival in either of the above strategies. the rich multi-method and longitudinal research methodology of this article over a -year period involving interviews, ethnographic observation, and regular data collection among the ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurs in brazilian enclaves world-wide enabled the authors to offer a conceptual framework and complementary insights based on their findings and experiential knowledge. in summary, the research supporting articles in this part are both consistent and supportive of arguments presented in "introductions" and "developmental arguments." they will also serve as a basis for arguments in the following "discussions." as stated in the "introductions" section, this issue's release would coincide with the world in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. initially and on the face of it, the pandemic was perceived as a health-care problem in china followed by other counties in the east and south-east asia; but it soon turned into a world-wide crisis far-beyond health-care in a few other countries quickly affecting nearly all aspect of the others before inflicting them with the unfolding crises of their own. generally, health-care institutions are viewed as the societies' institution of last resort and are expected to deal with potential crises of others, rather than becoming the epicenters of a crisis, posing challenges to others and to their respective societies as a whole. the health-care system in the publicly financed countries is given resources; held in high regard because of their highly capable human resources; is assumed to be well managed ready to resolve health-care-related problems, if not crises; and consequently expected to effectively solve all health-related challenges as they arise. however, and regardless of their orientation-privately held or publicly supported systems-the health-care system traveled to the brinks of breakdown and collapse, although they had dealt with similar, but smaller, outbreaks of regional and seasonal flu or other epidemics previously-e.g., the hiv/aids outbreak of the late s and now endemic world-wide, sars epidemic of , and n h flu of that became a pandemic, among others, in the near recent memories-but the covid- pandemic overwhelmed them. retrospectively, the health-care institutions, and the system as a whole, were not the only sector experiencing high levels of systematic fatigue, stress, and strains nearing breakdowns, suggesting that some countries were not prepared to deal with a major crisis. naturally, less prominent institutions than the country' healthcare system, and subsequently the government alike, were not spared; and many ad-hoc experimental procedures had to be used and valuable lessons had to be learned in hurry in various institutions and many occasions in the hope of saving the moment pregnant with precarious lives and livelihoods. such rapidly developing phenomena, seemingly beyond control initially, influenced the overall theme of this issue, although already accepted articles waiting to be placed in a regular publication were not written on the topic of crisis management. given the gravity of the covid- pandemic pushing many institutions into their crisis of survival, this issue adopted the overriding thematic topic of crisis management perspective to enable a richer discussion of different components of crisis management with a focus on smes and ismes based on the specific research of each of the articles accepted through the journal rigorous doubleblind review process. expectedly, the resource-constrained small-and medium-sized enterprises (smes) and their internationalized counterparts (ismes) suffered deeply due to lockdown of their customers, employees, and service providers. similarly, the sudden stoppage of major national and international economic activities in many advanced countries, including those in the european and american continent, paralyzed them initially as the early impacts were totally unexpected. the health-care system was not the only sector experiencing dangerous levels of stress and strains. entertainment hotel and lodging industries, performing and creative arts, hospitality and restaurant industries, and tourism and their complementary goods and service providers, mostly smaller enterprises, among many other smes, were caught off-guard and suffered deeply from lack of demand due to rapid economic slow-down, fears of infections, and enforcement of lockdowns in many affected countries. similarly, integrated manufacturing systems, such as automobile industries, where parts had to arrive from different international sources on time, if not just in time, came to a halt because of the near collapse of international supply chains in addition to national protectionism of the past showing its ugly face after sometimes. such conditions were not seen for some seven decades, after the second world war triggering the multi-lateral agreement in bretton wood in to 's multi-national conferences that created the world's enduring world institutions such as gatt (replaced by wto), imf, and world bank. at the socio-cultural and economic levels, the imposed self-isolation and lockdown of cities and communities, to avoid further transmission of the coronavirus to the unsuspecting others, entailed immobility, and the imposition of social distancing disrupted all normal routine behaviors. many industries could no longer operate as safe social distances could not be provided. international, national, and even regional travels were shuttered down as national boarders were nearly closed. as a direct result, small-and medium-sized enterprises in the affected industries, who depend on others intensively, suffered a double whammy massively-their demand had collapsed, and their supplies had stopped. some were ordered closed and others had no reason to operate due to the immobility of employees, customers, and clients alike as well as severe shortages of parts and supplies. consequently, they had to shut down to minimize unproductive fixed costs. in short, the world has been, and in some cases is still, struggling with the covid- crisis at the time of this writing in june . only months earlier in december , not many people imagined the emergence of the crisis in their locale, let alone a massive global pandemic, crippling community after community, which revealed deep socio-cultural, economic, and institutional unattended faults. collectively, they pointed to unpreparedness of many unsuspecting productive enterprises and institutions alike. in contrast, more far-sighted and conservative institutions with alternative contingency plans based on their relatively minor crisis-like experiences previously, such as transportation and labor strikes, not comparable to covid- , activated their relevant contingency plans. consider, for example, that the alternative of online marketing and sales could compensate for the immobility of customers and in-person sales transactions. naturally, enterprises with on-line capabilities either gained market shares or suffered less severely. in short, the overriding lesson of this crisis as discussed in some length in "developmental arguments" and in "the summary highlight of articles in this issue" and in response to queries raised in "introductions" is that the institutional under-and unpreparedness, regardless of the level, location, and size, inflicted far higher harms than the incremental costs of carrying alternative contingency plans for the rainy days as evidenced by the considerable success of on-line expansion and quick reconfiguration of flexible manufacturing to accommodate the unexpected oddities of the unfolding crisis. aside from the global scale of the covid crisis, similar, if not more severe, crises had happened in different locations, some repeatedly, and humanity had suffered and should have learned. consider, for example, the torrential rains and subsequent flooding and mudslides in the temperate regions; massive snow falls in the northern hemisphere shutting down activities for days, if not weeks, at the time; massive earthquakes destroying residential and office buildings without warning (e.g., christ church city, new zealand, the ancient trading city of baam in southeastern iran); heavy ice storm in eastern canada destroying electrical transmission lines that resulted in shutting down cities for many days; the massive and widespread tsunami of indian ocean destroying coastal areas in about countries with quarter-million casualties, among many others, should have served as wake-up calls. while many of the past stricken areas still remain exposed and vulnerable to recurrence, reinforcement and warning systems are in place for a minority of them. for example, the earthquake detection system in the deep seas neighboring tsunami-prone areas has provided ample warning to the vulnerable regions and have avoided major damages. conversely, the massive tsunami of eastern japan that destroyed the fukushima daichi nuclear power plant in addition to large financial, property, and human losses as well as untold missing persons could have been avoided. in an earthquake-prone country such as japan, the design faults in the protective barrier walls should have protected the fukushima nuclear power plant and avoided the release of toxic nucleic emissions. the above discussions point to a few noteworthy lessons and implications as follows: the possibility of recurrence, possibly with higher striking probabilities than before, is not out of the realm of reality, thus calling for planned precautions and, if not adequate, preparations for preparedness. the organs, institutions, and systems weakened by a crisis, regardless of its magnitude and gravity, are in need of rebuilding and re-enforcement to endure the next adverse impacts, which also include smes that reached near demise and their management systems were nearly compromised by the emerging covid and its still uncertain unfolding and post-covid-aftermath. the primary vital support systems, especially the support systems of the last resort, including the first responders, emergency systems, warning and rescue systems, among others, need to develop alternative and functional contingencies and stay near readiness as the timing of the next crisis may remain a true uncertainty (of knightian type discussed earlier). the immediate support systems, agencies, or persons need to have planned redundancies and ready-to-act as backups should their clients be affected by unforeseen events. sustainability and resilience need to become an integral part of all contingency plans as the strength of the collectivity depends on the strength and resilience of the weakest link(s) (blatt ). the prevention of a natural disaster of covid-scale possibly engulfing humanity is in need of supra-national institutions with effective plans, incentives, and sanctions to prevent self-interest at the cost to larger collectivity, if not to the humankind. the immediate implication of the above discussions in the post-mortem analysis of a crisis, regardless of its scale and magnitude, is to learn about causes and the reason for failure to stop and possibly reverse their effects in a timely fashion. in the context of smes and ismes, management training, simulation to test the efficacy and reliability of crisis scenarios for alternative contingency plans, and their feasibility and functionality, among others, are of critical importance, which point to the four equally important efforts: crisis management needs to become an indispensable part of education at all professional levels to enable individuals to protect themselves and assist others in need as well as to reduce the burdens and gravity of the collective harms. the societal backbone institutions and institutional infra-structures on which others depend must be strengthened so that they can stand the impact of the next crisis, regardless of its timing and origin, and support their dependents. the widespread and learned lessons of covid- crisis should be utilized to prepare for a more massive crisis in not so distant future the smes, and especially ismes, as socio-economic institutions with societal impact need to re-examine their dependencies on others and take steps to avoid their recurrence in ways consistent with their long-term aims and objectives. in the final analysis, the experience of the covid- pandemic indicates that humanity is fragile and only collective actions can provide for the necessary capabilities and resources for dealing with the next potential disaster. similarly, the smaller institutions that provide for the basic ingredients, parts, and support for the full functioning of their networks and the livelihood of their respective members need the assurance of mutual support in order to survive and to deliver their vital support needed. on a final note, it is an opportune privilege for the journal of international entrepreneurship to take this invaluable opportunity to reflect on the ongoing crisis with the ability to still inflict further harm and more damages nearly beyond the control of national governments. similarly, and on the behalf of the journal, i invite the scholarly community to take up the challenge of educating and preparing us for the next crisis, regardless of its nature, location, and timing. the journal is prepared to offer thematic and special issue(s) covering the management of crisis in smes and ismes alike. the market for "lemons": quality 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firm: ten years after the economics of organization: the transaction cost approach the new institutional economics: taking stock, looking ahead institutional theory and contextual embeddedness of women's entrepreneurial leadership: evidence from countries overcoming the liability of foreignness the dynamics of the liability of foreignness: a global study of survival in financial services publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations key: cord- -dpay k authors: hsiu-ying kao, grace; wang, stephen w.; farquhar, jillian dawes title: modeling airline crisis management capability: brand attitude, brand credibility and intention date: - - journal: j air transp manag doi: . /j.jairtraman. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: dpay k crisis management consists of a number of capabilities which evaluate crisis signals and implements actions to minimize damage. both identifying these capabilities and understanding their influence on perceptions of brand attitude, credibility and intention to purchase offers significant theoretical and managerial insights. this paper, therefore, proposes a cause-effects model of perceived airline crisis management capabilities and their influence on brand credibility, brand attitude and purchase intention in the aftermath of large-scale taiwanese airline strikes. using data collected via an online survey, the study makes three contributions to airline crisis management. it, firstly, identifies a set of crisis management capabilities for strike-hit airlines, secondly, it offers a causal chain of perceived airline crisis management capabilities, brand attitude, brand credibility and purchase intention. furthermore, it the full mediating effects of brand credibility and brand attitude in the causal chain. this study, thus, makes conceptual and methodological contributions to crisis management and purchase intention research and provides practical insights into effective airline crisis management and brand management for the airline industry. the airline industry has been hit extremely hard by the covid- crisis, with consequences even graver than the sum of the events of / and the global financial crisis (molenaar et al., ) . the international air transport association (iata) has updated its analysis of the revenue impact of the covid- pandemic on the global air transport industry and estimates that industry passenger revenues could plummet by $ billion or % below 's figure. this figure takes into account the severity of travel restrictions as well as the anticipated global recession. these estimates are a dramatic increase on earlier analyses of $ billion loss of revenue just three weeks earlier. the current scenario is one in which severe travel restrictions will last for up to three months, followed by a gradual economic recovery later this year (alexandre, ) . strategic options for airlines include determining the optimal size and dimensions of their networks and fleet, considering mergers and consolidation opportunities or restructuring their operating models. however, the most critical question currently concerns the duration of the crisis in light of government responses and the progression of the virus (molenaar et al., ) but as yet there are no answers. unlike the comprehensive crisis faced by all airlines and, indeed, practically everyone else, this investigation draws on crises that arose from airline industrial action in taiwan during / during which time three large-scale strikes initiated by flight attendants and pilots took place. the first strike was by china airlines' flight attendants in , which affected more than , passengers and flights. airline revenue was reduced by about m ntd, and about m ntd to compensate travelers and travel operators (wiki, ) . the second strike was by china airlines pilots in february , which lasted for days, in which flights were cancelled and , travelers affected. the airline lost m ntd in revenue and compensated travelers for losses and related expenses, totaling m ntd and further compensation claims from travel agencies of bn ntd compensation, the total market value of china airline has dropped by more than . bn ntd (wiki, a) . these two large-scale strikes china airlines staff not only incurred significant loss of revenue but also exacts hidden losses such as image and goodwill -far harder to assess. in june , a third strike the longest and largest strike in taiwan's aviation history occurred, initiated by the taoyuan flight attendants' union (tfau). this strike lasted from june to july , , leading to the cancellation of flights of eva air with more , travelers affected and with cumulative revenue losses of . billion ntd and compensation for passenger losses and related expenditures of million ntd (wiki, b) . the average airline strike by a union not only brings about a decline in the brand's shareholder equity (becker and olson, ) but may also have a significant redistributive effect on the whole industry in that whilst the value of the strike hit airline decreases, that of competing and strike-free airlines increases (de fusco and fuess, ) . evidence from strikes experienced by lufthansa, indicates that not only do daily costs rocket but that passenger numbers subsequently decline (atkins, ; sheahan, ) . as part of managing a crisis, in such a way as to avoid returning to the pre-crisis state and to create a less strike-prone environment (hätty and hollmeier, ) , the significance of branding (grundy and moxon, ) , specifically brand attitude (wang, ) , brand credibility (wang and close, ) and intention to purchase needs clearer delineation. the purpose of this study is therefore to identify passenger perceptions of airline strike crisis management capabilities and how these capabilities influence brand credibility, brand attitude and passenger intention to use that airline brand. specifically, it addresses the following points: • why airlines with better crisis management capabilities strengthen passenger attitudes towards airline brand, airline brand credibility and intention to use. to date, scholars have only investigated airline safety characteristics and trustworthiness with relation to passenger intention to use (wang, ; wang and close, ) . this study extends this work by investigating how airline crisis management capabilities influence passenger brand attitudes, brand credibility and intentions to use a specific airline brand. • owing to the homogeneity of service provision in airline transportation, airlines use brands as a means of differentiation (doganis, ) , however, with the loosening of regulations and environmental norms, distinctions between airlines have begun to undergo significant changes and differences (collison and boberg, ) , thus prompting enquiry into how airlines manage brands in a crisis situation. the structure of this paper is as follows: the conceptual background providing the reasoning for the formulation of the hypotheses, the methodology, the results and the conclusions. in this section of the paper, the theoretical background to the study is presented beginning with crisis management. although crisis management is often envisaged as being concerned with natural disasters, firms have to deal with human induced crises such as strikes (crandall and menefee, ) . even if the strike or crisis cannot be averted, there is scope for improving the organizations preparedness through detection and prevention (mitroff, shrivastava and udwadia, ) . the management of crises consists of two distinct perspectives, one focused on the internal dynamics and the other directed externally at managing external stakeholders. (bundy et al., ; pearson and clair, ) . it has been asserted that by adopting a stakeholder-based model for crisis management a more favorable outcome might be achieved (alpaslan et al., ). an essential element, therefore of crisis management, is for organizations to understand how key stakeholders might react to a crisis, what resources and information stakeholders might have available to assist in the management of a crisis, how stakeholders might be impacted by the crisis and how stakeholders might exert a negative impact on the organization's ability to manage the crisis (mitroff et al., ) . from an internal perspective, crises, are intrinsically processual (roux-dufort, ) with three distinct stages being identifiedpre-crisis prevention, crisis management and post-crises outcomes but even then, the second and third stages are reliant on stakeholders (bundy et al., ) . it is evident that organizations need to learn from managing crises (pearson and mitroff, ) , fine honing their cognitive and emotional capacities (mitroff and anagnos, ; williams et al. ). drawing on the framework developed by bundy et al. ( ) , this study defines airline strike crisis management capabilities as: the pre-crisis preparation and preparedness exhibited by airlines when facing a strike crisis, the ability to respond during a strike crisis, and the service resilience capability after strike crisis. as brand crises negatively affect brand attitude (dutta and pullig, ) , there is a strong argument for airlines to acquire capabilities so that they can manage strikes effectively. therefore, even if a strike is likely to occur, well-prepared and resilient organizations such airlines are better protected (mitroff et al. ) and in a better position to protect their brand and influence passenger intention to use. within the airline industry specifically, challenges such as command incompetence, information ambiguity and coordination difficulties were identified (yin and jing, ) . later research proposed four capabilities as follows: command, coordination, information, and environmental pressure have been proposed (chang et al. ( ) . whilst they provide an initial framework to airlines for managing crises, an essential addition learning that airlines need to engage in to overcome crises (for example, pearson and mitroff, ) . accordingly, this study summarizes airline crisis management actions with reference to chang et al. ( ) , yin and jing ( ) , and doug and hugh ( ) , developing a framework of crisis management capabilities to include those five. command should cover clear authority and full authorization of senior management, emergency response of operating units, clear command chain, decentralization, duties and responsibilities of senior management, implementation of standard operating procedures, crisis response management team, regular crisis management training programs, crisis drills and preparedness drills, and links to external rescue and medical services. coordination includes internal coordination of emergency management, feedback and review, timely communication with relevant groups, personnel scheduling, logistics support, coordination with government agencies, coordination with company partners, communication with the media, communication with the victim's family, and communication with the injured passenger. information should be transparent, accurate and timely. environmental pressure covers responses to pressure from stakeholders such as publics, governments, media that address complexity and uncertainty. finally, learning comprises improving resilience, learning from experience and solutions. based on existing studies, this investigation develops second-order reflective construct that measures airline strike crisis management capabilities. the hypotheses are: h a …… h n : perceived airline crisis management capability consists of several underlying dimensions: command (h a ), coordination (h b ), information (h c ), learning (h d ), response (h e )……environmental pressure (h n ). in the following section, the second part of the model that pertains to brand attitude/credibility and intention to use is presented. in particular, further insight is needed on how passengers might perceive the relationship of crisis management capabilities on their attitudes to the airline brand, its credibility and their subsequent intention to use. from the passenger perspective as opposed to the airline itself, additional airline capabilities come into play, for example, safety, professionalism and punctuality are important considerations when choosing an airline (medina-muñoz et al., ) . passenger intention to use a particular airline, however, will be influenced both by brand preference and brand equity (wang, ) , therefore, passenger perceptions of an airline having strong crisis management capabilities are likely to influence their intentions to use a particular airline brand. research into brand management includes investigation into brand crises where advice has been to take an analytical approach to the crisis and to adopt a forthright communications strategy with substantive changes to behaviors (greyser, ) . the ability of a brand to weather a crisis is also embedded in existing consumer attitudes (pullig et al., ) , which means that stronger brands are better able to withstand crises (cleeren et al., ; van heerde et al., ) but much of this work refers to product brands rather than services and airlines in particular. knowledge about a brand crisis in transport or airlines is and how it affects passenger brand attitudes and intention to use is limited in spite of airline crises being quite common (mason, ; ray, ) and worldwide. we contend that the combining passenger perceptions of crisis management combined with brand perceptions and how that combination impacts on intention to use extends passenger and consumer theory in airline transport. the theoretical foundation of this study rests on the theory of planned behavior (tpb), which over the years has received extensive attention from researchers in various disciplines and is widely used to explain consumer decision-making behaviors. past researches (wang and ngamsiriudom, a, b; wang and hsu, ; lee et al. ) revealed that tpb has a solid performance in observing and predicting consumer behavior intentions. in the context of airline crisis management, tpb enables novel insight into the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of airline passengers of airline crisis management capabilities. brand attitude is a fairly stable summary evaluation of a brand, which goes on to stimulate consumer behavior (spears and singh, ) . the following hypotheses are therefore developed beginning with h h . perceived airline crisis management capability positively influences passenger brand attitude. as well as and attitude, brand credibility is a related but distinct brand outcome and is defined as the plausibility of the information conveyed by a brand so that consumers perceive that it has the ability to deliver its promise swait, , ; erdem et al., ) . brand credibility affects consumer choice of brand (erdem and swait, ) and moderates price sensitivity (erdem et al., ) . whilst it is an established construct (e.g., erdem et al., ; erdem and swait, ; rao and ruekert, ; rao et al., ; wernerfelt, ) , brand credibility has yet to be considered as a function of crisis management capability in aviation. airlines can attempt to build brand credibility through concentrating on information strategies about crisis management capabilities. information on crisis management capability may strengthen ensure consumer intentions to use. favorable brand attitudes may also affect brand credibility. h . perceived airline crisis management capability significantly influences passenger intention to use. perceived airline crisis management capability positively influences brand credibility. h . passenger attitude towards brand positively impacts brand credibility. an individual's intentions represent their motivation to perform a particular behavior (eagly and chaiken, ) , which in this study is represented by tpb (fishbein & ajzen, ) . intention is a key criterion variable in a typical tpb model and has been previously used in tourism, hospitality, and travel research (alvarez and campo, ; casaló et al., ) . it is argued that there is a positive effect of brand credibility and brand attitude on, in this research, passenger willingness to use an airline service (daneshwary and schwer, ) . this model tests the extent to which brand attitude, brand credibility and intentions are associated (see for example mackenzie, lutz, and belch, ; mackenzie and spreng, ) within the context of airline crisis management capability. h . passenger attitude towards the airline brand positively affects their intention to use. h . airline brand credibility positively affects passenger intention to use. having developed the model of airline crisis management capabilities and their influence on brand attitude, credibility and intention to use, the study now provides detail of the methodology. the model of airline crisis management capability is based upon a framework of perceptions, attitudes and intention to use. in addition to the antecedent of brand attitude, we have reasoned that perceived crisis management capability and brand credibility are significant. the model hypothesizes that perceived crisis management capability has both direct and indirect impacts on airline brand credibility and passenger intention. the data were collected by means of a survey that consisted of items drawn from existing consumer behavior literature. brand attitude was measured with five items (brett et al., ; mitchell and olson, ; five items), brand credibility with seven items (erdem and swait, ) and intention to use with two items (jamieson and bass, ; putrevu and kenneth, ) . for crisis management sub-dimensions, items were adapted from a range of sources (chang et al., ; doug and hugh, ; yin and jing, ) . the wordings of the items were slightly modified so that they fitted the context of the study. as the scale was drawn from existing sources written in english, the questionnaire used in taiwan was translated from english to mandarin chinese involving translation, back-translation, followed by third-party re-translation (kotabe and helsen, ) . the items on brand attitude, brand credibility and intention were measured with a five-point likert-type scale, with strongly disagree = and strongly agree = . the data for the study were collected using the pollster online survey service in taiwan (www.pollster.com.tw). the advantages of using this type of service is the large number of members, for example there are over , pollster members. these members have already registered their real name supported by government-issued id number. fully registered members receive a mail invitation from pollster to complete any new survey promptly. members who complete a survey will earn points, dependent on the amount of time and the difficulty of the task. these points can be exchanged for cash. members took ten days to complete this survey. however, useable responses from the pollster site were generated (see table ). the first step in the analysis used exploratory factor analysis (efa) to extract four factors from the airline crisis capability items as follows: coordination and integration (six items), management and learning (six items), command and information (five items) and assurance (two items) as shown in table . a further check using efa to detect notable deviations from the structure of the constructs, in particular to see whether the data conformed to the multi-normality requirement required for structural equation modeling (sem) technique (mcdonald and ho, ). as the data conformed to this requirement, the proposed model was tested in a two-stage structural equation framework, using confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). here the aim was to assess the validity of the constructs prior to conducting structural path analysis. as common method variance (cmv) may present problems in behavioral research (bagozzi and yi, ; williams et al., ) , we employed a set of procedures assess and address with any issues (podsakoff et al., ) . after applying the cmv remedy procedure, the unmeasured latent method construct (ulmc, p-value = . ) showed an insignificant level of common method bias (richardson et al., ) . when comparing the difference of cfa from single factor and multi-factor structure (lindell and whitney, ) , the Δχ = . , Δdf = , p-value < . (Δχ /Δdf = . ), indicated that the validity of this study was not affected by common method bias (carson, ) . the sample size of was believed to be sufficiently large to compensate for any model misspecification and model complexity (hair et al., ) . checks were also made for possible univariate and multivariate outliers but no significant violations were found. the analysis showed that the value of kurtosis ranged from − . to . and of skewness ranged from − . to − . and so satisfied standard evaluation criteria (mardia ( ) . the measurement models were estimated using lisrel . (jöreskog and sörbom, ) with the goodness of fit indices summarized in table . the chi-square statistics are significant at the . level, which is not unusual with a fairly large sample (doney and cannon, ) . the values for comparative fit index (cfi), non-normed fit index (nnfi), root mean square error of approximation (rmsea), and standardized root mean residual (srmr) were all . • feedback and review of plan. . • timely communication with relevant parties. . • coordination with government agencies. . • coordination with company partners. . • communication with the media. . • retain complete crisis management related data for further use . • learning and improving from the crisis experience . • regular crisis management training programs and exercises. . • referring to similar crisis from other airlines, learning and improving for a better crisis management capability. . • personnel scheduling and logistic support. . • response and action under complicated situations, governmental pressure and partners. . • clear lines of authority and sufficient authorization from top management. . • information flow is clear and unblocked. . • information disclosed is transparent, complete, accurate and consistent. . • responsibilities and accountabilities of top managers and crisis response management team. . • prompt and timely disclosure of information. . • airline service staff are reliable, providing safety air transport service for passengers. . • airline service staff has full authorization from airline, providing qualified air transport service politely. considered acceptable for the proposed model (hu and bentler, ) and are as follows: . for cfi and nnfi, . for rmsea, and . for srmr. since the results from goodness-of-fit indices were acceptable and the firm theoretical basis for the proposed model, no further modifications were made to the model specifications. subsequently the quality and adequacy of measurement models was investigated by assessing its unidimensionality, reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. unidimensionality was assessed on the basis of principal component analyses performed on all items with all items loading at . or higher on the hypothesized factors. no significant cross-loading was identified thus supporting unidimensionality for each of the studied constructs. for composite reliability, again, there was evidence that all the cronbach alpha values exceeded the suggested . benchmark (bagozzi and yi, ) . for cfa, convergent validity, that is the degree of association between measures of a construct, was assessed by examining t statistics related to the factor loadings. all the t statistics are statistically significant at the . level, suggesting that the indicator variables provide good measures with their respective construct (hoyle and panter, ) . the average variances extracted (ave) values relating to the constructs are at or higher than . , which also provide evidence of convergent validity (fornell and larcker, ) . discriminant validity was checked using a series of chi-square difference tests on the nested models to find out whether their values are significantly lower for the unconstrained models where the phi coefficient is constrained to unity (anderson, ) . the critical values related to the chi-square difference at the . significance level are higher than . in all possible pairs of constructs, suggesting that the models are unrelated. it seems safe to conclude therefore that the constructs in the study meet standard reliability and validity checks. the sample size (n = ) is considered sufficiently large for model specification and further analysis. the overall fit of the model is reasonable. simultaneous maximum-likelihood-estimation procedures are used to examine relationships among perceived crisis management capability, brand attitude, brand credibility, and intention (table ). the analysis results reveal that all significant relationships between latent constructs match the hypothesized directions, except for h (crisis management capability→intention). in our proposed models, perceived airline crisis management capability consists of four sub-dimensions, they are: command and information, coordination and integration, management and learning, and assurance. meanwhile, perceived airline crisis management capability has significant positive effects on brand attitude and brand credibility, supporting h , and h . further, brand attitude has significant positive effect on both brand credibility and intention, supporting h and h ; brand credibility positive significant affects intention, supporting h . as to the structure of the second order perceived crisis management capability, perceived crisis management capability were proved to consist of four sub-dimensions (command/ information, coordination/integration, management/learning, and assurance), supporting h a, h b, h c, and h d. since the construct of perception of airline crisis management capability didn't have a significant influence on air passengers' intention, we proceeded to examine the mediating effects (sobel, ) of brand attitude (ba) and brand credibility (bc). specifically, both brand attitude and brand credibility are thought to mediate the relationship between air passengers' perception of airline crisis management capability (acmc) and intention (i). the analytic results shown in table that for the mediating effect of brand attitude, the direct paths between perceived airline crisis management capability and brand attitude and perceived airline crisis management capability and intention are significant. when controlling for brand attitude, the relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability and passenger intention to use remains significant with beta being reduced from . to . -indicative of a partial mediating effect. following similar processes, analyses of the mediating effect of brand credibility indicate that the direct paths between perceived airline crisis management capability and brand credibility and perceived airline crisis management capability and intention are all significant. once more, after controlling for brand credibility, the relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability and intention is insignificant with the coefficient being reduced from . to . , which is indicative of a full mediating effect. to conclude, table measurement scales and summary statistics. • airline service staff are reliable, providing safety air transport service for passengers • airline service staff has full authorization from airline, providing qualified air transport service politely. brand attitude (brett et al., ; mitchell and olson, ) • this brand's product claims are believable. • over time, my experiences with this brand have led me to expect it to keep its promises, no more and no less. • this brand has a name you can trust. • this brand doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. intention (jamieson and bass, ; putrevu and kenneth, ) whereas brand attitude has partial mediating effects on the relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability and intention, brand credibility has a full mediating effect on the relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability and intention. it is therefore noteworthy that perceived airline crisis management capability does not influence passenger intention to use directly at a significant level. however brand attitude partially mediates and brand credibility fully mediates the relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability and intention. the purpose of this research was to propose a cause-effects model of perceived airline crisis management capabilities and their influence on brand credibility, brand attitude and purchase intention in the aftermath of large-scale taiwanese airline strikes. the study confirms the causal relationship between perceived airline crisis management capability, brand attitude, brand credibility and intention. meanwhile, the results also reveal the partial mediating effects of brand attitude and full mediating effects of brand credibility on the relationship between passengers' perception of crisis management capability and intention. of the four airline crisis management capabilities (command/information, coordination/integration, management learning and assurance) all of them have relatively high explanatory power of overall airline crisis management capability. specifically, management learning is the single most important factor of airline crisis management capability. the results above indicate that passengers perceive airline brands having crisis management capability if the airline retains complete crisis management related data, learning from the crisis experience (pearson and mitroff, ) , apply regular crisis management training programs and exercises, referring to similar crises from other airlines, have better capability in personnel scheduling and logistic support, and response and action under complicated situations, governmental pressure and partners. in addition to the management and learning factor, coordination/integration, command/information, and finally, providing assurance are all constructs with significant effectiveness perceived by passengers on airline crisis management capability (see fig. ). providing assurance emerges strongly from this research as a factor in crisis management, where it has been often overlooked (see for example macleod, ) . most of crisis management related studies focused on managing the crisis itself and/or solving the strike movement. our study revealed that not only is crisis management itself important, but also the service provided by staff, in particular their reliability. moreover, such service needs to be offered without breaching usual standards of politeness. in times of strikes and other upheavals, passengers are not tolerant of breaches of usual service levels nor may they understand their role in such situations (elliott et al., ) . perceived airline crisis management capability has positive significant effects on attitude, brand credibility and intention. however, the results show that perceived airline crisis management capability does not influence intention directly at a significant level. thus, if air passengers perceived airline with outstanding crisis management capability, they will have a more favorable attitude toward the airline brand. the results are similar with brand credibility, where perceptions of crisis management capability engender belief in the brand, such as competence and trustworthiness. although perceived crisis management capability had insignificant influence on air passengers' intention, it is their brand attitude toward airline crisis management capability that transforms their perception into the intention to adopt the airline brand. moreover, airlines with a strong brand credibility are more likely to benefit from the feedback of air passengers, while air passengers who perceived airline brand with excellent crisis management capability seek opportunities to echo their intention to adopt the airline brand. however, the presence of brand attitudes and brand credibility both weaken their intention directly from perceived airline crisis management capability. while the sem test revealed that perceived airline crisis management capability did not directly lead to passenger intention to use the airline brand, perceived airline crisis management capability does influence passenger intention through the mediators (i.e., brand attitude and brand credibility). the results of the mediating effect test show that passengers are willing to adopt the airline brand only if they have a positive brand attitude toward the airline brand with a strong crisis management capability, or if they find the brand credible. therefore, without positive brand attitude and brand credibility, airline crisis management capability would not have a significant effect on air passengers' intention to use the airline brand. this finding underlines the significance of branding in influencing passenger intent in crisis cleeren et al., ; greyser, ; van heerde et al., ) . in this paper, we have presented a causal effects analysis of crisis management capabilities and brand attitude, capability and passenger intent to use as an extension of theory in air transport management. we now summarize the implications of the research. given the challenges in influencing passenger intentions in a highly competitive industry, the results of this study contribute to strategic airline crisis management in three novel ways. firstly, this study demonstrates the capabilities from a passenger perspective which capabilities airlines need to build. secondly, that process affects passenger attitude and credence in the brand, and in turn, intention to use. thirdly, among the empirically supported dimensions of crisis management capability, the emergence of providing assurance is an important addition to the crisis management literature. furthermore, the study has highlighted the need to use second-order multi-dimensional crisis management capability as antecedent of airlines' brand attitude, brand credibility and behavior intention. the evaluation study conducted has demonstrated the practical advantages of the causal analysis as a means of both examining an airline's crisis management capabilities and efforts towards effective crisis management and brand management. in addition to its conceptual and methodological contributions to airline crisis management capability research, the outcomes of this study provide useful insights for the case airlines and other airlines to improve their capabilities for effective crisis management capability for strike or air safety crises. the results suggest that airlines can influence passenger intention to use by enhancing customer's perception on brand attitude and brand credibility through making explicit to passengers their airline crisis management capabilities. the study has a number of implications for managers in the airline industry. the study indicates the benefits of visibly building crisis management capability as a means of enhancing passenger attitude towards the airline brand and its perceived credibility. there should be further advantages to the airline through communicating these capabilities within brand-led communications. based on the relationships within the causal model ( fig. ) airlines can that can upgrade passenger perceived brand attitude, brand credibility and hence intention to use. the novel dimension of providing assurance also has implications for staff development as it is they who are the 'face' in many instances of crisis management. whilst this study was initiated by crisis management during prolonged strikes of airlines in taiwan, there is scope for extending this work into services, with much of the literature on crisis management investigating natural disasters and instances of product harm, no less that covid . as indicated by elliott et al. 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trustworthiness trumps attractiveness and expertise: enhancing brand credibility via celebrity endorsement airline co-branded credit cards -an application of the theory of planned behavior celebrity livery featured aircraft, the moneki neko (fortune cat) of airlines hello kitty livery is just a glimpse of hello kitty experiential package: the effects of celebrity-themed aircraft on purchase intention umbrella branding as a signal of new product quality: an example of signaling by posting a bond lack of method variance in self-reported affect and perceptions at work: reality or artifact? organizational response to adversity: fusing crisis management and resilience research streams a schematic view of crisis threat assessment questions directors should ask about crisis management he has papers published in referred journals jillian's research interests include marketing strategy particularly in financial services as well as case study research methods. she has authored books, book chapters and papers and is former editor of the international journal of bank marketing supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi. org/ . /j.jairtraman. . . key: cord- -hc ygnde authors: pinho, josé carlos; de lurdes martins, maria title: the opportunity to create a business: systemic banking crisis, institutional factor conditions and trade openness date: - - journal: j int entrep doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: hc ygnde this study examines the impact of several institutional factor conditions on entrepreneurship in difficult macroeconomic environments such as a systemic banking crisis. it uses data from the national expert survey (nes–gem). a total of national entrepreneurship experts representing countries were included in the analysis. using laeven and valencia ( )’s criteria, countries were considered as most affected by the global economic crisis (group ) and as less affected (included in group ) in order to test if opportunity perceptions are significantly affected in times of recovery. in terms of findings, the study confirms that institutional factor conditions strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business regardless of how damaged the economy of countries hit by the crisis was. among the six institutional factors studied, four are found to be statistically significant and two are partially significant. the interacting effects of systemic banking crisis and the exposure to international conditions kept the previous relationship relatively unchanged. in terms of contributions, the study first highlights the importance of the institutional view in explaining the opportunities to start-up in the aftermath of a crisis. second, the study compares the proposed relationships between four sub-sample data sets based on trade openness and banking crisis severity. from a practical and government perspective, this study provides a useful picture of the yet limited understanding of the role that institutions and trade openness can play in entrepreneurs’ perceptions and thus in economic recovery dynamics. assuming that entrepreneurial activity is crucial for economic growth, development, employment, and innovation (simón-moya et al. ) , the systemic banking crisis that ocurred before may have brought about important changes in the perception of opportunities for the creation of a new business, slowing down the recovery processes, despite all measures and policies taken by public authorities. to enrich our understanding of this phenomenon, this study also assumes that economies that are more exposed to international conditions, e.g., economies that evidence a considerable dependency on international trade, may be more affected by the above mentioned changes. the more recent systemic banking crisis, which has also been labeled as a "global financial crisis", started in the major us financial institutions and spread throughout the global economy, particularly to europe, causing severe social, political, and economic consequences. this global crisis, which was strongly associated with a systemic banking crisis, disrupted the toughness of the european economy leading to the economic disequilibrium of countries known as piigs (portugal, italy, ireland, greece, and spain) as was reflected in the rating agencies that increased the sovereign risk rates, causing a weakness of the euro (reyes and moslares ) . in line with giotopoulos et al. ( ) , this global financial crisis whose origin is associated with a systemic banking crisis was considered one of the most severe crisis in the last decades effecting not only a significant drop in demand for products and services but also having severe implications on credit crunch conditions. as a result, conditions were adverse in terms of opportunities to create a new business. if governments react to boost growth by stimulating the opportunities perceived by managers, then the negative impact of the crisis can be counterbalanced by strong institutional factor conditions, such as cultural and social norms that encourage entrepreneurship, internal market openness, entrepreneurial education, government programs, among others, even when countries are more negatively affected by unanticipated changes in economic conditions. ultimately, several authors stressed "how" entrepreneurs are guided and influenced by the surrounding environment or institutional context (arabiyat et al. ; bruton et al. ; busenitz et al. ; urbano and alvarez ; raza et al. , among others) . unlike previous crises, the systemic banking crisis affected mostly advanced economies as can be confirmed using the database of laeven and valencia ( ) (which was followed in this study to distinguish the most affected countries from the others, a list with both groups of countries is found in table ). these economies, however, have more space to implement counter-cyclical policy responses which can easily foster other factors that can minimize the negative consequence of the crisis. this study posits that this systemic banking crisis caused serious implications for new and growing businesses and cutting down on costs was a common reaction of most small firms. this crisis was directly associated with the drying up of credit from the banking system due to the increase in customer defaults (papaoikonomon et al. ; simón-moya et al. ) . however, periods of economic adjustments are also a good opportunity for current entrepreneurial firms to reorganize and rethink the economic viability of their business cutting certain fixed costs and mainly to undertake new investments in high-potential growth areas. it is generally recognized that behind a crisis, there are a large amount of opportunities (some of them are government-driven). in line with bosma et al. ( ) , institutions have a crucial impact on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurship. these may act, as they noted, as conduits of entrepreneurial talent towards productive entrepreneurship. therefore, the institutional environment in which new business takes place assumes particular relevance as it defines, creates, and limits entrepreneurial opportunities and most important may affect entrepreneurial growth rates (urbano and alvarez ) . aparicio et al. ( ) studied the institutional factors that stimulate opportunity entrepreneurship and subsequently explain economic growth. the understanding of the institutional factors that determine the opportunity to create a new business is of crucial importance (stenholm et al. ) . baumol ( ) argued that understanding the institutional factors that shape entrepreneurial opportunities is relevant as it allows for an efficient allocation of resources. previous research has also emphasized the increasing importance of the institutional framework in which the individual is embedded (north ) . other studies draw a distinction between managerial and entrepreneurial economies, to identify groups of countries with similar entrepreneurial activity and economic variables as well as determining the institutional drivers for each group (abdesselam et al. ) . as these authors acknowledged, the financial crisis involved a break in entrepreneurial dynamism, with agricultural economies resisting the financial crisis better. still, others considered the impact of a prolonged economic recession on the entrepreneurial intentions of young people, distinguishing between propensity to start a new business and perceived likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur (arrighetti et al. ) . in a recent study, ali and muffatto ( ) conducted a rigorous systematic review of years of literature in order to identify studies that have empirically explored the effect of three formal institutions on cross-country entrepreneurial attitudes. in turn, williams and vorley ( ) undertook a somewhat different view and showed that some formal institutional changes imposed by eu on greece during the global financial crisis caused limited entrepreneurial opportunities. this is also in line with stenholm et al. ( ) who stated that there is scant literature on how certain supportive or conductive aspects in the national environment have affected entrepreneurial activity. similarly, riaz ( ) maintained that the institutional theory may help to "understand the complexities of organizational-institutional interplay in contexts such as the present crisis" (riaz , p. ) . in fact, countries facing budget deficit problems under intervention by international entities, such as the imf and the european central bank, are vested with considerable authority and legitimacy to tackle market failures and control the deficit. considering the previous studies, we may conclude that little attention has been directed at understanding how several institutional factor conditions, viewed by national entrepreneurship experts, impact on the opportunity to create a business, particularly in a global economic crisis context. hence, to the best of our knowledge, our study is different from the previous ones as it examines the impact of several institutional factor conditions and trade openness on the perception of an opportunity to create a business during a systematic banking crisis, thereby it fullfills an important gap in the literature. to achieve this goal, this study uses the lens of the institutional theory (scott ) which relies on three major institutional pillars (normative, regulatory, and culturalcognitive). in a recent study, urbano et al. ( ) carried out a systematic literature analysis over the last years of research on institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth and found that a number of scholars have used scott's ( ) institutional dimensions or pillars (busenitz et al. ; kostova ; arabiyat et al. ; among others) . in a sense, this study advances knowledge in a related field as it assumes that the three scott institutional pillars influence entrepreneurial opportunities. although this study posits that the country's macroeconomic stability, and subsequently a stable institutional framework are necessary conditions for the good functioning of the business environment, the global financial crisis may produce an important effect on perceived entrepreneurial opportunities. it is equally expected that this interaction effect is perceived differently by national experts in entrepreneurship from the two groups of countries. specifically, assuming that the institutional factors explain why some countries score consistently well on rates of entrepreneurship while others do not (amorós and bosma ) , it is anticipated that those countries that were most hit by the global financial crisis may evidence several institutional weaknesses (or fragilities) that may affect the opportunities to create a new business. these fragilities are partly related to regulatory failures, compounded by over-reliance on market selfregulation, lack of transparency, lack of financial integrity, and irresponsible behavior (năstase and kajanus ) . considering this scenario, the spread of the systemic banking crisis not only affected economic growth and the labor market but also caused a number of constraints to new and growing firms having particular implications on high-quality entrepreneurship due to adverse conditions (giotopoulos et al. ). nevertheless, the global financial crisis may also be associated with fewer employment opportunities, which may be a good reason to push people into entrepreneurial activities due to lower paid jobs and it is also commonly associated with lower opportunity costs for new entrants (simón-moya et al. ). according to arrighetti et al. ( ) , the rate of entrepreneurial supply has decreased in those european countries that were most severely hit by the systemic banking crisis. the choice of national experts stems from the fact that they are very well informed about the entrepreneurial reality of their countries. thus, the perception of a sample of national entrepreneurship experts (nes-gem) derived from two group of countries is examined and the following research questions are addressed: ( ) are institutional factor conditions important in shaping the entrepreneurial experts' perceptions of opportunites to create a new business? ( ) do countries exposed to systemic banking crisis exhibit a pattern in the experts' perceptions of opportunities that differ significantly for business creation? ( ) do institutional factor conditions have the same impact on entrepreneurial experts' opportunity perceptions regardless of the macroeconomic conditions experienced and trade openness? to address the previous research questions, this study pairs a country-level dataset of the gem project for entrepreneurial opportunities factors with information on countries affected by the recent global financial crisis and examines whether the experts' opportunities perceptions and their main drivers differ systematically across the two groups of countries. moreover, it is tested if these changes vary with the degree of dependence on international trade exhibited by the country. in order to divide the sample into those countries mostly affected by the global financial crisis versus the other countries, this study adopts the definition of a banking crisis used by laeven and valencia ( ) . accordingly, a crisis is identified as a systemic banking crisis when two conditions are met: first, there are significant signs of financial distress in the banking system; and second, significant banking policy intervention measures have been taken in response to losses in the banking system. in this vein, countries were included in the analysis, comprising a total sample of respondents (national entrepreneurship experts). of these, are representative of the banking crisis countries and are representative of countries not affected by this crisis. in terms of contributions, this study makes the following advances in the global entrepreneurship literature. first, this study addresses an area of the gem model, the nes-gem, that is under-researched. in fact, this project proposes "good constructs and measures" that can capture the various (formal and informal) aspects of institutions, which is in line with gupta et al. ( ) . second, as previously mentioned, the study examines the impact of several institutional factor conditions and trade openness on the perception of an opportunity to create a business during a systematic banking crisis, thereby it fullfills an important gap in the literature. third, the study includes the topic of the global financial crisis within the global entrepreneurship debate. fourth, this study is in line with bruton et al. ( ) , who argued that institutional economics can be relevant for understanding which factors encourage opportunity entrepreneurial behavior with the goal of increasing economic growth. the paper is structured as follows: it starts with a presentation of the literature review and hypotheses; a description of the research setting and the main results then follow. finally, some limitations and future research directions are identified. several authors recognize that there are two major streams in institutional theory (bruton et al. ) . one stems from sociology and organizational theory and maintains that the major force driving institutions is the effort they make to achieve legitimacy and a stable framework in uncertain situations. the other relies on political science and economics and focuses on governance structures or ruling systems constructed by individuals. this orientation maintains that actors persistently build institutions that achieve the outcomes they desire, seldom asking about where preferences arise from or considering feed-back mechanisms (bruton et al. ) . irrespective of the type of stream research, several authors maintain that different national institutional factors may contribute to different levels of entrepreneurial activity across countries (urbano and alvarez ) and, more specifically to increase the opportunities of creating a new business (or start-ups). this study rests on the belief that the opportunity of creating a new business is likely to be influenced by the three key institutional dimensions proposed by scott ( ) . while the normative dimension incorporates social norms, values, and beliefs related to social behavior, the cultural-cognitive dimension relies on "taken-for-granted rules" and comprises collective understandings of the make-up of social reality as well as frames through which individuals and organizations interpret information (bruton et al. ; busenitz et al. ) . in the opinion of busenitz et al. ( : p. ) , this dimension can be viewed as the "knowledge and skills possessed by the people in a country pertaining to establishing and operating a new business". bosma et al. ( ) also included the education dimension within the cognitive dimension. finally, the regulatory dimension considers the formal system of rules, laws, regulations, and government programs as important features to promote certain behaviors and inspect others' conformity to them (busenitz et al. ) . bosma et al. ( ) included within the regulatory dimension variables such as regulatory burdens, labor market regulations, among others. in a recent study, urbano et al. ( ) examined the institutional factors shaping entrepreneurial activity and their effect on economic growth. the opportunity recognition is the first central step in the entrepreneurship process. yet, the debate over this notion of opportunity has been very intense due to the absence of a clear definition, which, in the words of davidsson ( ) , can be characterized as an "elusive concept". as this author noted, there is very little solid knowledge about what "the salient characteristics of "opportunities" are; how such entities can be idend and how to measure their characteristics in non-experimental settings, and what direct actormoderated effects they have on action and outcomes beyond initial attractiveness assessments" (davidsson , p. ). this author puts forward a reconceptualization of the concept of opportunity applying it to the constructs of external enablers, new venture ideas, and opportunity confidence. baron ( ) highlights aspects related to alertness, active search, prior knowledge of customers, and technology. shane and venkataraman ( ) acknowledged that opportunities exist as an objective fact though they are not known to all individuals. thus, an opportunity by definition is unidentified until discovered. there are individuals who are more sensitive to environmental shifts and have the capability to see gaps based on a valuable ability to search and scan the environment (chandler and friedman ; kirzner ) . another perspective relies on the fact that entrepreneurs bring opportunities to existence through creative processes based on their efforts, actions, and active search (sarasvathy et al. ) . in this case, entrepreneurs are an integral part of opportunity occurrence as they invent what they believe to be reliable by resorting to a set of deep and diverse experiences as well as an extended network of resources and people (wood and mckinley ) . specifically, there are two schools of thought in the way opportunities are found: discovery vs search (chandra et al. ). the former assumes that opportunities are unknown until being discovered and that one cannot intentionally quest for something that one does not know exist, the latter relies on the fact that opportunities are identified through a purposeful, rational, and systematic process. in turn, welter and smallbone ( ) acknowledged that entrepreneurship is influenced by external conditions, which affect the way entrepreneurs behave in regard to opportunity recognition, development, and business strategy. within the debate of opportunity to create a new business, a different stream of research can be derived from the work of alvarez et al. ( ) , who claimed that the formation of an opportunity has been traditionally examined in isolation rather than understanding the context in which entrepreneurs may change or even may create institutions. these authors contend that opportunities are the result of purposeful and emergent actions that start an iterative cycle of change based on experimentation, learning from successful (or failed) actions, and non-predictive decision-making. it is generally accepted that determined entrepreneurs exploit opportunities and access resources they identify throughout their stakeholders in their environment to realize their growth expectations. yet, the dominant approach of institutional theory focuses mainly on the important role of institutions in molding individuals' actions (acemoglu and robinson ) . as these authors acknowledged, institutions strongly influence individuals and organizations in different regions and countries, a point also stressed by aparicio et al. ( ) who underlined the importance of culture, beliefs, and social values in the configuration of entrepreneurship in different countries. in the same line, bruton et al. ( ) argued that the institutional framework is important to understand which factors stimulate entrepreneurial opportunities. consistent with this, the nes-gem project views opportunity to create a new business as a construct that includes a number of indicators that range from plenty of good opportunities for the creation of new firms, opportunities that people are able to take advantage of, opportunities that can be easily pursued by individuals, among others. as previously mentioned, entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurial opportunity perceptions can be crucial for economic growth, development, employment, and innovation (aparicio et al. ; simón-moya et al. ; urbano and alvarez ) . with the global financial crisis, important changes in the perceptions of opportunities for business creation can take place, particularly in a context in which public policies adopted by governments aim to stimulate the economic recovery process. this study posits that the financial crisis affects directly and negatively these opportunity perceptions namely because of the increased uncertainty about the future. also, the financial crisis can affect the perception of good oportunities in an indirect way. for example, when governmental agencies change their behavior in times of crisis, or when market regulations are adapted to deal with some aspect of the crisis, or even if the social image of the entrepreneur (to name a few reasons) is changed in a way that interferes with the positive effects impacting on entrepreneurial activities. these indirect effects may reinforce (or attenuate) the negative economic consequences of the crisis and can shed some light on possible stimuli used by public authorities in their counter-cyclical interventions. additionally, this study also examines whether countries more exposed to international conditions (or economic freedom) would have a lower negative impact of the adverse economic environments on opportunities to create a new business. using gem data from eu countries, mandić et al. ( ) found a positive and significant effect of institutions operating in a context of economic freedom and activity, and subsequently entrepreneurial opportunities. also, hall et al. ( ) found a positive association between institutions that promote economic freedom (and international conditions) and entrepreneurial activity (or opportunities). considering the above, the following hypothesis is presented: h a: countries exposed to a systemic banking crisis would evidence a lower level of opportunities to create a new business. h : this effect is moderated by country's international trade exposure) relying upon nes-gem, this study uses cultural and social norms, internal market openness, government programs, education and training, and social image of the entrepreneur as proxy variables of scott's ( ) three institutional dimensions (normative, regulative, and cognitive). next, a detailed analysis will be developed for each proxy variable and this will be linked to the opportunity to create a new business. the normative dimension enforces restrictions on social behavior through values and social norms (scott ) . while values are "conceptions of the preferred or the desirable together with the construction of standards to which existing structures or behaviors can be compared or assessed", social norms specify "how things should be done; they define the legitimate means to pursue valued ends" (scott, , p. ) . the normative dimension is concerned with "what people consider to be legitimate, acceptable ways of gaining something that has broad societal approval" (valdez and richardson, , p. ) . these authors consider an entrepreneur's perceptions of cultural and societal norms regarding entrepreneurial activity as a good indicator of the normative dimension. similarly, urbano and alvarez ( ) associated the normative dimension with the culture dimension; therefore, this study uses cultural and social norms and internal market openness as proxy variables of the normative dimension. cultural and social norms are important because they shape human behavior and can be viewed as a collective phenomenon as they are shared by people who live within the same social environment (hofstede ) . culture assumes a collective nature and the values associated with it may vary within and among nations, though there is a considerable overlap between countries' cultures. as acknowledged by arabiyat et al. ( ) , the gem model distinguishes between national culture viewed as "cultural context" and "entrepreneurial cultural and social norms". while the former are treated as a contextual aspect, the latter involve context-specific beliefs and attitudes toward entreprenurship. the study of culture and the ways in which it interacts with other contextual factors like institutions and economic development has great relevance to understand entrepreneurial behavior around the world (hayton and cacciotti ) . these authors also suggested that there are a number of other variables, such as rates of inward investment, national innovation, or entrepreneurship policies that are expected to interact with cultural factors. in the view of meek et al. ( , p. ) , "social norms could shed light on how group-level values impact the individual-level decision making" and, as a result, on the level of opportunity to create a new business. additionally, the normative system boosts market openness and freedom, which are of particular importance for the opportunity to create a new business (sambharya and musteen ) . for mcmullen et al. ( ) , economic freedom can be translated into property rights and labor and is associated with opportunity-entrepreneurship as it enables one to exploit new market segments, enjoy wider profit margins, and is less sensitive to changes in tax rates and inflationary pressures than their necessitymotivated counterparts (mcmullen et al. , p. ) . in countries with economies that have lower internal market openness or lower market freedom, such as the case, for instance, of a country operating under the auspices of the international monetary fund (imf), reflected in rigid rules, increased taxation, among others, it is likely that entrepreneurship will be mainly driven by the informal sector (sambharya and musteen ) . the excessive control of economic activities by a prisoned government may partly distort "competitive forces and make entry by entrepreneurs that seek to pursue opportunities that can potentially disrupt the status quo difficult" (sambharya and musteen , p. ) . considering the previous discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : the normative dimension will strongly (and significantly) impact on the opportunity to create a new business. (h a: this effect is moderated by adverse economic conditions (as well as by country's international trade exposure) the cultural-cognitive dimension: higher education and training and social image the second institutional pillar proposed by scott ( ) is the cultural-cognitive dimension, which comprises "the shared conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and create the frames through which meaning is made" (scott, , p. ) . this dimension is important as it relates to "how societies accept entrepreneurs, inculcate values, and even create a cultural milieu whereby entrepreneurship is accepted and encouraged" (bruton et al. , p. ) . it also reflects the cognitive structures and social knowledge shared by people in a given country (urbano and alvarez ) , an issue also emphasized by busenitz et al. ( ) who underlined the importance of knowledge and skills (or education) connected to establishing and operating a new business possessed by the people in a country. concerning higher education and training, it impacts on national-level entrepreneurial activity through two mechanisms: ( ) the ability to recognize and pursue entrepreneurial economic opportunities; ( ) instilling individuals with the necessary capabilities and technical skills required to launch new start-ups (levie and autio ) . education also enhances an individual's cognitive ability making the recognition of a potential opportunity easier (levie and autio ) . in line with shane and venkataraman ( ) , knowledge building helps to identify specific entrepreneurial opportunities in response to technological changes (giotopoulos et al. ) . furthermore, when individuals evidence higher skills, knowledge, high social capital, and experience to start a business, they are more likely to engage in an opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. according to bowen and de clercq ( ) , a country's level of educational capital targeted at entrepreneurship will positively affect the allocation of entrepreneurial efforts toward high-growth activities. conversely, a low level of technical and business skills inhibits entrepreneurs from starting a new venture (gnyawali and fogel ) . highly educated individuals are more aware of opportunities, are more motivated to pursue their exploitation (eckhardt and shane ) , and have more confidence about the feasibility of their project, fostering their self-efficacy (arrighetti et al., ) . in the context of the global financial crisis, it is likely that "the intrinsic motivation in well-educated individuals linked to their attempts to fulfill their aims in life may outweigh the extrinsic material-reward and wealth-seeking motives, since credit squeeze and austerity measures across europe could discourage wealth attainment" (giotopoulos et al. , p. ) . in other words, in adverse economic conditions, individuals with high levels of human capital are likely to better perceive opportunities to create a new business, particularly with regard to high-potential businesses (giotopoulos et al. ) . concerning the social image of the entrepreneur, individuals are often attracted to self-employment if they perceive that being associated with the reference group of entrepreneurs provides them with higher status, prestige, and a successful image (parker and van praag ) . several authors argue that beyond the distinctive traits of people who become entrepreneurs, there is another possible explanation which is related to social mobility processes associated to entrepreneurship even if it is reflected in a wage disadvantage (sørensen and sharkey ) . additionally, as stated by aleksandrova and verkhovskaya ( ) , the perception of entrepreneurship as a successful career choice and an entrepreneur's high status (or a favorable social image) given by society has a positive impact on entrepreneurial activities, and subsequently, in our view, on entrepreneurial opportunity to create a business. a favorable social image of the entrepreneur is positively and frequently associated in the press (or social media) with the dissemination of successful stories and a general social perception that entrepreneurs are competent and resourceful individuals (pinho and thompson ) . for instance, higher media attention for new business achievements has a positive impact on entrepreneurship (urbano and alvarez ). yet, it should be noted that for the vast majority of the self-employed, success may be elusive and the entrepreneurial activity may be short-lived, particularly in a context of an unpredictable global crisis event. hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : the cultural-cognitive dimension will strongly (and significantly) impact on the opportunity to create a new business. h : this effect is moderated by adverse economic conditions (as well as by country's international trade exposure) the third institutional pillar proposed by scott ( ) is the regulatory dimension, which comprises the capacity to establish laws, regulations, and government programs in order to foster certain behaviors and inspect others' conformity to them (bruton et al. ; busenitz et al. ) . for the purpose of this study, government programs regarding entrepreneurship and regulatory protection are used as proxy variables of the regulatory pillar. according to several authors, government regulation of economic activity promotes entrepreneurial activity in such a way that the focus is more centered on markets or governments (collective actions) rather than on individual actions (alvarez et al. ; mcmullen et al. ; valdez and richardson ; urbano et al. ). according to raza et al. ( ) , government regulations establish and apply policies and laws that control a country's business activities. it is generally accepted that government programs and their intrinsic quality may influence entrepreneurial activities. in fact, the level of regulatory complexity may represent a significant obstacle to entrepreneurship in such a way that entrepreneurs pursuing an attractive business opportunity may be inhibited to reach their objectives due to cumbersome and time consuming regulations (sambharya and musteen ) . in other words, there are a number of government programs, rules and policies that are perceived negatively by potential entrepreneurs, particularly those associated with the extended length of time required to start a business, high costs to obtain permits or licenses, high entry barriers, difficulty in closing a business, rigidity in labor regulations, and requirements of minimum capital to start a business. their implications not only affect innovation but also induce a lower propensity to maximize the potential opportunity to create a new business (gnyawali and fogel ; urbano and alvarez ) . concerning regulatory protection, it may also represent a significant barrier to entrepreneurship. dealing with complex administrative processes and particularly in the event of running the risk of losing private property, potential entrepreneurs may be discouraged from engaging in entrepreneurial activities (mcmullen et al. ) . regulatory protection relates to the degree to which government creates the right to property and enforces the written laws to protect those rights. one key driving force of a free market economy is the ability to accumulate wealth; therefore, it is crucial to ensure protection of private assets (mcmullen et al. ). if the state does not ensure an efficient rule of law towards protection of private and intellectual property, individuals are less likely to invest in improving their assets and produce wealth (desoto ) . lack of protection of property rights also diminishes entrepreneurs' trust with regard to starting a new business, avoiding making long-term plans (mcmullen et al. ). in other words, an unfriendly environment with regard to property rights may in the long run constrain the level of capital investment and place capital under fiscal and regulatory barriers, so that it affects the opportunity to create a new business. hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: h : the regulatory dimension will strongly (and significantly) impact on the opportunity to create a new business. (h a: this effect is moderated by adverse economic conditions (as well as by country's international trade exposure) the model presented in fig. depicts the relationships between the institutional factors and their impact on the opportunity to start-up. to test the proposed model, a full sample of national experts was considered, but after dropping missing values, there remained responses to use in regressions, of which are representative of the countries affected by the banking crisis and experts are from the unaffected countries (see table for details). this study adopts the classification criteria proposed by laeven and valencia ( ) and follows adams- kane et al. ( ) , in which a crisis is identified as a systemic banking crisis. for the purposes of this study, the notion "systemic banking crisis" will be used interchangeably with the notion of global financial crisis. table identifies the countries belonging to each of the groups that are surveyed in the gem nes edition, which corresponds to the first year after the global financial crisis period considered in the work of laeven and valencia ( ) . the crisis variable is a binary variable that takes on the value one if a systemic banking crisis occurs and zero otherwise. regarding the measurement of a country's exposure to international markets, this study uses a dicothomous variable that takes on the value one if the country's trade (% of gdp) exceeds % (according to world bank data) and zero otherwise. more specifically, international trade is the sum of exports and imports of goods and services measured as a share of gross domestic product. to test the proposed hypotheses, the gem data are used, particularly from the national expert survey (nes). the nes-gem collects the views of national experts on entrepreneurship on a wide range of aspects of a country's socio-economic milieu that are believed to have a significant impact on national entrepreneurship. each institutional dimension is associated with a number of entrepreneurial factor conditions (efcs) that are included in the nes-gem survey (fig. ) . the indicators for each institutional sub-dimension are provided in appendix table . concerning the opportunity to create a new business, it addresses the existence of good opportunities for the creation of new firms and considers whether people in general are able to take advantage of these opportunities. it also identifies whether opportunities have increased significantly in the past years, among others. measures of opportunity are based both on the five single items inquired in gem nes about perceived opportunity (questions k - in appendix table ) and also on a single variable "perception of the existence of opportunities" based on the component principal analysis (cpa) that summarizes all items. (i.e., nes _ksum). in other words, according to the gem manual, "perception of the existence of opportunities" is a cpa summary of the first five questions (appendix table ). the gem data team calculates a principal component analysis on the global nes data obtained each year. the blocks are summarized in one or two principal components and these new quantitative and continuous variables are those that represent the status of the entrepreneurial framework conditions. the scores of these variables are included in the comparative file for each economy after assessing their reliability properties, such as cronbach's alpha. this study investigates the impact of three institutional pillars (normative, cognitive, and regulative) on the opportunity to create a new business (appendix table ). table illustrates the direct estimates of different institutional factor conditions on the opportunity to create a business, which enables one to confirm the proposed hypotheses. several different measures for the dependent variable, extracted from the nes survey, and presented in appendix table are used and the estimation results are shown in table . relying on table , which includes all cases, first, it can be concluded that the institutional factor conditions considered in the present study have globally a significant impact on the opportunity to create a business. additionally, results seem to indicate that countries exposed to (a) systemic banking crisis and (b) more exposed to international conditions (because their economies depend more on international trade than the others) would evidence a lower level of opportunities to create a new business. these results seem to suggest that h a and h a are partially supported by the data. with regard to the normative pillar, which emphasizes cultural and social norms and arbitrary aspects of social life, it includes two sub-components: cultural and social norms and internal market openness. results indicate that the cultural and social norm sub-component has a significant and a positive impact on the opportunities to create a new business (β = . ; p < . ). concerning the internal market openness subdimension, it was divided into two sub-categories: the internal market openness (or dynamics) and the internal market burdens. while the first sub-category is not supported by the data (β = . ; p > . ), the second one is β = . ; p < . . overall, this indicates that h , which maintains that the normative dimension will impact on the opportunity to create a new business, is supported by the data. concerning the cultural-cognitive pillar, which underlines the shared understanding that forms social reality and defines what is meaningful to members of society (scott ) , it comprises two sub-components: education and social image. with respect to education, it was sub-divided in two subcategories. the primary/secondary education, which is not supported by the data (β = − . ; p > . ), and the level of education at vocational, professional, college, and universities, which evidences a negative direction. although this last result is counter intuitive, a possible explanation for this result may be possibly related to the fact that higher education in entrepreneurship is usually associated with a specific type of entrepreneurship, the opportunity entrepreneurship, which is based on innovation and development of new products. this type of opportunity entrepreneurship is usually associated with innovation-driven countries. as most of the countries that fit in this category are under the global financial crisis pressure, a new type of entrepreneurship may arise, which is more oriented to necessity entrepreneurship. in such circumstances, higher education in entrepreneurship may assume a different role than it would assume in a non-crisis context. irrespective of that, more research needs to be conducted, particularly by considering these two categories as potential mediators or moderators. with regard to the sub-category of social image, it is supported by the data (β = . ; p < . ). this seeems to suggest that a favorable social image of the entrepreneur regarding entrepreneurship will strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business. this result shows the value of entrepreneurs in society, which has a positive and significant effect on experts' opportunity perceptions. the social image of the entrepreneur seems to be a critical factor to explain the opportunity to create a new firm table regression estimates for the effect of crisis and institutional factor conditions on the opportunity to create a business within the studied countries. overall, results indicate that h , which maintains that the cultural-cognitive dimension will impact on opportunity to create a new business, is supported partially due to education by the data. finally, the regulatory pillar, which emphasizes formalized structural aspects within society, includes two sub-categories: the government programs and the regulatory protection. with regard to the former, it is assumed that as government programs are favorable towards entrepreneurship, there is a positive impact on the opportunity to create a new business. results depicted in table support this relationship (β = . ; p < . ). the second sub-category relates to regulatory protection (e.g., intellectual property rights, patents, copyrights, among others), which maintains that favorable regulatory protection regarding entrepreneurship will strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business (β = . ; p < . ). overall, it can be concluded that the regulatory dimension will strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business, supporting h . to conclude, considering the overall sample, the three institutional factor conditions considered in this study evidenced a positive and strong impact on the opportunity to create a new business. in other words, results confirm the relevant impact of the normative, cultural-cognitive, and regulatory on the opportunity to create a business. this is in line with several authors who stated that these three dimensions gauge a country's ability to support high-impact entrepreneurship (stenholm et al. ) . this study went a step further and examined the "hia" (where i represents each of the opportunities' determiners tested) in which we consider two interacting variables, namely: (a) the systemic banking crisis and (b) the exposure to international conditions (assessed here by each country's exposure to international markets). in our regressions, when testing the interaction of the independent variables with trade openness, we found that the models in table were always a better econometric approach. therefore, we concluded that we had no evidence to support the hypothesis that instituitons could be more effective in less open economies. by contrast, several of the crisis variables' interactions seem to have a significant role in atenuating/enhancing opportunity perceptions in more adverse economic environments such as the systemic banking crisis. table illustrates the result of this analysis. as depicted in table , results suggest that the systemic banking crisis may reinforce the role of those national cultures that value individual success, encourage risk-taking, creativity and innovativeness on creating good conditions for the opportunity to create a business. in other words, cultural and social norms that belong to the normative pillar are a powerful push factor that stimulates people's opportunities to create a business and that also seems to be particularly effective in difficult economic times. this is in line with several authors who maintained that values, beliefs, and norms may differently influence the entrepreneurial activity of a country's residents (busenitz et al. ; descotes et al. ) . another interesting result indicates that the systemic banking crisis reduces the positive effect associated with the social image of the entrepreneur. this social image (or status) is commonly attached to individuals on the basis of their apparent possession of certain attributes as perceived by other members of their social group. the importance of this perceived social image on good opportunities for starting a business was negatively affected by adverse economic conditions. despite the role of trade openness in augmenting the crisis impact on opportunities to create a business, it was not observed or at least it was not so evident when considering indirect effects such as those postulated in the remaining "hia" hypothesis. a possible table regression estimates for the interaction effects of crisis and institutional factor conditions on the opportunity to create a business explanation for this may lie in the fact that irrespective of international trade conditions, institutional factors (regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive) are important to explain the opportunity to create a business. these results are in line with the findings of urbano and alvarez ( ) , who found that a favorable regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive dimensions increase the probability of being an entrepreneur. the only difference from their study is that we have applied the constructs to national experts' opinions. to sum up, it can be concluded that the previous results (table ) suggest that the systemic banking crisis as well as the international trade conditions kept the effect of institutional factor conditions on the opportunity to create a business relatively unchanged. this study follows baumol's ( ) reasoning that over centuries, certain societies favored certain institutional structures of reward in the development of entrepreneurship, whereas others did not promote these institutional mechanisms and structures of reward. this occurred to such an extent that these societies dissuaded national (and local) elites from developing entrepreneurial productive activities which, in the long run, inhibited the dissemination of technical progress (baumol ) . the results of this study have relevance for theory and practice. the primary theoretical contribution lies in investigating how several institutional factor conditions, viewed by national entrepreneurial experts, impact on the opportunity to create a business. second, this study concluded that countries exposed to homecountry crisis which are more dependent on international trade than the others exhibit a pattern in the perceptions of good opportunities for business creation that differ significantly from the other countries. third, considering the global sample of countries and examining the normative dimension, which includes both cultural and social norms and market openness, this study finds that it has a significant and positive impact on the opportunities to create a new business. cultural and social norms seem to be particularly relevant in times of crisis, increasing significantly the perception of opportunities and thus helping governments to succeed in their recovery policies. with regard to the cultural-cognitive dimension, the study concludes that the first sub-category of basic education (primary/secondary) is not supported by the data while the second one is. however, this second sub-category evidences a negative direction which may be seen as a counter-intuitive result and thus deserving further attention in future research. the study also concludes that a favorable social image of the entrepreneur will strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business. this shows the importance and value of entrepreneurs in society, which has a positive and significant effect on experts' opportunity perceptions. in relation to the regulatory dimension, it is assumed that as government programs are favorable towards entrepreneurship, there is a positive impact on the opportunity to create a new business. also, a favorable regulatory protection regarding entrepreneurship will strongly impact on the opportunity to create a new business. fourth, concerning the moderating effects of systemic banking crisis and the international conditions on the relationship between institutional factors conditions and the opportunity to create a business, the following results were found. first, the effect of all studied institutional factor conditions on the opportunity to create a business does not differ significantly for the two sub-samples (systemic non-banking crisis versus banking crisis countries) with the exception related to the cultural and social norms and social image dimensions. cultural and social norms seem to be more important for opportunity perceptions in the sub-sample of countries affected by the global crisis and social status seems to be more important for opportunity perceptions in the sub-sample of non-crisis countries (table ) . second, no solid evidence was found in the present study that international conditions strongly moderate the relationship between institutional factor conditions and the opportunity to create a business. thus, we did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that instituitons could be more effective in more open economies. fifth, by using the nes-gem data, this study explores an area of gem that is considered as under-researched (amorós and bosma ) . it should be noted that most studies relying on the gem project have been mainly based on the "adult population survey" data with very few studies addressing the national expert survey (nes) either from a single national or from an international based perspective. this argument was developed by amorós et al. ( ) , who contend that there are a number of entrepreneurial framework conditions (efcs) identified by the gem model that have not been the subject of much analysis. in the same line, bruton et al. ( ) found that studies using both multi-country databases and institutional theory are very scarce. it is also relevant to notice that this database is formed by national experts with a substantial range of backgrounds and knowledge about each country (reynolds et al. ) . from a practical perspective, this study is useful for designing a supportive institutional background that fosters the creation of a set of opportunities to create a business within an adverse context. finally, the findings and implications of this study should be considered in light of several limitations. one possible limitation is the use of a perception based measure for the creation of opportunities, with the perceptions of national specialists in entrepreneurship being our main dependent variable. however, this limitation is transversal to all studies exploring the nes-gem database. another limitation relates to the choice of the proxy variables of scott's institutional dimensions. this study relies mainly on the nes-gem variables; however, other studies considered other variables to measure the normative, cultural-cognitive, and regulative dimensions (urbano and alvarez ; busenitz et al. ; among others) . for instance, arabiyat et al. ( ) in a recent a recent study included a vast number of variables from different data bases (nes-gem, aps-gem, gci, wef). still, another limitation is related with the use of cross-sectional data, i.e., each sub-sample only covers year (year ), which does not capture the dynamic processes of the global economic crisis. future studies could extend this work by investigating the nature of global crises, particularly the one we are living now, the covid , and the role of certain institutions, particularly those related with the health sector to minimize the effects of this global crisis. as doern et al. ( ) observed in a recent study, the implications of crises for entrepreneurship have been found to be negative and positive. as they noted, the negative effects are widely known, namely business failure, contraction, and resource losses. however, crises can also provide the impetus for developing new opportunities and resource gains. thus, examining the nature of a global crisis (economic recession, natural disaster, global health pandemic, etc.) may bring important insights for future government policies and actions. at the same time, another question that deserves further attention is what the entrepreneur who is well integrated and knows their community quite well can do in order to minimize certain institutional fragilities and address specific needs of individuals by supplying critical resources in the aftermath of a crisis (grube and storr ) . .the illegal sales of 'pirated' software,videos, cds, and other copyrighted or trademarked products is not extensive .new and growing firms can trust that their patents, copyrights, and trademarks will be respected .it is widely recognized that inventors' rights for their inventions should be respected entrepreneurship, economic development, and institutional environment: evidence from oecd countries persistence of power, elites, and institutions foreign bank behavior during financial crises the influence of formal institutions on the relationship between entrepreneurial readiness and entrepreneurial behaviour opportunities and institutions: a co-creation story of the king crab industry global entrepreneurship monitor global report: fifteen years of assessing entrepreneurship across the globe ten years of global entrepreneurship monitor: accomplishments and prospects institutional factors, opportunity entrepreneurship and economic growth: panel data evidence the influence of institutional and conducive aspects on entrepreneurial innovation entrepreneurial intention in the time of crisis: a field study opportunity recognition as pattern recognition: how entrpreneurs "connect the dots" to identify new business opportunities entrepreneurship: productive, unproductive, and destructive institutions entrepreneurship, and economic growth in europe institutional context and the allocation of entrepreneurial effort institutional theory and entrepreneurship: where are we now and where do we need to move in the future? country institutional profiles: unlocking entrepreneurial phenomena does self-efficacy affect entrepreneurial investment? the recognition of first time entrepreneurial opportunities entrepreneurial opportunities and the entrepreneurship nexus: a re-conceptualization capturing institutional home country conditions for exporting smes special issue on entrepreneurship and crises: business as usual? an introduction and review of the literature opportunities and entrepreneurship drivers of high-quality entrepreneurship: what changes did the crisis bring about? environments for entrepreneurship development: key dimensions and research implications embedded entrepreneurs and post-disaster community recovery institutional environment for entrepreneurship: evidence from the developmental states of south korea and united arab emirates the effect of personal and economic freedom on entrepreneurial activity: evidence from a new state level freedom index is there an entrepreneurial culture? a review of empirical research culture and organizations: software of the mind. mcgraw-hill, london kirzner i ( ) competition and entrepreneurship systemic banking crises database a theoretical grounding and test of the gem model economic freedom and entrepreneurial activity: evidence from eu countries economic freedom and the motivation to engage in entrepreneurial action the impact of social norms on entrepreneurial action: evidence from environmental entrepreneurship context the impact of the global crisis on sme and entrepreneurship behavior -romania and finland cases entrepreneurship in the context of crisis: identifying barriers and proposing strategies group status and entrepreneurship institutional-driven dimensions and the capacity to start a business the influence of formal institutions on the relationship between entrepreneurial readiness and entrepreneurial behaviour: a cross-country analysis global entrepreneurship monitor: data collection and implementation the global financial crisis: an institutional theory analysis institutional environment and entrepreneurship: an empirical study across countries three views of entrepreneurial opportunity institutions and organizations: ideas, interests, and identities, rd edn influence of economic crisis on new sme survival: reality or fiction? entrepreneurship as a mobility process exploring country-level institutional arrangements on the rate and type of entrepreneurial activity institutional dimensions and entrepreneurial activity: an international study twenty-five years of research on institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth: what has been learned? institutional determinants of macro-level entrepreneurship institutional perspectives on entrepreneurial behavior in challenging environments the impact of institutional change on entrepreneurship in a crisis-hit economy: the case of greece the production of entrepreneurial opportunity: a constructivist perspective publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. key: cord- -npt i bc authors: poole, norman a. title: if not now, when? date: - - journal: bjpsych bulletin doi: . /bjb. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: npt i bc the editor of the bjpsych bulletin reflects on the extraordinary recent events triggered by the covid- pandemic. mental health professionals are at the front line of managing the pandemic and emergency changes should lead to a much needed refocus on what is really vital. in these unsettling times we ought to review how we manage the crisis, and its aftermath, both personally and professionally. my -year-old daughter woke this morning with a cough. rather sweetly, she claimed she'd 'caught hold of the cough' which she knows is making people ill. instead of the group cycle i'd planned, i rode out on my bike alone, giving others an acceptably wide berth. well, i say acceptably wide, but how wide is that? two metres or more? should i even have been out exercising? is it a cold or covid? how worried should i be? pedalling into a cold northerly squall, it suddenly dawned on me: 'i'm scared'. not so much for myselfalthough perhaps i'm not yet willing to admit thatbut for my daughter, my family, friends, their families, colleagues and, of course, our patients. we are taught that insight in psychosis is impaired, but i've often found anxiety to be less well recognised by patients, and me it turns out, than the textbooks tell us. it was an unsettling discovery because at that moment i also realised how powerless i am. the neuropsychiatry team at st george's where i work had spent the previous week switching to remote clinics, mainly from home, but also seeing neurology in-patients at st george's hospital. we learned that the liaison psychiatry service, led by the unflappable marcus hughes, had split into red and green teams; the former working exclusively in the new covid- unit. 'how noble?', i thought. 'how long will they last?', i fretted. everyone accepts that at some point they will have to take their turn in the red team. we heard how our in-patient colleagues on the mental health wards are also dividing themselves into teams and containing units to mitigate the virus's spread. 'how ironic?', i mused. doctors were first sent to the asylums some years ago to prevent contagion seeping out into the community at large. now we are struggling to do the opposite. community teams are restructuring services on the hoof to maintain care despite all the limitations imposed on them. as i write, it still feels like a phoney war, yet so unnerving to watch our futures unfolding before us in daily despatches from the frontlines in italy and spain. in this war against an invisible enemy the frontline is long, and thin. and mental health professionals are as much part of it as anyone. i personally hate churchill's quip about 'not letting a good crisis go to waste', which so blithely ignores human cost and personal tragedies. yet i am surely not alone in believing that covid- must change how we deliver mental healthcare for good. the pandemic, from which we will hopefully recover, and our catastrophic mismanagement of the environment are not unrelated events. pathogens are increasingly likely to cross species barriers as we pillage natural habitats. tomlin's editorial draws attention to healthcare's contribution to poisonous greenhouse emissions and a previous article in this journal described the damage that excreted ssri medications could be wreaking on our marine environment. we are currently working towards a special edition of the bjpsych bulletin on the climate crisis and psychiatry, which will highlight the problems and point to some solutions. in this vein, i am hopeful that many of the new ways we are workingtelepsychiatry and stripped-back bureaucracywill outlive the current crisis. psychiatry must resist successive governments' fantasy that individual risk can be managed on the basis of population-level statistics. , it can't, and we must say so. the reality is, we would probably have the workforce to deliver a world-class mental health service if everyone wasn't so tied up inputting pointless data. if not now, when? the virus has also exposed glaring injustices in our society. some have the resources to weather the storm either through accumulated wealth or the luxury of being able to work from home. many others live hand-to-mouth in insecure jobs while paying extraordinary housing costs. how will they fare? the sacrifices being made across the board must lead to a rewriting of the social contract, as happened after the second world war. the debts currently being accrued cannot be repaid with regressive income taxes while personal and corporate wealth remains undertaxed. unlike post- , corporate bailouts must come with conditions that benefit the majority. later this year, with peter byrne's support, bjpsych bulletin will publish a themed edition on inequality as a major source of mental disorder. i'd say it is timely, but we have known this stuff for years yet not always, it seems, accepted the corollary: psychiatry must argue unflinchingly for a fairer society. if not now, when? this crisis will be demanding on us all, but social distancing also provides opportunities. as i cycled alone, which i expect to be doing a lot more of, i realised just how addicted i'd become to the relentless news cycle. i've resolved to limit my intake to once a day. much better to repurpose these new uninvited evenings spent at home. sadly, i doubt it'll be to learn the piano but in these strange times i'm opening up to music recommended by others (please send some suggestions!) and have been live streaming gigs from my favourite venue (café oto, if you're interested: https://www.cafeoto.co. uk). there are various writing projects that i aim to complete before unwinding with movie nights. i have already had an evening in a virtual pub and reconnected with longlost friends. all the while knowing that these are mere displacement activities to manage a gnawing fear. it will be harder still for the completely self-isolating over- s. many i know are self-organising to support the vulnerable locally, and it will be a testament to our society if these activities endure. closer to home, i've started a book club with my mum to help keep her spirits up in the long months ahead and allow us to chat about something, anything, else. and there are plenty of books that have sat on my to-do list far too long. my apocalyptic reading starts here: if not now, when? insight and psychosis: awareness of illness in schizophrenia and related disorders a history of psychiatry: from the era of the asylum to the age of prozac global rise in human infectious disease outbreaks the climate crisis and forensic mental health care: what are we doing? prescribing' psychotropic medication to our rivers and estuaries pokorny's complaint: the insoluble problem of the overwhelming number of false positives generated by suicide risk assessment the hcr- and violence risk assessment: will a peak of inflated expectations turn to a trough of disillusionment? use it or lose it: efficiency gains from wealth taxation (nber working paper ) crashed: how a decade of financial crises changed the world if not now, when? penguin modern classics none. key: cord- -iuo ukaz authors: engström, gustav; gars, johan; jaakkola, niko; lindahl, therese; spiro, daniel; van benthem, arthur a. title: what policies address both the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis? date: - - journal: environ resour econ (dordr) doi: . /s - - -y sha: doc_id: cord_uid: iuo ukaz the coronavirus pandemic has led many countries to initiate unprecedented economic recovery packages. policymakers tackling the coronavirus crisis have also been encouraged to prioritize policies which help mitigate a second, looming crisis: climate change. we identify and analyze policies that combat both the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis. we analyze both the long-run climate impacts from coronavirus-related economic recovery policies, and the impacts of long-run climate policies on economic recovery and public health post-recession. we base our analysis on data on emissions, employment and corona-related layoffs across sectors, and on previous research. we show that, among climate policies, labor-intensive green infrastructure projects, planting trees, and in particular pricing carbon coupled with reduced labor taxation boost economic recovery. among coronavirus policies, aiding services sectors (leisure services such as restaurants and culture, or professional services such as technology), education and the healthcare sector appear most promising, being labor intensive yet low-emission—if such sectoral aid is conditioned on being directed towards employment and on low-carbon supply chains. large-scale green infrastructure projects and green r&d investment, while good for the climate, are unlikely to generate enough employment to effectively alleviate the coronavirus crisis. electronic supplementary material: the online version of this article ( . /s - - -y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. as decision makers around the world scramble to respond to the coronavirus crisis and the deep and possibly prolonged recession that follows it, commentators have called for them to use the opportunity to also further our progress in mitigating climate change, which a majority of people believe to be as serious a crisis as the coronavirus (ipsos ) . by pursuing policies that can both alleviate the economic recession caused by the coronavirus and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the current crisis presents an opportunity to put the world on a new trajectory with a lower risk of future climate calamities. crisis management often requires exceptional policies, and may temporarily alter constraints on decision making. strategic vision at such a time can help decision makers take into account longer-term objectives, which might be difficult to meet under normal circumstances. as rahm emanuel famously said, "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste". yet, for climate policies to have a chance of implementation at this moment, they cannot be at odds with addressing the current crisis. in this paper, we seek to systematically identify where the intersection between 'coronavirus policies' and 'climate policies' lies. we are interested in which types of policies can help mitigate the impacts of the coronavirus crisis, and also make headway in setting societies on low-carbon pathways. we intentionally focus on long-term climate impacts. many coronavirus policies have temporary effects on carbon emissions (e.g., reduced traffic due to a lockdown), but we see such temporary effects as unimportant, given the long timescales involved in anthropogenic climate change (le quéré et al. ) . specifically, our contribution is the following. we first identify policies which alleviate the coronavirus crisis, as well as a set of channels through which relatively short-term policies can have impacts on climate change in the longer run. second, we present data on sector-specific economic activity and emissions. we then use these tools, together with previous research, to evaluate and score policies in terms of their usefulness in tackling the climate and coronavirus crises. policies ranked as 'good for climate' should be expected to yield substantial long-run emission reductions. policies ranked as 'good for coronavirus recession' should help alleviate the job losses due to the current recession and (in some cases) have public health benefits regarding current or future pandemics. we present a set of policies that can help reduce the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis, and simultaneously aid societies in meeting climate change mitigation targets in the longer run. we hope this exercise can help policymakers think through their policy options if they want to chart a 'green recovery' while dealing with the coronavirus crisis. 'green stimulus' is of course not a new term. in the wake of the financial crisis of - , strand and toman ( ) evaluated potential stimulus policies in terms of their potential to improve long-term environmental outcomes. some of their recommendations are still valid. however, for the current crisis one has to evaluate policies that are specific to it, i.e., that are adapted to the health aspects of the coronavirus, and the unprecedented economic shock of a simultaneous sharp fall in both demand and supply. hence, our set of policies differ from strand and toman ( ) . we also consider some channels for long-run impacts that they did not touch upon. other, more recent, analyses (e.g., cat ) outline the climate effects of various policies, but ignore whether any of the policies (such as green r&d) are actually good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis. the paper by hepburn et al. ( ) has a similar objective to ours, but their analysis starts from previously used stimulus policies (since the financial crisis of [ ] [ ] and is based on surveys of expert opinions. we start from policies that seem especially appropriate in the current crisis, and evaluate them based on an analysis of the individual policies, combined with basic empirical observations about the carbon, labor and layoff intensity of different sectors and jobs. finally, helm ( ) discusses the broad effects macroeconomic policies intended to tackle the coronavirus may have on carbon emissions. we take a complementary perspective, looking at a large set of individual policies in more detail. we want to defuse two potential criticisms against the notion that crisis policies should be evaluated based also on their effect on environmental outcomes. the first relates to the tinbergen rule: that, to obtain an efficient outcome, one needs as many instruments as there are externalities. in particular, policymakers should use one set of instruments to deal with the health crisis, another to achieve macroeconomic stabilization, and a third to achieve long-term environmental objectives. in a first-best world this would of course be true. in practice there are constraintspractical and political-that make perfect fine-tuning difficult. given such constraints, we have to ensure that measures to address one goal do not undermine another. we illustrate with two examples from our analysis. first, implementing a carbon tax would, if done in isolation, likely worsen the current recession. but if the proceeds were used to lower labor taxes, the policy could instead alleviate the coronavirus crisis. second, economic stabilization will involve government investment, or subsidies to private investment, into capital assets. the question is then: which types of capital assets? the answer necessarily has to account for the effect the assets will have on the climate. the second criticism is that beneficial long-term effects on climate are unlikely to be achieved in the absence of long-term policies to price externalities (strand and toman ) . without pricing the externality directly, rebound effects can undo the beneficial effects of e.g. green stimulus policies. further, the general equilibrium effects of stimulus policies on emissions may be hard to assess. sectoral policies should consider the complementarity of targeted sectors with emissions-intensive sectors. a prominent example relates to sectors linked to air travel: e.g., hotels and restaurants have limited direct emissions, but high indirect emissions through tourism and business travel. stimulus payments aimed at such carbon-complementary sectors may backfire unless also accompanied by other measures, such as carbon pricing (dwyer et al. ) . uniform carbon pricing on all fuels would eliminate such concerns. our immediate answer is that we agree that long-term externality pricing is critical, and we include tax and subsidy reforms such as revenue-neutral carbon pricing in our set of policies. a further riposte, indeed to both of the above criticisms, is that long-term pricing policies are endogenous: policies today affect what is politically feasible tomorrow (acemoglu and robinson ). subsidies are not a substitute for carbon pricing (helm ) but may help pave the political route to their implementation. our goal is to evaluate policies in terms of their potential to mitigate the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, and their long-term effect on climate change. to this end, we start by discussing what types of policies can help deal with the consequences of the pandemic. we then present channels via which relatively short-term policy interventions can have longer-run impacts on climate change and climate policy. these two classification exercises allow us to identify policies that have effects on both crises. we then present some data that will be useful in evaluating policies. when people are forced to stay at home they do not go to work and they consume less. the inability to work is a supply shock, while the reduction in consumption is a demand shock. the combination of the two implies bankruptcies and layoffs, aggravating income losses and lowering demand even further. the supply shock will disappear as an improving understanding of the coronavirus allows for more targeted public health measures, and eventual control of the pandemic. however, the economic effects on aggregate demand are likely to persist, so that the demand shock will outlive the supply shock. we mainly focus on policies implemented in the medium term, and thus centered around the economic recovery, rather than around pandemic control per se. economic stimulus policies-in particular, ensuring high demand by supporting incomes and employment-will be central for mitigating the economic fallout. it is well established empirically that wealthy capital owners tend to save a larger share of their income than people who are poorer and who rely on labor income (see e.g. bernheim and scholtz ; beverly ; browning and lusardi ; dynan et al. ; diamond and hausman ; gentry and hubbard ; quadrini ; alan et al. ; dupas and robinson ; gandelmann ) . hence to assess the potential of a policy to restart the economy, we will evaluate policies based on their potential to secure employment (which also benefits mental health) and labor income. some of the firms that now go bankrupt may not be able to quickly resume their old activities once the health crisis is over. it may take time for firms and labor to match, for investors and firms to match, and so on. helping businesses survive will reduce such frictions. for this reason, policies that reduce bankruptcies can also help the recovery. unfortunately, data on bankruptcies are not yet readily available. we conjecture (based, e.g., on andersen et al. , carvalho et al. , and our own analysis using preliminary data, see appendix a. ) that bankruptcies are highly correlated with layoffs. policies may have long-run implications on climate change through a variety of channels. we have identified four channels we see as particularly relevant for our purpose. . investment -direct effect of long-lived investments. to mitigate the unprecedented economic crisis, governments are planning to stimulate economies through massive investment programs, either implemented directly by governments, or by subsidizing private-sector investments. such investments have direct long-run impacts once sunk: some will be long-lived, and either substitute or complement fossil fuels (e.g., power generation or transportation infrastructure). once made, they will be used, and thus have long-run impacts on baseline emission pathways and on the cost of implementing future climate policies (shalizi and lecocq ; seto et al. ). . political -dynamic political economy effects. policy can be persistent: economic decisions taken by firms, in response to policies intended to be temporary, can affect political incentives, preventing a future reversal of a policy (coate and morris ) . this can happen as an indirect effect of sunk investments which changes the structure of vested interests (with respect to climate policies): a devaluation of fossil-related assets, or the introduction of new assets complementary to climate policies, will affect the power and incentives of interest groups to influence future policies (acemoglu and robinson ) . similar effects could result from the destruction of interest groups, e.g. due to bankruptcies in a sector that receives little stimulus money. the formation of special interest groups may also prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (grey ) , and short-term disruptions to interest group formation can have long-run effects. . technological -path dependence due to technological development. a further indirect effect may arise through changes in the direction of r&d (e.g. low carbon versus carbon intensive). when technological change is directional, temporary policies may determine in which direction an economy develops. such differences can persist: tem-porary growth in one type of technology may sustain itself, due to innovation incentives being geared towards a dominant technology, and due to complementarities in r&d (acemoglu et al. ; hart ; van der meijden and smulders ). . learning -forced experimentation and learning effects. consumers and producers may not perfectly optimize their choices, e.g. due to costs of finding out about the characteristics of various options, because of biases in decision making, institutional constraints, or because of habit formation favoring status quo behavior. temporary disruptions to choice sets may force them to look for new options, which may be preferred after the disruption has ended (seto et al. ; larcom et al. ; helm ) . policies that promote or subsidize experimentation can help a wider set of agents explore novel options, and thus promote permanent changes in behavior. we focus on two metrics for alleviating the coronavirus crisis: the number of layoffs in an industry and the labor intensity of the industry, expressed in employees per unit of value added. for judging the climate effects, we focus on the emissions intensity of an industry: climate goals suggest the long-run prospects of relatively clean industries should be prioritized. we use two empirical metrics: emissions per unit of value added, and per employee. we collect data on emissions, number of employees and value added by sector from eurostat. layoffs data are from national sources: swedish public employment service for sweden; the helsinki gse situation room for finland. we show results for labor and emissions intensity for the european union, germany, france, the united kingdom, sweden and finland. our results for layoffs are limited to the countries for which we could find reliable data on recent layoffs during the coronavirus recessions (sweden and finland). these roughly correlate with productivity and demand declines (see appendix figure a ). figure plots both layoffs and layoffs per thousand employees against co emissions per employee (note the logarithmic scale on the horizontal axis) for the sectors given in table . the most affected sectors in sweden, in terms of total layoffs, are i (hotels and restaurants), g (wholesale and retail trade), h (transport and storage), n (rental and real estate), and r (culture). some of these show large layoffs simply because of their size. when layoffs are normalized per , employees, the same sectors stand out except that sector e (water and sanitation) is badly affected while sector g (wholesale and retail trade) appears less affected. the picture for finland is broadly similar, except that there are more layoffs in sector c (manufacturing). we emphasize that this is a high-level categorization which masks detail-yet it serves as a useful benchmark for stimulus and other policy decisions. we specifically highlight three caveats. first, co intensity is measured in a narrow sense: direct emissions from the sector under consideration. since sectors are connected, a subsidy to one sector will affect other sectors as well, e.g. indirectly subsidizing sectors that produce complementary outputs. the full effect of a sector-specific subsidy should include any indirect emissions coming from the effects of the subsidy on related sectors, i.e., the total general-equilibrium effect. second, layoffs are a recent snapshot and may be temporary. figure is likely to change over the course of the coronavirus recession, and in the absence of uniform carbon pricing across all sectors, accounting for indirect emissions may be important. for example, hotels have a low emissions intensity as the emissions from associated travel are allocated to the transport sector, but clearly hotels facilitate (carbon-intensive) travel via tourism and business trips (dwyer et al. ) . greenhouse gas emissions from tourism are substantial, with estimates suggesting the sector accounts for more than % of global greenhouse gas emissions (lenzen et al. ; see appendix a. for a further discussion of this). a second example relates to the relationship between the emissions-intensive transport sector, and the seemingly low-emissions services sectors. an important fraction of transport demand results from activity in services sectors (alcántara and padilla ). in the construction sector, also, indirect emissions can make up a large share of total emissions (acquaye and duffy ). the indirect effects of policies on emissions, output and employment may be important to consider and could be tackled using input-output analysis (mäenpää and siikavirta ; markaki et al. ). this is a promising avenue for further research, both academically and for applied policymaking, but beyond the scope of the present paper. to overcome some of these concerns, fig. plots a measure of labor intensity (employees per million euros of value added) against a measure of emissions intensity (co emissions per million units of value added) for each of the sectors in the european union, germany, france, the united kingdom, sweden and finland. per amount of stimulus spent, industries with high labor intensity may also be relevant to target from a recession perspective, since each unit of spending can be expected to have a larger employment effect in those sectors. from the climate perspective, one would like to focus on sectors with low emission intensities. the results vary somewhat across countries, but paint a remarkably consistent picture. first, there is a slight negative relationship between labor intensity and emissions intensity, perhaps reflecting that sectors with low labor shares rely on more energy-intensive capital. industries that stand out as potential targets that score well on the coronavirus-climate interface are not necessarily the ones that have seen the most layoffs, although they overlap partially. for the european union as a whole, the set of high-labor, low-emissions sectors include i (hotels and restaurants), g (wholesale and retail trade), n (rental and real estate), q (health care and elder care), p (education), r (culture) and s (services). sectors i, g, n and r have also experienced a peak in recent layoffs. for each of the individual countries, almost the same set appear on the high-labor, low-emissions list. in appendix a. , we comment on these sectors individually, and end by commenting on some other industries. to structure our analysis we categorize policies along the following dimensions (table ) . first, we split them into policies that are primarily motivated by their effects stimulus spending refers to policies that require substantial amounts of government funds, with the aim to preserve employment, avoid bankruptcies, create new jobs, and help the hardest-hit consumers. the second category includes tax reform policies that are complementary or even somewhat orthogonal to stimulus, but that raise extra revenues that can be used as additional stimulus, and that have overall economic efficiency benefits. third, some policies do not require large financial injections from the government; e.g., mandates, standards, or bans. they may also span several categories. we group them under 'cross-cutting' policies. any categorization of policies is necessarily imperfect: there is no optimal choice of dimensions and policies will spill across categories or overlap with each other. policies vary in their breadth and budgetary requirements. the most important matter is that our list of policies is reasonably complete. we believe it is, with some caveats. we purposely omit some policies. we do not tackle coronavirus policies that have no long-run climate impacts, or that are not relevant beyond the immediate crisis. these include test-trace-isolate, travel restrictions, and vaccine development. similarly, some central policies to manage the pandemic have significant but short-lived effects on emissions-yet long-run climate impacts appear highly limited. these include distancing policies such as lockdowns, restricting access to public spaces, and the closing of restaurants and schools. we have evaluated the set of policies in tables and (the latter breaks down financial assistance to firms by industry). figure summarizes the conclusions from this analysis. we plot policies according to how good they are for the coronavirus crisis (vertical axis) and for the climate crisis (horizontal axis). policies marked green denote stimulus policies, policies marked red denote tax reform policies, and policies marked blue denote other cross cutting policies. below we proceed to comment on policies we have identified as particularly promising (located in the upper right corner). a detailed analysis of these-and other policies-can be found in the appendix (a. -a. ). there, after describing each policy and briefly analyzing it, we draw a conclusion as to how it scores in terms of alleviating the recession and its long-run climate impact. these scores take seven levels: very bad; bad; bad-to-neutral; neutral; neutral-to-good; good; very good (these results are also presented in tables and ). the precise scoring can be refined, but we present a conceptual framework for analyzing the joint set of policies meant to address the coronavirus recession and climate crises. small scale green infrastructure investment (good, good, a. ) aiding industries (see table and fig. we plot these policies in green, labelled by industry. there have been various policy proposals on how to support businesses and workers, in general, during the crisis. these include giving out loans or grants to small businesses, or providing firms with tax relief (becker et al. ; scarpetta et al. ) . these policies aim to support business owners, to support workers and allow them to maintain their relationship with the firm, or to prevent the overall collapse of businesses. the choice between different industries appears the most consequential decision that governments can make. how the stimulus funds are allocated across industries determines both the short-run employment effects and could have long-run climate implications. the question we therefore ask is: which sectors should be targeted for aid (bailouts, investments, loans, etc.) if the objective is for this to both alleviate the current crisis and be good for the climate? whether stimulus for particular industries has meaningful impacts on long-term climate goals depends on several factors. for example, preferentially saving firms in a given sector may not have a large direct impact on the sector in the long run. the reason is that the capital assets, many of them specific to the sector, will still exist; so will a large fraction of the sector-specific human capital. thus, even if a wave of bankruptcies were to destroy many businesses in some low-emissions sector, that sector may spontaneously recover once the crisis has passed. one potential long-run effect from extensive bankruptcies in a sector is that consumers and buyers may shift their habits away from that sector, implying a longrun decline in sector-specific demand. furthermore, persistent changes may result through the forced experimentation mechanism or long-lived government investments. bankruptcies among firms conducting r&d into renewables may lead to a slowing of technological change (which we address separately below). the political channel can also be at work. firms will likely vary in their ability to weather the current crisis along many dimensions. if there is systematic variation in survival probability between firms in competing subsectors, long-term effects may result from subsectors that see many firms go bankrupt being unable to represent their interests in the political process. for example, in the european electricity sector, the largest firms tend to focus on fossil-fuel technologies in their innovation. large firms also likely have better access to credit. thus, a wave of bankruptcies may mean policies in the recovery stage may favor large, fossil-oriented firms. such temporary disruption can have persistent effects, by strengthening the structure of vested interests in the sector, and thus the persistence of policy (brainard and verdier ; coate and morris ) . this presents another reason for supporting vulnerable 'green' industries. a word of caution is in place. aiding industries has at least two problems. first, it may not be politically feasible. second, it may not be very efficient in general compared to more direct measures at tackling unemployment. funds to aid firm survival will help firms' owners without necessarily boosting employment. the same holds for tackling climate change. this is since such assistance would work only indirectly to affect the goals (such as employment and lower emissions) and firms may not use the aid as intended. a valuable complement could be conditioning of aid at the firm or industry level, for those who receive it. this policy is orthogonal to other policies but could ensure that industry aid becomes more effective, by aligning the recipient's goals with those of the policy-maker. for instance, assistance could be made conditional on lowering emissions or on the funds being used for hiring or retaining labor. conditioning loans is common practice at the world bank and imf, and for many governments. there are several examples of such conditioning having already been used in the current crisis. for more details on contingent policies, see sect. . . . based on this analysis, previous research and data of employment and emissions, the sectors hotels and restaurants, health care and education would be good candidates but for different reasons (for a results of the other sectors see table ; for a fuller analysis of all sectors see also appendix a. ). restaurants are very labor intensive, have been hit hard by the lockdown and have low direct emissions. targeting this sector in the recovery phase could therefore be a good idea. hotels have also been severely affected, but subsidizing hotels likely aids the transport sector which is very emissions intensive. hence, a finer targeting may be needed here, for instance, only towards restaurants or more broadly to other service industries. we rank aiding this sector as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and neutral-to-good for the climate. the education sector has not been hit by the crisis. but having a high labor share and being essential in the structural transformation of the economy forced by the coronavirus crisis, this sector is key in dealing with that crisis. at the same time, it is low on emissions. stimulus may thus shift production and 'consumption' in a climate-friendly direction. we rank aiding this sector as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. health care also has high employment intensity. it of course has not seen any layoffs, being essential for dealing with the medical fallout of the current or future pandemics. it is also low on emissions, so the same motivation as for education applies here. we rank aiding this sector as good for alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. economic stabilization can of course take the form of monetary stimulus. relatedly, it has been suggested the fiscal commitments could be funded as 'helicopter money'by printing money. we are not aware of research on the climate effects of such policies, so we do not include them in our ranking, summary and conclusions. see appendix a. for further details. these policies are also plotted in green. fiscal stimulus can be aimed at 'climate-oriented' infrastructure investment such as renewable-energy generation facilities, associated infrastructure, and energy-saving investments. governments have already announced very large investments in infrastructure as part of stimulus programs. on may th , the european commission presented a revamped long-term eu budget and a € . trillion recovery plan, with the explicit goal to provide the instruments to build a modern, clean and healthy economy, better known as the 'eu green deal' (new europe ). stimulus spending should be directed according to these plans if governments are serious about climate change mitigation. not doing so will undermine the climate targets: recovery from the coronavirus crisis will exhaust the appetite for public spending for many years. but from a coronavirus perspective, the immediate benefit of such investment stimulus is unclear. the stimulus would primarily operate through the construction sector. however, this sector has not seen severe layoffs due to the health crisis. there is thus a trade-off between optimizing strategic investments that move societies onto more sustainable pathways, and getting societies out of the immediate coronavirus recession as rapidly as possible. if there is potential for sufficiently skilled workers to move in from other sectors, there could be beneficial short-run effects on overall employment. the most direct long-term climate policy effect of green infrastructure investments is their emissions reduction throughout their long lifetimes. complementarities (for example due to network infrastructure investments) mean they can also spur further, private investment, and shift societies away from 'carbon lock-in' and towards a 'green lock-in' path. this lock-in can be reinforced by indirect channels. a shift towards green investment generates larger vested interests in favor of e.g. carbon pricing policies, given that renewable investments stand to gain from such policies. for example, in germany, the feed-in tariffs for renewables generated constituencies and advocacy groups which stabilized the policy regime and led to an expansion of the sector (jacobsson and lauber ; strunz et al. ) . further, any shift towards greener infrastructure and future pricing policies incentivizes green r&d investments, due to larger potential market size (acemoglu et al. ). the channels involved here are thus long-lived investment, changing political status quo and technological changes. an important point here is that the labor intensity of infrastructure projects depends on their scale: small-scale projects are more labor-intensive than large-scale projects (strand and toman ) . this could favor small-scale renewables such as residential solar and retrofit projects. our judgment of the effect on coronavirus crisis is therefore based on the scale of the projects. based on the above, we particularly want to highlight smallscale infrastructure projects such as retrofitting insulation and installing solar panels on houses. we rank this policy as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. for reasons similar to those in the case of large-scale infrastructure investment, we do not think that extensive green r&d investment, while good for climate, will be particularly well-suited to deal with the coronavirus crisis as the effects on employment in the short-to-medium run are essentially limited to those holding the right competence. investing in green r&d will just shift research labor from one area to another. fiscal stimulus to private r&d spending in the renewable energy sector, by way of grants or loans, can prevent bankruptcies and the breaking up of successful r&d teams. more details can be found in appendix a. . we rank both policies as neutral-to-good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. another promising green stimulus option is planting trees. afforestation and reforestation activities are likely cost-effective both in terms of climate and in terms of the coronavirus crisis, as the trees will absorb co and as planting requires large numbers of manual and unskilled labor (strand and toman ) . we rank this policy as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate (see more in appendix a. ). we plot these policies in red. while tax reforms obviously do not need to be climatemotivated, we have identified revenue-neutral 'green tax reform' (involving for example carbon taxes, an abolition of fossil fuel subsidies, tighter emission caps, and meat consumption taxes) as especially promising, because it would enable an even more aggressive stimulus package (see appendices a. -a. ). revenue-neutral policies not only have important long-run climate effects, but also have the potential to improve economic recovery. green taxes improve economic efficiency by internalizing the carbon externality. they would thus also help to internalize potential negative externalities from indirect emissions that could result from certain sectoral aid (e.g., aiding hotels and restaurants that are closely linked to travel). how the revenues are spent determines which industries and consumers are winners vs. losers (and thus whether the policy is on net favorable or unfavorable to preserve employment). there is a possibility of a double dividend if the revenues are used to offset preexisting distortionary taxes (goulder ; de mooij ) . the coronavirus recession may thus be a politically opportune moment for well-designed green tax reform that enables environmental and employment benefits at the same time. we rank carbon taxes, an abolition of fossil fuel subsidies and tighter emission caps as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and very good for the climate. we rank a meat consumption tax as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. as a benchmark for the neutrality of the green taxes, we assume that the proceeds are spent on reducing labor taxes. one reason for using this benchmark is that fiscal stimulus in the form of reduced labor taxes takes effect more quickly than monetary stimulus (kaplan and violante ) . this could be good for a rapid exit from the coronavirus crisis by stimulating labor demand. such tax cuts can also be tailored with distributional impacts in mind, and could thus be designed to help households most likely at risk of an immediate liquidity crisis. to use the proceeds for labor tax reductions is of course just one option out of many. a green tax reform would have an even more favorable impact on the climate if the revenues were spent on direct investments in renewable energy, clean tech r&d, and other low-carbon technologies. in this case, both the tax itself and the revenues provide immediate incentives to reduce emissions, while also benefiting from path-dependency effects of redirecting capital to build up a greener capital stock. this type of revenue recycling is less attractive from the perspective of mitigating the recession, as many green investments do not require much labor. we would therefore focus on policies that reduce labor taxes economy-wide. labor tax cuts are a form of fiscal stimulus which could be considered in isolation for tackling the coronavirus fallout. we are not aware of research that would shed light on the impact of labor tax reductions, in isolation, on climate outcomes. we rank this policy as good for the coronavirus crisis and neutral for climate. see appendix a. for further details. we plot the cross-cutting policies in blue. the pandemic has led many governments to impose different forms of regulations and restrictions on citizens and businesses, related for example to travel, sick leave, and way of doing business. there are also mandates that have been, or could be, imposed with the primary purpose to mitigate emissions and air pollution. these are relevant to analyze as they in turn may impact economic recovery, or adaptation potential for the current or future pandemics. we comment on the most promising of such policies here. neves and brand ( ) find that about % of short car trips could in theory be replaced by cycling or walking, reducing emissions from car travel by about %. city planning policies and infrastructure investments promote active modes of transportation by making car travel more expensive (e.g., congestion charging) and less convenient (winters et al. ) . we already see initiatives along these lines. milan plans to reallocate km of street space from cars to cycling and walking in the summer of , in response to the coronavirus crisis. given path dependencies of infrastructure investment and forced experimentation, initiatives like this can also foster persistent change. a shift towards active modes of transportation could also have long-run health effects in the form of lower rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension (pucher et al. ; rasmussen et al. ; grøntved et al. ). this reduces the share of people vulnerable to the coronavirus. we rank this policy as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. tighter air pollution regulation would reduce carbon emissions: this could involve switching from coal generation to gas generation, especially near population centers, and boosting less emission-intensive transport. such policies may involve long-lived investments (into renewables and gas-fired plants to replace coal) which will be long-lasting. they will also generate new interest groups (cyclists, drivers of electric vehicles) and perhaps reduce the power of coal generators. there is also some preliminary evidence that local air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides (no x ) and atmospheric particulate matter with a diameter of less than . microm (pm . ) may increase mortality from the coronavirus (ogen ; wu et al. ). if these preliminary findings hold up, they point to long-term benefits if the virus becomes endemic, circulating in the population indefinitely. we rank this policy as good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for the climate. there has been a broad debate about conditioning bailouts to firms in polluting sectors. if a bailout can be credibly conditioned on future changes in activity, and if, in the absence of bailouts, the industry is likely to resurrect after any bankruptcies, then conditional bailouts of emission-intensive sectors may be beneficial to the climate. consider airlines: a wave of bankruptcies will wipe out current shareholders, but the aircraft assets will be sold to new companies once the health crisis subsides, and these new firms will operate according to market incentives. a bailout will save the current firms, but it can set conditions on their future behavior, such as reducing the number of short-haul flights for which feasible low-emission alternatives exist. several airlines have already been given bailout loans with no conditions attached (laville ) . on the other hand, the bailout given to air france comes with the requirement that the company halve its carbon emissions from domestic routes, essentially forcing it to cut back services on routes (financial times ). we rank this policy as neutral-to-good at alleviating the coronavirus crisis and neutral-to-good for the climate. recapitalization is an alternative to conditional bailouts. rescuing firms by injections of equity using public funds are, effectively, partial nationalizations. as such, they give the state an ownership stake in the firm, and thus a voice in the management of the firm. many commentators warn against the state taking a role in commercial decisions, even in situations in which it does hold a stake. however, where a firm's commercial decisions involve important externalities, it may be justifiable to have the state exercise its owner's right to influence commercial decisions, so as to take account of the full social costs of these decisions. the recapitalization should be large enough to give a state a voice as a major shareholder. the channels involved here are thus through long-lived investment and political status quo. government may pay wages for private employees as a way to avoid the labor search costs associated with rehiring once the economy starts to recover (as proposed by sinn ). with regards to the long-term climate effects from this policy the results are less clear. if labor gets increasingly replaced by capital as a result of forced experimentation, where companies adopt new technologies or management practices that replace some of the previous jobs, this shift in the capital-labor share could potentially have a negative climate impact since capital is typically more fossil fuel intensive. the specific impacts may depend on industry; the analysis of sect. . . applies. we conclude that his policy is very good for addressing the coronavirus crisis and neutral-to-good in terms of climate. in this category we have also looked into tightening renewable portfolio standards, and encouraging working from home. we have ranked these policies as neutral for alleviating the coronavirus crisis and good for climate (the analysis is found in a. and a respectively). a cross-cutting policy that is not promising though is extending sick leave provisions (see appendix a. ). unless also financed by the government, such provisions may lead to bankruptcies and substitution away from labor. we rank this policy as neutral-to-bad for alleviating the coronavirus crisis and neutral-to-bad for climate. the severity and abruptness of the coronavirus crisis do not make the climate crisis any less pressing. our societies need to solve the former, immediate crisis without taking our eye off the latter, inexorable one. we have above identified a set of policies that would help in tackling both the coronavirus crisis and climate change. the most effective policies involve revenue-neutral tax reforms towards carbon pricing, which would be excellent climate policies and also help deal with the coronavirus crisis by allowing reductions to labor taxes. subsidizing temporary employment in less emissionsintensive industries (services sectors including leisure services like restaurants and culture; or professional services like technology, education, and healthcare) can help laid-off workers try out occupations that have potential even under tougher climate policies. here one needs to be aware of potential indirect emissions effects in sectors with complementary goods, but with proper carbon pricing, such effects could be internalized. labor-intensive investments into natural capital (tree planting) and into low-carbon physical capital can both support employment and incomes, while storing carbon or helping societies transition towards a low-carbon future. health and climate goals can also be achieved by promoting transport methods which not only reduce carbon emissions, but local pollutants too, improving cardiovascular health. all sectoral aid should be conditioned on being directed towards employment and on low-carbon supply chains. the crisis is ongoing, and the full outcomes in terms of health and unemployment are yet to be known. policies will be tried out, and 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lindahl , · daniel spiro · arthur a. van key: cord- -sqojhvwx authors: araújo-vila, noelia; fraiz-brea, jose antonio; de araújo, arthur filipe title: spanish economic-financial crisis: social and academic interest date: - - journal: j bus cycle res doi: . /s - - -z sha: doc_id: cord_uid: sqojhvwx the present study analyses the interest of both experts and the general population in the economic-financial crisis that has affected spain up until . to examine the interest of the general users, google searches were analysed through the google trends tool. meanwhile, the interest of scholars was assessed through the analysis of academic papers published on scopus, one of the most relevant peer reviewed literature database. to this end, a scopus search was made for papers containing the fragment “spanish financial crisis” on their tittles, abstracts, or keywords, which ensued a sample of studies. findings show that the spanish financial crisis worries the general population as well as scholars. peaks in searches by general internet users take place in the years preceding the crisis ( and ) as well as throughout its duration ( , , and ). accordingly, the academic interest has also grown substantially up from . the years preceding the beginning of the spanish financial crisis- - -are characterised by a cumulative economic imbalance. many countries had extremely negative checking account balances, while others achieved atypical surplus values, which led to a global financial crisis. some countries had loose monetary policies, and at the same time, a great amount of savings. this led to the inflation of assets' prices, especially real state, which came to be known as the real estate bubble (garcía ) . in spain, construction was financed by international loans. the instability in the construction industry led to high rates of indebtedness, which soon affected the country's whole economy. an excessive amount of money was being loaned to an industry that was no longer profitable. in this context, banks were increasingly uncertain about whether the debts would be liquidated. moreover, productivity problems tend to lead to future economic issues. in the years preceding the crisis, spain's gdp grew more than that of the united kingdom and the united states (eu-klem ) . this was already a sign that something was not right, or that, at the very least, the situation was temporary and unrealistic. a significant part of this growth was caused by the construction industry, which was responsible for % of the country's economic growth between and . as garcía ( ) points out, this was caused by the increase in working hours and the intensive use of technological capital. the so-called real estate bubble led to the beginning of a global liquidity crisis in the banking system, which was intensified by the frequent trade of complex and structured financial products. initially, this crisis did not affect spain, as the national banks had focused on retail banking and refrained from selling structured mortgage products (alonso-almeida and bremser ). however, economic-financial problems brought about by the global recession increased the perceived risk and the real estate market's adjustment, which eventually reached spain as well (Álvarez ) . the present work analyses the interest demonstrated by both the general population and economic scholars (and those from related areas) in the economic-financial crisis that affected spain up until the observed period ( ). naturally, the health crisis currently being faced by the whole world due to the outbreak of covid- is an even bigger problem, which is expected to have catastrophic consequences for many countries' economies, including spain. in this context, it is important to observe that the present research does not consider such phenomenon, which started after the data collection and analysis period. regarding the methodological steps carried out as part of this investigation, first the extant literature on the spanish financial crisis was systematically reviewed, which allowed the authors to understand the factors that led to this situation. then, to achieve this paper's objective, the interest of the general population was assessed through the analysis of google searches on the subject throughout the selected timeframe ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) . meanwhile, the interest of academics was examined through the analysis of scientific papers published on the scopus database during the same period. since the end of the twentieth century, spain had been one of the fastest growing and most successful economies in europe. immigration, low interest rates, and a recently liberalised and modernised economy had contributed to this great economic status (royo ). this condition, however, was interrupted in , when the country started facing a severe economic recession. although the global economic crisis significantly contributed to this deceleration, domestic imbalances have also played an important role. in this context, is arguably the year when the financial crisis reached spain, along with many other european countries. in the spanish instance, the crisis was the result of a -year period of high liquidity in the financial market (Álvarez ) . in other words, during this time, it was particularly easy to convert any financial asset into money with minimal loss. this is shown by the increase in monetary aggregates (adrian and shin ) noticed in this period, which led to an overcapacity of the financial system. this, in turn, led to a general state of distrust, in which neither employers nor families were willing to not take credit. the only cases in which credit was taken were those when people needed to renew their debts or cover their losses. naturally, as capitalist economies are based on credit, such situation would necessarily have a negative impact on the country's economy. along with this deterioration of economic conditions, a poor management of the situation by the bank of spain, the dependence on wholesale financing, and weaknesses in the regulatory framework, all contributed to this recession (royo ) . however, the key factor that led spain to the current crisis was the channelling of the financial sector into the real estate market (alvarez ; montalvo ; taylor ). the so-called system of perverse incentives, adopted as a temporary solution to fund construction activities, made the real estate market very attractive (montalvo ). for the families, buying a house started to look like a very attractive proposal. for the sake of comparison, in the united states, there is the "lease with the option of purchase" model, which became a very favourable option, even for those who could not afford the mortgage payments. moreover, if the prices happened to increase, which was expected, all parts would benefit from capital gains (case et al. ). on the other hand, if prices remained stable, one could simply stop paying the mortgage and lose the purchase option. in this case, the deal would effectively become a regular rent. another incentive was the barriers of entries, through which people could also request a loan (mayer et al. ). in spain, however, the scenario was quite different, as the financial product normally employed for the purpose of buying a house is the personal loan with mortgage. in such a deal, if one does not liquidate the debt, they must give back the house. nevertheless, the general belief was that there was an incredibly low chance of decrease in prices, which encouraged many families to buy houses anyway (garcía-montalvo ) . there was a whole chain of factors that encouraged this model of purchase. for example, bank workers needed to sell mortgages in order to hit sales targets and gain bonuses. therefore, they lowered the criteria for granting this type of loan (montalvo ) . moreover, all this housing construction and urbanisation methods did not take place in an institutional void (garcía ) . part of the problem was exactly the lack of spatial planning. more precisely, as observed by maldonado and pérez ( ) , specific plans for urban development either did not exist or were totally disregarded. the described scenario led the spanish construction industry to a great recession, which significantly affected the country's economy (kapelko et al. ) . the difficulty in liquidating loan payments was also linked to a decrease in the demand for finished buildings (both residential and non-residential), which resulted in a large amount of unsold real state (vergés ) . in sum, as concluded by stiglitz ( : ) spain allowed a massive real estate bubble to arise, and now faces an almost total collapse of this market. as opposed to the united states, however, spanish banks were more prepared to endure this trauma, due to the country's banking regulations. nevertheless, they country's economy had much greater losses. this led to a general distrust by bank clients, which, as concluded by carbó-valverde et al. ( ) , is an indicator of a significant negative impact of banks' activities in the economy. moreover, the bursting of the real estate bubble contributed directly and indirectly to almost . million job losses and a large private debt (garcía ) , which further aggravated the situation and forced the government to save banks by financing them with foreign savings. therefore, spain was one of the european countries where the late ′s global economic crisis had the most devastating outcomes. this happened due to internal factors that amplified the crisis' effects, especially the country's massive real estate bubble. the present study examined the interest of two distinct groups in the spanish financial crisis: . the general internet user; and . scholars and specialists in economy and related areas. the interest of the first group was assessed with the help of google trends, a tool that allows researchers to examine general trends in google searches. google searches were selected as an indicator of the general internet users' interest because google is the most popular web searcher in the world (ebizmba ). the interest of the second group was assessed through the examination of scientific papers published on scopus's database, which is one of the peer-reviewed literature databases with the highest number of citations and abstracts (andalial et al. ; bosman et al. ) . the analysis carried out through google trends encompassed searches made with the keywords "crisis española", "crisis financiera española", and "spanish financial crisis", made worldwide up from (year in which the tool started registering searches). this allowed the authors to verify whether the general internet user's interest in the topic increased up from , the year after the beginning of the crisis. the analysis of articles published on scopus was a slightly more complex, due to the nature of the database. first, a search for papers containing the fragment "spanish financial crisis" in their tittles, abstracts, and keywords was made. the phrase in english was adopted for the search because most studies in the database are in in this language. a total of works was found, from which % had been published between and (see table ). researches on the topic started being published in a considerable amount from - , following the beginning of the crisis. studies published in the ′s refer to previous financial crises, such as the one that took place between the ′s and the ′s, or even crises in previous centuries. scientific studies were also subjected to a content analysis, which considered their tittles, abstracts and keywords. qualitative content analysis is a method for analyzing text data and delve into their meaning by following systematic procedures (schreier ) . the term includes a series of different techniques to analyse texts (powers et al. ). more specifically, content analysis serves to "identify, analyse and inform patterns within the data" (braun and clarke p. ) . it includes the codification and classification of textual units, which makes it very useful to explore big volumes of textual information and determine tendencies, patterns within the words employed, as well as relationships between their meanings (gbrich ) . qualitative analysis methods are not only a useful tool for generating knowledge, but also an effective vehicle for presenting and addressing meanings and findings (holloway and todres ; sandelowski ). to assure these methods' validities, researchers must clearly explain how the results were achieved (schreier ). in the case of content analysis, the preparation phase starts with the definition of the unit of analysis (guthrie et al. ) , to which researches must consider what they want to analyse (cavanagh ) . in the present investigation, the object of analysis was the academics' interest in the subject of the spanish financial crisis. in this context, the units of analysis were, as previously stated, the tittles, abstracts and keywords of scientific studies on this topic. content analysis may serve two main functions, the heuristic and the proofing function (bardin ) . naturally, the goal of the present study was not verifying any previously proposed hypothesis about the interest of academics in the spanish financial crisis, but simply exploring the trends and patterns in such interest through the analysis of published researches. therefore, within this investigation, the content analysis serves the heuristic function, as it enriches the exploratory attempt, increasing the likeliness of discovery. moreover, within the available content analysis techniques, the one adopted in the present study was the categorical content analysis, which consists in dismembering text units, or categories, according to pre-established criteria. in this context, the chosen total studies registry of unit was the word-rather than the theme-which facilitated the systematic analysis of a big volume of texts. moreover, the main enumeration rule for coding, as it considers that the registry unit's relevance increases with its frequency of appearance. a quantitative summary of the content analysis' results is presented in table . the google trends analysis indicated that searches for "crisis financiera española" were only made in spain. some related searched topics include "crisis", "crisis financiera", "finanzas", "españa" and "ciencia económica", which showed a consisted increase in searches from . the terms also show two punctual peaks in searches in november and march , which were indeed the highest search rates within the analysed period. these peaks are followed by april and september (fig. ) . when considering searches for more generic terms, such as "crisis española", the number of countries from which searches were made increases. among the additional countries, the ones with the highest numbers are peru, ecuador, colombia, and argentina (all spanish speaking countries) (fig. ) . related search terms include "crisis económica española", "la crisis económica", "crisis económica españa", "crisis política española" and "la economía española" all of which had a puntual increase in searches in , and then consistently decreased, especially after . for these terms, search peaks took place in september , june , november , and may (fig. ) . when considering the english term "spanish financial crisis", the peak in searches was in march , followed by april and june . up from , the numbers decrease significantly (fig. ) . related search terms that present a punctual increase include "spain financial crisis" and "spanish economic crisis". when considering searches for the more generic term "spanish crisis", the countries from which the most searches were made are spain, singapore, united kingdom, australia, nigeria and united states (fig. ) . searches for this term had their peak in june , followed by may , and unlike in the previous cases, october , which is particularly recent (fig. ) . as mentioned in the methodology chapter, the search for papers published on scopus's database ensued studies addressing the spanish financial crises since , % of which have been published in the last decade. studies on the subject come from three main areas: social sciences ( . %), economy, econometry, and finances ( . %), and business, management, and accounting ( . %)-it must be observed that the same paper can be classified into more than one area. most of the researches were published on journal papers ( . %). the remaining documents include reviews ( . %), book chapters ( . %), and conference papers ( . %). to delve deeper into the topic, it is important to know which items are more often addressed within these studies. to this end, a frequency analysis of the whole sample of keywords (n = , ) was carried out. results indicate that the most frequent research topics are spain, financial crisis, economic crisis, crisis, human, article, economic recession, and finances (table ) . to analyse the topic even further, the works of the most proliferous authors in the field-kapelko, m., lara-rubio, j., navarro-galera, a. and perles-ribes, j.f.-were analysed. each of these authors published five studies within the last years. the titles, abstracts and keywords of such studies were subjected to a content analysis (table ) . results show that although the crisis took place over a decade ago, back in / , it still attracts significant academic interest. moreover, this interest comes from different research areas, as the mentioned authors investigate areas as distinct as the public sector, the banking sector, the construction industry, and the tourism industry. the concepts analysed within those studies include inefficiency, financial sustainability, and all the effects of the economic and financial crisis worldwide, in the euro zone, and especially in spain. the construction industry was one of the most affected, as it depends on economic cycles. therefore, the situation initiated in has led to a significant drop in productivity. the country's economic situation had a great impact on the sector. on the other hand, part of the studies analysed focus on the public sector. these studies emphasize the need for financial transparency, especially on official websites. the solvency problems, risk premiums, and bank loans brought about by the financial crisis ultimately affected local governments, which must deal with the consequent increase in levels of (public) debt. the banking sector is also one of the most affected by the economic situation. one of the biggest problems for the sector is the risk of loyalty loss and abandonment by its clients. at last, studies analyse how this situation affects one of the star industries of the country: tourism. more specifically, they examined which types of tourist destinations (e.g., seaside, cities, etc.) have already overcome the crisis, as well as how the economic cycles have affected the tourism industry, namely its employment growth rates, since the beginning of the crisis ( / ) . studies also examined the opposite effect, that is, how tourism development affects the crisis, specially through the sale of vacation houses, which ultimately affects the construction industry. finally, analogous to the analysis carried out with the web searches, the published papers' origins were examined and the countries that show the greatest scientific interest in this topic were identified. as expected, the country from which the highest number of studies was published is spain, which accounts for . % of studies. with significantly lower numbers, the following countries account for most of the remaining researches: united kingdom ( . %), united states ( . %), germany ( . %), italy ( , %), netherlands ( . %), portugal ( . %), france ( . %), and poland ( . %). next, with less than % each, comes sweden, australia, canada, chile, peru, austria, belgium, colombia, and denmark (fig. ) . table academic studies from the most proliferous authors on the spanish financial crisis transparency about sustainability in regional governments: the case of spain current crisis; demand for greater transparency in the public sector; sustainability in public administration; regional governments; websites; sustainability information in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a series of economic circumstances triggered a global economic-financial crisis. these circumstances included the contrast between countries with extreme deficits in their commercial balances and those enjoying atypical surplus values. in europe, one of the countries that suffered the most as a result of the crisis was spain. in the years preceding the beginning of the crisis, the country experienced several favourable economic circumstances, such as a higher gdp growth than that of global leaders, i.e., the united states, which eventually proved to be an illusion. in , the economic boom came to an end, following the solvency crisis in the banking system and the decrease in the demand for products and services, especially houses. in this context, the construction industry was one of the most affected, and arguably one of the main factors responsible for amplifying the crisis effects in the country (due to the real estate bubble). to the present day, spain has not fully recovered, and the aftermath of the crisis still worries its population. it is particularly striking that, in the years preceding the crisis, there was already an uneasiness about it. this is evidenced by web searches on the topic, which begin to increase already in . in fact, the peak in searches for "crisis financiera española" took place in november , which was an omen of what was about to happen. moreover, searches related to the spanish economic crisis, spanish economy or simply the economic crisis have also been quite frequent, which indicates that the population is still worried and interested in this topic. once the crisis begins, peaks in searches are once again observed, especially between and . when considering searches worldwide (for terms in english), the data shows that the interest in the topic starts decreasing in . therefore, the peaks in interest from the general internet users take place in two specific moments: years before , when some people already inferred that a crisis was about to come, and the fig. countries that investigate the spanish financial crisis first years of crisis. it must be observed, as well, that although the topic is particularly related to one country, spain (which is evidenced by the fact that the majority of searches were made from this country), the analysis of searches in english shows that internet users from other countries are also interested in the situation. those include several european countries, such as united kingdom (in second place, immediately after spain), germany, italy, portugal, and france; but also countries from other continents, such as the united states (in third place), and with a significantly lower volume in searches, australia, canada, chile, peru, and colombia. regarding the academic world, the subject starts attracting a great deal of interest up from / , when the crisis had already begun. the peak in number of published papers takes place in ( works). however, the biggest growth is noticed between and , when the number of studies practically doubled. in sum, academic studies show a continuous growth from to . the most frequently addressed topics amongst the analysed studies are the economic or financial crisis, the economic recession, unemployment, and the banking system. many studies share some of the same keywords, from which "spain" is by far the most frequent. the content analysis carried out on the works from the most proliferous authors within the topic indicates that construction is amongst the most addressed industries or sectors in researches related to the crisis. this is in line with previous literature on the subject, as addressed on the theoretical overview, the construction industry played a relevant role in amplifying the crisis' effects in spain and was also one of the most affected economic activities. other particularly affected area was the public sector, which was also one of the leading figures of the situation, due to the lack of a proactive attitude and preventive measures, and to its actions during the actual crisis. other authors focus on tourism, a key industry to the spanish economy, and one that was also affected by the crisis. finally, similarly to the general internet user's interest, academic interest in this subject does not come exclusively from spain, but also from other european countries, such as germany, italy, france, and portugal. moreover, studies also come from countries outside europe, such as the united states, peru, and chile. this data indicates that there is a coincidence regarding the countries that show high levels of social preoccupation on the subject, demonstrated by the web 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what's in a name? qualitative description revisited qualitative content analysis in practice freefall: america, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy the financial crisis and the policy responses: an empirical analysis of what went wrong (no. w ) the information asymmetry in the spanish real estate sector. crisis and stocks. observatorio inmobiliario y de la construcción key: cord- -ehabkd authors: jean, sébastien title: how the covid- pandemic is reshaping the trade landscape and what to do about it date: - - journal: inter econ doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ehabkd the covid- pandemic carries heavy threats, and preserving stable and coordinated international trade relations will be essential to avoid catastrophic disorders or conflicts. this general context is aggravated by the mounting tensions between the us and china. while the 'phase one' deal signed in january marked a ceasefi re in the trade war between the two countries, it did not resolve the underlying sources of tensions, far from it (jean, ) . moreover, the pandemic will probably call into question china's enforcement of its import commitments under this agreement. on april , the world trade organization (wto) released its forecast for world trade in , announcing that it expected a fall in volume of between % and %. both the magnitude of the fall and the width of the forecasting range speak volumes about the violent blow the crisis dealt to international trade and about the uncertainty surrounding ensuing consequences. they refl ect the deeply disruptive economic impacts of lockdown measures taken to counter the pandemic. since these measures should be short-lived, part of their impact is temporary, and it is reasonable to expect that their removal will bring signifi cant economic relief. yet, i argue that this crisis will create lasting changes in the trade landscape and serious threats to the rules-based trading system, warranting a reconsideration of trade policy priorities in important respects. the fact that the shock is violent does not mean that its consequences will last. four types of reasons lead to the expectation that some of them will be irreversible, though. lasting changes in competitive positions and macroeconomic conditions the looming economic crisis, expected to be of unprecedented scale in peace time at least for decades, will cause a large number of bankruptcies and buyouts, in a manner that is far from homogeneous across countries and sectors. while it is diffi cult to predict the size of the wave, it is likely to signifi cantly alter competitive positions. given the recognised importance of hysteresis and irreversibilities in international trade (e.g. baldwin, ; ramanarayanan, ) , the consequences for international trade patterns might be longlasting. they are likely to trigger policy responses focused on domains deemed critical, to make sure the capacity to act forcefully is preserved even in conditions of crisis. for a long time, such concerns have been central to public policies in two areas: defence and food. they have translated into a different set of policies, warranting the special status of each of these domains in the international trading system and accommodating wide-ranging state intervention well beyond what is customary in other tradable sectors. but the covid- pandemic has brought two additional domains to the front of strategic importance: health and digital infrastructure. given the extraordinary tensions witnessed around procurement of, among other things, face masks and test reagents, there is probably no need to elaborate on the strategic status gained by the health sector. but it is worth emphasising that digital infrastructure also demonstrated its strategic importance, since it has been key to enabling the partial functioning capacities of many economies while maintaining fairly strict lockdown policies. this experiment will probably have lasting impacts on habits, norms and organisations, accelerating the increasing relevance of telepresence, a change with powerful disruptive potential (baldwin, ) . as heated controversies around g networks and the leading position of huawei illustrates, the critical nature of the infrastructure upon which such new organisations and practices rely was already largely recognised. it can only be reinforced by the present crisis, warranting increased state attention on their autonomy in this area. beyond these concerns of strategic autonomy, states may also have to adjust their policies to citizens' heightened expectations with regard to the state's protective role against potential threats. to be sure, governments will be eager to make sure that they are better prepared to face any future health crises, but expectations and possible measures may extend well beyond this specifi c area. an important open question is to what extent it will transform perceptions and policies regarding climate change and, more generally, sustainable development. after all, even though a direct causation cannot be established in the present case, this pandemic can be viewed as a cautionary tale about the dangers for mankind of disrupting ecological equilibria. finally, the role of the state in the economy is already being altered in practice as a result of the support programmes carried out to prevent the pandemics and the ensuing lockdown measures from wreaking havoc on their productive systems. these programmes are extraordinary in their size and in the scope of the measures involved, including guaranteed loans, bailouts, direct or indirect subsidisation, with partial or complete nationalisations likely in several cases. they profoundly alter the practices in most economies and change the background against which disciplines have been considered and discussed for years, particularly in relation while the woeful absence of us leadership in the pandemic response can only add to the strategic rivalry between the two countries, increased tension is also visible in the trade arena, as witnessed by the us administration's tightening of the rules restricting exports of sensitive products to china. the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of epic proportions, in health as well as in economic terms. as such, it will probably leave a lasting imprint upon perceptions. since personal experience infl uences risk taking behaviours (e.g. malmendier et al., ; koudjis and voth, ) , it is likely that this crisis will increase risk aversion among a number of decision makers for a long time. this infl uence might lead to a reconsideration of effi ciency-robustness trade-offs, potentially altering fi rms' international strategies. this has led to debates and questions surrounding vulnerabilities of global value chains (gvcs), and in various cases to calls to relocate production in order to boost resilience. as miroudot ( ) emphasises, the capacity to maintain production during a crisis is referred to in the management literature as robustness, while resilience refers to the capacity to return quickly to normal operations after a crisis. and on both accounts, the vulnerability of gvcs is questionable compared to alternative, less international and less complex strategies, either in this crisis or in previous ones. however, the most pressing questions raised by the coronavirus crisis about gvc vulnerabilities may not be related to resilience or even robustness, but rather to autonomy and control. indeed, the pandemic shed crude light on the dependence of many advanced countries upon a very limited number of suppliers -frequently mainly upon china -to procure critical products such as active pharmaceutical ingredients, reagents or even personal protective equipment. to assess the uncertainties created by such a situation, one has to take into account not only the risk of disruption of production in a given area (which, after all, is no less at home than abroad), but also threats like trade confl icts or disruption in the transportation sector. with rising international tensions, such dependence might increasingly be seen as a weakness. firms might consider hedging this risk as well, which may lead them to re-assess their strategies, giving more weight to the benefi t of diversifi ed and easily controllable providers. changes in the role of the state in the economy from the state point of view, increased awareness of such situations of dependence raises concerns of strategic autonomy -understood in a broad sense -since it jeopardises its capacity to independently fulfi l missions of vital importance. since such issues were already high on the policy agenda before the coronavirus crisis, in particular in the eu, the consistency of the multilateral trading system is currently jeopardised by the failure to maintain two of its overarching principles: transparency and enforceability. safeguarding them is a priority. ensuring transparency requires that members live up to their notifi cation obligations. unfortunately, in many areas, notification obligations have been met with very long delays, when they have not been purely and simply ignored. this was the case, for instance, when the chair of the wto committee on subsidies and countervailing measures told members at a meeting in that compliance with the obligation to notify subsidies "remains discouragingly low". judging by the recent wto information on export-restrictive measures, the problem is far from being resolved: on april, only out of members (counting the eu as one) had notifi ed the wto of the measures they introduced since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis (wto, , ). more political emphasis should be put on the necessity of accurate and timely notifications, as well as substantial deliberation, as preconditions for an orderly trading system. the binding adjudication of trade dispute settlement, widely lauded as one of the main achievements of the wto, is now paralysed by the us veto on the appointment of appellate body members. while the multiparty interim arbitration agreement is a poor substitute for this institution, it consists of several major players from the trading system, including the eu, china and brazil. as such, it is a useful temporary solution to retain some enforceability, and hopefully to create positive dynamics, making it possible at some point to get the appellate body back to normal operation. until then, it should be maintained and, to the extent possible, reinforced. in addition to these cross-cutting principles, strengthening disciplines on export restrictions is another priority. while article xi ( § .a) of the general agreement on tariffs and trade (gatt) allows "export prohibitions or restrictions temporarily applied to prevent or relieve critical shortages of foodstuffs or other products essential", their use is especially costly for trading partners, particularly infl ammatory in times of crisis, and rarely serves meaningful purposes. agreement should be sought whereby exporters refrain from resorting to export restrictions, even though the enforceability of such commitments is notoriously diffi cult to achieve because they tend to be used as emergency responses to crisis situations, in a temporality that is incompatible with rules-based dispute settlement, at least in the existing form. to industrial subsidies and state-owned enterprises (soes). as a matter of fact, several of these measures are probably in breach of commitments made in the wto agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures (scm). this is fully understandable given the circumstances, but it modifi es signifi cantly and, in all likelihood, for a long time, the background against which the highly sensitive question of industrial subsidies and soes will be discussed in the years to come. the bottom line is grim for the rules-based trading system: exacerbated tensions will make it all the more diffi cult to propose a coordinated response to the need to adapt public policies to the exceptional circumstances created by the covid- crisis and to lasting pressures to protect domestic producers. worse, these threats materialise in a context where the multilateral trading system was already destabilised not only by the ongoing trade war between the us and china but also, and more deeply, by its inability to address the structural challenges raised by the transformation of the world economy since the marrakech agreement was signed in (jean, ) . the pandemic and the ensuing structural changes can only add to the feeling that wto rules have been conceived in a context that differs substantially from the one we are living in, increasing the risk of a loss of legitimacy. the rules-based trading system is threatened with irrelevance, and the inability of the wto to play an active role in coordinating responses since the outbreak of the crisis does not help to assuage these concerns. lessons about the costs and dangers of disorderly responses to trade tensions had been learnt the hard way in the interwar period. preserving coordination and stability in international trade relationships is thus more essential now than ever and should be the priority of any european trade policy response. it is, however, utterly challenging, both because of the frailty of the existing multilateral trading system and because of the necessity to make trade a lever, not an obstacle, to legitimise public objectives such as health, security and sustainable development. a rigid application of existing rules is unlikely to work, given their eroded legitimacy and the fl aws already apparent in their enforcement. a multilateral agreement to reform the wto would be the best solution that would allow for an updating of the rules, organising of mutually profi table grand bargains and coordinating of responses to global challenges. unfortunately, it is clearly out of reach in the near future. a more pragmatic approach is needed, building upon political understandings and piecemeal reform, combining all available levels of political dialogue -at the wto but also in the g and other international forums -so as to retain the trading system's consistency, but also to allow it more fl exibility. forum mote sustainable development are not stymied by excessively rigid trade disciplines. finally, the changes entailed by the pandemic on the role of the state in the economy make it even more necessary than before to tackle the question of industrial subsidies and soes. this issue was already a central point of contention between big trading powers before the pandemic, with china as the main focal point, in a context marked by the lack of transparency and by the importance of subsidies in some industrial sectors (jean and nicolas, ) . the sanitary crisis and ensuing massive public support plans are only adding to these concerns. in order to avoid a negativesum competition game between subsidising programmes, a coordinated approach is urgent. an agreement, let alone new rules, is probably out of reach in the short term. however, enhancing transparency and deliberation might be a useful fi rst step to at least assess the situation more accurately. discussions about the respective merits and shortcomings of different types of public support could follow. the public support programmes being carried out in response to the coronavirus crisis are not going to vanish overnight as the present exceptional situation is here to stay at least for some time. seeking agreed rules intended to minimise their distortive impacts is probably the most pragmatic approach to preserve some coordination in this area. in the longer term, it is the articulation between state and market that needs to be reconsidered in the multilateral trading system, but this is a daunting challenge that cannot be expected to be dealt with quickly. the covid- pandemic carries heavy threats, and preserving stable and coordinated international trade relations will be essential to avoid catastrophic disorders or confl icts. the eu has an important role to play in defending the multilateral consistency, while also promoting fl exibility. at least in an initial stage, damage control should be the main focus, but this crisis will also make it necessary to reconsider how trade disciplines should be articulated with other public policy objectives. given the intense pressure that the crisis has put on the multilateral trading system, improved fl exibility is also required. the rules must not only be acceptable to stakeholders, they should also be consistent with vital public policy objectives such as health, security and sustainable development. this principle is already explicit in wto agreements and, for instance, the objective of "allowing for the optimal use of the world's resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development" is emphasised in the fi rst paragraph of the preamble of the agreement establishing the wto. given the situation described above, however, it is fundamental to clarify the articulation between trade disciplines and other public policy objectives. as mentioned above, the covid- crisis has shed light on the specifi city of critical products, and as a result, public policies are primarily guided by the need to respond to citizens' demands for protection and security. while defense and food products are already treated as exceptions for this reason, health-related products and digital infrastructures are not. agreements leaving more space for state intervention for these products should be considered. irrespective of opinions about the right policy response to these concerns, it should be recognised that organising public policies so as to secure due availability of the corresponding resources is up to each state and that the corresponding objectives have precedence on trade rules. this principle is actually consistent with gatt article xx (general exceptions), stating inter alia that "nothing in this agreement shall be construed to prevent the adoption or enforcement by any contracting party of measures: … (b) necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health". however, the conditions of application of these general exceptions are very strict, making their use diffi cult in practice. the predictability and usability of these provisions could be greatly enhanced by coordination on the interpretation of what policies are authorised. an agreement specifi cally focusing on the limited scope of products concerned could even be sought to go beyond such interpretation, in particular in the case of health products. the same logic should prevail with regards to policies tackling climate change. while responses to this existential challenge are second to none in importance, institutional asymmetries between subject areas have de facto created what johnson ( ) calls the structural supremacy of trade law over environmental law (bellora et al., ) . this is increasingly troublesome, especially as global environmental challenges are looming larger. the rules on general exceptions and their interpretations should be clarifi ed to make sure that efforts to combat climate change and pro- hysteresis in trade the globotics upheaval: globalisation, robotics and the future of work trade and biodiversity covid- : demand spikes, export restrictions, and quality concerns imperil poor country access to medical supplies china's factory defl ation deepens as pandemic hits demand beliefs and leverage: personal experience and risk taking in margin lending, cepr discussion paper depression babies: do macroeconomic experiences affect risk taking? resilience versus robustness in global value chains: some policy implications imported inputs, irreversibility, and international trade dynamics staggering' collapse in infl ation expectations may force fed's hand markets point to defl ation risks for us economy export prohibitions and restrictions, information note uk-china-economy-infl ation/chinas-factory-defl ation-deepens-aspandemic-hits-demand-idukkbn o co preparing for a second wave of covid- a trade bargain to secure supplies of medical goods rethinking the global food crisis: the role of trade shocks international trade disagreements: beyond trump, politique étrangère the 'phase one deal': a truce that creates more problems than it solves international trade: rekindling interest in a multilateral rules-based approach information revelation and structural supremacy: the world trade organization's incorporation of environmental policy longer-run economic consequences of pandemics key: cord- -hspek authors: timmis, kenneth; brüssow, harald title: the covid‐ pandemic: some lessons learned about crisis preparedness and management, and the need for international benchmarking to reduce deficits date: - - journal: environ microbiol doi: . / - . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: hspek nan if, despite the explicit warning of the world health organization in that 'the world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public-health emergency' (https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/wha /a _ en.pdf), it was not apparent to those in charge, and to the general public-i.e., those suffering from covid- infections and the funders of health services (tax/insurance payers)-that existing health systems had inherent vulnerabilities which could prove to be devastating when seriously stressed, the sars-cov- pandemic (e.g., see brüssow, ) has brutally exposed it now. in some countries, preparedness, despite being officially considered to be of strong operational readiness against health emergencies (kandel et al., ) , was inadequate at multiple levels (e.g., horton, ) . similarly, a fundamental lack of preparedness is the case for a number of impending non-health crises (e.g., global warming, poverty, the soil crisis, etc.). once we are over the covid- pandemic, important questions will be: what have we learned/can we learn and how can we improve our systems? below, we argue for the necessity for major realignment of crisis responsiveness, and indeed of health system operationality, based on international benchmarking and adequately funded preparedness. international benchmarking is mandatory, because it has become clear that there is a wide range of effectiveness in the ability of different countries with developed economies to respond to this crisis (and probably others), and the tax-paying public has no compelling reason to tolerate perpetuation of factors underlying poor responses to crises. disparity in country/regional responses to sars-cov- leaving aside for the moment decisions about whether to robustly contain the outbreak-to kill it by throttling-the classical strategy of infection control, but which leaves most of the population susceptible to a new outbreak, or attempt to manage an outbreak to achieve herd immunity and a population unsusceptible to a repeat outbreak, it is obviously imperative to know how the outbreak is spreading and how effective are any containment measures that are instituted, so that a change in course of action remains an option. widespread testing for the viral pathogen, with correct sampling and analysis procedures, is thus essential. this enables, inter alia, calculation of reliable mortality (case fatality) rates, which ordinarily play a key role in determining crisis response policy, calculation of the basic reproduction number, r , and reliable modelling of transmission and mortality trends. there have been enormous differences in testing coverages among countries. early predictions of transmission and mortality trends are only as good as the adequacy of the information fed into models so, with inadequate testing, prediction of trends are unreliable. mortality-based policy formulation for sars-cov- responses in some countries was based on incomplete information. • diagnostics and widespread testing are the basis of informed policy development for crisis management of infectious disease epi/pandemics and must become its centrepiece the disparity of sars-cov- testing coverage in different countries is much discussed but the reasons are sometimes rather opaque. there are many tests available (e.g., see https://www.finddx.org/covid- /pipeline/), so one bottleneck would appear to be a limitation in authorized testing facilities. scaling up testing in existing official centres requires not only acquisition of the appropriate instrumentation and reagents, but also of competent personnel disposing of the necessary expertise, which may constitute a bottleneck. however, it is abundantly clear that the instrumentation and expertise needed to carry out sars-cov- testing are widespread in academic research laboratories, as is the eagerness of many research groups to contribute to efforts to combat the pandemic. while issues of safety, quality control, logistics, data reporting and security and so on, need to be addressed, a failure in some countries to harness early in the crisis the expertise and enthusiasm of young researchers to fulfil a key need and, with it, the opportunity to acquire data that could have resulted in responses that saved lives, is regrettable. paradoxically, while there have been frantic efforts to open new hospital facilities to accommodate covid- patients, and to recruit the health professionals needed to operate them, there has been an indiscriminate closing of research institutes capable of carrying out diagnostic work, and thus of identifying infected and, importantly for frontline health professionals, non-infected individuals. • rapidly developing pandemics necessitate rapid responses. getting diagnostics and testing facilities up and running that are able to handle large numbers of samples are key to efforts to manage the disease. crisis preparedness demands not only formulation of strategies to enable rapid scale up official facilities, but also advance identification of relevant available resources outside of the health system, and strategies of how to promptly and effectively harness them. widespread testing for viral rna must be complemented by widespread testing, or at least the testing of sentinels of the population, for anti-viral antibodies. this is essential for relating the dynamics of infection to virus shedding (being infectious = infective for others) and to symptom development. and if (and this is a big if) the presence of antiviral antibodies reflects protective immunity, antibody testing is essential for herd immunity policy scenarios, to provide the data needed for monitoring and modelling immune population densities/granularity, and also for identification of those in the population who are in principle protected and hence able to return to normality and spearhead safe exit strategies from lockdown measures. • contingency planning requires identification of facilities or alliances able to promptly develop, produce in quantity and distribute easy-to-use antiviral antibody tests. patients having contracted covid- are grouped into three categories: in the china outbreak, % experienced mild, % severe and % critical infections (wu and mcgoogan, ) . for those requiring hospitalization, and those with the most acute symptoms requiring intensive care, two key variables in treatment capacity seem to be bed availability generally, and in intensive care units particularly (images of patients lying on the floors of some hospitals made this abundantly clear to the entire world), on one hand, and ventilator/intubation tube availability for patients needing intubation, on the other. there are enormous differences between countries in terms the availability of hospital beds/ population (e.g., japan . , germany . , france . , switzerland . , italy . , uk/canada/denmark . , india . : https:// data.oecd.org/healtheqt/hospital-beds.htm), icu beds/ population, and numbers of available ventilators/intubation tubes (here, ventilators can be considered a proxy for any other clinical device that may be needed in a health crisis). an insufficiency of beds (and often health professionals) also resulted in 'non-critical' interventions being postponed in some countries, and who, among critically ill patients suffering from different ailments, should be given an icu bed. there are different reasons for insufficient beds and clinical devices. but the fact remains: some countries manage better than others; some countries do not have enough beds for even small increases representing normal fluctuations in patient needs and anticipated seasonal variations, let alone exceptional demands made by epidemics. • it is essential to increase bed, especially icu bed, capacities in many countries, in order to reduce stress situations where patients cannot receive required treatment, and to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed in times of crisis, when there is a spike in patients requiring hospitalization. one new development triggered by the covid- pandemic was the creation of so-called 'fangcang shelter hospitals'-rapidly constructed, large scale, low cost, temporary hospitals, by converting existing public venues into healthcare facilities in wuhan to manage the rapidly increasing covid- patient numbers (chen et al., ) . instead of being delivered to regular hospitals, covid- patients were sent to shelter hospitals, where they were isolated and received basic medical care and frequent monitoring. patients whose mild disease state transitioned to severe were then transferred to regular hospitals where they received intensive care. although new emergency hospitals have been created in other countries, the purpose of these is generally to receive spillover from traditional hospitals, when these become overwhelmed by patient numbers. the purpose of fangcang shelter hospitals is, in contrast, to centralize clinical management of the epi/pandemic outside of the traditional hospital system. covid- patients are channelled to shelter hospitals, thereby minimizing viral ingress into hospitals and infection of health professionals, and helping to maintain staffing levels and normal functioning of outpatient and inpatient facilities. it is important to note that shelter hospitals constitute low-cost clinical settings-they require fewer health professionals and diagnostic-treatment infrastructure than normal hospitals, because all patients have the same clinical issue and most have only mild-to-moderate disease-and thereby relieve pressure on traditional hospitals with sophisticated infrastructure in limited capacity that constitute high-cost clinical settings (the creation of parallel low-cost clinical settings to relieve pressure on limited capacity high cost clinical settings is more broadly applicable over and above epi/pandemic response situations: see timmis and timmis, , for an example in primary healthcare). • shelter hospitals should be incorporated into pandemic planning as the primary destination for pandemic patients, to allow traditional hospitals to continue functioning as normal as possible (or normally as long as possible). it may seem so trivially obvious to say, but obviously needs saying because it was not apparent from the health system responses of a number of countries: those most at risk of infection are those in contact with the infected, i.e., front-line doctors and nurses. and as they become infected, the numbers of available health professionals left to treat patients goes down as patient numbers go up. and, of course, infected health professionals become transmitters of infection among one another, and to uninfected patients, since in the hectic reality of emergencies, they may not always be able to practice adequate physical distancing. this obviously means that the greatest protection from infection must be accorded the front-line professionals. however, there were substantive differences between countries in terms of the availability and use of best practice protective clothing (personal protective equipment, ppe) in the early days of the covid- crisis; these differences were mainly in different degrees of deficiencies. the incomplete protection of front-line health professionals that occurred in a number of countries in the early days of the crisis, and that resulted in many infections and some deaths, is an unacceptable deficit in their health systems, particularly since the covid- outbreak was, from end of january , a predictable disaster of international magnitude. then there are those one might designate accessory front-line professionals: those who transport infected individuals, like ambulance drivers, non-medical workers in hospitals, and so forth, carers ministering to people in care homes or in private homes, and others like some pharmacy and supermarket staff who, because of the nature of their work, come into physical contact with many people and cannot always achieve prescribed physical distancing. these are also particularly vulnerable to infection and to becoming infection transmitters. since the people they care for are, because of their ages and underlying morbidities, often themselves particularly vulnerable to severe outcomes, infected carers may, unknowingly and unwillingly, become 'angels of death'. accessory front-line professionals thus also require best ppe. there are wide regional and occupational differences in the availability and use of such clothing by these professionals. in addition to the issue of ppe, there is the issue of hygiene in the workplace-the surfaces that become contaminated and sources of infection. while traditionally these have been cleaned by auxiliary staff, such people are themselves at considerable risk of being infected in such environments and, as a result, there may be an insufficient number to continue carrying out this task, thereby raising infection risk. robots are in principle able to carry out various mechanical operations, so might take an increasing share in disinfection of high-risk, high touch areas (e.g., robot-controlled noncontact ultraviolet surface disinfection), and indeed other hospital tasks, such as delivering medications and food, diagnostic sample collection and transport, and so forth, (yang et al., ) , that may reduce both the work burden of overstretched staff and their infection risk. • the incorporation of robots into appropriate hospital operations should be energetically explored leadership in times of crisis is crucial to ongoing damage limitation and outcome severity, quite apart from its importance in planning crisis preparedness. although we need to look back when all this is over, and take stock of what went right, what was wrong, and what went wrong (i.e., to perform a gap analysis), at this point it seems that most countries were on their own, acting largely independently of others during the sars-cov- outbreak, at least in the early days. however, a pandemic is by definition an international crisis, requiring an international response (national-self-interest-policies may even be counterproductive in times of pandemics). extensive and effective cooperation, coordination and sharing of resources were not evident (e.g., see herszenhorn and wheaton, ) . leadership quality and effectiveness varies significantly among countries and among relevant international agencies. where leadership is suboptimal, dissemination of misinformation flourishes, and people are subjected to unnecessary levels of uncertainty and associated stress. • effective and decisive, biomedical science-guided, national and international leadership and coordination is absolutely crucial in pandemics, to prevent-hindermanage-minimize damage, acquire-integrate-learn from collective experience, make recommendations for crisis management, publish best practice procedures and standards. there is significant room for improvement. it is well known that experts have been warning of impending deadly epi/pandemics, including coronavirus outbreaks, for a long time (e.g., turinici and danchin, ; ge et al., ; menachery et al., ; https:// www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_ not_ready?language=en; editorial ( ) predicting pandemics, lancet doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - ; https://apps.who.int/gpmb/assets/annual_ report/gpmb_annualreport_ .pdf; https://www. weforum.org/agenda/ / /a-visual-history-ofpandemics/). now while the nature, evolution, timing and source of novel emerging infectious agents is uncertain, pandemics are always counteracted by the same timehonoured strategy: interruption of infection chains and anticipation of a surge in need for treatment of acute disease (here, we are nearly in the same situation as in the world confronted by spanish flu in ). we, therefore, only need one epidemic preparedness. despite this, the sars-cov- outbreak has clearly exposed how unprepared we were. there are multiple reasons for this, including. contingency planning is long term, lacks immediacy and 'wow factor' and so may not always enjoy high political priority, and thus is often neglected a primordial responsibility of government is to protect its citizens. this includes effective contingency planning for pandemics. however, due to the global nature of pandemics, coordination with neighbours (and factoring in potential flashpoints located more distantly, such as refugee camps in greece and elsewhere, which could become, if not cared for, sources of a second wave of infection when the first is over), and intergovernmental cooperation is essential. adequate contingency planning for deadly and devastating infectious disease outbreaks is not an optional policy, and the public have the right to insist on it, even if it becomes politically or economically expedient to neglect. for the public-the key stakeholders in this-transparency is essential and it must have access to information on the current state of preparedness, and future plans of government, and those of different political parties during election campaigns. trusted biomedical science organizations must support the public in this by providing expert scrutiny and assessment. governments must become accountable for the efforts they make to protect us. • governments must engage the public in issues of crisis preparedness and publish their contingency plans for scrutiny. • scientific organizations should have press/web groups that become trusted sources for evidencebased information for the public. catastrophe prediction/management expertise is not always at the heart of government, and thus able to inform and influence policy governments establish the presence of experts in key posts for topics they consider to be vital for informed policy and legislative activities. such experts exert an influence in policy development by providing input that is upto-the-minute in a changing world. while some governments contain epidemic/catastrophe experts, others do not. without such expertise, responses to catastrophes will generally be slow, ad hoc and inadequate, as has been the case in some countries in responding to the sars-cov- outbreak. for governments to fulfil their responsibilities to protect their citizens, it is essential that they have expert-informed contingency planning. learned societies and academies also have a major responsibility to seek to inform and influence government. the royal society, uk, and the american society for microbiology exemplify strategic influencing of national and international policy; other learned societies could be more proactive. • expert scientists must be embedded in the heart of government to enable development of evidencebased informed policies contingency planning involves inter alia the acquisition and maintenance of resources, such as beds, icu capacity, stocks of ventilators, protective clothing, and so forth, in the case of pandemics (e.g., kain and fowler, ) , that are by definition surplus to day-to-day requirements, and that will only be used if and when the catastrophe occurs. it also includes the development of generic platforms for rapid responses; in the case of pandemics, the development and testing of diagnostics, vaccine candidates, and effective treatments (see also below). this entails a significant recurring budgetary commitment. political and economic viewpoints that such costs are not cost-effective are fundamentally flawed because they generally only take into account the immediate cost elements, not the potential overall cost of the crisis and all its knock-on effects. these are being brutally revealed by the unfolding sars-cov- outbreak which, at this still early stage, is involving governmental support of national economies amounting collectively to trillions of dollars. and this is only the tip of the economic iceberg. bankruptcies, loss of employment, recession, loss of tax revenues, large scale deterioration of existing medical conditions in populations, potentially wide-scale deterioration of mental health, and so forth, and the economic costs of these, also need to be taken into account when reflecting on the cost of the contingency planning insurance policy. as an illustration of knock-on effects, global economic estimates of the benefits of vaccination have also shown that they extend well beyond those estimated from prevention of the specific disease in vaccinated individuals (bloom, ) . it is also worth comparing crisis preparedness costs with military expenditures. the latter are indeed budgetary commitments for preparedness for another type of crisis, namely a military conflict (excepting countries that use their military for internal affairs). and, as is the case in epi/pandemic preparedness, a considerable fraction of military resources is dedicated to surveillance operations. while accepting that military expenditures are also justified in terms of deterrence of hostile actions, and a multitude of non-combat roles armed forces may undertake, it is not self-evident that future military conflicts may result in losses of life and economic damage as high as the current covid- pandemic. in any case, in terms of protecting citizens, it should be abundantly clear that effective contingency preparedness for pandemics, and other crises, should be equated with military preparedness, and budgeted accordingly. • the principle of citizen protection demands that governments budget for adequate crisis preparedness in the same way that they budget for military preparedness. it is simply one of several essential 'insurance premiums' to which the state must commit. from earlier infectious disease outbreaks, we can assume that the most probable source of a new pandemic will be an animal virus, probably a coronavirus, whose natural host is a wild animal, possibly a bat (e.g., see brüssow, ) , that mutates and, as a result, becomes infectious for humans, or for an intermediate host, from which it subsequently jumps to humans. close contacts between humans and the animal host provide the opportunities for transmission. reducing such close contacts will reduce the probability of spillover and thus of an outbreak. close contacts between wild animals and humans occur in wet markets in asia, small-scale mixed farming activities with ducks and pigs, and so forth, or when humans encroach into wildlife habitats, e.g., through ecotourism, or destroy wildlife habitats for economic activities, forcing wildlife to enter human habitats (e.g., the destruction of rainforest for palm oil cultivation appears to have catalyzed a nipah virus outbreak; brüssow, ) . in any case, although pathogen:host interactions underlying disease are generally well studied, current knowledge about the ecology of infectious agentswhere pathogens are and what they are doing prior to infection of humans, especially those having alternative hosts, and how they are circulating and evolving new pathogenic and host-range potentialis inadequate. in order to transit from response mode to pro-active ecological measures to prevent outbreaks from occurring, there needs to be a major research effort to obtain a fundamental understanding of pathogen ecology (see e.g. timmis, ) . • greater efforts are needed to reduce human:wildlife contacts and habitat overlaps, in order to decrease the probability of viral pandemics • effective outbreak prevention measures require acquisition of fundamental knowledge about pathogen ecology contingency planning and the public memory. it is human nature that, once this crisis is over, people, except those who lost loved ones, employment, and so forth, will generally want to forget it as quickly as possible and get back to normal. the number of individuals who try to keep it in the forefront of memory, in order to institute new measures that adequately protect us from the next crisis, and there will undoubtedly be new crises (see above), will be few and far between. some, not all, leading politicians who now (often for the first time) insist that their responses are being guided by the best scientific evidence and advice, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, will quietly shed themselves of their scientific credentials and revert to business as usual, even when unpleasant issues like global warming, the antibiotic resistance crisis, our vulnerability to terrorist and cyber-attacks, again come to the fore. in order that our collective memory retains the crucial need for crisis preparedness, it is essential that each year governments publish updated and independently audited contingency plans. literacy. and the public-the central stakeholders in, and funders of, government policy/actions-must be able to understand the issues and personally evaluate the sometimes vague policy statements they hear. to do this, society must become knowledgeable about/literate in such things. in the case of infectious disease crises, such as the one currently ravaging humanity, and the contingency plans necessary for these, literacy in relevant microbiology topics is, as we have previously argued, essential (timmis et al., ) . interrupting the transmission chain in a pandemic may require lock-down, which imposes major personal sacrifices on the public, including confinement: loss of freedom of movement/social activities/family visits; closure of workplaces/loss of employment and income, resulting in economic hardship/increases in debt; closure of schools/ places of worship/hospitality venues/fitness studios/clubs of all sorts; restrictions on shopping; and elevated stress/ worsening of psychiatric conditions. it is, therefore, crucial that such measures are accepted and supported by the public. for this, people must be engaged and presented with coherent lock-down plans that are convincingly justified, in order to solicit compliance, solidarity and sharing of responsibilities. federal structures, like those in the usa, germany and switzerland may lead to uncoordinated actions in different parts of the country that are unsettling and unconvincing, because the public perceives them as arbitrary. such countries require coherent national plans that are consistent for the entire country. of course, all people in lock-down want an exit as soon as possible, and it is essential for governments to develop and communicate as soon as possible their exit strategy, and the determining parameters and assumptions upon which it is based. interestingly, some members of the public favour staggered exit plans, which implies a willingness to accept an infection risk. it will, therefore, be important for the government to have a public discussion on different risk scenarios, to obtain, present and discuss human/economic cost:benefit estimates (e.g., human lives against cost in loss of income /economic prosperity underlying the lock-down versus herd immunity approach-how much unemployment averts how many deaths or years of productive life when considering the age structure of death). and this discussion needs to take place in the context of the probabilities of loss of life through other adverse causes, such as annual influenza epidemics. family-friend contacts with terminally ill patients. one of the most shocking aspects of the covid- pandemic is the daily reporting of relatives of terminally ill patients who are unable to be with their loved ones at the end, and to pay last respects before burial. while this may be understandable in the context of patient isolation, social distancing, and the unbelievable hectic in overwhelmed icus, serious effort should be made to find a solution, perhaps moving terminally ill patients to an environment that permits both end-of-life patient care and limited safe contact with loved ones. • governments must publish annual audited overviews of the national state of crisis preparedness, with critical analyses of its strengths and weaknesses and plans to address the weaknesses • governments and education ministries must raise public awareness of crisis potential and promote understanding of key elements of crisis management, inter alia through investing in school curricula changes and public information campaigns that increase literacy in topics such as microbiology and public health • governments should involve civil society in discussing restrictive measures because this increases compliance and the solidarity to shoulder the consequences. achievement of optimal preparedness for, and operational responses to, a pandemic demands two things: international benchmarking and transparency/accountability in health systems (and of those who regulate and finance them). this includes chains of command and shared administrative responsibilities, procurement services, reliance on external suppliers of essential materials, and so forth. the disparities in responses we have listed above, that demonstrate significant differences between countries in the ability to respond to pandemics, are not justifiable in terms of operational efficiency, protection of frontline professionals, clinical outcome, and so forth, and cannot be allowed to persist, to be manifested again in future crises. health systems worldwide largely operate within narrow national perspectives, with little interest in better systems elsewhere. we urgently need objective and transparent benchmarking, and automatic mandating of adoption of the best practices in the world, where feasible. transparency and convincing justification for failure to adopt the benchmark must become the norm. of course, different health systems operate in different frameworks-payers, insurance, authorization and recommendation agencies, and so forth-but the tail cannot be allowed to wag the dog. existing frameworks can no longer be accepted as default excuses not to improve. they must be adapted to allow adoption of the benchmarks, where possible, not the other way round. in the final analysis, there are only two elements relevant: the person in the icu, who pays tax/insurance, and hence for the health system, and the government, which is responsible for health system functioning/evolution and protection of its citizens. both of their goals are in principle aligned, so there should be no controversy: provision of the best achievable health system that is adequately prepared for catastrophic pandemics. • governments and health systems must subject national health systems, and national health system crisis preparedness, to international benchmark scrutiny, and transparently strive for attainment of best international standards. it is the responsibility of government to protect its citizens and the role of industry to innovate and create commercial products and services. these two goals are not always aligned for current clinical exigences. but to provide a vital health system, government and industry must align and form alliances that create synergies. there are, of course, many successful examples of such beneficial alliances. however, there is sometimes an unrealistic perception of the role of industry, particularly by some governments when confronted with a crisis for which they are not prepared, as articulated in the generic cry: why do not we have a vaccine for this, why do not we have a drug for that? for example, regulatory and payment hurdles incentivize industry to develop cancer drugs rather than antimicrobials, so it is irrational and unwarranted to complain about the poor state of pipelines for new antivirals in the time of covid- , of antimicrobials in the time of the antimicrobial resistance crisis. if industry is to realign its research priorities towards current clinical priorities, it needs incentives to do so, e.g., through adequately funded creative governmentindustry-academia-clinical-regulatory strategic alliances. we have previously proposed a mechanism to create novel pipelines for accelerated discovery of new drugs and diagnostics (timmis et al., ; and, simultaneously, to promote long-term revival of struggling economies, interestingly in response to a financial crisis-that of -which the sars-cov- pandemic will again unleash with considerable severity). this proposal calls for the use of infrastructure budgets (not overstretched research-education-health budgets) to be targeted to the creation of new strategic national/ regional alliances between (i) cell biology and microbial diversity research groups, to discover and develop new diagnostics, drug targets and assays, and new drug leads from new microbes, (ii) biochemical engineers, chemists and pharma, to produce, evaluate and develop drug candidates, (iii) pharma, clinical research and regulatory agencies to assess clinical efficacy and safety of, and develop new drug candidates. in the context of the sars-cov- pandemic, an alliance between virology, cell biology, microbial diversity, and synthetic microbiology groups in upstream discovery would accelerate new antiviral discovery and populate antiviral drug pipelines, but also pipelines of new antimicrobials urgently needed for the treatment of bacterial superinfections responsible for some of the covid- mortalities. and: while advanced age, underlying co-morbidities and infection dose are identified as predisposing factors for development of severe covid- disease, deaths among young healthy individuals also occur for reasons currently unknown. once predisposing factors for this group have been elucidated, diagnostics to identify young people at risk, especially those most exposed to sars-cov- , will be needed in order to reduce their exposure. vaccines, despite their proven value in protecting against disease and their much-heralded pivotal importance for lockdown exit and herd immunity, are the cinderellas of clinical practice and, in normal times, not only attract little interest from governments but also are controversial, due to negative publicity from vociferous anti-vaccine groups propagating unfounded claims. the development and use of a number of current vaccines/vaccine candidates are orchestrated and funded, not by industry and public health systems, but by philanthropic organizations, like the gates foundation, working with agencies like cepi (coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations) and gavi (global alliance for vaccines and immunizations). indeed, the gates foundation is also playing a leading role in the search for, and development of, a vaccine against covid- (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ media-center/press-releases/ / /bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-dedicates-additional-funding-to-the-novel-coronavirus-response). however, it is the duty of national governments and international organizations, as part of their pandemic preparedness, to finance vaccine development platforms that are able to rapidly create new vaccines in response to an outbreak. once a new vaccine candidate is shown to be safe and protective, its rapid large-scale production and distribution requires the infrastructure of large pharmaceutical companies. as epidemics cannot be planned, industrial managers cannot be expected to promote projects without a market. governments must therefore intervene to maintain the interest and technical capacity of industry in developing vaccines and antibiotics (a smouldering fire) by creating a market in form of governmental orders. assessments of value-for-money of these strategic alliances must be made in the context of the global costs of pandemics like that of sars-cov- . • pandemic preparedness requires rapid creation, production and distribution of effective materials for diagnosis, prophylaxis and therapy. this necessitates significant long-term investment in research and development involving unconventional alliances of disparate academic science and medical research groups, industry, philanthropic foundations, vaccine enabling coalitions, and crisis preparedness taskforces. there is great diversity in stress resilience (e.g., the ability to deal with peaks of illness) of different health systems, with some being at least regionally overwhelmed during the winter influenza season. the less resilient systems will generally be the first to become overwhelmed in a health crisis. while there are numerous parameters involved in health system resilience, and experts know most of the pinch points and solutions that can deal with these (but also what is uncertain and what needs to be understood before effective 'solutions' can be formulated), three elements worth consideration in efforts to increase health system resilience are discussed here. healthcare systems are by and large extremely large, complex, heavily bureaucratic and fragmented. the often system-wide, multi-level consultations, decisions and responses needed in times of emergencies are challenging and often slow, usually slower than crisis development, which means that healthcare systems follow and react to events, rather than managing them. crises are in some ways analogous to wars, and bureaucracies are not designed to manage wars, which is the job of the military. in crises, we need crisis strategy-tactics specialists, a taskforce with short, well defined and effective chains of command, tasked with overriding normal procedures and taking charge of supply chains and requisitioning of assets, (re)deployment of personnel, organization and prioritization of allocation of infrastructure, managing logistics, and so forth. these could be specially trained taskforces of existing staff within healthcare systems, external taskforces or combinations of both. of course, for taskforces to operate optimally, they, together with the best available scientific minds, must also plan in advance the required resources, supply chains, personnel, strategic options, and so forth. they must also organize regular 'infection games'/public health manoeurvres (https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_ next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en) = crisis 'fire drills', to train nationally and transnationally, refresh skills and explore and anticipate unexpected events to ensure preparedness, so that appropriate responses can be rolled out rapidly anywhere, independently of national borders. another, mandatory, task for the taskforce would be to conduct regular 'stress tests' of healthcare system resilience, as have been instituted for banks to ensure that they have adequate resources (= resilience) to withstand crises. such stress tests should be designed by health experts, epidemiologists-modellers, procurement agencies, representatives of the diagnostics-vaccine-drug industry, and so forth, and the design and implementation of the stress tests overseen by the taskforce. • national crisis task forces consisting of dedicated strategy-tactics specialists need to be established to plan crisis preparedness, make recommendations to improve health system resilience, and carry out regular crisis "fire drills" and stress tests. an important aspect of the sars-cov- outbreak is that, in most countries, it has become more difficult to obtain consultations with primary healthcare clinics/physicians, because of social distancing practices, illness or involvement in crisis management (e.g., see keesara et al., ) . as time goes on, the inability to access many primary healthcare services leads to progressive worsening of existing and new conditions in some individuals. access to primary healthcare, which in some countries was already unsatisfactory before covid- , is becoming a new crisis. this has resulted in the 'flight to the web' for information (sometimes obtaining disinformation in the process): the web is becoming a substitute for clinical consultations, in terms of obtaining information relating to symptoms experienced. this will ultimately have a significant impact on how the public views the computer as a facilitator-mediator of primary healthcare. while classical telemedicine-the ad hoc consultation of a remote, unknown physician who can advise on the symptoms presented-may be helpful in times of inadequate access to regular primary healthcare facilities, it cannot replace clinical advice informed by patient case histories and personal knowledge of the patient. reduced access to primary healthcare below a certain threshold constitutes itself a significant health hazard and is counter to a government's duty to protect its citizens. what to do to increase resilience of primary health care and increase access? one important contribution will be the 'digital healthcare revolution' (keesara et al., ) , i.e., some traditional one-on-one meetings between patient and doctor being replaced by web-based consultations. but also imagine teleconsultations based on (i) complete personal case histories, combined with (ii) up-to-date population epidemiological information, combined with (iii) individual patient best practice recommendations based on precision medicine analyses/predictions: welcome to the national clinical informatics centre (ncic; timmis and timmis, ) , informing in real time a virtual doctor, a clinically-programed, ai-evolving server. this doctor, interfacing with both the patient and ncic, diagnoses according to detailed case history and patient symptom input via computer (and aided, where necessary, by diagnostic information obtained through in-home patient self-diagnosis with apparatus/diagnostic materials promptly delivered by a medical logistics service), and makes treatment recommendations (timmis, ) . in some countries/regions, access to primary healthcare already involves significant waiting periods. the additional restrictions on access to primary healthcare resulting from the sars-cov- outbreak are resulting in further suffering and frustration that will surely make the prospect of a consultation with a virtual doctor providing personalized medicine, who is instantly available / , an increasingly attractive future possibility. of course, many health issues cannot be handled remotely via the web (though the proportion will increase steadily with the development of informatic infrastructure and easy-to-use home diagnostics), and will result in referral to a clinician. but, web-based consultations can significantly reduce numbers of patients requiring clinician consultations and the associated stress on the health system. • it is essential that health systems urgently develop centralized, secure informatic infrastructure needed to underpin web-based machine learning-facilitated precision medicine, and evolve web-based consultations, available on demand / , as an integral mainstream component of primary healthcare services. the current sars-cov- outbreak has brutally exposed the current vulnerability of society to pandemics, even those that have been long predicted and anticipated (ge et al., ; menachery et al., ) . most healthcare systems have not evolved for resilience in times of catastrophe, nor for effective rapid responses to pandemics. a key principle steering evolution has been value-for-money within a fixed budget; contingency planning within this framework (outlays for materials that may never be used) may be considered to be a nuisance that diminishes what can otherwise be done with limited funds, and so to a greater or lesser extent may be postponed. for this reason, it is crucial that budgets for contingency planning are separate from health system budgets. equally important, it has emphasized the fact that some healthcare systems have for a long time been on the edge of the cliff, just waiting for an event to push them over. their adaptation to changing needs has often been through a 'sticking plaster' response. evolution has been ad hoc, via responses to new developments and challenges, and often led to fragmentation rather than coherence. the lessons to be learned are thus not only to take scientifically-founded pandemic predictions seriously into account in policy elaboration, but also to streamline and institute changes in healthcare systems that impose an evolutionary trajectory that increases coherence, efficiency and preparedness, and the necessary mechanisms to maintain these as new exigencies arise (e.g., see timmis and timmis, ) . and, especially because this crisis has revealed enormous disparities in responsiveness, effectiveness and the quality of responses in different countries, both preparedness for pandemics and the general improvement of healthcare mandate international benchmarking for contingency planning and the evolution of healthcare systems. comparisons/benchmarking within countries-within single systems-is no longer acceptable. many healthcare systems need substantive improvements through strategic investments, in most cases targeted to system changes, not just extra funding of existing services. and above all, they need crisis taskforces embedded in them that can prepare for, and take charge in times of, impending catastrophes. another lesson learned is that the sars-cov- outbreak has revealed new synergy potentials, such as the manufacture of ventilators by engineering companies not normally active in the manufacture of medical devices. it is not unreasonable to assume that new innovations can and will emerge from new interactions between creative engineers and clinicians. for example, best practice for breathing difficulty and poor blood oxygenation is intubation and ventilation. the paucity of ventilators is a 'critical control point' for best treatment practice in some hospitals, which has been discussed above. anecdotal evidence suggests that, of those individuals who die, despite best treatment practice involving intubation, the cause of death is often due to superinfection by antibiotic resistant bacteria (vincent et al., ) . the cause of this may indeed be intubation, causing perturbation of normal lung physiology and creating susceptibility to superinfection. there are, however, less invasive means of increasing blood oxygen levels. perhaps engineers, together with clinicians, will devise new or improved non-invasive approaches to blood oxygenation. and once creative engineers from the non-medical field start to expertly scrutinize current medical devices, perhaps we will see new approaches and new designs that significantly advance medical practice. but perhaps the most important lesson learned is about our frontline health professionals ministering to covid- patients, especially those with severe disease. these clinicians and nurses who willingly and selflessly work long, sometimes multiple shifts to the point of utter exhaustion, often not able to see their families for long periods because of the danger of infecting them, always under unbelievable stress working in what are essentially war zones with the accompanying horrors (e.g. see http:// www.sixthtone.com/news/ /i-spent-seven-weeksin-a-wuhan-icu.-heres-what-i-learned?utm_source=sfmc& utm_medium=email&utm_campaign= _agenda_ weekly- april &utm_term=&emailtype=newsletter), sometimes without adequate protective clothing and always in danger of contracting covid- , sometimes becoming infected, and sometimes paying the ultimate price. these are the heroes of the pandemic, the faces of resilience of covid- healthcare, exceptional citizens demonstrating exceptional fortitude, personal sacrifice and professional dedication: they are our role models of the st century. real estimates of mortality following covid- infection valuing vaccines: deficiencies and remedies on viruses, bats and men: a natural history of food-borne viral infections the novel coronavirus-a snapshot of current knowledge fangcang shelter hospitals: a novel concept for responding to public health emergencies isolation and characterisation of a bat sars-like coronavirus that uses the ace receptor offline: covid- and the nhs: "a national scandal preparing intensive care for the next pandemic influenza 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diseases key: cord- -hrxj tcv authors: bunker, deborah title: who do you trust? the digital destruction of shared situational awareness and the covid- infodemic date: - - journal: int j inf manage doi: . /j.ijinfomgt. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: hrxj tcv developments in centrally managed communications (e.g. twitter, facebook) and service (e.g. uber, airbnb) platforms, search engines and data aggregation (e.g. google) as well as data analytics and artificial intelligence, have created an era of digital disruption during the last decade. individual user profiles are produced by platform providers to make money from tracking, predicting, exploiting and influencing their users’ decision preferences and behavior, while product and service providers transform their business models by targeting potential customers with more accuracy. there have been many social and economic benefits to this digital disruption, but it has also largely contributed to the digital destruction of mental model alignment and shared situational awareness through the propagation of mis-information i.e. reinforcement of dissonant mental models by recommender algorithms, bots and trusted individual platform users (influencers). to mitigate this process of digital destruction, new methods and approaches to the centralized management of these platforms are needed to build on and encourage trust in the actors that use them (and by association trust in their mental models). the global ‘infodemic’ resulting from the covid- pandemic of , highlights the current problem confronting the information system discipline and the urgency of finding workable solutions . information system (is) artifacts have been developed and used throughout human history and over time we have witnessed their disruption of business, industry and society. the current wave of digital disruption has been caused by the development of mobile phones (that are really computers), resource sharing services such as uber and airbnb and social media communications platforms that are centrally managed (but socially distributed) like facebook, instagram and twitter. unfortunately, our is development trajectory also now sees us https://doi.org/ . /j.ijinfomgt. . in a time of post-truth , fake news and an 'infodemic' which have wreaked digital destruction and havoc on our shared mental models of what we understand to be real and true i.e. shared situational awareness . it is becoming increasingly difficult to agree on what information represents the reality and truth about crisis events within the echo chamber of social media and the opaque algorithmic biases which underpin platform providers, search engines and data aggregators (bunker, stieglitz, ehnis, & sleigh, ; himelboim, smith, rainie, shneiderman, & espina, ; noble, ; sismondo, ) . fig. shows the current level of concern with fake news about the covid- epidemic from a survey conducted in canada, china, france, germany, india, japan, mexico, saudi arabia, s. korea, u.k. and u.s. (edelman trust barometer, ) . this survey highlights that % of respondents worry that there is a lot of fake news being spread about covid- while % of respondents are having difficulty finding trustworthy and reliable information. if these levels of concern are reflected in the global population at large, then managing an adequate pandemic response through shared situational awareness becomes an impossible task. while profiling is not a new approach to the treatment of data, communications and service platform providers and data aggregators have found new ways of combining the techniques of individual user profiling (iup), data analytics (da) and artificial intelligence (ai) to monetize the vast amounts of data that have been increasingly generated by their users (liozu & ulaga, ) . iup, da and ai are applied to better understand, influence or manipulate an individual's opinions and social, political and economic behavior through 'nudging' mechanisms (lanzing, ) . this approach to profiling is a powerful tool (zuboff, ) which is used to exploit the individual, their decisions and behavior for financial gain, but which does not effectively address issues of critical and optimal decision making and behavior for societal and group benefit e.g. pandemic management. this is due to the creation of mental model dissonance through the misinformation and rumors that are produced and propagated by this approach. for example, in the current covid- pandemic, in order to stop the spread of the virus, health agencies across the globe are urging us to stay socially distant, wash our hands at every opportunity, wear masks (when necessary), and get tested if we develop symptoms. unfortunately, rumors propagated on social media platforms quite often reinforce multiple and conflicting mental models of virus conspiracies, 'quack treatments' and inaccurate information regarding government motivations for lockdowns. this can severely hamper crisis management efforts. some examples of misinformation propagated during the current pandemic include: dissonant mental models are reinforced by recommender algorithms (lanzing, ), bots (mckenna, and trusted individual platform users or influencers (enke & borchers, ) resulting in alarming levels of digital destruction which is turn undermines social cohesion and creates a barrier to shared situational awareness and effective crisis response. we therefore see a tension and conflict arising from: ) the need for alignment of mental models and shared situational awareness to support effective crisis management; and ) the developments of digital disruption, destruction and the facilitation and reinforcement of dissonant mental models through post truth perspectives and conflicting situational awareness. shared situational awareness is developed through the alignment of our mental models to represent a shared version of truth and reality on which we can act. this is an important basis for effective information sharing and decision making in crisis response (salas, stout, and cannon-bowers et al., ) . aligned mental models help us to agree about the authenticity, accuracy, timeliness, relevance and importance of the information being communicated and give concurrence, weight and urgency to decisions and advice. harrald and jefferson ( ) highlight that shared situational awareness implies that "( ) technology can provide adequate information to enable decision makers in a geographically distributed environment to act as though they were receiving and perceiving the same information, ( ) common methods are available to integrate, structure, and understand the information, and ( ) critical decision nodes share institutional, cultural, and experiential bases for imputing meaning to this knowledge" (page ). we know that most crisis management agencies have established, agreed, authenticated and qualified mental models on which they base their internal operational command and control systems. this gives them assurance and governance of the information they produce (bunker, levine, & woody, ) and qualifies their decisions and recommended actions to manage crisis situations. it also engenders public trust in these agencies, to provide relevant and critical crisis information and advice for public action. fig. highlights the current high and increasing levels of trust in government institutions during the covid- "…that truth has been individualized or that individuals have become, to borrow a turn of phrase from foucault, the primary and principal points of the production, application, and adjudication of truth is one important point. that emotion and personal belief are able now to outflank even objective facts and scientific knowledge is another (the claim that literature, for example, has truths to tell has long fallen on deaf ears). their articulation is decisive: with the regime's inflection, even inflation, of the indefinitely pluralized and individualized enunciative i who, by virtue of strong feeling, is able at any moment not only to recognize or know but, also, to tell or speak the truth, truth is privatized and immanitized, its universal and transcendental dimensions nullified altogether. hence, what is true for any one person need not be true for everyone or anyone else; what is true for anyone now need not necessarily be true later" (biesecker, pp - ) . we posit that fake news is, in essence, a two-dimensional phenomenon of public communication: there is the ( ) fake news genre, describing the deliberate creation of pseudojournalistic disinformation, and there is the ( ) fake news label, describing the political instrumentalization of the term to delegitimize news media " (egelhofer & lecheler, page ) ." "an over-abundance of informationsome accurate and some notthat makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it." (who, ) "a concentrated, personally constructed, internal conception, of external phenomena (historical, existing or projected), or experience, that affects how a person acts" (rook, )page . "refers to the degree of accuracy by which one's perception of his current environment mirrors reality." (naval aviation schools command ( ) pandemic (edelman trust barometer, ). when digital destruction produces mental model dissonance shared situational awareness between crisis management agencies and the general public becomes impossible to maintain and communicate (both to and from) due to inconsistencies in what constitutes reality and truth, making crisis response unmanageable. centrally managed communications and service providers and data aggregators treat your personal data as a commodity/resource which they are generally entitled to use as they wish, however, they largely ignore the deeper understanding of the mental models on which data is produced by any one system (bunker, ) . "in the social sciences, in particular, big data can blend wide-scale and finer-grained analytic approaches by providing information about individual behaviour within and across contexts" (tonidandel, king, & cortina, )page . data science harnesses the belief that data created by an individual using different applications or platforms, can be seamlessly combined then analyzed using sophisticated data analytics and ai. conversely, this belief has also fundamentally changed the way that all individuals view and interact with data and information in their daily lives. for instance, our trust in the google maps application on our phone to tell us exactly where we are at any given moment, extends to the belief that all information coming to us via our mobile phones and the applications we choose to use, must be some version of reality or the truth. we selfselect our filters (applications and services) for engagement with the wider world and our reliance on mobile technology and applications to navigate the world is now at an all-time high i.e. . billion or . % of the global population. if we are a social media platform user, however, we can be bombarded with paid advertising or 'nudged' by recommender algorithms to make contact with other platform users, information sites and products and services that are deemed to be relevant to us and part of our 'shared reality' (echterhoff, higgins, & levine, ). nudging performs three functions : meeting platform user ) epistemic; and ) relational needs; and ) adding to the platform owner's profitability'. for instance, the platform user is directed to people, products, information and communities of interest that help them to "achieve a valid and reliable understanding of the world" (levine, ) -pg ; this then fulfills their "desire to affiliate with and feel connected to others" (levine, ) -pg ; and ; platform owners and managers (and their influential users) then make lots of money selling targeted advertising by directing platform users in this way. this might be a desirable situation when sharing situational awareness within a social media platform community of interest where mental models align, but when combined with platform characteristics like user anonymity and lack of information assurance, then treating a social media platform as a trusted information source for shared situational awareness becomes problematic. for example, social media platform users can be a valuable source of eyewitness information for crisis management agencies to enhance the production of shared situational awareness for crisis decision making. social media information when generated in large volumes in a crisis, however, is difficult to process. the source of the information can take time to identify and authenticate and the information provided by them can be a problem to verify, validate, analyze and systematize. this produces a general lack of trust by crisis management agencies and other social media users, in the crisis information produced on social media platforms. this can have catastrophic consequences for shared situational awareness through failure to detect and use important and relevant information or through the belief in, and the propagation of, mis-information produced on these platforms (bui, , ehnis and which can also impact and undermine social benefit and cultural cohesion in times of crisis (kopp, ) . we are currently living in an era of digital disruption which provides many economic and social benefits, but we must also be able to support crisis management based on shared situational awareness. post truth perspectives, fake news and the resulting infodemic has resulted in wide ranging digital destruction and the enablement and encouragement of mental model dissonance. how can we best address this problem? seppanen, makela, luokkala, and virrantaus ( ) have outlined the connection characteristics of shared situational awareness in an actor network. fig. highlights the configuration of the connection which includes three requirements: ) informationto bridge the information gap through the identification of key information elements; ) communicationto understand the fluency of how actors communicate through describing this communication in detail; and ) trustto analyse the role of trust on the quality and fluency of communication. they reason that "if trust could be increased the availability, reliability, and temporal accuracy of information could be improved". recent research conducted on the use of social media platforms for crisis communication purposes, so far concludes that: ) trusted agencies have an early mover information advantage in crisis communication on social media platforms such as twitter (mirbabaie, bunker, stieglitz, marx, & ehnis, ) ; ) information communicated by trusted agencies can be amplified and intensified by influential social media users and others to "communicate, self-organize, manage, and mitigate risks (crisis communications) but also to make sense of the event (commentary-related communications)", for example through retweets on twitter (stieglitz, bunker, mirbabaie, & ehnis, ); ) trusted agencies and the information they supply is influential in shaping the human response to crisis situations (mirbabaie, bunker, stieglitz, & deubel, ) ; ) trusted agencies find processing the high volumes of information communicated through social media platforms problematic due to the difficulty in authenticating the information source (user) and establishing the accuracy, timeliness and relevance of the information itself ; and ) there are a number of tensions which emerge in the use of social media as a crisis communications channel between trusted agencies and the general public. these tensions occur in the areas of: information, generation and use i.e. managing the message; emergence and management of digital and spontaneous volunteers; management of community expectations; mental models which underpin prevention, preparation, recovery and response protocols (pprr); and management of the development of the large-scale adoption of social media technologies for crisis communications (elbanna, bunker, levine, & sleigh, ) . this knowledge points us to a number of areas of research focus in is for the future development of data analytics and artificial intelligence to more effectively align mental models for shared situational awareness. these should: • build on the trust in government and their crisis management agencies, as well as other influential actors in crisis management communications, to provide and amplify advice and information as early as possible in a crisis; • build frameworks that create algorithmic transparency, information governance and quality assurance for platform and service providers and data aggregators to create and reinforce trust in them as information sources i.e. so they become trusted actors in the communications network; • address how platform and service developers and government communication system developers can share concepts and build systems that address crisis communication requirements, including those used in iup, ds and ai; and • address government failures to provide robust is services, during the covid- pandemic, and the subsequent impacts this has had on trust in government and their systems for tracking and tracing infections (chakravorti, ) . these areas of focus are important given the negative impacts that are already emerging from the use of ai during the covid- pandemic i.e. varying levels of data quality and comprehensiveness, development of covid- treatments based on the use of this variable data, use of social control and surveillance methods to minimize virus spread (smith & rustagi, , naughton, b . it is time to critically analyze and evaluate how centrally managed platforms, their data and systems algorithms are being used during the covid- pandemic (and other crises) by the companies who own and run them. how are they using the information they collect i.e. development of services, influencing users, creation of profits etc., (how) are they limiting the spread of post truth arguments and fake news/information and are they exacerbating or assisting with the management of crises? some platform owners (youtube, twitter, whatsapp) are currently making efforts to be more transparent in their platform operations, data governance and quality assurance (hern, ; naughton, a) . there have also been growing calls from critics for regulation of these companies and their business practices (lewis, ) . there is a long way to go, however, to address the problems, issues and barriers caused by these companies for the production of shared situational awareness to support crisis management. for instance, the latvian government wanted to access the google/apple designed contact tracing framework (a bluetooth enabled api) which "can later be translated into covid- exposure notifications" and which are sent to contacts of a covid- positive person. google and apple set preconditions to accessing this framework, however, by only allowing the registration of one government/health authority approved contact tracing app per country and by not allowing government health agencies access to the personal details of contacts, due to their evaluation of potential privacy issues (ilves, ) . multi-jurisdictional legal definitions and treatment of privacy issues is also a complicating factor in this decision. this situation presents a problem to any country wishing the use the api, as contact tracers need to be able to: ) assess the level of potential exposure to the virus of the contact; and then ) provide advice to the contact as to what action they should take. this could be anything from "get a test and self-isolate for days" through to "take no action at all, socially distance from others, but watch for symptoms". as covid- health advice can have critical health, economic and social consequences for an individual, the advice needs to be tailored for the individual and be as least impactful as possible. merely sending an exposure notification to a contact of a covid- infected person, does not guarantee any action, or the correct action being taken by that person. by prohibiting access to data and controlling their api in this way, google and apple are not sharing available data with not sharinggovernment health agencies that would allow them to tha perform effective contact tracing which could save many lives while preventing large scale economic hardship and vice versa. this presents us with a difficult legal and ethical situation to ponder i.e. does the individual requirement for data privacy outweigh the opportunity to save lives and livelihoods? we are now in the midst of a pandemic and the 'infodemic' that has followed in its wake and to counter the effects of this overload of inaccurate and misinformation, the who has collaborated with the providers of social media platforms (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc.) to mitigate the impact of false information on social media (who, ) in order to support shared situational awareness and effective crisis management. this is an unsustainable and unrealistic situation, however, due to the ongoing cost, level of resources and necessary skills required for such an intervention. while many countries have been unable to adequately deal with the pandemic, there are many success stories of shared situational awareness supporting health agency and public response for effective virus containment through day-to-day decisions and actions. australian governments (federal and state) have had mixed results in the containment and management of the covid- pandemic. there have been communications and is missteps along the way e.g. ruby princess cruise ship (mckinnell, ) and the melbourne quarantine hotels (kaine & josserand, ) where quarantine protocols were breached, as well as the current technical problems with the collection and use of the data from the australian federal government covidsafe tracking and tracing app (taylor, ) . we are also currently seeing the rapid development of a covid- outbreak in metropolitan melbourne (victoria), where previously there had been a successful pandemic response. this has necessitated the reinstatement of lockdowns, strict social distancing enforcement and the closure of the nsw/victorian border. this outbreak has been exacerbated by misinformation circulating on social media targeting specific cultural groups, which has caused general confusion (especially in non-english speaking communities) as well as the promotion of racist tropes and hate speech (bosley, ) . while managing a pandemic is a complex and complicated process with many stakeholders, to achieve a more effective level of crisis management there are benefits to be obtained by shared situational awareness through the alignment of mental models that represent more broadly acceptable situational reality and truth. this alignment would further support our trust in government as well as develop trust in other organizational and individual actors in the communications network. individual differences in political, social and cultural contexts also add a layer of complexity to the alignment of mental models for shared situational awareness. government agencies should refine their mental models of situational awareness to accommodate those variations in factors of significance which impact alignment e.g. cultural behavioral practices, housing conditions, working environments and practices, access to services, regard for community leadership, digital literacy, access to technology etc. or they risk the ongoing development and reinforcement of dissonant and alternative mental models and erosion of their trusted status. (mirbabaie et al., ) both government and platform providers have public interest and safety information communications requirements to satisfy in both the short and long-term, which directly impact our ability to manage pandemics and other types of crises and disasters effectively. there must be collaboration and cooperation (either legislated or voluntary) to build on the trust in government to provide information as early and as often as possible in a crisis (and enable the amplification of, and action taken from this advice) as well as ensure algorithmic transparency, information governance and quality assurance for robust and trusted communication and information services overall. to remain successful in managing the pandemic, however, requires long term vigilance and effort by both the pandemic managers and the international journal of information management xxx (xxxx) xxxx public alike. as we can see by the current covid- outbreak in victoria, mental model alignment (and realignment) during a crisis is a continual process which requires constant attention, effort and resources. "a critique of how science is produced is very different from the post-truth argument that there are alternative truths that you can choose from. post-truth is a defensive posture. if you have to defend yourself against climate change, economic change, coronavirus change, then you grab at any alternative. if those alternatives are fed to you by thousands of fake news farms in siberia, they are hard to resist, especially if they look vaguely empirical. if you have enough of them and they are contradictory enough, they allow you to stick to your old beliefs." bruno latourinterview (watts, ) . guest editor's introduction: toward an archaeogenealogy of posttruth reports melbourne coronavirus cluster originated at eid party could stoke islamophobia, muslim leaders saythe guardian (online) social media, rumors, and hurricane warning systems in puerto rico a philosophy of information technology and systems (it&s) as tools: tool development context, associated skills and the global technology transfer (gtt) process repertoires of collaboration for common operating pictures of disasters and extreme events bright ict: social media analytics for society and crisis management digital contact tracing's mixed record abroad spells trouble for us efforts to rein in covid- . the conversation (online) july shared reality: experiencing commonality with others' inner states about the world spring update: trust and the covid- pandemic fake news as a two-dimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda repertoires of collaboration: incorporation of social media help requests into the common operating picture emergency management in the changing world of social media: framing the research agenda with the stakeholders through engaged scholarship social media influencers in strategic communication: a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication shared situational awareness in emergency management mitigation and response youtube bans david duke and other us far-right users. the guardian (online) classifying twitter topic-networks using social network analysis why are google and apple dictating how european democracies fight coronavirus? the guardian (online) melbourne's hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. it was overseen by a flawed security industry. the conversation (online) fake news: the other pandemic that can prove deadly strongly recommended" revisiting decisional privacy to judge hypernudging in self-tracking technologies going back to basics in design science: from the information technology artifact to the information systems artifact socially-shared cognition and consensus in small groups facebook and google must move away from the zero-sum game. the sydney morning herald -opinion (online) monetizing data: a practical roadmap for framing, pricing & selling your b b digital offers queensland researchers analysing coronavirus conspiracy theories warn of social media danger ruby princess passengers disembarked before coronavirus test results to get flights, inquiry hears social media in times of crisis: learning from hurricane harvey for the coronavirus disease pandemic response who sets the tone? determining the impact of convergence behaviour archetypes in social media crisis communication twitter taking on trump's lies? about time too. the guardian (online) silicon valley has admitted facial recognition technology is toxic -about time. the guardian (online) algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism defining and measuring shared situational awareness a kuhnian analysis of revolutionary digital disruptions mental models: a robust definition. the learning organization the role of shared mental models in developing shared situational awareness developing shared situational awareness for emergency management editorial 'post-truth? the problem with covid- artificial intelligence solutions and how to fix them. stanford social innovation review sense-making in social media during extreme events australia's covidsafe coronavirus tracing app works as few as one in four times for some devices. the guardian (online) big data methods: leveraging modern data analytic techniques to build organizational science this is a global catastrophe that has come from within' interview. bruno latour: the guardian (online) novel coronavirus ( -ncov) situation report the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power i would like to thank the communications and technology for society research group at the university of sydney business school,and the marie bashir institute for infectious diseases and biosecurity for their continued support for this work, and adjunct associate professor anthony sleigh and dr christian ehnis for their encouragement and invaluable feedback on this paper. key: cord- -oqe rcbu authors: laufer, daniel title: academics engaging through the media—insights from creating a monthly column on crisis management date: - - journal: public relat rev doi: . /j.pubrev. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: oqe rcbu universities increasingly expect academics to engage with external stakeholders. this includes providing media commentary. in this article i describe my experience writing a monthly column on crisis management in the new zealand herald, the most widely read newspaper in new zealand with an average daily readership of over , people (new zealand herald, ). the article also describes the benefits of writing a newspaper column including educating the public about issues relating to crisis management such as managing covid- , creating a platform for enhancing collaboration between academics and public relations firms, and enhancing the reputation of both the academic and university. this article will benefit academics in the field of public relations who are interested in writing a newspaper column to engage through the media. research and teaching-oriented universities increasingly expect academics to engage with external stakeholders. these stakeholders include companies, the government and the general public. leading academic organizations also recognize the need for increased external engagement. for example, the american political science association created a task force to discuss how to generate effective engagement (mcmurtrie, ) . an important type of engagement activity for academics is commentary in the media which is a way to educate the public about an important topic related to a scholar's area of expertise. an academic's perspective is viewed by many in the public as an informed and relatively unbiased opinion compared to other commentators. this is especially important during the covid- crisis when trust in the government in many countries is in decline, and the public is looking for credible sources of information. whereas writing op-eds, speeches and granting media interviews are beneficial for both the academic and university, i believe other types of activities are more reputation enhancing. for example, writing a column in one's area of expertise for an influential media outlet enables academics to have a longer-term impact that goes beyond occasional commentary. in this article i describe my experience writing a regular column about crisis management for the new zealand herald, the most widely read newspaper in new zealand with an average daily readership of over , people (new zealand herald, ) . in the following sections i describe the benefits of writing a newspaper column, and my experience writing a column from to . a key difference between writing a regular column and providing occasional commentary is control over content. when being interviewed for a story, an academic typically spends a considerable amount of time speaking with reporters and answering questions through email correspondence. despite these lengthy and in-depth conversations with reporters, in most cases when the news articles are published, only select quotes from the academic expert's commentary are included. unlike providing occasional commentary for the media, writing a regular column for a newspaper provides a much greater level of control and autonomy for an academic. since i started writing my monthly column on crisis management in early , i've always chosen the topic of the column, as well as the content included in the − , word monthly column. my column has appeared times in the newspaper since i was hired to write the column, and the editor has made only minor editing changes on rare occasions before publishing the column. having greater control over the content minimizes the risk of being misquoted or taken out of context. this is a major concern of academics when dealing with the media. in many situations journalists will choose the quotes they prefer to use, and this may distort the views of academics in a published newspaper article or a news clip on tv or the https://doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . e-mail address: dan.laufer@vuw.ac.nz. radio. a good example of this is a tv interview with cynthia miller-idriss a professor of education and sociology at american university. she was interviewed on nbc's today show in the usa for a segment on how white nationalists were trying to infiltrate college campuses. the sound bite used by the today show featured professor miller-idriss calling a white-nationalist group "smart" and "savvy". after the interview aired, professor miller-idriss mentioned that her comments were taken out of context and did not include "the context of my larger points about why the mainstreaming of extremism in the united states is so dangerous" (miller-idriss, ). commentary in the media enhances both the reputation of the academic and the university. the academic benefits from commentary in the media because the general public learns more about the expertise of the scholar, which enhances the reputation of the scholar as an expert in his or her area of specialization. this can create opportunities for the academic including invitations for giving presentations, membership on advisory boards, and consulting projects (miller-idriss, ) . in addition, the university benefits because it is viewed by the public as a prestigious institution employing scholars highly sought after by the media for commentary on important issues related to their areas of expertise. this can influence prospective students in deciding whether to apply for programs at a university, or alumni in donating to the university. according to orr ( ) "universities are now competitive businesses as much as spaces for advancing knowledge. universities market themselves as brands, hence media attention is one way university bureaucrats measure success". writing a column in a newspaper can enhance the reputation of an academic and a university even more than occasional commentary in the media. the frequency of exposure to the public through the publication of a column can strengthen perceptions of the public regarding an academic's standing in his or her area of expertise. in addition, the academic's name and university is typically featured more prominently in a column when compared with being quoted in the media. in order to maximize the chances of convincing a newspaper to launch a new column, it is important to demonstrate that an academic has the ability to write a regular column. an effective way to show that an academic can be successful as a columnist is to prepare a portfolio of previous media commentary. when in addition to the importance of prior experience writing commentary in the area of crisis management for a well-known global media outlet, experience with media commentary in new zealand was also important. my commentary for radio new zealand about a product tampering crisis involving imported strawberries from australia (laufer, ) , and an interview about my research on tv 's q + a, the leading weekly news program on tv in new zealand, played an important role in the new zealand herald's decision to hire me as a columnist. finally, beyond demonstrating relevant experience, an academic also needs to convince the newspaper that its audience will be interested in reading a new column. in my case the new zealand herald had never previously published a regular column focused exclusively on crisis management. in pitching the idea, i emphasized the success of the "crisis of the week" column in the wall street journal, as well as the interest of major media outlets in new zealand for commentary on topics related to crisis management. this was compelling support for the potential of the new column in attracting interest among the newspaper's readers. my efforts to convince the new zealand herald to launch a new column on crisis management were successful, and i received a oneyear contract to write a monthly column in ( − , words). due to the success of the column, the contract was extended for another year in . in determining the topics and content to include in my column, there were a number of factors that influenced my decision: in writing my column, i wanted to educate the public about topics related to all three phases of a crisis (for a list of topics in my column, see appendix a). it is worth noting that most research published in the area of crisis management focuses on the crisis phase (coombs & laufer, ) , and the media also tends to focus on issues around managing a crisis. despite the importance of knowing how to respond to a crisis when it happens, how to prevent a crisis from occurring (precrisis phase), and how to learn from a crisis (post-crisis phase) are also important topics in crisis management which i wanted to incorporate in my column. in order to emphasize the importance of crisis prevention, i decided to write about a topic related to the pre-crisis phase in my inaugural column. my focus in the column was on crisis contagion, or how a crisis occurring in one organization can spillover to others (laufer & wang, ) . the column described ways a company can assess the risk of crisis contagion, and how it can manage the risk. an example of a topic related to managing a crisis in my column was a discussion about whether to use a ceo as a spokesperson during a crisis (laufer, ) . this topic is of great interest to companies who need to decide the best way to communicate their message during a crisis. should they use the ceo, or perhaps another spokesperson may be more effective in communicating during the crisis? the column discussed several factors to consider in deciding whether to use the ceo as a spokesperson during a crisis. another topic related to managing a crisis in my column involved carnival cruise's response to the covid- crisis on its cruise ships. in the column, the company was criticized for its poor response. according to claudia macdonald, managing director, mango communications nz, who provided commentary in my column "their lack of communication to date is not helping them repudiate an already shaky health reputation. the president of princess cruises only spoke this week for the first timemore than a month after the first incident". finally, my column also covered topics related to the post-crisis phase. for example, i discussed conducting an investigation after a crisis. what increases the likelihood that learning will take place after the findings from an investigation are published? in the column i discuss factors that enhance the credibility of an investigation, and the likelihood that recommendations from an investigation will be accepted by stakeholders. when deciding on topics for my column, my research provides me with a lot of useful ideas. these included writing about crisis contagion public relations review xxx (xxxx) xxxx (laufer & wang, ) , how crisis management in china differs from the west (wang & laufer, ) when to use the ceo as a spokesperson during a crisis (einwiller, laufer, & ruppel, ; laufer, garrett, & ning, ) and how to manage customer rage (gregoire, laufer, & tripp, ) . however, in deciding whether to focus on my research topics for my column, an important consideration is my target audience. is my research of interest to the general public, or is it primarily of interest to an academic audience? for example, an article about the usefulness of a scale would be of great interest to academics, however it would not be a good topic for the column. in addition to my research, i incorporate information from other sources as well, including government officials. for example, i interviewed a senior government official from the ministry of business, innovation and employment in new zealand for a column about managing product recalls. during the interview, i asked the senior product safety analyst about the most common mistakes companies make in new zealand during a product recall. this type of information is of great interest to the readers of the herald, and it was included in the column. as previously mentioned, the relevance of a topic to the newspaper's readers is an important consideration in choosing the topic for the column. an important issue related to relevance is whether the audience is familiar with the organizations involved in the crises. as a result, i include examples of well-known new zealand companies that have experienced crises in my column. for example, when i wrote my column on consumer outrage, i discussed a crisis involving burgerfuel, a well-known fast-food restaurant chain in new zealand. the crisis occurred when an employee at a burgerfuel franchise in auckland used blackface to promote a new jamaican burger launched by the company. in the same column i also describe the outrage directed towards air new zealand, the country's national carrier, after the christchurch mosque shootings in march . the airline raised its prices after the shooting due to the increased demand in flights to christchurch. despite the importance of including local content in the column, i also believe it is important to discuss global topics. new zealand is a country that relies heavily on international trade, and readers of the herald are interested in news from overseas. in one of my columns i wrote about how crisis management in china differs from the west. china is new zealand's largest trading partner, and there is also a free agreement between new zealand and china. finally, covid- is an example of a crisis with a significant impact both globally and domestically. the crisis has dominated the news over the past few months, and my column has covered covid- three times. there is enormous interest in the topic, and no other crisis has been covered as frequently in my column. covid- was also the first topic that was covered under the new format of the column involving an exchange of views between academics and practitioners. in the next section, i will discuss the new format of the column. after my contract as a columnist for the herald was renewed in , i decided to make changes to the column. the newspaper was pleased with the column, however i felt that through changes to the format i could achieve another important objective, creating a platform for an exchange of views between academics and practitioners. collaboration between academics and practitioners has long been identified as an important objective in the field of public relations. for example, the commission on public relations education (cpre) states that increasing collaboration between educators and practitioners advances excellence in public relations education and practice throughout the world (http://www.commissionpred.org/). an important prerequisite to collaboration is creating a greater understanding of the different ways practitioners and academics view issues. before considering collaboration, both practitioners and academics need to assess the potential benefits of collaboration. through the mutual exchange of ideas in the column, practitioners can assess the potential benefit of academics' ideas for improving their practice, and academics can assess the potential for research collaboration and improvements in teaching by incorporating the practitioner's perspective. newspaper readers of the column also benefit from this exchange of views by getting different perspectives on crisis management. in redesigning the column, i incorporated the approach taken by the wall street journal with their "crisis of the week" column by creating a panel of experts. as part of the new format for the column, i decided to incorporate commentary from both a practitioner and an academic on how an organization or individual performed during a crisis. both experts would have up to words to give their perspective. the response to the new format of the column has been overwhelmingly positive from both academics and practitioners. academic experts in crisis management from most of the major universities in new zealand have agreed to provide commentary for the column. similarly, most of the leading public relations firms in new zealand with expertise in crisis management have also agreed to provide commentary. in total, i have a pool of people on my panel of experts comprising of both academics and practitioners. each month i choose two different experts to provide commentary for the column. the herald has already published the column three times with the new format. with covid- dominating the news, i decided to focus on how individuals and companies are managing the pandemic. the column has focused on the prime minister of new zealand's response to the crisis, how air new zealand is managing covid- , and how carnival cruises' is managing the pandemic. feedback from the new format has been very encouraging. for example, my column about the prime minister of new zealand's response to covid- was included on an influential list of recommended news articles by one of the leading online news outlets in new zealand (newsroom, ) . writing a newspaper column is a very fulfilling experience that can greatly benefit academics and universities. despite the considerable amount of time involved in writing a column, i believe the benefits greatly outweigh the costs. in writing my column on crisis management, in addition to the benefits to academics and universities, i believe that the field of public relations can benefit as well through the potential for future increased collaboration between academics and practitioners. the public also benefits through exposure to a diversity of views expressed on topics related to crisis management by leading experts from both academia and public relations firms. writing a column has enabled me to share my expertise with the general public, which has resulted in a number of opportunities. these include receiving invitations to give presentations at high profile industry events and to teach webinars. it is worth noting that one event has been especially gratifying. as a result of the column, i was invited to give a presentation to high school teachers in auckland to discuss how the column can be used to teach their students about crisis management. i believe teaching crisis management in high schools will increase the demand for crisis management courses at universities in the future. my university has also benefited from the column. as part of my contract with the new zealand herald, my university has permission to post the column on its website one month after it is published in the newspaper. by sharing the column with its stakeholders, the university can highlight that its faculty provide commentary on a regular basis in their area of expertise in leading media outlets. this enhances the reputation of the university. creating a platform through the column that incorporates the views of both academics and practitioners can also play an important role in bridging the gap between these groups. in many cases, academics and practitioners are not familiar with each other's work. by including commentary in the column from both groups, this increases the chances that they will become more familiar with each other's views and ideas. to facilitate this, i email a copy of the column to my panel of experts after it is published, so they can read the commentary of the academic and practitioner. finally, the public also benefits from a diversity of views. this is especially important during times of crises such as covid- when there is a need for reliable information from credible sources. by presenting the views of leading experts from academia and public relations firms, the public learns about important concepts in crisis management. for example, in his commentary on the response of air new zealand to covid- (new zealand herald, ) , dr. chris galloway from massey university mentioned that "this is the time when lessons need to be absorbed, new operational procedures and structures introduced, and reputations rebuilt where damage has occurred". neil green, chief executive, senate shj, a leading public relations firm in new zealand, also provided useful commentary in the same column: "clarity of communication and calmness under pressure are highly regarded leadership attributes and foran (ceo of air new zealand) has consistently demonstrated both, earning respect and goodwill from staff, customers, shareholders and other stakeholders". after reading the column, readers gain a better understanding of best practices when dealing with a pandemic. this is of great value to the public and represents an important contribution in the area of engagement. appendix a. list of topics in column on crisis management in the new zealand herald ( - ) • how companies can protect themselves from crisis contagion. • beware of judging during uncertain times. • should the ceo of a company be a spokesperson during a crisis? • what causes consumer outrage, and how can companies prevent it from happening? • can celebrity endorser crisis spread to companies? • when trouble strikes, investigate. • how to avoid costly mistakes when managing a product recall. • firms losing victim status in data hacks. • what foreign companies can learn from past crises. • crisis management in the era of social media. • crisis management in china: how it differs from the west. • think long term before going on a limb: weigh the risks before you take a stand that can later prove controversial. • how has prime minister jacinda ardern been managing the coronavirus crisis (includes expert commentary from academic and practitioner). • covid- coronavirus: air new zealand's response (includes expert commentary from academic and practitioner). • carnival cruises' response to covid- (includes expert commentary from academic and practitioner). global crisis management -current research and future directions believe me, i am one of you! the role of common group affiliation in crisis communication a comprehensive model of customer direct and indirect revenge: understanding the effects of perceived greed and customer power should ceos of multinationals be spokespersons during an overseas product harm crisis strawberry crisis: how nz growers can prevent "crisis contagion guilty by association -the risk of crisis contagion examining the effectiveness of the ceo as a spokesperson during a product harm crisis: insights from china and south korea political scientists propose new ways to engage policy makers and the public lessons i learned -and you can, too -from my 'today' show appearance nz herald defies trends with soaring readership covid- coronavirus: air new zealand's response. retrieved from media monitoring -bernard's pick of the links-mar academics and media in australia. retrieved from:the university of queensland tc beirne school of law legal studies research papers series how does crisis management in china differ from the west? -a review of the literature and directions for future research key: cord- - wnbf t authors: fay, daniel l.; ghadimi, adela title: collective bargaining during times of crisis: recommendations from the covid‐ pandemic date: - - journal: public adm rev doi: . /puar. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: wnbf t the covid‐ dramatically changed employment across sectors in . this viewpoint essay examines public sector labor relations during the pandemic and describes the impact bargaining process used to protect public employees. we draw on our own experience in impact bargaining negotiations and the public labor relations, conflict management, and civil service reform literatures to develop recommendations for public union labor leaders in times of crisis. we suggest that public unions have an important role in crisis management, but must act strategically in order to develop good working relationships with leadership and successfully negotiate employee protections in uncertain times. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. ) union leaders should initiate negotiations with leadership early and often during times of crises. ) as part of the negotiations, unions must mobilize union members and the workforce represented by the collective bargaining agreement immediately. ) negotiations should prioritize issues for the workforce groups most affected by the crisis. ) labor relations leaders must integrate governmental crisis response to negotiations ) impact bargaining agreements must be formalized upon completion. the global coronavirus disease pandemic of has disrupted many aspects of normal life, including the work processes and responsibilities of public employees. many in the public sector workforce have been on the front lines as first responders directly dealing with those infected with covid- , and enforcing government protective orders. others have been forced to rethink how to effectively accomplish their job responsibilities virtually while adhering to protective orders. every public employee has faced challenges, uncertainty, and anxiety as a result of the covid- pandemic affecting their dayto-day and long-term employment. the bureau of labor statistics estimates that . % of public sector employees, including police officers, firefighters, and teachers, are covered by union or employee association collective bargaining agreements. (u.s. bureau of labor statistics, ). public sector unions use collective action to improve the working conditions of workers during normal operations, but emergencies which disrupt normal operations further underscore the role of collective bargaining to protect the public workforce and in negotiating new "impact agreements" to protect employees during times of uncertainty. in march , one of our authors participated in "impact bargaining" for a unit of a large state education union: uff-fsu-gau, a graduate assistant (ga) union, which is a unit of the statewide united faculty of florida . the union proposed beginning the impact bargaining process to the university leadership on march , , and after negotiations, the university accepted the memorandum of understanding (mou) on april , . estimates suggest that % of faculty and graduate students are covered by collective bargaining agreements at more than institutions across the u.s. representation for both groups, including part-time and adjunct faculty has been growing since (berry & savarese, ) . florida has had a long history of legislative efforts to weaken public unions in the state, including the state house passing hb in early march, prior to public protective orders in response to covid- (dailey, ) . at the time of these writing there has been no further action to diminish public unions by the state government. in our roles as public management and policy scholars, and using our experience as practicing public labor relations leaders, we describe the challenges of collective bargaining during the covid- pandemic and present five general recommendations for public sector unions impact bargaining during times of crisis: ) initiate negotiations with leadership early and often; ) mobilize union members and the workforce represented by the collective bargaining agreement immediately; ) prioritize issues for the workforce groups most affected by the crisis; ) integrate governmental crisis response to negotiations ) formalize impact bargaining agreements. while our negotiations occurred in a higher education setting, our recommendations apply to general public labor relations in times of crisis. as industries quickly adapted to the covid- pandemic, employers made swift decisions that directly impacted collective bargaining agreements (cbas) across the country in terms of working conditions, compensation, benefits, and workforce reductions. when circumstances in times of crisis arise that allow employers to make these sweeping changes, bargaining units are then entitled to begin "impact bargaining," which is also known as "effect bargaining" or "implementation bargaining." the process allows the bargaining team to negotiate the impact that these crisis-time decisions have had on their terms and conditions of employment as outlined in their cba. impact bargaining, when successful, results in the creation of a mou which serves as an addendum to the collective bargaining agreement and can create additional protections for employees during the crisis which are otherwise not covered under the cba. this process was commonly used by european labor unions in response to the great recession of (glassner, keune, & marginson, ; lehndorff, ; malo, ) . it is imperative that bargaining units react as soon as possible to begin these impact negotiations. doing so helps manage conflict by establishing a sense of shared mission between management and labor in addressing the challenges presented by the crisis. the labor challenges of covid- are far different than those presented by the global financial crisis of , but, regardless, timing is critical, with the best defense being a good offense to protect public employees. units which delay negotiations may be perceived as self-interested and reactionary, which could generate hostility, win-or-lose situations, and long-term resentments (yates, ) . given the state of the covid- pandemic, unions must consider that these newfound conditions have an undetermined end date. units may have to develop several mous throughout the duration of the crisis, so establishing an open communication channel early allows management and labor to provide contemporaneous information, which is an effective strategy to manage conflict (yates, ) . research has identified several other strategies and tactics to constructively manage conflict including using an incremental approach focused on winning concrete issues (rainey, ) . unions that begin negotiations early can request protections and resources before other competing groups or agencies, thereby increasing the likelihood of success. as conflict endures, barriers to communication (e.g. aggressive language, biased interpretations, selective information, and dissolved collaborations) decrease the likelihood of agreement (rainey, ) . early success can prevent prolonged conflict and may help future negotiations in a prolonged crisis. delaying fervent and frequent negotiations and communications with administration can lead to unilateral decision-making by the administration without consulting the union, leaving unions retroactively trying to combat issues that could have been circumvented. our own experience in the covid- bargaining process demonstrated that when early success is achieved in the mou, it is advantageous for the bargaining team to recognize the uncertain duration of the crisis and include a clause providing open-ended language allowing for agreed upon protections to stay status quo throughout the duration of the crisis. the longer the crisis will last, the more dire circumstances will become, and once agreed upon protections and gains are made, this open-ended language will provide a baseline of worker protections that will not have to be renegotiated every few months with potentially increased hostility. the necessity of physical distancing for the duration of the covid- crisis has significantly impacted the typical means by which unions mobilize members and their workforce. during "normal" working conditions, it is beneficial to mobilize and engage members of one"s bargaining unit to urge negotiations forward during collective bargaining. often staging public showings of support, organizing a demonstration, or simply packing a bargaining session full of bodies can lead to increased cooperation from leadership and adds social pressure to avoid enmity during negotiations and increases the likelihood of success (flavin & hartney, ) . a specific example of the value of physical mobilization can be seen in the various calls to action made by uff-fsu-gau. over its ten-year tenure, mobilizing members in large numbers to occupy a physical presence during bargaining creates a noticeable shift in the tone and conversation with leadership, which is dramatically different than if the room is equitably represented with about a dozen individuals on both sides of the bargaining table. prior to the pandemic, this same union has packed the room at board of trustees (bot) meetings (florida state university board of trustees, ), utilizing the public comment section at the front end of these public, live streamed meetings to have several speakers attest to the harmful deficiencies and unsavory working conditions of gas. during times when physical presence is impossible, such as during mandatory social distancing orders adopted in response to covid- , there are alternative modes of group mobilization that are effective and raise the profile of one"s bargaining efforts. building up a social media presence that incorporates as many people as possible and mobilizing massive contact campaigns to reach out to key administrative offices on a set issue are also effective and important. the need for this group involvement and additional visibility and applied pressure is even more critical during the covid- crisis. creating multiple opportunities for stakeholder involvement from your unit is critical during a regular bargaining period, but embracing public employees at all levels and providing complete information to members as part of the negotiation process empowers the unit. this does not change during impact bargaining. one effective strategy for conflict management is to include all affected parties in negotiations (yates, ) . this will make a critical difference in impact bargaining during times of crises, particularly if most negotiations take place on virtual online platforms. while technology can be seen as a challenge for successful negotiations during an emergency period, it also offers an opportunity to engage more of the represented group and involve them in the negotiation process. most unions have never had to engage in virtual bargaining, and adjusting to the changing format requires some intentionality. leadership is responsible for setting up the virtual forum for formal impact bargaining, which is a public meeting open to anyone. however, during caucus , unions will want to operate their own separate virtual platform not tied to their administration and switch between these two with attending members to keep them engaged and visible. this is quite different than bargaining at a physical table, in person, with administration on one side, and the bargaining team and unit members on the other, presenting and discussing proposals face to face, and then separating into two separate physical spaces for caucus periods. one of the largest opportunities for unions to come from this is to increase member turnout and engagement; unions should take every opportunity to increase email communications during this emergency period to ensure members are informed, included, and empowered to participate in a larger way in these virtual spaces. while the essence of collective bargaining stems from the desire to achieve the best outcomes for the bargaining unit as a whole, advocating for those most affected and least advantaged during times of crisis must be prioritized in a search for just conditions (rawls, ) . during crises such as the covid- pandemic, this may not inherently default to those who are the lowest paid in the bargaining unit, as one might assume. certainly low-wage workers are deeply affected by crises that generate financial instability, because they may not have amassed enough savings to weather the storm, but even high-wage public sector employees may be on the front-line of emergency management and therefore disproportionately exposed to risk. in the higher education system, graduate assistants (gas) are easily categorized as one of the most marginalized and vulnerable employment groups within a university system, despite the critical role they play in organizational operations. in the example of uff-fsu-gau, gas across departments are compensated very differently. in response to covid- , uff-fsuparty leaving the main room in which they are meeting and going to another private space before they both agree to reconvene and resume discussions. gau, quickly prioritized protecting two of the most vulnerable groups of employees -on one end of the spectrum, vulnerable employees typically paid the least -gas in the music, theater, and dance departments, because immediately many of their summer appointments were eliminated in an effort to defer mounting university deficits. moreover, university departments have, in the past, manipulated these employees" appointment start and end dates to the point that these workers actually earn less than the minimum stipend outlined in the cba. while summer appointments are not guaranteed because regular appointments are on a nine-month timeline covering the fall and spring semesters, many gas are approved to take on teaching duties in the summer for additional income. many were going to be conducting one-on-one instruction, and in a term when assistantships are not guaranteed, the university decided to offer fewer positions that could not easily accommodate multitudes of students in online sections. while these gas did not yet have their summer offer letter in hand, experiencing this unit loss early on in covid- response helped guide building in added protections for subsequent semesters, to help especially those most vulnerable. this solidified the need to advocate that part of the mou which flushed out reappointment protections. however, another marginalized group also exists and was identified on the opposite side of the spectrum. gas in the stem fields, which are typically paid among the highest rates within the university, were still required to go in to work during the initial few weeks of closures when virtually everyone else was working from home. their own full-time faculty who oversee their work were no longer coming into the labs, but deemed their gas as essential employees and had required them to show up to campus in person, often in smaller groups, to complete lab research. this created a great deal of anxiety and frustration, from the fear of running out of essential supplies such as personal protective equipment (ppe). uff-fsu-gau elevated this as a need to start impact bargaining with administration to address this issue, and while it was resolved and administrative review procedures for who would be considered "essential" were put into place, perhaps those three weeks of anxiety-inducing work could have been avoided if impact bargaining could have started even sooner. while a very small handful of gas are still classified as essential, it is now a much smaller number, and they have safeguards and guarantees that they will receive what they need to complete their job safely. the context of this example can be transferred to nearly any other bargaining unit: a large bargaining unit with vastly different job duties and associated compensation, some portion of the employees being deemed essential frontline workers and therefore facing significant personal risk, shortage of adequate and necessary supplies, and disproportionate change in their day-to-day ability to perform job duties. this reinforces the need for a comprehensive evaluation of who is most affected within a unit and to ensure the ways in which they need to be supported and protected are clearly delineated in impact bargaining strategies. state policy can dramatically influence union membership, mobilization efforts, and civic participation of members, but public employee unions also influence policy making at every level of government, and union commitment can directly and indirectly increase employee job satisfaction (davis, ; flavin & hartney, ; riccucci, ) . public employee unions should be mindful of the interconnectedness of public policy and public labor relations during impact bargaining and integrate the government response to the crisis and negotiations. in both require officers to interact with the public thereby increasing likely exposure to covid- (cohen & kupferschmidt, ; eligon & macfarquhar, ) . other public employees were also deemed essential to ensure that government operations and revenue generation continued during the crisis, and therefore had to show up to work despite the dangers and the lack of ppe (mays & goodman, ) . in each of these cases, public sector unions intervened in certain jurisdictions to provide public employees with protections and conditions that these policy makers overlooked in the protective orders. labor relation leaders must be keenly aware of the public policy responses to crises and the disproportionate impacts for certain employee groups, both contemporaneously and after the crisis has ended. in our own experience, we understood that operational disruptions would disproportionately harm graduate assistants that require scientific lab workstations, archival materials, travel, or other fieldwork to make progress in their degree program, a necessary employment condition. all covered employees benefited from the guaranteed protections that targeted these unique circumstances resulting from state policy response to covid- . public policy change itself may necessitate impact bargaining across sectors, such as when food workers unions challenged working conditions in meat processing plants, which were mandated to stay operational through an executive order (swanson & yaffe-bellany, ). public unions must therefore remain hypervigilant of policy change during crises in order to protect members during a rapidly changing policy landscape. when formulating impact bargaining negotiation plans, union leaders should be strategic and intentional about securing agreements that are achievable in the current crisis and provide the best employment protections for members. this can be best achieved by focusing on nonresource-based protections since leadership may be unable to provide financial commitments during financial catastrophes. in our own experience, we initially proposed a refund of graduate student fees, since campus operations ceased on march th , , as one resource-based request for university leadership. this was a particular sticking point, which the union dropped to focus on other non-resource-based priorities. union leadership should therefore consider the fiscal environment and policy changes which address the causes of financial crises. during the farreaching covid- crisis, financial impacts remain unknown and unpredictable across sectors and industries, but the effects will likely last for years. as a result, rather than trying to impact bargain for % salary guarantees, for example, it is more advantageous to focus on general job security, protecting health insurance coverage, and working conditions for public employees. putting guarantees on the longevity of job security and health insurance over direct salary benefits enables a union to protect the largest number of people possible. this also allows leaders to use tools such as furloughs to solve budget crises. aggregate public employee groups view furloughs as reasonable during troubled times and have little influence on employee turnover (grissom, viano, & selin, ; lee & sanders, ) . a furloughed employee is better off than a terminated employee. at the time of this writing, cities and states have already signaled that, without federal intervention, hundreds of thousands of public employees could be terminated in response to the covid- fiscal crisis (romm, ) . limiting the flexible tools available to leadership during financial crises through an impact bargaining mou is not in the best interest employees. labor relations leaders should acknowledge that workforce reduction tools are inevitable, but should embrace the least harmful and temporary options such as furloughs and work-sharing arrangements that may reduce pay, but maintain long-term employment (skuterud, ; wright, christensen, & isett, ) . it is crucial that public unions take the extra steps needed to ratify their mous from impact bargaining. during normal conditions, at the conclusion of bargaining, the union would disseminate the agreed upon and signed contract to the bargaining unit for review, giving them two weeks" notice to review the new contract, and are provided with several dates and locations where dues-paying members can appear in person to submit a secret ballot. at the conclusion of vote collection, the ballots are counted, numbers are reported and the contract is considered certified in accordance with the state-level public employer relations commission (perc) (public employees relations commission, ). without ratification, the mou is an unenforceable agreement with leadership based on a goodwill commitment. the cba is what is enforceable and applicable for grievance procedures as needed, and without ratifying a newly established mou, negotiated protections may lack legal force. for example, if the administration takes action that causes direct harm to members of your unit in violation of the mou, the union will not be able to follow grievance procedures or file an unfair labor practice (ulp). while some states allow for online ratification, a case in florida set precedent (united teachers of dade v. the school district of miami-dade county, ), and florida"s perc has not allowed online ratification due to issues tied to voter custody and transparency, factors that at that time they deemed difficult to uphold in an online format. at the time of this writing, florida"s perc is currently working with unions to approve ratification procedures virtually during this covid- emergency period. currently these procedures can vary by state perc offices, so units should contact their statewide office to complete the appropriate forms required to apply for a variance to conduct ratification of covid- mous online. once the variance is granted, unions can utilize a host of online vendors through which to case their online ratification vote. to uphold validity, it is best to use a platform that provides a tracking number for each case vote, allowing the caster of the vote to see that their vote was in fact counted correctly, and answers the transparency issue of concern to the union. once the vote is ratified, similar to during normal times, the union can communicate the outcome to administration and have now established solid legal protection for the mou. completing this virtual ratification also connects back to recommendation , because this step gives people in the bargaining unit power and ownership in this process. importantly, we are not suggesting that the mous should attempt to finalize the labor relation response to the crisis. the end date of the crisis may be unknown, such as the case for covid- . this uncertainty reinforces the importance of flexibility in the mou"s language to ensure that the agreed-upon guarantees will be in effect for the duration of the crisis. the mou is not something that should be time-bound by a specific date, but rather kept in effect for as long as normal operations are disrupted as a result of the crisis (uff-fsu-gau, ). a crisis such as covid- is a pressure cooker, decreasing the time but increasing the pressure on both administrative leadership and employees in the negotiation process (venn, ). public labor relations leaders must respond quickly and strategically to protect employees. impact bargaining is infrequent, but can dramatically affect the lives of public employees for years after the end of the crisis. we have identified several strategies to increase the likelihood of successful negotiations during times of crises such as covid- or the great recession. of utmost importance is for union leaders to identify how the crisis will affect public workers and negotiate accordingly. in these uncertain times, impact bargaining should be a dynamic communication process between public leaders and public sector unions. notes: the directory of us faculty contracts and bargaining agents in institutions of higher education collective bargaining; approval or rejection florida house passes hb , called an opt out measure by supporters, 'union busting' by opponents. wfsu news unionization and work attitudes: how union commitment influences public sector job satisfaction when government subsidizes its own: collective bargaining laws as agents of political mobilization collective bargaining in a time of crisis: developments in the private sector in europe understanding employee turnover in the public sector: insights from research on teacher mobility fridays are furlough days: the impact of furlough policy and strategies for human resource management during a severe economic recession before the crisis, in the crisis, and beyond: the upheaval of collective bargaining in germany collective bargaining reforms in southern europe during the crisis: impact in the light of international standards. employment relations in an era of change understanding and managing public organizations justice as fairness: a restatement mass layoffs begin in cities and states amid coronavirus fallout, threatening education, sanitation, health and safety identifying the potential of work-sharing as a job-creation strategy united teachers of dade v. the school district of miami-dade county union members summary legislation, collective bargaining and enforcement: updating the oecd employment protection indicators motivated to adapt? the role of public service motivation as employees face organizational change the politics of management jossey uff-fsu-gau is the legal union representing all teaching assistants (tas), graduate assistants (gas), and research assistants (ras) employed by florida state university. uff-fsu-gau represented a total bargaining unit of , - , gas, with more than dues paying members. uff-fsu-gau is one of thirty-two chapters of united faculty of florida (uff), which includes more than , dues paying members across the state. key: cord- -wkczsrgu authors: o'donoghue, cathal; sologon, denisa m.; kyzyma, iryna; mchale, john title: modelling the distributional impact of the covid‐ crisis( ) date: - - journal: fisc stud doi: . / - . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: wkczsrgu the covid‐ emergency has had a dramatic impact on market incomes and income support policies. the lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrain policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. we overcome the lack of data by proposing a dynamic calibrated microsimulation approach to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than is available in dated income surveys. we combine nowcasting methods using publicly available data and a household income generation model to perform the first calibrated simulation based upon actual data aiming to assess the distributional implications of the covid‐ crisis in ireland. overall, we find that the crisis had an equalizing real‐time effect for both gross and disposable incomes, notwithstanding the significant hardship experienced by many households. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved the sudden appearance and global spread of the covid- virus is doing enormous damage to public health and living standards. recognising the significance of this new virus, governments have responded rapidly with large-scale interventions to slow the spread of the virus and limit the damage to incomes. from an economic perspective, the policy response has had two main elements. first, physical gatherings to produce goods and services deemed non-essential have been largely shut down even as production in targeted health-related areas has expanded. second, new inemployment and out-of-employment income support schemes have been put in place to ensure that household access to essential goods and services -and where possible continued formal links to employers -are maintained during the emergency. it is recognised that these policies will have major implications for public finances, but there is widespread acceptance that significant deficits are a necessary price for suppressing the spread of the virus while limiting economic damage provided borrowing capacity can be retained. this is a distinctive crisis, expected to dwarf the financial crisis from with a major cost in terms of health and human lives (baldwin and weder, ) . apart from detrimental health losses, the crisis is also inducing economic pressure on workers that become unemployed or lose (part of) their incomes. in this context, public policy comes at the forefront of the crisis applied 'timely, targeted and temporary' (gaspar and mauro, ) with a huge potential to stabilise the economy during the crisis. policy makers need to support the incomes of those adversely affected by the policy-imposed shutdown, especially given the speed with which the crisis has unfolded. this requires a timely understanding of those most affected by the containment measures or more at risk. in managing income distribution impacts (and associated fiscal costs) it is valuable to be able to assess the effects of different wage and unemployment support policies given the most up-to-date information on the labour market. the aim of this paper is to undertake a real-time analysis of the income distribution effects of the covid- crisis in ireland in order to identify those most likely to suffer from income losses, to assess how these loses are distributed in the society, and to provide policy makers the evidencebased input needed for designing effective/efficient targeting of income support measures. to reach this objective, we develop a calibrated microsimulation approach based upon actual data to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than the underlying income survey (o'donoghue et al., ) . we combine nowcasting methods using up-todate data from live registers, official reports on the labour market and policy impacts of covid- with the labour force survey (lfs) and a household income generation model to predict the distributional impact and the fiscal costs of the covid- . apart from the conventional definition of household disposable equivalized income, we also consider an alternative definition by adjusting household disposable equivalized income for workrelated expenses, housing expenditures and some capital losses. by using this definition, we can identify real changes in the financial resources available for households during the crisis as compared to the period before. we find that a decrease in this expenditure during the crisis helped most deciles to maintain their disposable incomes at the pre-crisis levels or even to increase them, which served as an important mitigation instrument for market income losses. this study focuses on ireland. ireland was one of the countries that experienced the largest impact of the financial crisis and one of the highest return bounces. the covid- crisis is thus an additional test of the country's resilience. moreover, the state has introduced a range of innovative measures including a new social protection system targeting those who became sick, were made unemployed or targeting those who remained in precarious employment. measures comprised both public sector delivery mechanisms such as new subsidies, but also measures delivered through the private sector such as pauses in mortgage repayments and breaks in childcare payments. our approach relies on modelling the distributional impact of covid- and the policy measures introduced to flatten the curve and to mitigate some of the economic impacts of the crisis. these impacts are highly asymmetric, affecting people in different ways and dimensions. the key methodological challenge is the lack of up-to-date household survey data that contains the income situation of the households. understanding the characteristics of households, including realtime estimates of their incomes, enables policies to be targeted to mitigate the impacts of the crisis at least cost. existing methods are relatively crude, applying price inflation factors and changing proportionally the employment rate in specific industries and then using a tax-benefit model to explain the policy consequences (navicke, rastrigina and sutherland, ) . we overcome this challenge by proposing a more nuanced approach based on a 'nowcasting' methodology (o'donoghue and loughrey, ) which combines the latest available european union survey on income and living conditions (eu-silc) data with recent data on employment and prices to calibrate a microsimulation model of household incomes, taxes and benefits to produce a real time picture of the population and to identify who is affected differentially (atkinson et al, ) . our approach explains the heterogeneity of changes in the population by estimating a system of equations that model the income generation process utilising a dynamic modelling approach to update the data (li and o'donoghue, ; bourguignon, fournier and gurgand, ) . we use the generic household income-generation model (igm) developed by sologon et al. ( ) , which simulates the labour market and household market income distribution as a function of personal and household attributes, and generates counterfactual distributions under alternative scenarios. taxes and benefits are simulated using the nui galway microsimulation model developed for studying the impacts of an economic crisis (o'donoghue, loughrey and sologon, ) . in this paper, we simulate counterfactual real-time income distributions as a function of more timely live register, price and lfs data to predict the distributional impact of the covid crisis. fundamentally, this involves the simulation of the core welfare variable of interest and its components. in most microsimulation analyses, disposable income is the main welfare variable, which depends upon market income, benefits and taxation, which are in turn dependent upon personal skills, family characteristics, and tax-benefit parameters. however, given the nature of the shock, and the multi-faceted impact on household living standards, it is necessary to utilise an augmented version of disposable income, which takes into account also work-related expenditures (childcare, commuting), housing costs and capital losses. projections are based upon a set of external calibration control totals that are available for more recent time periods than the micro income survey data and that reflect the changes in the macroeconomic climate in ireland over the period of the outbreak, particularly in relation to the structure of the labour market. to do this, we draw upon the dynamic microsimulation literature, using an alignment or calibration technique described in li and o'donoghue ( ) . the objective of calibrating a microsimulation model is to ensure that the simulated output matches exogenous totals (baekgaard, ) . in short, we build up our microdata to the present and we calibrate the igm data to external control totals reflected in the macro trends. this will assure that the igm is describing the targeted period. we then use the infrastructure by introducing various shocks (e.g. factoring sector specific impacts, differentiated by age, macro changes, fiscal responses) and create counterfactual distributions and costs under alternative scenarios. in order to apply the microsimulation methodology, two types of data are needed:  microdata, on which to perform estimations and simulations; and  calibration data to align microdata with the recent changes in labour market and income growth. our source of microdata is the version of the irish component of the european union survey on income and living conditions (eu-silc). the eu-silc dataset collects information on incomes, labour market characteristics, demographics, and living conditions, and is widely used to undertake analyses on poverty, inequality, and deprivation. the irish component relies partially on survey and partially on register data. around % of respondents allowed their national social security number to be used to assess administrative data in relation to their benefit entitlement (callan et al., ) . a national weighting methodology is utilised to achieve representativeness of the dataset with respect to gender, age, region, and household composition. the main advantage of the eu-silc for our analysis is that it has the appropriate variables required for tax-benefit modelling. there are, however, a number of challenges to utilising the eu-silc for microsimulation modelling, discussed in detail in o'donoghue, loughrey and morrissey ( ), whose strategy to address them we also follow in this paper. underpinning our analysis is a set of calibration control totals reflecting the changes in the macroeconomic climate in ireland over the period, which elapsed between and the current covid- crisis. in order to account for these changes, we adjust the eu-silc data using control totals for the current employment situation, provision of pandemic wage subsidy, requests for mortgage deferral, shifts in work-related expenditures, and changes in the stock market. the following data is used to produce control totals:  now-casting information on employment is drawn from the labour force survey, live-register data and official statistics provided by the irish central statistics office.  changes in employment post crisis draw upon weekly updates in relation to recipients of pandemic payments by age and sector. when people are working at home during the covid crisis, a number of work related expenses are not incurred. these include expenses such as commuting costs and childcare costs. in order to work out commuting costs, the household budget survey from was used. the average modelled total commuting cost per week constitutes € . for one worker, € . for two workers and € . for three workers. it should be noted that those who do not work also have transport costs for other purposes. the onset of the covid- crisis saw a large fall in stock markets across the world. the irish index, iseq, fell by % from january to april . the holding of shares is quite variable across both the income distribution and the age distribution. the irish household finance and consumption survey in reports that the top % of incomes are times more likely to hold shares than the bottom % of households. in addition, the value of financial assets for those who hold shares is times higher. the average value of shares held per household varies with age, but is not monotonic. individuals are eligible for a covid- pandemic unemployment payment (pup) if they lose their job. this instrument provides a payment of € per week, available to workers who have lost their job on (or after) march th due to covid- . those who get sick as a result of covid- are eligible, if they are of working age, for a covid enhanced illness benefit (ceib). the benefit is paid at the enhanced rate of € per week where a worker is told to self-isolate by a doctor or the health service executive (hse) due to being a possible source of infection or has been diagnosed with covid- . these instruments will be in place for the duration of the crisis. the commuting costs that we deduct from disposable income are only those for essential travel related to work. non-essential travel is not considered in our definition of commuting cost and adjusted disposable income. more than per cent of these commuting costs fall on motor fuels. we perform a monte carlo simulation and we predict commuting costs from the current distribution observed in household budget survey. note, while the actual cost of commuting for work may be higher, it is assumed that there would be some substitution if an individual were not working. the state agreed with the main irish banks that they would allow freezing of up to three months on loan and mortgage repayments for customers financially impacted by covid- . as of march th , applications had been made to defer mortgage payments, with approximately a further being approved per day. this resulted in a total of mortgage deferrals by april th . the state announced measures to support childcare providers and parents during covid- closures, to provide sustainability to the childcare sector and ensure that parents do not have to pay childcare fees during this covid- crisis, while providing them with reassurance that they will maintain their childcare places. the household budget survey reports both the distribution of childcare costs per family type and by disposable income distribution. in order to incentivise employers to retain their work force during the covid crisis, the state introduced a covid- temporary wage subsidy scheme on march th . it aims to keep employees registered with their employers, so that they will be able to get back to work quickly after the pandemic. businesses with a minimum of % decline in turnover between march th and june st are eligible for the scheme. the scheme was initially based upon an employee's net earnings (after income tax, pay related social insurance and universal social charge) and is paid up to a maximum ceiling of € per week. on april th , changes were announced to the temporary wage subsidy: the subsidy is % of previous earnings for employees with a previous average take-home pay below € per week. the subsidy will be € per week for employees with a previous average take-home pay between € and € per week. a tiered system has been introduced for employees with a previous average take-home pay of over € per week. employees who were taking home more than € per week will be able to avail of the scheme, with tapers depending upon the proportion paid by the employer. the wage subsidy will have a relatively minimal distributional impact as the state subsidises the payments received by employees from employers. it does, however shift the balance between private sector and public sector expenditure. figures a and b summarize the absolute and relative change in the distributional characteristics of different types of incomes during the crisis as compared to the period before. the deciles used are based upon household disposable income adjusted for work, housing expenses and capital losses. looking at the change in the absolute size of market income first, we can see that it has decreased across all deciles of the disposable income distribution. in absolute terms, the decrease was larger at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. in relative terms, however, the opposite holds suggesting an overall increase in market income inequality during the covid- crisis as compared to the period before. a substantial increase in the size of benefits during the crisis partially compensated the loss of market income for all individuals regardless of their place in the distribution of household disposable income (figures a and b ). in both absolute and relative terms, however, benefits grew the most for individuals in the upper tail of the income distribution. the drop in market income was also accompanied by a decline in taxes paid. although the decrease in taxes occurred across all deciles of the disposable income distribution, it was more sizable at the top than at the bottom. in general, neither changes in benefits nor changes in taxes allowed individuals across all deciles of the income distribution to maintain their pre-crisis level of disposable income ( figures a and b) . the decline in household disposable income was relatively small among the bottom four deciles but was rather large in the upper tail of the distribution. a relevant measure to analyse while trying to trace changes in the real standard of living of individuals is disposable income adjusted for housing costs, work-related expenditures and capital losses. the covid- crisis has pushed a substantial share of employees to work from home or to take up temporary unemployment, which resulted in a decline in work-related expenses. some individuals also took up the opportunity to put on hold interest payment on their mortgages, which induced a decline in current housing costs. taken together, a decline in these two types of expenditure (figures a and b ) helped individuals in the lower tail of the income distribution to end up with even higher adjusted household disposable income during the crisis than in the pre-crisis period (see figures a and b) . for households in the upper tail of the income distribution (above the th decile), the adjusted disposable income was still lower during the crisis than prior to it, but nevertheless the decline in housing and work related resources helped them to soften the drop in conventional disposable income. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. change in different types of monthly incomes by decile (€ per month per adult equivalent) figures a and b indicate that losses to household equivalized disposable incomes were attenuated during the early weeks of the crisis, thereby avoiding the same size of losses we observe for market incomes. this cushioning occurred via a mix of private and public measures, which deviated from the standard social insurance-income maintenance mechanisms. under private measures, we consider work-related (childcare expenses, commuting costs) and housing (mortgage interests and rent payments) costs, which individuals have to pay from their disposable income every month. under public measures, we consider new types of benefits and wage subsidies, which were introduced during the crisis to soften a decline in market incomes. in what follows, we discuss these private and public measures in terms of their impacts on incomes along the entire distribution of household disposable income adjusted for housing and work-related expenditure. figure describes the distributional change in private income support measures (childcare expenses, commuting costs, mortgage interests, and rent payments) during the crisis as compared to the period before. it documents a decrease in all these expenses along the entire distribution of disposable income during the crisis, except rents, which did not change. childcare expenses recorded the largest decrease among all types of expenses and across all deciles, except the th and th , with the size of decrease ranging between % to %. the relative decline in commuting expenses was also substantial and more homogenous along the distribution falling between % and %. mortgage interests decreased at various rates across the distribution, ranging between % and %, larger in the middle. figure a documents that employment shares are lower for the bottom than for the top deciles of the income distribution. in the bottom half of the distribution, the most affected in terms of employment rates are the rd and th deciles. this, however, is not reflected in their average weekly work income, which is not the lowest among the bottom deciles. among the top half deciles, the rank in disposable incomes is positively associated with the average weekly work income, whereas among the bottom half deciles the trend is unclear, most probably due to commuting costs (those with higher commuting costs are at the bottom of the income distribution). percentage of employees receiving covid related income support schemes by decile note: disposable income* stands for household equivalized disposable income adjusted for housing, work related expenses and capital losses. deciles are defined within the distribution of this income. figure c shows that the highest prevalence of pup is in the top half of the distribution, where the percentage of employees who receive it varies between . % and . %. in contrast, at the bottom of the income distribution, the percentage of employees who receive pup lies between % and . %. overall, we find a positive relationship between the prevalence of pup and income deciles. given our simulation assumptions, as expected, the distribution of ceib across income deciles follows the age distribution. table summarizes changes in inequality of different types of incomes during the crisis as compared to the pre-crisis period and identifies contributions of benefits, taxes, and work-related and housing costs to these changes. the contribution of benefits to redistribution is derived as the difference in the gini coefficients calculated for gross and market incomes. the contribution of taxes to redistribution is derived as the difference in the gini coefficients calculated for disposable and gross incomes. the contribution of work-related and housing costs to redistribution is derived as the difference in the gini coefficients for disposable income adjusted for work-related and housing expenditures and disposable income without these adjustments. table shows that inequality in market income increased by . points during the crisis as compared to the period before. in contrast, inequality in gross income, disposable income, and disposable income adjusted for work-related and housing costs decreased by . , . , and . points respectively. among three redistributive instruments (i.e. benefits, taxes, and workrelated and housing expenditures), the changes in benefits contributed the most to the decline in inequality, followed by the changes in work-related and housing costs. the redistributive role of taxes decreased slightly during the crisis as compared to the period before. table summarizes the changes in inequality of different types of incomes using the theil index. the findings are consistent with the ones based on the gini index; they show an increase in market income inequality during the covid- crisis but a decrease in inequality in gross, disposable and adjusted disposable incomes due to a stronger redistributive role of public benefits and changes in work-related and housing costs. our analysis shows how the combination of crisis-induced income-support policy innovations combined with existing progressive elements of the tax-benefit system were effective in mitigating an increase in income inequality in the early stage of the covid- emergency. we find evidence of declines in market incomes across the income distribution, which were more pronounced (in relative terms) at the bottom than at the top. these declines were attenuated by public policy measures aiming to (at least partially) preserve incomes of those who lost the job or got sick. we find that all deciles experienced an increase in benefits during the crisis. the size of benefit increases were not sufficient to fully offset the loss in market incomes, but they helped the poorest % avoid substantial losses in gross incomes. at the same time, there was a decline in taxes paid along the distribution, with the decline being more pronounced among the more affluent part of the distribution. despite the increase in benefits and decline in taxes, the size of disposable incomes (unadjusted for housing costs and work expenditures) decreased for all individuals except the poorest. once we account for the decline in housing and work-related expenses, we find that households situated among the bottom % of the distribution improved their financial situation, whereas losses are recorded among the top %. this indicates that the poorest % of the distribution gained under the covid policy measures. we find that inequality in market income increased during the crisis, whereas inequality in gross and disposable income decreased. overall, the crisis had an equalizing real-time effect. on a methodological level, our analysis shows how an approach that combines microsimulation and nowcasting can provide real-time information to policy makers on the income distribution implications of economic shocks and policy responses even where the availability of survey data comes with unavoidable lags. this approach could have significant value as governments move to gradually reopen the economy and possibly adjust income support policies to improve targeting. the methodology is well-designed to explore the relaxation of the shutdown in targeted sectors (which will effect employment rates in those sectors) as well as changes in benefit generosity and subsidy rates. using the model, policy makers could explore a menu of policy combinations in terms of their impact on key welfare measures and fiscal costs. microsimulation of social policy in the european union: case study of a european minimum pension micro-macro linkage and the alignment of transition processes. some issues, techniques and examples mitigating the covid economic crisis: act fast and do whatever it takes the potential costs and distributional effect of covid- related unemployment in ireland fast development with a stable income distribution: taiwan from data to policy analysis: tax-benefit modelling using silc fiscal policies to protect people during the coronavirus outbreak evaluating binary alignment methods in microsimulation models nowcasting indicators of poverty risk in the european union: a microsimulation approach using the eu-silc to model the impact of economic crisis on inequality nowcasting in microsimulation models: a methodological survey decomposing the drivers of changes in inequality during the great recession in ireland using the fields approach modelling the distributional impact of the covid- crisis accounting for differences in income inequality across countries: ireland and the united kingdom key: cord- - doxts authors: moorkamp, matthijs; torenvlied, rené; kramer, eric‐hans title: organizational synthesis in transboundary crises: three principles for managing centralization and coordination in the corona virus crisis response date: - - journal: nan doi: . / - . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: doxts boin ( ) argues that in transboundary crisis management it is almost impossible to achieve centralization and coordination. this article identifies three principles through which actors in a transboundary crisis can balance centralization with autonomy while shaping coordination along the way. we reanalysed three transboundary cases: the dutch military mission in afghanistan, the downing of mh and hurricane irma striking sint‐maarten. the principles we found are as follows: (a) reformulating key strategic priorities, (b) flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and (c) the emergence of multifunctional units. with these three principles, we reflect on challenges in the dutch crisis response to the corona outbreak and propose improvements for progressing current crisis management efforts. in transboundary crisis management, there is a dual challenge of centralization and coordination that makes crisis response highly problematic (boin, ) . boin argues that centralizing decision power in the hands of political leaders does not work because the involvement of many different political actors makes it hard to define a unified "high-command." coordination between crisis responders is highly problematic as well, because many of them are involved in different activities, without established coordination routines. boin ( , p. ) calls for a research agenda that studies conditions under which preparatory and management efforts can be effective in transboundary crises. our paper contributes to this agenda by providing three principles for transboundary crisis management. the principles enable crisis responders, across different organizational levels, to successfully develop centralization and coordination during the crisis response. based on thompson's ( ) classic concept of the "synthetic organization," we conceptualize a process of organizational synthesis. by means of this process, we show how crisis managers balanced centralization with autonomy by quickly reformulating key strategic priorities. also, crisis workers established coordination through flexible adaptation of existing crisis management protocols and the creation of multifunctional units. we captured these achievements in three principles for transboundary crisis management, visualized in figure . (torenvlied et al., ) . the third case is the crisis response on the island of sint-maarten after hurricane irma destroyed most of the island's infrastructure in (moorkamp & wolbers, ) . the empirical material gathered for studying the cases is presented in table . the three principles of transboundary crisis management are being observed in the dutch corona crisis response (april ). however, important elements are absent, and this has consequences, we argue here. in that light, we first briefly reflect on the dutch crisis response to the outbreak. the third and fourth sections of this paper detail the support for the three approaches, both theoretical and empirical. in the initial dutch crisis response, key priorities were reformulated multiple times (wallenburg & helderman, ) : from containing the virus outbreak through location-specific measures in the most affected north-brabant province-to a much contested "herd immunity" priority protecting frail elderly while keeping open schools-then to an "intelligent lock-down" priority closing universities, schools, bars, restaurants and "contact" jobs. these reformulations are informed, foremost, by expert advice from the outbreak management team (omt) initiated by the dutch national institute for public health and the environment (rivm)-enabling coordination between hospitals across the country. the ability to include different perspectives and crisis domains into the way strategic priorities are reformulated is, however, a challenge in the present crisis response. experts argue that the primary focus on health care seriously jeopardizes economic stability and social security (see e.g., crisislab, ) . including multiple perspectives in prioritizing future responses to the corona virus outbreak is important as a recent harvard study foresees intermitting recurrence of the virus until (kissler, tedijanto, goldstein, grad, & lipsitch, ) , which necessitates alternating between medical, economic and societal priorities. in the netherlands, national-level crisis protocols allow for some flexibility (torenvlied et al., ) . a newly formed centralized national coordination platform for spreading patients (lcps ) became responsible for moving covid- patients from overcrowded hospitals to other (less affected) parts of the country. the lcps is a good example of an ad hoc adaptation to national-level crisis management protocols as this platform did not exist as such in present national-level crisis protocols. the newly established central lcps has some multifunctional characteristics as it consists of medical specialists, actors from the ministry of defense that support command and control and logistics, and civil servants from the ministry of health, welfare and sports. the previously mentioned omt, however, appears to lack multifunctionality to the extent it consists only of closely related specialisms such as virologists, epidemiologists, clinicians and other medical specialists. in relation to the first point on reformulation of key priorities, reliance on mono-disciplinary advice may seriously jeopardize the ability of the transboundary crisis response organization in managing the crisis in time. the moment we have entered the "warm phase" of the virus outbreak, we may be in the "hot phase" of the social-economic crisis, when holding onto domain-specific silos in a transboundary crisis management is known to be a recipe for disaster. not only does thompson describe the challenges of centralization and coordination in (transboundary) crisis response organizations, he also hints at a process of organizational synthesis that emerges as the organization swings into action. our current interpretation of the organizational synthesis process is the following. crisis response actors in transboundary crises shape, and reshape, organizational context while simultaneously enacting multiple uncertain, emerging and evolving crisis contexts. in doing so, they develop their organizational context in such a way that centralization and coordination are, ultimately, achieved. the more recent notions of sensemaking and organizing concepts (kuipers & boin, ; weick, weick, , help to understand how organizational synthesis among many different crisis response actors is achieved when it comes to transboundary crises specifically. on the one side, crisis response actors have to make sense of their own specific and continuously evolving crisis context. sensemaking hence refers to dealing with the "outside," the way in which actors together attempt to create a "workable level of certainty" (cf. weick, ) in inherently uncertain, equivocal, reactive and specific crisis contexts. on the other side, crisis response actors engage in organizing processes by "assembling ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes" (weick, , p. ). organizing, thus, places emphasis on the "inside," the creation of a sensible social structure. sensemaking and organizing together constitute, in our view, a general process of organizational synthesis. the process of organizational synthesis is at the heart of our understanding how crisis response actors in a transboundary crisis successfully deal with the challenges of centralization and coordination in their crisis management. three examples of transboundary cases make this very clear. our reanalysis of the transboundary cases from the perspective of organizational synthesis revealed three principles for successful transboundary crisis management, namely: reformulating key strategic priorities, flexible adaptation of crisis management protocols and the emergence of multifunctional units. when it comes to the first, we witnessed the quick reformulation of key priorities at the central level-ranging from the ministerial level in the mh case to the task-force command level in uruzgan and the company command level in the sint-maarten case. in the mh case, the dutch crisis cabinet, headed by the dutch prime minister, immediately attended to the initial impact of the mh crash in dutch society by formulating three priorities: "repatriation of victim's remains," "investigation of the crash" and "bringing those responsible to justice". commanders of the marine unit who were present on the island of sint-maarten during the passing of hurricane irma quickly formulated three priorities: "saving life and limbs," "controlling luting" and "evacuation." during the uruzgan mission, "reconstruction" goals were reformulated to "peace enforcing" goals, after patrols in the mission area discovered a subsequently more dangerous mission area than expected. the reformulated priorities placed more emphasis on combat activities and were more in tune with the nature of the experienced mission area at the time. the formulation of key priorities certainly was a product of central level actors making sense of environmental cues, trying to simplify environmental turmoil. these priorities were not set in granite. simultaneously, the formulation of priorities provided key cues for shaping coordination between dispersed crisis response actors at the contextualized. this resulted in the creation of a so-called "steering group mh recovery" in which different actors from different ministries coordinated their activities to govern the task-force on site in ukraine. the steering group refrained from a "top-down" command and control approach, but instead promoted the effective, autonomous operation of this task force and its commanders. the marine crew that was deployed on the island of sint-maarten abandoned their standard "hurex" protocols in favour of combat heuristics developed in a recent peace-keeping mission in mali. the heuristics facilitated the creation of a centralized "pocket of force" engineers and infantry integrated their activities within multifunctional platoons for the passing of a second hurricane (maria). within tfu, the so-called smallest unit of action-principle was developed in which soldiers from different functional specialisms (such as: engineers, infantry, cavalry) regrouped themselves into multifunctional patrols, better able to deal with the uruzgan mission environment. the three principles visualized in figure are we thank marie-anne van stam for her design of figure . in dutch: landelijk coördinatiecentrum patiënten spreiding. the transboundary crisis: why we are unprepared and the road ahead analyse: in de strijd tegen corona balt de macht zich samen in den haag projecting the transmission dynamics of sars-cov- through the postpandemic period task force uruzgan and experimentation with organization design exploring the eu's role as transboundary crisis manager: the facilitation of sense-making during the ash crisis operating under high-risk conditions in temporary organizations: a sociotechnical systems perspective (series: routledge advances in management and business studies) crisis response at the island of sint-maarten in the wake of hurricane irma: introducing the process of bricolage at the organizational level organizations in action disaster, community organization and administrative process evaluatie nationale crisisbeheersingsorganisatie vlucht mh de impact van de coronacrisis op gemeenten: eerste tussenrapportage een maand na de uitbraak the netherlands response to the coronavirus pandemic the social psychology of organizing organizational synthesis in transboundary crises: three principles for managing centralization and coordination in the corona virus crisis response key: cord- - trvostt authors: tse, alan c.b.; so, stella; sin, leo title: crisis management and recovery: how restaurants in hong kong responded to sars date: - - journal: int j hosp manag doi: . /j.ijhm. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: trvostt the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) outbreak constitutes an example of the many crises that a restaurant may encounter. this article reviews a typology of crises, examines the crisis response of restaurants in hong kong, illustrates how local restaurants deal with this unprecedented situation and develop strategies for management and recovery. the lessons and experience gained from dealing with the sars crisis serve as references for restaurants in other destinations when they face similar crises in future. restaurants in hong kong have already been put under great pressure to survive in the harsh market environment resulting from the asian financial crisis of , but the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) outbreak in march was a death sentence to the industry. the sars epidemic has affected nearly people and killed worldwide. hong kong people were afraid of venturing out to crowded public areas and shopping malls, causing a significant drop in business for restaurants. by any measure, business levels were a far shot away from the levels prior to sars. chinese restaurants where people eat family style from shared www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhosman - /$ -see front matter r elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. doi: . /j.ijhm. . . platters of food in a crowded environment were the worst affected having lost as much as % of their business since the outbreak began (geoffrey and prystay, ) . this reveals vulnerability in the catering industry's ability to respond to crisis, especially epidemics like sars that spread panic and disrupt the everyday activities of the people. however, some restaurants have managed to stay afloat, with some even turning a little profit. by studying the crisis response of these restaurants, we can formulate a crisis response and recovery plan to serve as a future reference for other restaurants facing similar disasters. following stafford et al. ( ) , we propose in this paper a four-step crisis management procedure to deal with crises like sars. fig. shows the four steps in the process. step one is categorization of crises in which restaurant managers should classify the crisis they are dealing with into one of the seven categories outlined in table below. identification of the crisis type is important because it helps managers find the appropriate measures to keep the crisis under control. next, the extent and type of damage is assessed, and then tactics are formulated and implemented to combat the crisis. the last step of the crisis management process is to evaluate the effectiveness of the recovery strategies using a feedback loop that enables managers to refine the tactics until the crisis is brought under control. crisis is defined as a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization, and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly (pearson and clair, ) . fearn-banks ( ) views a crisis as a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics, products, services, or good name. pauchant and mitroff ( ) regard a crisis as a disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, and its existential core. barton ( ) suggests a crisis is a major, unpredictable event that has potentially negative results. in the business context, an event that damages a firm's reputation or drastically harms the long-term goals of profitability, growth or survival is called a crisis (lerbinger, ) . the various crises that a business organization may encounter warrant different solutions and crisis-management methods. using lerbinger's ( ) typology of crisis, and following stafford et al.'s ( ) approach of categorizing the september terrorist attacks, we classify the potential crisis faced by restaurants into seven categories based on whether the crisis is caused by external factors or originate within the restaurant itself. the seven types of crisis are shown in table . the seven categories can be grouped together with respect to the environment in which each crisis arises. in the following, we would elaborate more fully on the nature of various crises in each environment, and would attempt to relate sars to the appropriate environments. as an external factor, physical environmental conditions such as natural disasters and technological failures are the least controllable by a restaurant. restaurants can only react passively to large-scale hurricanes or other natural phenomenon. such is the case with hurricane andrew in florida, , and hurricane hugo in south carolina, , which resulted in . billion and billion dollars worth of damage, placing them as the top two costliest hurricanes in the us history (http:// www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastcost.shtml). technological failure is caused by errors in the application of science in industry. the most prominent example is that of the chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in , resulting in many european countries destroying crops in fear of contamination. the sars outbreak in hong kong fits naturally into the physical environment category of crises. the origin of the coronavirus suspected of causing sars is still unknown and restaurant managers are still grappling with the task of dealing with its consequences. the entire industry lost three billion dollars of revenue in the two months after the outbreak, and many restaurants were on the verge of collapse. the appropriate strategy to deal with disasters of the physical environment type is to react quickly to minimize the damage. time is of the essence because the damage could escalate very quickly to a point that threatens the survival of the business. crises of the social environment are caused by human deeds. strikes by labour unions and boycotts of certain goods resulting in damage to firms are examples of confrontation types of crises in a firm's social environment. acts of malevolence are likewise crises of the social environment. these crises include terrorist acts or criminal deeds, which are also extremely disruptive to a firm's business. the sars instance in hong kong had indirectly generated crises of the social environment because many restaurants experienced liquidity problems after the outbreak, and had to lay off thousands of staff or force them to take no-pay leave. this led to some labour unrest and lawsuits. the strategies for dealing with crises in the social environment involve calming the people and negotiation with the parties affected to achieve a win-win resolution. legal measures may be necessary if compromise is not possible. the management level is of utmost importance as many crises are caused by skewed management values, deception or misconduct. fiscal forecasts and goals that cannot be reached often lead to unethical behaviour, or even criminal acts on the part of the management. such crises can utterly destroy the reputation of a firm, as with the recent enron and worldcom scandals. many restaurants are facing serious cash flow problems after the sars outbreak, so there is great temptation for their managers to engage in unethical conduct to ensure the survival of their business, which may ultimately give rise to crises of the management failure type. the appropriate strategy to deal with these kinds of crises is to enforce a strict code of conduct on business practices. very often, dismissal and legal sanction have to be resorted to for criminal behaviour. the crisis typology we outlined in the previous section is useful to restaurant managers in two ways. first, the appropriate management and recovery strategies are dependent on the type of crisis in question (lerbinger, ) . for example, in the case of a crisis that belongs to the technological failure type, the possible remedial actions may include a public relations campaign to convince the public that the failed system has been adequately fixed, or a better new system is in place. the firm should also communicate to the public that it would try its best to avoid similar failures in future. second, the typology can alert managers to subsequent crises that may follow the original one when the wrong approach has been used to deal with the original crisis. in the sars outbreak, for example, restaurant managers' attempt to lay off staff without proper compensation to improve their cash flow position may lead to confrontation with the labour, which may subsequently cause a crisis of the social environment type. before a recovery plan is devised to rebuild the business, restaurants should assess the type and extent of damage caused by the crisis. in the sars instance, for example, the major damage caused to a lot of restaurants was a sudden cash flow problem that was both immediate and heavy. hence, the appropriate counter measures must aim at maintaining an adequate liquidity position for the restaurant. operating costs must be minimized, and low cost loans must be solicited. meanwhile, revenue enhancement plans need to be devised to generate more cash inflow to the restaurant. to draw out the appropriate recovery strategies to save their business, restaurant managers must consider each process in the business operation, and find out how each step in the service management cycle could be modified and improved to bring the crisis under control. essentially, the appropriate tactics in the sars epidemic should include all measures that could minimize the cost and enhance the revenue of the restaurant. the strategies that restaurant managers have devised to deal with the circumstance are: during the sars crisis, restaurant managers sought various ways to minimize their running expenses so that it had a better chance of surviving the outbreak. this goal could be accomplished via a multitude of recovery measures. one approach is to reduce investment in advertising and promotion. another possible means of cutting costs is to reduce factor input costs, achievable through negotiation with suppliers to lower the cost of foodstuffs, with landlords to reduce rent, and with staff for pay cut or no-pay leave. a time of crisis also warrants the step of lobbying for government financial support. the government may take notice of the plight and offer benefits such as interest-free loans or allow for a suspension of certain fees and charges. on april th, the hong kong general chamber of commerce began lobbying for government relief for sars-affected businesses, including the catering industry. in response to the lobbying, hong kong's chief executive, mr. tung chee-hwa, announced a hkd . billion package that included tax rebates, lower rent for shops in public shopping malls and reduced water and sewage charges for restaurants. simultaneous to cost reduction, restaurant managers may implement revenue enhancement strategies. to combat the pressures resulting from widespread fear of sars, a restaurant could increase its patron's perceived value of dining there by adopting a combination of the following. the most obvious tactic is to improve food quality and service. in addition, restaurants may offer discounts or other forms of promotion to entice potential customers to dine. capitalizing on the people's current emphasis on health and strengthening their own immunity, some restaurants offered specialized ''anti-sars'' menus, with items that claim to boost customers' immune system. such items are often based on chinese herbal medicine and aim to induce harmony between the yin and yang forces within the body. this approach was well received by the hong kong people, who already have a strong tradition of incorporating chinese medical herbs into their diet. for customers who were nonetheless still afraid of dining out, many restaurants provided take-away or delivery services. several restaurants also took steps to improve their social image in order to attract customers by setting up a community fund whereby a proportion of any patronage was donated to sars-related causes. the damage to restaurants caused by sars is largely due to panic and widespread fear as opposed to actual direct consequences of the virus. this stems from the fact that threats that cannot be seen or controlled are considered much more perilous than those that can be seen (gregg, ) . perceived physical risk is one of the six types of risks that have been extensively discussed and studied by marketing scholars like bauer ( ) and bettman ( ) . as the sars virus is transmitted by airborne water molecules, it is necessary to deploy a clear and effective policy that ensures the sanitation of the restaurant premises, so that the perceived risk of dining in the restaurant could be kept to the lowest possible level. to instil a sense of confidence in the patron, restaurant managers should advertise its hygiene policies and the measures the restaurant has taken to safeguard the customers' physical health. to make the customer feel confident, restaurants proactively took steps to sanitize the restaurant area. in fact, many restaurants used cleanliness and hygiene as a selling point in addition to food quality and cost. the following measures were adopted by local restaurants to combat the sars epidemic: regardless of position, all staff were instructed to wear protective surgical masks. this policy was implemented in almost all restaurants in hong kong. a 'hygiene ambassador' was employed to greet customers and offer antibacterial wipes. the american restaurant chain ruby tuesday said it regained % of its lost customers through this sanitation measure and offering a % discount. another example is queen's, a disco in hong kong that introduced nurse betty, an attractive waitress who checked the temperatures of customers at the door. many restaurants disinfected the premises several times a day and all eating utensils were kept in a sterilized compartment or immersed in hot water to eradicate the virus. chinese people share a meal amongst friends and family using chopsticks, which provides a channel for spreading sars. to deal with this problem, each dish was accompanied with a ''common'' pair of chopsticks that everyone used to transfer food to his/her own bowl instead of using the pair for eating. karaoke restaurants advertized that all microphones we re cleaned by ultraviolet rays and disinfectant spray to prevent the spread of the virus. the tactics devised for fighting the crisis must be closely monitored and refined depending on their effectiveness. that is, contingency measures must remain flexible and adapt to changing conditions of the crisis. new information needs to be incorporated into the business practices of the company. for example, the implementation scale of measures such as the distribution of face masks could be modified to minimize cost after who decided to withdraw hong kong from its list of affected areas. whilst the sars crisis is a natural disaster, the methods employed by local restaurant managers to deal with the challenge serves as a good reference for other restaurants who may be inflicted with similar crises in future. in this outbreak, local restaurants have been adept in responding to the crisis. through a combination of the cost reduction and revenue enhancement strategies outlined above, alongside a variety of additional measures, several restaurants have even succeeded in turning a profit under the adverse influence of the outbreak. one important issue uncovered from the sars outbreak is that nearly all hong kong restaurants do not have a crisis plan. the literature on crisis management has stressed the importance of a plan for crisis management (see, for example, fearn-banks, ; coombs, ; barton, ) . to survive a crisis, a restaurant must have formal guidelines and procedures for communicating to employees, as well as the general public about various reactive measures a restaurant plans to undertake in the event of a crisis. a restaurant's contingency plan should not cover epidemics like sars only, but should also look into recovery measures for all the other six types of crises we described in table . in formulating a crisis management plan, a restaurant must look at its needs and goals, establish a risk management policy and communicate it to all staff. the crisis management plan should establish clear accountabilities and responsibilities for identifying, managing and monitoring risks. in the planning process, restaurant managers must trade-off the risk involved and the costs of the measures to be undertaken, and should encourage openness and participation from all staff. finally, the plan should also incorporate a review process to enable a restaurant to learn from each crisis for more effective crisis management in future. finally, restaurants that prepare for a crisis should use a team approach. the use of teams is standard practice among leading corporations today (devine et al., ) . crisis in organizations: managing and communicating in the heat of chaos crisis in organizations ii risk taking and information handling in consumer behavior perceived risk and its components: a model and empirical test ongoing crisis communication: planning, managing, and responding teams in organizations: prevalence, characteristics, and effectiveness crisis communication: a casebook approach crisis management: planning for the inevitable restaurants, churches, taxis and bars woo sars recluses sars and the fear factor the crisis manager: facing risk and responsibility transforming the crisis-prone organization: preventing individual, organizational, and environmental tragedies managing the unthinkable reframing crisis management crisis management and recovery. cronell hotel and restaurant administration quarterly according to coombs ( ) , a crisis management team is a cross-functional group of people within the organization who have been designated to handle any crisis. previous research has found that a crisis team approach has a better chance of formulating a crisis management plan that is effective (pearson and clair, ; fink, ; pearson et al., ) . key: cord- -t hkwoo authors: radermecker, anne-sophie v. title: art and culture in the covid- era: for a consumer-oriented approach date: - - journal: sn bus econ doi: . /s - - -y sha: doc_id: cord_uid: t hkwoo since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the arts and culture sector has been experiencing a paradoxical situation. while the demand for cultural and creative content has intensified throughout the lockdown period––and digital access has become more critical than ever before––economic indicators predict that the cultural sector will be one of the most affected, and probably one of the slowest to recover. beyond short-term initiatives such as surveys or data collection aiming to provide artists and intermediaries with financial and logistical supports, both academics and practitioners must engage in joined-up thinking on the future of art consumption, especially from a consumer’s perspective. this commentary paper addresses the main challenges faced by the economy of arts and culture in times of global health crisis by pinpointing the specificities of cultural goods and services. more specifically, the paper shows the extent to which traditional patterns of consumption have been affected, and what research is needed to develop sustainable solutions. we argue that consumers will be critical players in the recovery process, and four research directions are suggested accordingly: ( ) data collection on consumers’ cultural practices; ( ) consumers and the digital cultural experience; ( ) consumers’ engagement and loyalty in the arts and culture; and ( ) consumers’ well-being. on march , the world health organization (who) declared covid- a global pandemic. amongst the main emergency measures taken by local governments was the temporary suspension of all social, cultural, leisure and recreation activities, followed by the closing of non-essential businesses, including cultural institutions and industries. by contrast, the demand for cultural and creative content has intensified throughout the lockdown period, with digital access having become more critical than ever before. paradoxically, despite the crucial role played by culture in times of isolation and resiliency, economic indicators predict that the cultural sector will be one of the most affected by, and probably one of the latest to recover from the pandemic and its consequences (unesco ) . the systemic uncertainty created by the crisis has indeed generated asymmetric effects on the arts and culture, and complicated the decision-making process for both suppliers and consumers. another reason is the multifaceted nature of the supply and demand for the arts and culture, which strongly depends on social and experiential interactions (hirschman and holbrook ; botti ; colbert and st-james ) . both cultural goods and services are also remarkably heterogeneous, for they are concerned with a broad range of artistic disciplines characterized by different distribution channels and consumption modalities (e.g., purchase, participation, immersion, etc.). in a context of generalized shutdown, immediate reactions have emanated from the cultural sector. the first priority of stakeholders has been to continue paying artists and employees, and to maintain a minimum level of activity by using digital technologies, as a consequence of the crisis's "inventiveness shock" (négrier and teillet, ) . in parallel, sectorial representation bodies, governments, and private organizations have carried out large-scale surveys amongst international, national, and local cultural players. the goal of these surveys was to report information from the field to policymakers to justify the logistical and financial support necessary for the survival of a sector already weakened by dramatic budget cuts over the years. the economic situation of suppliers (artists) and non-profit intermediaries has been the focus of most surveys, for they require urgent public aids. we believe, however, that the role of consumers should not be sidelined, especially in the long-run recovery process. the present commentary paper supports this hypothesis by providing a general overview of the situation experienced by the cultural sector since the beginning of the crisis and by singling out the main features of art consumption. our goal is to encourage further consumer-oriented research by initiating a discussion on four main axes which appear particularly relevant in light of recent events: ( ) the importance of collecting data on consumers' cultural practices; ( ) consumers and digital cultural content; ( ) consumers' engagement and loyalty in the arts and culture; and ( ) consumers' well-being as a core benefit of art consumption. arguments from the literature on culture in times of crisis and consumer behavior theory are used as a theoretical and contextual framework, and illustrated with concrete initiatives developed by cultural agents. contrary to common beliefs, social and economic crises can be productive periods for the arts. according to cosslett ( ) , "isolation has historically proved fruitful, and artists are producing new work all the time," and the artistic projects which have burgeoned across the world since the beginning of the pandemic corroborate this statement. as a matter of fact, some of the most significant art movements (e.g., expressionism and modernism) emerged as a response to political and economic uncertainty, even if unstable conjunctures can also lead to quality leveling-down, art frauds, and illicit trade (moldoveanu and ioan-franc ; euwe and oosterlinck ) . what is more, the key role of art and culture during economic downturns and their role in education and entertainment are widely acknowledged. participation in culture and the arts is indeed viewed as an escapist therapy to isolation (tajtàkovà et al. ) . for this reason, art consumption and participation tend to remain relatively dynamic in both crisis and post-crisis times, although characterized by a "lipstick effect" suggesting that consumers tend to favor cheaper outdoor cultural activities in order to still satisfy their desire for consumption (tajtàkovà et al. ) . other studies have shown that high art institutions remain visited (sokolov ), whereas the high-end art market has proved to be relatively robust and quick to recover (goetzmann et al. ). therefore, one could argue that the current crisis is an opportunity for cultural institutions and industries to renew their business models and foster structural changes (reiss ; bonet and donato ; mcdonnell and tepper ) . from that perspective, and as an exogenous treatment affecting all cultural subsectors, the covid- pandemic can be viewed as an unprecedented occasion for innovation and experimentation. it is however true that global crises also generate substantial uncertainty within a field where financial and human resources may differ significantly, limiting de facto some innovation opportunities. we have witnessed this vulnerability in recent periods of economic turmoil, such as the - , and - economic crises. typically, crises of this magnitude tend to undermine an already challenging context in which cultural institutions and organizations face decreasing government funding, shifts in philanthropy, growing competition, technological changes, and rising costs of artistic labor (mcdonnell and tepper ) . since it strongly relies on government funding in europe (bonet and donato ) and private patronage and donations in the united-states (renz ) , the cultural sector remains particularly precarious and all the more vulnerable in uncertain times. to some extent, the current pandemic shares some similarities with the financial crisis, since the economic recession predicted by economists is likely to affect the sector's three main sources of revenue: government funding, private donations, and income generated by sales and ticketing. consistent with what bonet and donato ( ) found for - , and despite the approval of emergency funds and exceptional credits, future budget restrictions from governments and private sponsors are a likely scenario of yet-unknown proportions, as well as the bankruptcies of profit and nonprofit cultural structures. household spending and consumption practices have also proved to decrease in times of recession, with cultural goods and services at the forefront since, unlike physiological needs, they are not considered vital. nonetheless, despite the long-standing socio-economic consequences of , it is encouraging to see that most leading cultural institutions (museums, concert venues, theatres, etc.) are still standing, just like art sales have experienced significant growth, and creative industries have continued to flourish in major cities and local urban hubs. yet the sanitary crisis differs from the economic downturn. one of its main distinctive features is the temporary closure of all cultural structures and the suspension of on-site cultural activities. to that must be added an unprecedented systemic uncertainty, resulting from the combination of three types of uncertainty (biological, economic, and idiosyncratic), and causing severe asymmetric effects on the economy (dasgupta et al. ). on the supply side, this systemic uncertainty seriously complicates planning, decision, and production making. on the demand side, it generates "a variety of individual-level responses, making it almost impossible to offer clear solutions" (dasgupta et al. : ) . in fact, the pandemic has challenged the fundamentals of the expected utility theory (eut), by preventing suppliers and consumers from identifying the probable outcomes of specific decisions amid the crisis, and from taking optimal decisions based on prior experiences. in such a situation, procedural rationality tends to prevail in the decision-making process, to reach not optimal but "reasonably good" outcomes (simon ; dasgupta et al. ) . in light of this, it is necessary to assess the extent to which measures taken to cope with covid- have-momentarily or durably-modified consumption patterns. the experience deriving from consuming the arts and culture is inherently multifaceted. it can be individual or collective, physical or virtual, active or passive, public or private, on-site or in private environments, open-air or indoor, all these categories not being mutually exclusive. evidently, art consumption is not only concerned with the purchase of tangible cultural goods (e.g., works of art, books, records, dvds, video games, etc.). the industry of cultural services and participation in cultural events are part of the broad consumption experience (e.g., visiting exhibitions, attending concerts, theatre plays, traditional folklore, etc.). the distinction between high and popular culture finds its origins in sociological and economic theories which state that consuming art and culture requires symbolic capital, which varies amongst socioeconomics groups (dimaggio and useem ; bourdieu ; andreasen and belk ; dimaggio and mohr ) . while the debate surrounding these two categories is out of the scope of this paper, the consumption process remains experiential, characterized by different levels of proximity and interactions with the good and service. cultural operators can operate at a local, national, or international levels (with different levels of reputation), and specialize in mainstream or indie cultural content. the access to the latter can be free or by payment, with prices ranging from a few euros to several million (in the case of the art market). when purchasing cultural goods or attending cultural events, people simultaneously seek functional, symbolic, social, and emotional benefits, with different degrees of experience (hirschman and holbrook ; botti ; colbert and st-james ) . those degrees of experience not only depend on the artistic discipline in question and on the nature of the goods and services consumed, but also on the configuration of cultural markets that vary in space and time (moldoveanu and ioan-franc, ) . table summarizes the main patterns of art consumption. the shutdown period has substantially affected a key pattern of art consumption: its social and experiential dimension. whereas some consumption patterns have temporarily disappeared since the beginning of the crisis (i.e., collective, physical, on site, indoor, public, etc.), some others have dramatically risen for they are less affected by social distancing (i.e., digital/virtual, private, home, free and openaccess). additionally, crucial parameters such as the structure's status (e.g., public or private, commercial or non-profit), its field of specialization, and missions (e.g., education, entertainment, conservation, research, etc.) may have impeded efficient crisis management. further, while the closing measures applied to all types of structures (e.g., concert venues, museums, theatres, creative industries, auction houses, etc.), the easing of containment measures and the reopening of countries reveal differential and uncoordinated treatments. on the one hand, museums, art galleries, and other indoor cultural spaces are progressively being allowed to reopen under strict social distancing measures (e.g., online reservation, limited number of individual visitors per hour, floor marking, etc.). on the other hand, the future of some other structures remains extremely uncertain at this juncture, as is the case of theatres, concert venues, outdoor and indoor festivals, opera, etc. the performing arts, which require a minimum audience in situ, can hardly comply with such measures. operating at a limited seating capacity would even lead to significant income loss and cost inefficiency. despite these institutions' economic weight, public authorities and policymakers are still struggling to agree on economic reopening plans that would simultaneously ensure the security of artists, organizers, and attenders. as a consequence, several cultural sectors remain in a grey zone regarding their future operating procedures. the lack of coordinated directives creates asymmetric effects among cultural operators that prevent the whole sector from recovering homogeneously. the prolonged suspension of some cultural activities requires significant state interventions (e.g., direct financial aid, subsidies, emergency funds, tax incentive for donations) to guarantee their survival in the short term and viability in the long run (reiss ; bonet and donato ) . financial and logistical support of artists and cultural agents must therefore be encouraged, just as the necessity of considering the cultural sector as an ecosystem within which different stakeholders interact with each other permanently. amongst the proposals made by economists, benhamou and ginsburgh ( ) are in favour of a "new deal" that would weigh each cultural subsector based on its contribution to the general economy. in that respect, the recovery process should not focus on consumption but on investments in the lower end of the pyramid to relieve authors, artists, and creative people, as well as fragile or unfunded structures, from financial pressure. we further argue that these financial supports, and future funding, should be designed according to each cultural subsectors' inherent characteristics and consumption modalities, and by considering the ability of eligible cultural structures to endure systemic uncertainty. in belgium, some institutions such as the opéra royal de wallonie or brussels cultural centre flagey did not claim government aids as their annual grants allow them to overcome the crisis. see https :// www.rtbf.be/info/belgi que/detai l_fonds -d-urgen ce-pour-le-souti en-a-la-cultu re-accor d-sur-la-repar titio n-des-premi eres-aides ?id= &fbcli d=iwar rivkg xrfs zo df tm-yxreg l wya jlbmu g iry okkj f gk fycr lqq. ( ) : page of for a consumer-oriented approach as discussed above, the importance of artists and intermediaries for making supply meet demand constitutes a reasonable argument for funding. however, we believe that the publics and consumers should not be neglected in the recovery process. the social experience of art consumption has been severely affected by the sanitary crisis, and the consumers' willingness to attend large-scale cultural manifestations and to pay for online cultural goods and services will be decisive for the future of the sector. here, we address four directions in consumer research that might help cultural institutions and industries readjust their operating mode in light of recent events and improve their ability to cope with similar situations in the future. ( ) gathering data on consumers' cultural practices: data on consumers' practices in the cultural field remains relatively limited, and cultural operators rarely have the human and financial resources to carry out extensive research aiming to profile consumption patterns (turbide and laurin ; syen kang ) . local cultural operators' websites and statistical tools are usually limited to demographic information on their publics and are not always implemented for marketing purposes or predictive analyses. if education and incomes are known to influence art consumption (kurabayashi and ito ) , the current crisis has urged cultural institutions and industries to get a better sense of what their publics and consumers need, value, and expect when traditional consumption patterns are seriously challenged. this requires accurate knowledge on the publics, supported by data that might assist cultural operators to develop and take appropriate actions (e.g., adjustment of supply) in the short, medium, and long term. put differently, efforts should be made to understand consumers' incentives to attend cultural events or to purchase cultural goods in extraordinary circumstances. while knowledge about demand is essential to ensuring financial sustainability and competitive strength (troilo et al. ) , it may also help reduce structural issues and risks of bankruptcy in hard times. furthermore, there is a high likelihood that the current crisis will make people more risk-averse, with future consumption behaviours that may vary depending on how each individual has experienced the crisis. while radical scenarios might be stopping all cultural activities, or continuing attending cultural events as if the crisis had never happened, some individuals might behave moderately by reducing time and money spent in certain on-site cultural activities, or selecting the less risky operators that are able to implement efficient sanitary measures. since the arts and culture remain non-essential purchases, the swift from an optimal to a rational procedure in making-decision might therefore affect consumption behaviours more durably than expected (dasgupta et al. ) , and create new forms of inequalities among cultural institutions and industries. knowing to what extent and under which conditions people will be willing to consume the arts and culture in the near future is therefore crucial for cultural operators to provide appropriate responses to these new consumption behaviors. both the positive and negative experiences they have gained throughout the pandemic will constitute a significant advantage should similar crises happen again, since decision-makers have now clues on how to deal with the supply and demand for cultural goods and services in times of pandemics, which should facilitate the decision-making process. to guarantee the gathering of relevant and exploitable data, the building or reinforcement of alliances between the cultural sector with universities might be an option for ensuring relevant methodologies and data management that might serve both practitioners and researchers' interests. the role of cross-sectoral representative bodies, which have carried out surveys to report local information, is also central in those alliances, especially to reinforce connexions between academics and professionals and to foster data and information sharing. joint work based on accurate data may enable the publication of more regular and systematic reports on cultural consumption practices, aiming to strengthen funding applications for governmental or private financial aids. ( ) consumers and the digital cultural experience: in the first months of the crisis, the cultural sector has experienced an increasing demand for digital content directly accessible from private households. consumers have been eager to entertain themselves and this behavior has emphasized the importance of culture in everyday life. cultural institutions and industries have tried to be as responsive as possible to this growing demand by engaging in digital innovations and systematizing the use of alternative dissemination tools of cultural content, such as virtual exhibitions, "question and answer" sessions with curators and artists, online live music festivals, d concerts, free access to material and video archives (recorded ballets, etc.), online art sales, etc. the main characteristic of those alternatives is their free and open access, with the aims of showing dynamism and solidarity. although the digital consumption of art and culture is not per se a recent innovation, the crisis has undoubtedly raised three main issues: the delay or inability of some cultural operators to enter the digital era efficiently; the short-term necessity of moving to an exclusively online format (as well as the sustainability of such a constraint); and the opportunity for reaching a broader audience, including new publics. the race for digital content has revealed some disparities among cultural institutions and industries, some of them being less willing or less prepared than others to cope with the crisis, depending on their level of engagement in innovation. while the crisis has certainly been profitable to industries for which innovation and digitization are core strategies in their business model (e.g., streaming platforms such as netflix, spotify, deezer, amazon video, etc.), many traditional institutions such as museums and theatre venues fell behind on this innovation process. they had no choice but to rapidly rethink their operating mode by increasing their online visibility, creating new content, and digitizing their collections (rifkin ; borowiecki and navarrete ). even though moving online is not truly innovative (négrier and teillet ) , this lack of preparedness was particularly noticeable in terms of frequency of online posts, broadcast and video quality, and the ability to effectively reach and interact with an online audience. even if public authorities were to seriously consider investing in digital innovations, the risk of increasing inequalities between leading and local institutions is non-negligible. the nature of some cultural content may not be suitable to digitization, the institution may not have the financial resources to develop digital projects, and employees (usually humanists) may not be trained in digital technologies. future research is therefore needed to explore the potential of digitization, for feasibility and policy purposes, but also to examine its impact on publics and their consumption experience, since patterns are likely to change in a foreseeable future. in this process, more systematic alliances with computer scientists and companies specialized in digital tools should be considered. as a matter of fact, the crisis has also incited some intermediaries to re-examine their business models. will concerts and large-scale festivals happen again, and if so, under which terms and conditions? if the decision to perpetuate and accentuate the online model is taken, the monetization of digital content has to be considered, as well as the consumer's willingness to pay for such services, previously accessible physically. artists, intermediaries, and the whole cultural ecosystem need to actively generate inner revenues to remain operational, without relying exclusively on external private or governmental funding. if one of the consequences of the sanitary crisis appears to be the rise and expansion of online cultural supply--a process that might accelerate with the advances in artificial intelligence (ai)--a balance must be struck between physical and digital experiences in order to preserve the added value of social experiences which participates to the cultural capital building process. unlike digital consumption, for which customers are less able to interact with each other, physical consumption permits proximity with cultural goods and content, and contributes to developing the symbolic capital and taste for culture (atkinson and robson ). according to botti , social exchanges and interactions with peers (i.e., discussions, expressions of emotions and feelings, etc.), can hardly happen at an individual level. the complex relationship between experiential and digital experiences in the arts is therefore a compelling agenda for researchers to help cultural institutions and organizations deal with consumers' expectations and supply constraints. despite its limitations, digital and virtual consumption allows for innovative and interactive cultural participation (morrone ) . it has also proved to be beneficial for stimulating customers with experience-rich information environments (berman ) . as pointed out by several institutions, the opportunity to participate in free and open-access virtual cultural events has been game-changing for new publics, which can be viewed as an opportunity to democratize access to art and culture. whether or not those new publics will become regular once institutions return to normal activities is another question that can hardly be answered without reliable data. factors to consider in the investigation of this question include the extent to which access to digital appliances, necessary for digital experiences, is ultimately a limit to democratization. art consumption also requires a certain degree of familiarity, immersion, and contact frequency with the arts and culture, especially at an early age (stigler and becker ; mccarthy and jinnett ; zakaras and lowell ) . if digital consumption can lower entry barriers and attract non-publics, the physical experience with art and culture seems unavoidable in the process of becoming regular consumers. ( ) consumers' loyalty and engagement in the arts and culture: according to throsby ( ) , cultural consumption is a process of accumulating knowledge and experience which affects future consumption. customer satisfaction is crucial even in the art business, where success is mostly measured by customer's experience and participation (anderson et al. ; hume and sullivan mort , ) . one of the most striking reactions observed during the crisis is the consumers' willingness to show solidarity toward cultural operators. seemingly, the lockdown period has generated interesting reactions from the demand side, particularly visible on social media. while the sudden cancellation of cultural events may lead to customer dissatisfaction, the out-of-control situation experienced by the cultural sector has prevented most consumers from complaining. support and solidarity have taken multiple forms, including reimbursement renunciation, advanced subscription to the future seasons (for example, in theatre), online purchases, messages of support, and donations. put differently, recent events have revealed the extent of consumers' engagement and loyalty to cultural operators, and reciprocally, the necessity for cultural institutions and industries to know their consumers' expectations. prior research has already demonstrated that consumer satisfaction and active engagement in the arts and culture is a necessary condition to increase the likelihood of reiterating consumption experiences (e.g., arnould and thompson ; bourgeon-renault et al. ; hume ; troilo et al. ; yee-man siu et al. ). active engagement is part of cultural consumption, which can contribute to customer satisfaction once perceived as personally rewarding and joyful (yee-man siu et al. ; o'reilly et al. ) . the social experience offered by cultural consumption, as well as the opportunity to experience unique emotions, are crucial for developing loyalty mechanisms (colbert and st-james ) . by connecting with their public, adjusting the supply through appropriate marketing strategies (yee-man siu et al. ) , and making customers feel they are part of the cultural experience, institutions and industries can increase the feeling of belonging to a community. such a feeling of belonging is critical when facing uncertain times, mostly to incite financial support. furthermore, a high level of satisfaction can lead to new consumers' adherence, which, by snowball effect, may increase and reinforce the capital of loyal customers in hard times (fornell et al. ). ( ) consumers' well-being as a core benefit of art consumption: arts and culture are consumed for various reasons such as education, leisure, evasion, relaxation, delectation, self-reflexivity, etc. (russell and levy ). the strong relationship that cultural suppliers and intermediaries can tie with consumers is chiefly due to the hedonic value of cultural goods and services, or the enjoyment that results from their consumption. according to caldwell ( ) , "customers always seek a pleasing experience when attending arts activities." the social and emotional function of art consumption is also reflected in the creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions of consumer behaviors (hirschman and holbrook ; arnould and thompson ) . its positive impact on well-being and mental health has been acknowledged by scientists for reducing tension, anxiety, and frustration (e.g., matarasso ; kim and kim ). if future studies should assess how art consumption has helped individuals cope with the global health crisis, recent events seem to corroborate, if not reinforce, the fundamental role of art and culture in issues of individual wellbeing. this represents a significant funding opportunity that cultural institutions and organizations should promote to local governments and private sponsors, by insisting on how a given society can benefit from culture as a public good in a context of increased anxiety. in this perspective, strategic alliances with educational and welfare sectors are worth considering. in-depth knowledge of consumers' needs and expectations is needed to justify funding, which is consistent with the necessity of collecting data on cultural consumption patterns in times of crisis. since the announcement of the global pandemic, and the shutdown of most cultural institutions and industries, art consumption has experienced visible, and potentially measurable, shifts. while direct and physical access to art and culture has temporarily been suspended, indirect and online access has grown significantly due to a growing demand for cultural content in a situation of anxiety and isolation. whether the mid-and-long run impact of the pandemic on cultural consumption practices cannot be assessed yet, this commentary paper has outlined the importance of not only considering the supply side (artists and intermediaries), but the demand side as well (consumers). despite the opportunities stemming from the crisis (e.g., inventiveness, community reinforcement and enlargement, stronger integration through digitalization, etc.), financial and logistical support will be essential to help creative people and cultural operators recover in the long run. we argue that the role of consumers should not be minimized in this recovery process. art supply and consumption patterns are extremely heterogeneous with subsectors that have unequally been affected over the past months. this suggests that the recovery processes will differ from one subsector to another, with treatments ranging from basic social distancing measures to in-depth reassessments of business models. in order to take into account the demand side in the recovery process, four consumer-oriented research directions have been proposed: ( ) to get more systematic and accurate data on cultural consumption patterns; ( ) to better assess the hedonic value of digital art consumption; ( ) to reinforce consumers' engagement and loyalty toward cultural institutions, and ( ) to promote individual well-being as a key benefit from art and culture. each of them deserves to be further investigated to help cultural operators recover from this unprecedented crisis. for this purpose, the importance of building and reinforcing alliances with external partners such as schools, universities, computational scientists, education and public welfare sectors has been suggested. more accurate knowledge on consumption patterns within each subsector of arts and culture (e.g., the performing arts; fine arts; cultural industries; the art market, etc.) is indeed needed in order to better anticipate people's needs, expectations in times of crisis (but also future behaviors), to detect the emergence of alternative consumption patterns, and to help cultural institutions and industries avoid taking inappropriate decisions throughout the recovery process. surveys should therefore be conducted at a national level for cultural policies, but also at an individual level for private governance and business strategies. customer satisfaction and shareholder value predictors of attendance at the performing arts consumer culture theory (cct): twenty years of research arts and health as a practice of liminality: managing the spaces of transformation for social and emotional well-being with primary school children la pyramide inversée pour relancer l'économie de la culture performing online: pr through web gives arts and cultural institutions new power the financial crisis and its impact on the current models of 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effect and outdoor cultural consumption in slovakia in times of crisis the production and consumption of the arts: a view of cultural economics repurchase behavior in the performing arts: do emotions matter without involvement? performance measurement in the arts sector: the case of the performing arts in moments of crisis, people need culture arts consumption, customer satisfaction and personal well-being: a study of performing arts in hong kong cultivating demand for the arts. arts learning, arts engagement, and state arts policy acknowledgements i am thankful to felipe alvarez de toledo (duke university) for his careful reading of this paper.funding this commentary paper acknowledges financial support from the belgian american educational foundation (b.a.e.f.). ethical approval this article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author. key: cord- -nc gr f authors: meade, rosie r title: cdj editorial—what is this covid- crisis? date: - - journal: community dev j doi: . /cdj/bsaa sha: doc_id: cord_uid: nc gr f nan editorial all presuming of course, that homes are safe, that we have places to go and a means of washing at our disposal. maybe we are so 'vulnerable' that we will be cocooned and protected or maybe we are too vulnerable, and so risk being deemed expendable by economies that simply must 'keep calm and carry on'. when we are told that death primarily stalks those with 'underlying conditions', that most of 'us' will be fine, does that accentuate our deepest fears or bring grim but shameful relief? as we grieve our mundane routines, the public spaces we cannot share, the kin or comrades we cannot grasp, we still must find the resilience and imagination to believe in better futuresfutures that are as yet unwritten. but even to write these words smacks of privilege of the kind of life where the everyday is not already a constant struggle to conquer dread and negotiate uncertainty. many of us have been struck by the dawning awareness that it is those doing the most poorly rewarded and precarious jobs that we rely on the most; the cleaners, carers, shop workers, delivery people, agricultural labourers . . . even though 'we are all in this together', the consequences of the virus are not shared equally. illnesses discriminate because societies do. as cdj readers you are probably already asking what does this mean for refugees and displaced peoples, for prisoners and those in institutions, for those who are homeless or badly housed, for those excluded from health systems, for those who are the poor and 'racialized others, for the victims of war and state violence? neither are the consequences of lockdowns and collective quarantines borne equally. homes are hells for many women and children. some jobs are never coming back. isolation can be a mental torture. the policing of new restrictions and regulations may licence old prejudices and legitimise constant surveillance. many who are making the necessary sacrifices for the collective good have never known what it feels like to have their own welfare protected by the state or community. the consequences for democracy, for the economy, for capitalist globalisation, for life as we thought we knew it, are still impossible to predict. some governments seem humbled, tentatively steering populations through the crisis, affirming any and all demonstrations of civic responsibility, dripfeeding and parsing restrictions, sequencing the asks according to urgency and legitimacy. others are letting their authoritarian impulses off the leash, seizing powers and suspending freedoms for the most tenuous of reasons. why waste a good crisis, when it's possible to use it to purge and 'purify', to spread racism and communal hatred? and still others lurch from distortion to denial, from platitudes to empty promises, from macho displays of invulnerability to wheedling appeals to nationalist sentiment. science, expert opinion and mathematical modelling have been stripped of any remaining innocence. this crisis is ideological. and still there are occasions of hope and traces of utopian possibility. community development workers and activists weary of begging editorial governments for funding for essential services and welfare nets have learned that in the right/wrong circumstances money can be found. covid- has outed even the most reluctant keynesians. performativity targets and indicators are being set aside to allow people to get on with their jobs in the health and social spheres. previously disregarded voluntary groups are being called upon for their local knowledge, their abilities to organise and mobilise and for their rapid responses to need. volunteering and community have become the watchwords of this crisis. years of neoliberal pillage and austerity mean that states have ceded ground, capacity and legitimacy: now that networks of support must be created or restored, civil society seems to matter again. activists and social movements are keeping careful watch, to ensure that temporary measures do not become permanent, to speak up for the forgotten ones and the outcasts so that oppressions are not multiplied, to lead by example when governments fail to recognise that economies must service societies and not the other way round. covid- might break community but it might also recharge it. perhaps it will do both. it is too early to know for sure, and this is no time for easy answers to the non-stop flood of questions. having been kept at a distance from each other, will we trust again in sociability? will we long for but still fear the physical proximity of others? will our minds crack from the weight of anxiety and trauma? will being indoors make us more selfinterested or will it fill us with love for the world beyond us? in this moment of restriction and uncertainty, it is easy to lapse into judgementalism about those 'irresponsible others'-those who won't stay far enough away, the toilet paper hoarders, the ones who insist that their lives must continue as normal. but we might take our cues from elsewhere, when worrying about the fate of collective action and fellow feeling. we might think instead of the exhausted chinese doctors travelling to make-shift field hospitals across the globe to share their learning about the virus; of the grief-stricken neighbourhoods breaking into song because those are the only words left to them; of the unknown online artists and eejits endlessly creating memes and videos to lift our spirits; of the ones who 'come together while staying apart' to make sure that care, affection, food and attention are given to those without them. we might think of all those who do these things, not because governments or political leaders exhort them to, but because they know and have always known that humanity must be re-socialised, especially at times of crisis. director-general calls on g to fight, unite, and ignite against covid- key: cord- -hgnch ug authors: gigliotti, ralph a. title: looking beyond covid‐ : crisis leadership implications for chairs date: - - journal: nan doi: . /dch. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: hgnch ug nan looking beyond covid- : crisis leadership implications for chairs r a l p h a . g i g l i o t t i t he coronavirus crisis has seized our individual and collective attention over the last few months. crises of all kinds, and especially the current pandemic, are challenging moments for academic leaders. in my research on crisis leadership in higher education, i define crises to be "events or situations of significant magnitude that threaten reputations, impact the lives of those involved in the institution, disrupt the ways in which the organization functions, have a cascading influence on leadership responsibilities and obligations across units/divisions, and require an immediate response from leaders" (gigliotti , ) . the impact of the pandemic on all sectors, including colleges and universities, has been extensive. in short order, college and university campuses announced the transition to virtual instruction, restrictions on employee and student international travel, and new policies for working from home. the unprecedented activities of recent months, coupled with the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming academic year, further complicate the work of department chairs and other academic administrators across our institutions. for chairs, the challenges posed by the pandemic are plentiful and include concerns related to undergraduate and graduate student enrollment; course registration, delivery, and quality; changes in faculty tenure and promotion processes; the ability to reappoint nontenured and adjunct faculty; the financial health of the department; and the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of one's colleagues and students. effective leadership during times of crisis requires a dual focus on triaging immediate needs while also making strategic decisions that serve the long-term interests of one's unit, department, or institution. as we make sense of the short-and long-term effects of the pandemic, what follows are considerations for effectively navigating the present crisis while also looking ahead to collectively advance department strategic priorities. the role of the department chair is challenging enough in normal circumstances. crises add much complexity to the work of academic leadership, due in part to the increasingly high stakes, the varying and at times competing expectations from one's primary stakeholders, and the real and perceived loss of control and influence. the literature on this subject tends to emphasize the importance of certain characteristics for effective crisis leadership, including agility, clarity, compassion, honesty, preparation, resilience, trust, and transparency. furthermore, as i acknowledge in my writing on this topic, crisis leadership involves more than simply saying the right message(s) to the right audience(s) to uphold the reputation of one's department or institution. take the time to carefully consider your personal, departmental, and institutional values, and use these values as an anchor to inform the decisions you make as chair. treating this moment as a laboratory for leadership development, consider your response to the coronavirus pandemic. using the following questions as a guide, engage in active self-reflection to assess the leadership lessons that will help you to navigate these increasingly complex roles: • what has the pandemic taught you about leadership more generally and leadership within the context of higher education? • in what ways do you feel best prepared or least prepared for managing this crisis and future crises that might impact your department? • how would you rate your effectiveness in each of the crisis leadership competencies noted previously, and would your colleagues and students provide a similar assessment? • in what areas would you hope to develop to more effectively lead in this current crisis and in any future crises? opportunity, innovation, and reinvention can be found in the aftermath of crisis. in their characterization of organizational renewal, ulmer, sellnow, and seeger ( ) describe the fresh sense of purpose and direction an organization or system discovers after it emerges from a crisis. based on our experience at the rutgers center for organizational leadership, what follows are several strategies for engineering and advancing renewal efforts within one's academic department. facilitate an effective postmortem. provide colleagues with an opportunity to reflect on the department's handling of various dimensions of the crisis. through the use of a pre-session survey, encourage faculty and staff colleagues to offer honest insights into the strengths and areas for improvement, identify the major themes to emerge from the data, and use these themes to organize a constructive and meaningful discussion on the topic. ideally, the learning that comes from this session can inform future approaches to dealing with departmental and institutional crises. recalibrate, review, and reassess strategic priorities. determining a path forward after a disruption of this kind seems daunting. consider leading your department in a review of the unit's mission, vision, and values; the strategic priorities that existed in place prior to the crisis; and the ways in which the crisis might impact the strategic direction of the department. establish measurable goals and action plans that are collaborative and sensitive to personal and professional obligations. assess dimensions of organizational excellence. using an available external framework, such as the baldrige excellence framework or the excellence in higher education adaptation of the baldrige framework (ruben ), engage in a systematic review of the department's strengths and areas for improvement, and explore needed changes that may result from the coronavirus crisis. honor the emotions and experiences of department stakeholders. faculty, staff, and students have been affected in different ways by the pandemic, and there will be a need for collective healing in the aftermath of the crisis. in addition to advancing a shared strategic direction for the department, chairs can help advance the healing process by recognizing faculty and staff colleagues for going above and beyond one's job duties during the crisis, acknowledging students for their patience and persistence throughout this unprecedented period, demonstrating gratitude for individuals and offices across the institution who played an important role in the department's response to the crisis and ability to continue with core operations, and honoring those with a direct or indirect connection to the department who perished from covid- . unlike past crises, the coronavirus pandemic is unique in its ability to so quickly and dramatically impact all colleges and universities. it is a deeply troubling and disorienting moment for higher education, yet there is also much for us to be proud of during this time. higher education is not typically recognized for agility and speed, yet the immediate and what some have characterized as heroic response by our institutions is most impressive. ( ), it is in the darkness and chaos of crisis where values-based leadership becomes most critical, most visible, and most desired. this is a moment of reckoning for higher education. looking ahead, we will undoubtedly see many changes across our institutions, and the crisis could provide a valuable opportunity to reimagine, reinvent, and renew our work in higher education, all the while remaining sensitive to the needs of students, faculty, and staff. ▲ t r e y g u i n n c ovid- is top of mind, front and center, and continues to drive most conversations in the media, (virtual) workspace, and among family, friends, and communities across the globe. in addition to the actual health crisis and associated compromises to well-being, the upheaval to business as usual continues to be tremendous. colleges and universities everywhere are not immune but instead play a central role in all this. students being displaced and learning environments being in transition are part of the evidence suggesting that higher education is feeling a bit upside down. while many of our colleagues are eager to return to normal, i pray that we don't. let us not waste this crisis. a rubber band stretched is designed to return to its original form, but we can be different and do better. as we are being pulled and stretched in this season, may we "return" having learned valuable lessons and having grown into something better. institutions of higher education have much to learn from what's happening. similarly, individual members, meaning you and me, all have growth areas that will be exposed and can be maximized for the future. while some people i love are battling the virus, most are not-we are battling the related challenges. most leaders i speak to recognize that this crisis will reveal institutional shortcomings as well as expose leaders' strengths (and weaknesses). one of my favorite questions to ask my colleagues, clients, students, family, friends, and neighbors during this crisis is: "what are you learning about yourself during all this?" just ponder for a moment. what are you learning about yourself during this time? and what are you learning as a chair? wrestling with questions like these allows us to get beyond the mind-set of managing amid crisis and into the mind-set of leading through one. what would you like this crisis to reveal about you and your leadership? in early march, when the coronavirus was starting to escalate in the united states, i talked with my core group about how to manage and lead during the upheaval that would surely come. i noted three key areas-managing department communication during crisis, leading and advancing our learning community during crisis, and modeling compassion for self and others during crisis. in this article, i will share just a bit about all three. crisis leadership in higher education: theory and practice departmental and institutional renewal in the wake of the covid- pandemic: applying the excellence in higher education framework effective crisis communication: moving from crisis to opportunity key: cord- -by cujyy authors: guo, hai; yang, zhuen; huang, ran; guo, anqi title: the digitalization and public crisis responses of small and medium enterprises: implications from a covid- survey date: - - journal: front doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: by cujyy the covid- outbreak is a global crisis that has placed small and medium enterprises (smes) under huge pressure to survive, requiring them to respond effectively to the crisis. smes have adopted various digital technologies to cope with this crisis. using a data set from a survey with chinese smes, the study examines the relationship between smes’ digitalization and their public crisis responses. the empirical results show that digitalization has enabled smes to respond effectively to the public crisis by making use of their dynamic capabilities. in addition, digitalization can help improve smes’ performance. we propose a theoretical framework of digitalization and crisis responses for smes and present three avenues for future research. at the end of , a novel coronavirus disease broke out suddenly and spread rapidly to become a global pandemic. by late june , covid- had infected more than million people worldwide, including more than , people in china. this public health crisis has posed great challenges for the survival and development of firms, with small-and medium-sized enterprises (smes) suffering in particular. the covid- pandemic has been economically destructive in many ways. first, as more and more governments block cities in order to control the pandemic, the global supply chain has been significantly disrupted as both imports and exports are blocked. second, delays in the resumption of work have greatly reduced firms' production capacity while fixed costs such as salary and rent remain unchanged, leading to serious cash flow issues. third, the reduction in demand due to the outbreak has posed serious threats to service sectors such as catering, hospitality, and cultural tourism. worse, the damage caused by the covid- outbreak is expected to be longlasting and have a chilling effect on global economic growth. smes play a vital role in promoting technological innovation, improving employment, and maintaining social stability (o'regan et al. ). however, due to their shortage of resources, smes are much more vulnerable to public crises than other enterprises (barron et al. ; mayr et al. ) . the existing literature has examined the roles of production recovery, corporate social responsibility, and community participation in reducing the threat of public crises on smes (ballesteros et al. ; kearins ; neise and diez ) . in particular, firms' dynamic capabilities have been found to be the key to public crisis responses (lin and wu ; linnenluecke ; martinelli et al. ) . unfortunately, the ways in which smes should build and leverage dynamic capabilities in public crises like the covid- outbreak remain largely unclear. in this study, we argue that digitalization has the potential to help smes respond effectively to public crises by activating their dynamic capabilities (vial ) . digitalization refers to the use of digital technologies such as information, computing, communication, and connection technologies to promote organizational changes (bharadwaj et al. ; sebastian et al. ; vial ) . in the context of the covid- outbreak, much research has suggested that the adoption of digital technologies plays an important role in crisis responses. in china, the government has encouraged the use of big data, artificial intelligence (ai), cloud computing, and other digital technologies in pandemic monitoring, virus tracing, disease treatment and work resumption. for example, big data technology can provide powerful support for real-time pandemic monitoring and tracking. the adoption of online office software enables employees to work remotely in a flexible manner. based on data from an online questionnaire survey conducted with chinese smes, the present study explores the relationships among digitalization, crisis response strategies to the covid- outbreak, and the crisis response performance of smes. the survey results clearly show that digitalization can help smes employ emergency responses as well as respond strategically to public crises in the long run, thus contributing to the improvement in smes' performance. drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, we propose a theoretical framework of digitalization and public crisis responses and present several avenues for future research. invalidating normal practices and rules and leading to huge economic losses and even humanitarian disasters (wasileski et al. ) . firms can be seriously affected by public crises. such crises lead to instability, forcing firms to adjust their internal resources and capabilities to adapt to or operate upon the changing environment (martinelli et al. ) . as firms must respond to public crises as quickly as possible (bundy and pfarrer ; helmer and hilhorst ; williams ) , it is highly valuable to examine how firms should respond to such crises (cui et al. ; geroski et al. ; mayr et al. ; thornhill and amit ) . public crisis responses involve the posture that is taken with respect to modifying or adapting one's actions in a turbulent crisis environment (smart and vertinsky ) , which can be divided into two types: emergency responses in the short term for survival, and strategic responses in the long term for development (müller ; smart and vertinsky ) . in the short term, firms must make emergency responses to mitigate the immediate negative effects of a crisis (müller ) . firms' normal production and operation activities will be temporarily interrupted during the crisis (martinelli et al. ) , requiring them to implement immediate actions that promise immediate results, such as resuming production, improving efficiency, and reducing costs (müller ) . in addition, firms may have important social responsibilities in crisis areas (neise and diez ) . they can obtain support from the government and the community to perform better during the crisis by undertaking social responsibilities (kearins ) , such as protecting the basic rights of employees and donating to communities (ballesteros et al. ) . however, it is not sufficient to address ongoing threats (müller ) . in the long term, firms should strive to turn threats into opportunities, which requires strategic responses (ginsberg ; müller ; smart and vertinsky ; smith and sipika ) . for example, the practical value of digitalization has been widely recognized in the context of the covid- outbreak. further, the crisis has also triggered strategic changes, including changes in product lines, market width, and external relations (boeker ; kirtley and o'mahony ; romanelli and tushman ) . therefore, in the long term, firms should endeavor to pursue opportunities in the crisis environment through strategic responses (wan and yiu ; wenzel et al. ) . the key to public crisis responses is to understand the crisis environment in a timely manner, seize opportunities, and reconfigure resources to cope with the crisis (ballesteros et al. ; yang and hsieh ) . therefore, the dynamic capabilities perspective is highly relevant to crisis response research (fainshmidt et al. ; helfat ; linnenluecke ; martinelli et al. ) . as the covid- outbreak has been both unexpected and unpredictable, firms must possess dynamic capabilities to cope with it in a non-procedural, innovative, and dynamic manner. dynamic capabilities are the comprehensive capabilities to build, integrate, and reconfigure internal and external resources when coping with a rapidly changing environment (teece (teece , teece et al. ) , which are regarded as powerful tools for firms to create and sustain value in a changing environment (eisenhardt and jeffrey ; lin and wu ) . the turbulent nature of the environment becomes even more prominent in public crises. thus, crises represent a real opportunity for firms to unleash the full potential of their dynamic capabilities (linnenluecke ; martinelli et al. ; yang and hsieh ) . in the context of a crisis, dynamic capabilities can be divided into three dimensions: the capability of sensing the crisis, the capability of seizing new opportunities in the crisis (ballesteros et al. ; teece ) , and the capability of reconfiguring resources to cope with the crisis. first, firms with dynamic capabilities have the potential to sense or understand the crisis in a timely manner (ballesteros et al. ; lampel et al. ; teece ) . admittedly, no firm could predict the arrival of the covid- outbreak, but some firms may have sensed the spread of the outbreak and predicted that it would have a significant impact on their business. by assessing how the daily operations of the local community would be influenced by the potential crisis, such as the disruption of production and distribution activities, market failures, and staff shortages, firms can better perceive the crisis. without sensing and understanding a crisis, it is virtually impossible to develop the comprehensive and interlinked strategies that are required to respond to it (müller ) . second, firms with dynamic capabilities are more likely to identify and capture new opportunities in a crisis (ballesteros et al. ; danneels ; easterby-smith et al. ). a public crisis breaks social patterns and gives birth to new business opportunities. for example, the shutdowns caused by the pandemic have provided opportunities for online businesses to flourish. firms equipped with dynamic capabilities can better address valuable opportunities and are more likely to create and absorb new knowledge from the external environment, providing an impetus for changing under the crisis (ballesteros et al. ; makkonen et al. ) . for instance, during the covid- outbreak, meituan launched the "unmanned delivery" plan, which involved contact-free deliveries, by restructuring its intelligent distribution system. third, firms can integrate and reconfigure their internal and external resources to cope with a crisis (makkonen et al. ) . organizational inertia may pull firms away from observing external environment changes and adapting to them (newey and zahra ) . as a result, firms without the capability to reconfigure their resources might fail to implement either short-or long-term crisis response strategies. overall, dynamic capabilities are critical for firms' public crisis responses. then comes the question: what kind of firms are more likely to be able to dynamically respond to public crises? to answer this question, this study highlights the important role of firms' digitalization efforts, particularly under the context of the covid- outbreak. digitalization refers to the process of organizational transformation through the adoption of digital technologies (sebastian et al. ; vial ) , mainly manifested in organizations as digital artifacts, digital platforms, digital infrastructures (briel et al. ; giones and brem ; nambisan ; nambisan et al. ; yi et al. ) , as well as digital business and management models (srinivasan and venkatraman ) . digital technologies are a mix of computerized information and communication technologies (sturgeon ) and can be classified into seven types: social, mobile, big data, cloud guo et al. frontiers of business research in china ( ) (yoo ). thus, digitalization or digital transformation can help firms gain and sustain competitive advantages by improving their organizational flexibility and resilience (briel et al. ) and by enhancing their dynamic capabilities (sambamurthy et al. ; vial ) . in particular, we propose that digitalization is beneficial to firms' dynamic capabilities. first, digitalization helps firms sense environmental changes (vial ; warner and maximilian ; yoo ) . the great advantage of digital resources in volume, velocity, variety, and value makes it possible for firms to collect or retrieve information resources in the external environment at a low cost (gandomi and haider ) . in addition, the application of big data analysis systems and iot technologies helps firms screen valuable information through high-speed computing so that they can sense and predict environmental changes to some extent (george et al. ; sambamurthy et al. ) . second, firms can better seize opportunities in a crisis environment with the help of digital technologies. in the covid- outbreak, digitalization has created plentiful new opportunities (nambisan et al. ) , and areas such as online education, online working, and unmanned delivery have shown great potential. further, the decentralized nature of digital technologies breaks obstacles in time and space, and promotes interactions between focal firms and their value co-creators, thus increasing their opportunities in open networks (zeng and glaister ) . in addition, high-volume big data technology and high-speed cloud analysis technology have greatly improved the accuracy of business analysis, helping firms identify potential opportunities in complex environments (briel et al. ) . furthermore, digital technology has changed the ways in which new opportunities are exploited, in ways that are more novel than predefined (nambisan et al. ) . finally, digitalization enables firms to reconfigure their resources to respond to crises. digitalization improves firms' available resources in scope, scale, and flexibility. for example, it technologies reduce the cost of coordinating activities within firms and promote the flexible allocation of resources (kane et al. ) . in addition, digital technologies have fundamentally reshaped business processes, products, and services, as well as inter-firm relationships, greatly reducing the difficulty and costs of resource shifting (nambisan et al. ) . for instance, the blockchain, cloud computing, and iot technologies have shortened the time required to launch new products and transform businesses, thus enabling firms to quickly adjust their operations with low costs (warner and maximilian ) . during the covid- outbreak, firms with a high degree of digitalization, such as freshhema and meituan, have been able to quickly reshape their businesses to minimize the adverse impacts or even benefit from the crisis. sample and data collection an online questionnaire survey was conducted to collect first-hand data. after reviewing relevant scales in the literature, the survey team discussed scale development and designed the questionnaire. in mid-to late-february , the questionnaire was sent to firm managers through wechat and other online social media channels. the respondents were mainly emba, mba, and ee (executive education) students from key universities in china. by february , valid samples had been collected from smes (with less than employees), accounting for . % of the full sample. as table shows, . % of the sampled smes were private. foreign-invested firms and state-owned firms account for . % and . % of the sampled smes, respectively. in terms of region, more than % of the smes were based in eastern china (including shanghai, jiangsu, zhejiang, fujian, shandong, jiangxi, and anhui) and northern china (including beijing, tianjin, hebei, shanxi, and inner mongolia). the ratio of listed companies is relatively low, accounting for . % of the sample. in addition, about % of the sampled firms' business is conducted offline, leaving much room for digital transformation. the sampled firms are distributed across a wide range of industries, with manufacturing ( . %); information transmission, software, and information technology ( . %); and whole sales and retail trade ( . %) ranking in the top three industries. three alternative measures were adopted to measure the digitalization degree of the sampled firms. first, digitalization can be defined as the overall digitalization degree of a firm, which is reflected through five items. ( ) digital artifacts refers to applications or media content with specific functions and values embedded in digital products or services, such as positioning applications in mobile phones to track travel trajectories during the pandemic (ekbia ; nambisan ) . ( ) a digital platform is a set of shared general services and architectures that plays as an important role as a carrier of digital artifacts (nambisan ; tiwana et al. ) . ( ) the digital infrastructure refers to digital technology tools and systems (nambisan ) . ( ) the digital business model embodies the firm's digital technology-driven value creation logic, such as online retail business during the covid- outbreak. ( ) the digital management model involves the application of digital technologies in the organizational management system, such as the adoption of intelligent office systems. second, we measure a firm's digitalization through its adoption of digital technologies, which is reflected through seven items. these are ( ) social, ( ) mobile, ( ) big data, ( ) cloud computing, ( ) iot, ( ) platform development, and ( ) ai (bharadwaj et al. ; sebastian et al. ; vial ) . third, the digitalization degrees of firms for which the businesses mode is online are thought to be higher. therefore, digitalization can be roughly measured by distinguishing online business from offline business (biswas and burman ). firms' public crisis response strategies can be classified into short-term emergency strategies and long-term strategic ones (müller ; smart and vertinsky ) . while short-term response strategies aim to adapt to the turbulent crisis environment, longterm oriented response strategies endeavor to identify opportunities for future development, suggesting the importance of dynamic capabilities (ginsberg ; müller ; smart and vertinsky ) . in this study, we consider three types of short-term response strategies: production recovery strategies, employee protection strategies, and firm donation strategies (ballesteros et al. ; neise and diez ; wenzel et al. ) . production recovery strategies are reflected through eight items: ( ) reducing production and operating costs, ( ) divesting loss-making/less-profitable business units, ( ) adopting online telecommuting, ( ) optimizing business models to capture new customer needs, ( ) developing marketing channels and removing dependence on offline transactions, ( ) actively investing in technological innovation, ( ) diversifying into new business areas, and ( ) integrating supply chain. firms' employee protection strategies are reflected through six items: ( ) paying wages in accordance with contracts in one pay cycle, ( ) paying basic subsistence allowance in excess of one pay cycle, ( ) retaining employees' jobs, ( ) negotiating with employees or unions to defer payment, ( ) paying wages to employees who are quarantined, and ( ) arranging compensatory leave or overtime paying for employees who cannot take time off. the firms' donation strategies are reflected through their donation amounts. further, two long-term oriented response strategies are included, namely digital transformation and strategic changes (boeker ; kirtley and o'mahony ; romanelli and tushman ; wan and yiu ; wenzel et al. ) . digital transformation is reflected through five items: ( ) strengthening the application of online office tasks, ( ) improving the digitalization of supply chain channels, ( ) adopting digital artifacts, such as digital products or services, ( ) adopting digital platforms, such as digital communication platforms, and ( ) adopting digital infrastructures, such as digital technology systems. strategic changes are reflected through three items: ( ) changing existing product lines, ( ) changing regional market coverage, and ( ) changing external cooperative relations (wan and yiu ; wenzel et al. ) . four alternative measures were adopted to measure firms' performance during the outbreak: cost control status reflected in the extent to which costs are controlled, cash flow status reflected in maintenance of cash flow over time, revenue status in the first quarter of reflected in the extent to which revenue declines are controlled, and overall predicted performance under the crisis reflected in the perception of the firm's overall performance. unless specifically explained, the scales adopted in this study are all five-point likert scales, with indicating "totally disagree," "almost none," or "very poor" and indicating "totally agree," "pretty much," or "very good." we measured the value of each variable by taking the average value of all measuring items. to make the statistical results more intuitive, the average value interval of most variables was converted into an interval from to , except for the minimum and maximum. descriptive and correlational analysis for key variables table shows the descriptive statistics for key variables used in this study. first, in terms of the degree of digitalization, the results show that chinese smes have made initial achievements in digitalization, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. specifically, the mean of digital artifacts (usually embedded in products and services), digital platforms, and digital infrastructure are all above . , indicating that chinese smes have made initial attempts at digitalizing. however, the digital ability in value creation is insufficient, as the business model ( . ) and management model ( . ) are less digitalized. second, our results show that compared to internal r&d, smes often resort to external technologies for digitalization. third, in terms of digital technology adoption, the values for social technology ( . ) and mobile technology ( . ) are higher. this can be credited to the rapid development of china's e-business and internet economy over the past years. however, the adoption of the latest digital technologies such as ai ( . ) and cloud computing ( . ) still requires improvement. finally, considering the modes of business, the online rate is insufficient ( . ). in terms of short-term crisis responses, smes have generally adopted production recovery ( . ) and employee protection strategies ( . ), while the adoption rate of the donation strategy is relatively low ( . ). these results suggest that the most important task for smes is to survive the crisis. for long-term crisis responses, smes prefer to implement digital transformation strategies ( . ) instead of strategic changes in products, markets, and external relations ( . ). these results imply that smes have realized the unique value of digitalization in the covid- outbreak. regarding crisis response performance, the results of the survey show that smes have been adversely affected by the covid- pandemic in various aspects. costs ( . ) have increased less than %, but revenue in the first quarter ( . ) has decreased by %- % on average, and cash flow ( . ) can only be maintained for about half a year, on average. overall, under the covid- outbreak, there is an inevitable decline in predicted performance ( . ) compared with firms' performance in . table shows descriptive statistics with correlations of variables. province (the province in which the firm is located), industry, property, and year (the year in which the firm was established) are set as control variables. the results show that the digitalization of smes is positively associated with the implementation of crisis response strategies and performance, and that crisis response strategies are also positively associated with performance. therefore, it is necessary to continue to explore the functional relationship between variables. we calculated the variance inflation factor (vif) and the result shows that the maximum value is . , far below the cutoff value of . our results show no evidence of multicollinearity among all variables. as this is a survey study, a more intuitive and concise approach should be adopted to clearly present the results in a simple manner. to this end, we divided the value of each variable into three degrees, namely low, medium, and high. for example, the value of the degree of digitalization was sorted from the largest to the smallest, and then divided into three equal groups according to the number of samples, namely the high group, the middle group, and the low group. we then calculated the average value of the variable at each degree. this grouping method has the advantages of simplicity, intuition, and clarity in the presentation of data, which enhances the readability of the paper. the values were reserved to two decimal places, except for special notes. as shown in table , the survey results generally indicate that the digitalization of smes is positively associated with the implementation of crisis response strategies, including both short-term emergency responses (p < . ) and long-term strategic responses (p < . ). in the face of the covid- outbreak, highly digitalized smes can more effectively use short-term responses. for smes with a high degree of digitalization or digital technology adoption, the average scores of short-term crisis responses are . and . , respectively, both of which are higher than those for smes with a medium or low degree of digitalization. specifically, in terms of digitalization, the scores for production recovery strategy, employee protection strategy, and donation strategy are . , . , and . , respectively. in terms of digital technology adoption, the three scores are . , . , and . , respectively. the policy-based shutdown under the pandemic has left many firms facing production stagnation. highly digitalized firms with dynamic capabilities are more likely to integrate their internal and external resources quickly to resume production and operation activities through methods such as adopting online telecommuting or divesting less-profitable units. in addition, digital firms can make donations to the pandemic area through existing digital channels. internet firms, which have attracted plenty of well-deserved attention during this pandemic, have higher philanthropic efficiency than traditional firms and charities. similarly, highly digitalized smes are more determined to make long-term responses in order to deal with the crisis. for smes with a high degree of digitalization, the average scores of digital transformation intention and strategic change intention are . and . , respectively, all higher than those for smes with a medium or low degree of digitalization. similarly, for smes with a high degree of digital technology adoption, the average scores of digital transformation intention and strategic change intention are . and . , respectively, all higher than those for smes with a medium or low degree of digital technology adoption. the agility and openness of digital technologies greatly improves the accuracy of business analysis for the firms that employ such technologies. this explains why highly digitalized firms are more likely to find potential opportunities in disruptive environments and integrate resources for strategic transformation and changes. in addition, smes, with the primary business conducted online instead of offline, will perform better in responding to the covid- outbreak ( . vs. . , p < . ), which is mainly reflected in their long-term crisis responses ( . vs. . , p < . ). specifically, regarding other crisis response strategies, the performance of smes that conduct their business online is no worse than that of those that conduct their business offline, and the difference is not highly significant. responses to the covid- outbreak and response performance table shows the relationship between smes' crisis response strategies and performance outcomes. overall, both short-and long-term strategies in response to the covid- outbreak will lead to improved performance for firms. on the one hand, short-term crisis response strategies can improve the performance of smes, though this does not occur in a uniform manner. production recovery strategies ( . ) and employee protection strategies ( . ) can lead to better predicted performance (p < . ), but do not necessarily help smes improve their current performance. excessive production recovery and employee protection will consume a large amount of a firm's resources, putting even greater pressure on already thinly stretched smes during the outbreak. therefore, a moderate degree of production recovery and employee protection may be a better option. donation strategies have an overall positive impact on sme performance ( . ) and can help smes obtain more revenue ( . ), leading to stronger cash flow ( . ) and better predicted performance ( . ). smes and stakeholders are a community of interests in the public crisis. by donating to relevant causes, smes can obtain support from the government and the community to mitigate the harm of the crisis in an atmosphere of mutual assistance. on the other hand, long-term crisis response strategies have inconsistent effects on smes' performance. digital transformation strategies have the potential to generate better performance for smes, especially related to cash flow maintenance ( . ). however, strategic changes are associated with lower sme performance ( . ), indicating that an sme's intention to change its strategy seems to merely be a reflection of poor performance. strategic changes will consume a large amount of human, material, and financial resources, placing huge pressure on smes that are already struggling in the outbreak. however, this does not mean that strategic changes are not a good choice because the benefits of successful changes may be long-term and sustainable even if the temporal performance may decline. as shown in table , the results of the survey indicate that digitalization is positively associated with smes' crisis response performance. first, a high degree of digitalization will lead to higher sme performance ( . , p < . ). specifically, digitalization could help smes maintain cash flow ( . , p < . ), generate more revenue ( . , p < . ), and lead to perceived best predicted performance ( . , p < . ). as identified above, highly digitalized firms are more likely to resume production, effectively curbing revenue and profit declines. however, the advantage of digitalization for cost control is not obvious, leading to a lack of significant advantages for firms' overall performance. second, similarly, a high degree of digital technology adoption is associated with optimal sme performance ( . , p < . ). specifically, the adoption of digital technologies is associated with a higher degree of cash flow maintenance ( . , p < . ), all higher than the rest. however, this cannot help smes control costs or obtain revenue most effectively. finally, for smes that conduct their primary business online, their performance outcomes are not worse than those whose business is conducted offline, but the difference is not significant. the simple descriptive statistics show that compared to offline businesses, online ones may score consistently higher in cost control ( . ), cash flow maintenance ( . ), revenue ( . ), and predicated performance ( . ). however, these results require further and more rigorous verification. table shows the ways in which the sampled smes have adopted different digital technologies to improve their crisis response performance. the results indicate big data, mobile, and cloud computing technologies are particularly effective in helping smes cope with the crisis, but this does not occur in a uniform manner. first, mobile technologies are particularly helpful for cost control (β = . , p < . ). technologies such like g, instant messaging, and gps together with a variety of mobile applications could support smes in refined management and improve their organizational efficiency. for example, trajectory tracking applications can help smes efficiently conduct human resource management. second, big data technologies are regarded as most useful for maintaining cash flow (β = . , p < . ) and generating revenue (β = . , p < . ). in the digital economy, big data not only helps firms improve the efficiency of their existing businesses, it also enables the creation of new businesses. during the covid- pandemic, big data technology may not only help smes evaluate the spread of the pandemic, guiding them to reactivate work and production, it may also help them identify and take advantage of new business opportunities in the crisis and thus guide the direction of future developments. finally, cloud computing technology seems to be most important for smes' overall predicted performance (β = . , p < . ). this indicates that a new era of cloud computing is being welcomed. descriptive analyses and simple correlation analyses are often conducted in survey research. however, entirely abandoning the regression may cause problems hazarding research rigor such as neglecting the partial correlation variables. therefore, controlling the four variables of province, industry, property, and year, we conducted a simple whole regression test among the main variables as a robustness test. as shown in table , first, the overall degree of digitalization has a significant positive impact on the implementation of crisis response strategies, including both short-term responses (β = . , p < . ) and long-term responses (β = . , p < . ). second, digital technology adoption also has a significant positive impact on the implementation of short-term responses (β = . , p < . ) and long-term crisis responses (β = . , p < . ). third, smes that conduct their primary business online instead of offline will perform better in crisis responses, especially in long-term responses (β = . , p < . ). in addition, overall digitalization degree (β = . , p < . ) and digital technology adoption (β = . , p < . ) both have a significant positive impact on smes' performance. the implementation of crisis response strategies is further positively associated with smes' performance, which is mainly reflected in their short-term strategies (β = . , p < . ). these empirical results support our arguments. we have constructed a theoretical framework based on the above survey results (fig. ) . the survey results show that digitalization is positively associated with smes' public crisis response strategies and performance, which indicates that smes with a higher degree of digitalization are more likely to adopt effective public crisis response strategies and achieve better performance during the covid- outbreak. drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, we emphasized the role digitalization activities play in firms' crisis responses. highly digitalized firms can leverage their dynamic capabilities to sense a crisis, seize opportunities during the crisis, and reconfigure resources to cope with the crisis (vial ; warner and maximilian ; yoo ) , which means these firms are more likely to respond to crises quickly and effectively. further, crisis response strategies, including short-term emergency responses and long-term strategic responses (ballesteros et al. ; smith and sipika ) , can lead to improved performance for smes. here, we propose three avenues for future research. digital technologies are at the center of digitalization. sebastian et al. ( ) further builds an smacit framework to classify various digital technologies. the sensitivity and openness of digital technologies provide flexible access to and enable agile responses to the external environment. existing literature shows that digitalization can significantly improve firms' dynamic capabilities (vial ; warner and maximilian ; yoo ) , enabling them to remain flexible in highly uncertain environments (briel et al. ) . compared with traditional firms, digitalized firms are better prepared to sense the environment (george et al. ; nylen and holmstrom ; vial ) , to seize opportunities (briel et al. ) , and to reconfigure resources (vial ) . however, the connotations of dynamic capabilities are changing under the context of digital transformation. on the one hand, the widespread use of digital technologies is reshaping the nature and purpose of dynamic capabilities (warner and maximilian ) , as the powerful aggregation and generation of digital technologies elevate firms' dynamic capabilities. for instance, blockchain, cloud computing, and iot technologies enable firms to exponentially expand the scope and scale of their businesses. therefore, digital dynamic capabilities may become a key source of competitive advantages for firms in the digital economy (warner and maximilian ) . on the other hand, the boundary of dynamic capabilities is also changing. for example, makkonen et al. ( ) reclassify dynamic capabilities into regenerative and renewing capabilities, which are manifested by indicators like reconfiguration, leveraging, learning, sensing and seizing, knowledge creation, and knowledge integration. topic : digitalization and public crisis response strategy firms now operate in "vuca" times, characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (bennett and lemoine ) . we have witnessed more and more crises in recent years. in fact, at least four public crises have occurred since the start of , including the covid- outbreak, the african locust plague, the collapse of oil prices, and the u.s. stock market meltdown, all reminding us that we should pay attention to responses. firms should build, integrate, and reconfigure resources to cope with complex, turbulent, and highly uncertain environments (bennett and lemoine ; smart and vertinsky ) . the world is undergoing a new industrial revolution-the digital revolution (rindfleisch et al. ) . digitalization creates an abundance of business opportunities, and it is worth questioning whether it may help firms survive or even benefit from crises. however, the existing literature on firms' crisis responses is focused on the firm level, such as bankruptcy, stock price decline, and reputation damage (mayr et al. ; snyder et al. ; wei et al. ) , and public crisis responses have been examined less frequently. further, existing studies on public crises often address issues like governance and community resistance (donaldson ; martinelli et al. ) , overlooking the role of firms. the findings of our survey clearly indicate that digitalization can be useful in public crisis responses. compared with other firms, digitalized firms are more likely to adopt short-term and long-term crisis responses and enjoy better performance outcomes. further, we have bridged digitalization and crisis responses from the perspective of dynamic capabilities. however, research on this theoretical bridge is still in its infancy, with many deficiencies. dynamic capability theory is not the only theory that may help us understand digitalization and crisis responses. other traditional management theories have the potential to be integrated with digitalization, and the theory of digitalization itself deserves more exploration. therefore, it is valuable to examine the relationship between digitalization and firmlevel crisis response strategies. we suggest the following research questions. first, how do different public crises (natural vs. social) reshape the business environment? second, what is the nature of firms' strategic decision-making in crisis environments characterized by sudden and violent environmental changes? third, what are the similarities and differences between short-term emergency response strategies and long-term strategic response strategies? finally, what is the underlying mechanism through which digitalization impacts crisis response strategies? the results of the survey indicate that digitalization has a positive effect on smes' performance. although this paper only focuses on smes' present performance, future research should consider both present and future performance, as digitalization strategies have long-lasting impacts on firms. digitalization has greatly altered the ways in which businesses are run (ofek and wathieu ) , which can be a new source of competitive advantages for firms. on the one hand, digitalization can improve a firm's operational efficiency by automating decision-making, improving the efficiency of business processes, and saving costs (andriole ; pagani ) . for example, cloud computing technology provides elastic resources, which reduces the cost of hiring, managing, and maintaining technology talents (kane et al. ) . big data technology accelerates firms' decision-making processes, increasing the speed at which they can respond to intelligent products and services (bharadwaj et al. ). on the other hand, digitalization involves digital innovation activities (li et al. ) such as creating new products, services, business models, and organizational forms (autio et al. ; yoo ) . as digitalization often occurs at the firm level, firms must make holistic strategic deployments (fitzgerald ) , that is, digital transformation strategies. however, it remains unclear how firms should design and implement their digital transformation strategies. further, although the significance of digital transformations has been recognized, there is still a lack of a theoretical framework that can guide firms to realize this transformation. vial ( ) asserts that digital transformation will contribute to firms' performance through the design of digital business strategies, the adoption of digital technologies, and changes of value creation paths. however, it is unclear how this process works. it is thus a promising research direction to explore digital transformation strategies as well as their impact on firms' competitive advantages. we suggest the following research questions. first, is digitalization a new source of competitive advantages for firms? second, how should firms' digital business strategies be designed? third, how does a digital business strategy guide a firm's adoption of digital technologies? finally, how does digital technology adoption change a firm's value creation paths? the covid- outbreak is a public health crisis that has posed great challenges for the survival and growth of smes. the crisis has also highlighted the important role of digital technologies in the response to the covid- outbreak. data from a questionnaire survey was used in this study to investigate the relationships among digitalization, public crisis responses, and sme performance in the context of the covid- outbreak. the results of our survey show that an sme's efforts towards digitalization, manifested by their degree of digitalization, adoption of digital technologies, and business mode can help them better respond to public crises. further, digitalization contributes to improvements in smes' performance through the implementation of public crisis response strategies. to conclude the study, we construct a theoretical framework that links digitalization with public crisis responses from the dynamic capabilities perspective and propose three avenues for future research. a. online b. offline public crisis response strategy . in face of the pandemic, your firm has taken the following strategies to resume production: . in the face of the pandemic, your firm has taken the following strategies to protect employees' rights: five myths about digital transformation digital affordances, spatial affordances, and the genesis of entrepreneurial ecosystems masters of disasters? 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the effects of corporate reputation on firm value at the onset of a corporate crisis strategic responses to crisis adaptation to climate change: from resilience to transformation case analysis of capability deployment in crisis prevention and response platform heterogeneity, platform governance and complementors' product performance: an empirical study of the mobile application industry. frontiers of business research in china computing in everyday life: a call for research on experiential computing value creation from big data: looking inside the black box. strategic organization publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. guo et al. frontiers of business research in china we appreciate the joint investigation team members for their help in questionnaire design and data collection. notes. in order to show the actual situation in a clear manner, after referring to the opinions of the entrepreneurs, the items and were implemented on a -factor subscale.authors' contributions hg joined the research design, took data collection, undertook the empirical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. zy joined the research design, undertook the empirical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. rh joined the research design, and helped to draft the manuscript. ag participated in the correction of the manuscript and provided the guidance to propose a summary theoretical framework. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. this work is supported by the national natural science foundation of china under grant . the datasets used or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. the authors declare that they have no competing interests. received: april accepted: july key: cord- -zap dta authors: bai, xiao; sun, huaping; lu, shibao; taghizadeh-hesary, farhad title: a review of micro-based systemic risk research from multiple perspectives date: - - journal: entropy (basel) doi: . /e sha: doc_id: cord_uid: zap dta the covid- pandemic has brought about a heavy impact on the world economy, which arouses growing concerns about potential systemic risk, taking place in countries and regions. at this critical moment, it makes sense to interpret the systemic risk from the perspective of the financial crisis framework. by combing the latest research on systemic risks, we may arrive at some precautions relating to the current events. this literature review verifies the origin of systemic risk research. by comparing the retrieved and screened systemic literature with the relevant research on the financial crisis, more focus on the micro-foundations of systemic risk has been discovered. besides, the measurement methods of systemic risks and the introduction of interdisciplinary methods have made the research in this field particularly active. this paper synthesizes the previous research conclusions to find the appropriate definition of systemic risk and combs the research literature of systemic risk from two lines: firstly, conducting the division according to the sub-branch fields within the financial discipline and the relevant interdisciplinary research methods, which is helpful for scholars within and outside the discipline to have a more systematic understanding of the research in this field. secondly predicting the research direction that can be expanded in this field. the study of systemic risk suddenly increased after the subprime crisis. compared with the previous financial crisis, although there is an overlap between the two, systemic risk includes not only the information asymmetry, liquidity, and crisis transmission pathways involved in the financial crisis, but also the research on the stability problems caused by the structure of the system itself, the quantification of systemic risks, and early warning issues. as a result, further research on the market microstructure and agent heterogeneity has also been triggered. meanwhile, cross-disciplinary research methods from other disciplines have been introduced, such as the introduction of complex network models when studying the structural stability of the system, linking the contagious effects of financial systemic risks to the transmission pathways of infectious diseases or bio-food chains [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] , establishing new measures to measure systemic risk [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] . different measurement methods in the financial sub-branch field are also applied to empirically verify and predict the tail loss of systemic risks [ , , ] . what does systemic risk research study? what methods are used to study systemic risks? these are the questions that this review will always revolve around. the former one refers to a framework the scope of systemic risk and systematic risk is not the same. the latter refers to the risk factors shared by the entire economy, the non-distributable risk, also known as the market risk; it is opposite to non-systematic risk. systemic risk refers to the risk of an overall collapse of the entire system due to the impact of individual member units, and systemic collapse is reflected in the impact of most or all individual members [ ] . according to the econlit economic literature database search results, the term "systemic risk" can be traced back to the speech of andrew f. brimmer, a fed official in , at a joint annual meeting of aea (american economic association) and the society of government economists in new york (this speech was published in the journal of economic perspective the following year. see: [ ] ), there are different views on the clear definition of systemic risk in academia. [ ] first proposed the systemic risk and defined it as the occurrence and spread of a dilemma that is likely to seriously affect a country's financial order. the dilemma itself may be derived from micro factors or macro factors. the bis describes systemic risk as to the possibility that a party to a contract cannot perform an agreement and causes other contractors to default, and thus the chain reaction leads to a wider range of financial difficulties. this definition focuses on the overall risk of the system caused by the breach from microbodies. besides, darryl hendricks [ ] defines it from the perspective of equilibrium theory: systemic risk refers to the risk of moving the system from one equilibrium to another worse equilibrium, and this risk is difficult to reverse due to the catalysis of many self-reinforcing mechanisms. following the systemic elaboration of systemic risks in , [ ] summarized the definitions of systemic risks and classified them into three categories: ( ) the huge negative impact that the entire financial system faces at the same time, that is, systemic risks have the characteristics of simultaneity [ ] ; ( ) all or a part of the financial institutions face the same risk exposure, which means systemic risks have the same cause [ ] ; ( ) the impact can trigger a chain reaction. in other words, systemic risk is contagious [ ] . [ ] believe that these definitions have the following points in common: ( ) systemic risk concerns are for all financial institutions; ( ) systemic risk focuses on tail loss characteristics; ( ) all need to consider the relevance and cross-cutting of the various institutions within the financial system. besides, there are differences and linkages between the concepts of systemic risk and financial crisis. [ ] believes that systematicity is the most noteworthy cause of crisis formation and crisis development. the former is the reason and the characterization of the latter, that is, the financial crisis necessarily presents systemic risks, but systemic risks do not necessarily lead to financial crises. moreover, current systemic risk research is mainly limited to financial systemic risk issues within an economy. the financial crisis has a wider scope and more diversified forms of expression. for example, depending on the scope of the spread, a financial crisis can be divided into bank crisis (the bank run), currency crisis, bubble crisis of capital market speculation, sovereign debt crisis, etc., and may trigger a comprehensive economic crisis. on the other hand, systemic risk is similar to financial risk in that it is contagious, and most or all financial institutions in the system will face the same impact at the same time. however, systemic risk emphasizes the impact of financial institutions on the overall risk of the system, that is, the endogenous nature of systemic risks, while the financial crisis may origin from endogenous or exogenous causes, for instance, for iceland in the recent financial crisis, the us-centric financial crisis was transmitted to iceland's entire banking system, which led to the overall collapse of the country's economy [ ] . besides, although systemic risks are not all triggered by the leverage (for example, on october , , due to the stock market crash, the us stock index futures prices plummeted, causing the margin account to not add in time, leading to the collapse of the broker), the impact on the system after it occurs must be amplified with leverage. therefore, the study of systemic risks is essentially related to the credit creation process and the degree of leverage. according to the different sectors created by credit, it can be divided into systemic risks of the banking system and the shadow banking system; according to the classification of financial markets and instruments that occur, it can be divided into systemic risks in the real estate market, banking system, bill market, securities market, bond market and derivatives market; according to the different debt departments, it can be divided into systemic risks of public debt (including systemic risks of sovereign debt), systemic risks of corporate debt, and systemic personal risks of households. on the other hand, because the financial crisis is highly correlated with the concept of systemic risk, the scope of the financial crisis and systemic risk research also has great overlap. by entering the keywords "financial crisis" and "risk", a total of ssci core documents and working papers published since were searched through web of science. by entering the keyword "systemic risk", a total of core documents and working papers of the same period were searched. through screening the titles and abstracts of all these papers by adding "financial markets", papers are selected out. with the help of the software citespace, further bibliometric analysis reveals that financial risk and systemic risk research have more crossovers, and the research concentrated areas are almost overlapping ( figure ). the sub-branches of financial crisis research are numbered according to the timeline of theory development. it demonstrates that early crisis research mainly focused on macroeconomic issues [ ] [ ] [ ] as time went by, there was a detailed exploration into specific financial markets and product markets [ , ] . from another perspective, financial intermediaries and investor behaviors were discussed in terms of pricing credit risks [ , ] . as financial intermediaries have similar research methods with corporate finance, more later attention was drawn to bank governance [ ] . as the subprime crisis erupted, more studies were oriented to the stability of the financial system, which overlaps with the systemic risk research [ , , [ ] [ ] [ ] . a new branch, the extreme value approach, is also adopted in systemic research. systemic risk research is not distinct from crisis research, as the former one also refers to such bank behaviors and liquidity problems. among the subdivisions, more co-citation clusters are formed in regional contagion, monetary policy, credit risk pricing and systemic risk. within the systemic risk field, the co-citation cluster of multidisciplinary research is the largest one, also with most focus on the financial network. thus, by combing the literature on financial crisis theory and systemic risk research, it can be found that the research on systemic risk is closer to the micro-level than the original financial crisis research, although systemic risk management involves macro-level management and supervision. there are more studies on the micro-market structure and participant behavior, and more emphasis on systemic risk transmission and contagious research, as well as the endogenous mechanism research that pays more attention to the occurrence of risks; it can be said that systemic risk research is the further deepening and refinement of the theoretical research on the financial crisis. therefore, although the academic community still has differences in the definition of systemic risks, by comparing the concepts of systemic risk and financial crisis, and summarizing the definition of systemic risk in the academic world, the concept of systemic risk can be defined from an economic perspective: triggered by macro or micro-events, the institutions in the system are subjected to the sub-branches of financial crisis research are numbered according to the timeline of theory development. it demonstrates that early crisis research mainly focused on macroeconomic issues [ ] [ ] [ ] as time went by, there was a detailed exploration into specific financial markets and product markets [ , ] . from another perspective, financial intermediaries and investor behaviors were discussed in terms of pricing credit risks [ , ] . as financial intermediaries have similar research methods with corporate finance, more later attention was drawn to bank governance [ ] . as the subprime crisis erupted, more studies were oriented to the stability of the financial system, which overlaps with the systemic risk research [ , , [ ] [ ] [ ] . a new branch, the extreme value approach, is also adopted in systemic research. systemic risk research is not distinct from crisis research, as the former one also refers to such bank behaviors and liquidity problems. among the subdivisions, more co-citation clusters are formed in regional contagion, monetary policy, credit risk pricing and systemic risk. within the systemic risk field, the co-citation cluster of multidisciplinary research is the largest one, also with most focus on the financial network. thus, by combing the literature on financial crisis theory and systemic risk research, it can be found that the research on systemic risk is closer to the micro-level than the original financial crisis research, although systemic risk management involves macro-level management and supervision. there are more studies on the micro-market structure and participant behavior, and more emphasis on systemic risk transmission and contagious research, as well as the endogenous mechanism research that pays more attention to the occurrence of risks; it can be said that systemic risk research is the further deepening and refinement of the theoretical research on the financial crisis. therefore, although the academic community still has differences in the definition of systemic risks, by comparing the concepts of systemic risk and financial crisis, and summarizing the definition of systemic risk in the academic world, the concept of systemic risk can be defined from an economic perspective: triggered by macro or micro-events, the institutions in the system are subjected to negative impacts, and more organizations are involved in risk diffusion and the existence of internal correlations strengthens the feedback mechanism, causing the system as a whole to face the risk of collapse. the definition here emphasizes ( ) events triggering harms to institutions and systems; ( ) systemic risks that spillover and are contagious; ( ) due to the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the micro-subjects, a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism is formed; ( ) the potentially serious consequence of systemic risk is the overall collapse. we found that in web of science, from the journal of economics, finance, accounting, behavioral psychology, and management, from to march , all the articles on systemic risk published in the ssci core journals totaled articles. from figure a , we can tell the research on systemic risk has ups and downs from year to year, echoing with worldwide risk events. besides, the search for working papers on systemic risk research on the nber website has exceeded publications in the past years. furthermore, the number of work papers published in this field newly released in is still considerable (figure b) . especially, under current circumstances, systemic risk research deserves further exploring, as the covid- pandemic struck the real economy by threatening human life first, then financial systems are impacted in terms of both assets and liabilities, which may further hurt real economies through systemic risk chains. another peak in this area can henceforth be expected. negative impacts, and more organizations are involved in risk diffusion and the existence of internal correlations strengthens the feedback mechanism, causing the system as a whole to face the risk of collapse. the definition here emphasizes ( ) events triggering harms to institutions and systems; ( ) systemic risks that spillover and are contagious; ( ) due to the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the micro-subjects, a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism is formed; ( ) the potentially serious consequence of systemic risk is the overall collapse. we found that in web of science, from the journal of economics, finance, accounting, behavioral psychology, and management, from to march , all the articles on systemic risk published in the ssci core journals totaled articles. from figure a , we can tell the research on systemic risk has ups and downs from year to year, echoing with worldwide risk events. besides, the search for working papers on systemic risk research on the nber website has exceeded publications in the past years. furthermore, the number of work papers published in this field newly released in is still considerable (figure b) . especially, under current circumstances, systemic risk research deserves further exploring, as the covid- pandemic struck the real economy by threatening human life first, then financial systems are impacted in terms of both assets and liabilities, which may further hurt real economies through systemic risk chains. another peak in this area can henceforth be expected. the research literature on systemic risk is sometimes the overlap of the fine branches of the section . above. for example, the study of tail risk identification and quantification will involve specific empirical methods and recommendations including risk management. therefore, the literature review in this chapter is mainly summarized and reviewed from the following four aspects: the concept of systemic risk appears late, so systemic research on it is still being explored. however, according to the previous literature comparison, it has many similarities with the research theme of the financial crisis. the study of systemic risk formation mechanisms also draws on the research results of the formation mechanism of the financial crisis. therefore, in the study of the formation mechanism of systemic risk, the research context of the formation mechanism of the financial crisis is first outlined. the study on the formation mechanism of the financial crisis is mainly divided into two categories, namely, caused by emergencies or related to the economic cycle [ ] . in the [ ] and [ ] , bank runs come from depositors' expected self-realization, which can explain some of the bank runs the research literature on systemic risk is sometimes the overlap of the fine branches of the section . above. for example, the study of tail risk identification and quantification will involve specific empirical methods and recommendations including risk management. therefore, the literature review in this chapter is mainly summarized and reviewed from the following four aspects: the concept of systemic risk appears late, so systemic research on it is still being explored. however, according to the previous literature comparison, it has many similarities with the research theme of the financial crisis. the study of systemic risk formation mechanisms also draws on the research results of the formation mechanism of the financial crisis. therefore, in the study of the formation mechanism of systemic risk, the research context of the formation mechanism of the financial crisis is first outlined. the study on the formation mechanism of the financial crisis is mainly divided into two categories, namely, caused by emergencies or related to the economic cycle [ ] . in the [ , ] , bank runs come from depositors' expected self-realization, which can explain some of the bank runs and the currency crisis, but it is difficult to use the model to make a prediction. [ ] proposed that there is information asymmetry between banks and depositors. by establishing a global game model, the bank-runs problem is well explained, and the theoretical boundary value of bank runs is put forward. [ ] extended this model to the mutual fund market and proposed an empirical approach to the global game model. the research of this branch is mainly related to the micro-market structure from the perspective of the micro-level and individual agent. another focus of research on the causes of the financial crisis is its procyclical nature. [ ] pointed out that when the economy goes down, it is difficult for banks to realize the possibility of redemption. if depositors anticipate the impact of the economic downturn on the banking industry, they will withdraw funds from their banks, which may cause a run on the banks. [ ] examined the economic volatility indicators of the united states from the end of the th century to the beginning of the th century and found that the leading indicators of the scale of debts of closed enterprises can accurately predict the occurrence of the banking crisis. [ ] , however, systematically studied the us comprehensive monetary policy from to , and found that the four financial crises that occurred during this period were all caused by panic, but not related to the real economy. this led to a series of subsequent empirical tests on the causes of the financial crisis [ , ] , which conducted a more detailed investigation of the four financial crises and collected more extensive data. it has been empirically found that the first three financial crises were triggered by the impact of the real economy, while the fourth financial crisis broke out due to panic. the research on the systemic risk formation mechanism is carried out in the context of the establishment of the credible monetary system, and the degree of regulation of financial markets and the links between financial institutions and product innovations that have surpassed the previous era. therefore, against this backdrop, the occurrence of systemic risk not only means that the liquidity of the bank or the banking industry itself causes a banking crisis but also means that the liquidity of the inter-bank market or the lending market in which it is involved in financing is exhausted. furthermore, the resulting chain reaction, and even spread to other financial segment markets, eventually led to the collapse of the entire system. therefore, the research on the formation mechanism of systemic risk is divided into two directions. the first one is the research on the formation mechanism of the financial crisis, which focuses on the micro-level; dynamic analysis is used to explore the effects of interactions within the system between individual behaviors, organizations, and financial markets. the other one is to focus on the institutional roots of systemic risk from the perspective of normative economics, or law and sociology. [ ] found that the frequency of financial crises in the world, such as the great depression, was, in recent decades, twice the sum of the number of financial crises in the bretton woods period and the gold standard period ( - ). this cannot but make people wonder whether the shortcomings of the credit monetary system itself lead to the risk of a financial crisis, because the marginal cost of credit currency issuance is almost zero compared to its face value. therefore, the central bank is more inclined to issue more than a limited amount of money to obtain money as a gain from credit capital investment or to achieve other policy objectives, especially when the central bank has a monopoly position and no other financial institution issues currency to compete with it. moreover, the central bank is not bound by a bankruptcy (the self-owned capital ratio can be extremely low), so this tendency is more obvious. besides, according to the guidelines proposed by the central bank theory founder walter bagehot that the central bank should follow (the loans provided by the central bank should set higher interest rates to prevent those who should not get loans, and the central bank should accept good bank collateral in the financial crisis to distinguish borrowers who are not solvent), this type of criterion, which can only rely on the central bank's self-discipline, can easily be broken before or even during the financial crisis, as the fed did in the subprime crisis. therefore, [ ] believe that the financial crisis is essentially a lack of restraint of central bank behavior, resulting in excessive credit funds, which is caused by an excess supply of high-quality assets. this view is consistent with the findings of [ , [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] , which showed that credit booms and asset price bubbles prevailed before the systemic banking crisis. [ ] found that the financial crisis in many countries stemmed from the puncture of asset bubbles in the real estate market. as the financial crisis broke out, asset prices fell sharply and continued to have a major impact on real economic output and employment. further exploration of the deeper reasons, the premise of financial systemic risk accumulation as excessive debt, the root cause of excessive debt and what is the "degree" of liability, becomes an important part of the discussion of the formation mechanism of systemic risk. the discussion of this issue has even surpassed the scope of mainstream western economic theory, so it is difficult to see the whole picture in the previous classic systemic risk research literature. george bragues linked the act of capital interest-taking with the liberal democratic trend of thought, arguing that a large amount of lent funds had no tangible foundation beyond the credit creation ability of the banking system, and the fact that people exchange real goods and labor for this kind of currency without receiving any substantial return is unfair. it is the exploitation of the borrower by the lenders of the greeks proposed by philosopher aquinas. however, the idea of the rise of the liberal democratic notion that "everyone should be free to enter into a loan contract at an interest rate that is considered appropriate" justifies loan profitability. the function of credit creation in the banking system and the nature of profit-pursuing operation of capital will naturally lead to excessive debt of the overall economy, because "the main activity of finance is to create a huge debt chain and obtain more profits from it". that is, due to the existence of compound interest, even if there is no new debt, the scale itself will have endless compound growth. the growth rate of the real economy is relatively limited, and the duration of high-speed growth is short-lived [ ] , which will inevitably lead to a continuous increase in leverage. therefore, when debts accumulate to a certain scale, credit funds will inevitably spread more than high-quality assets, and due to the decentralized nature of globalization (financial centers and distribution centers in the west, product centers in the east, savings in the east, debt accumulation in the west, [ ] ), will become more dangerous, systemic risks and even the outbreak of financial crisis is inevitable. therefore, the free development of economy and capital may lead to disastrous consequences, requiring external supervision and constraints to restrict, and regulatory forbearance and legal loopholes are also important aspects of the study of systemic risk formation mechanisms. [ ] believe that the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis stemmed from the sec's policy of exempting investment banks from restricting the regulation of the balance sheet liabilities in , which was converted into an institutional voluntary supervision model, and the leverage ratio of investment banks generally rose sharply. the commodity futures modernization act, introduced in , prevented state governments from using their laws to prevent wall street from using derivative financial instruments. [ ] pointed out that relying on technocrats or over-reliance on technology to manage financial systemic risks will easily create an over-confidence illusion for regulators. as greenspan admitted at the october congressional hearing, he relied too much upon and believed in the "self-correction of the free market." jonathan c. lipson, a professor of law at temple university, believes that the design and trading of financial derivatives cds are divorced from the nature of their guarantees. unregulated over-the-counter trading has made this market far larger than the actual guarantee, which has created hidden dangers for the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis. compared with the research on the formation mechanism of the financial crisis, the research on systemic risk formation mechanisms is not entangled in whether it is related to the real economy, but whether it is at the macro level or the micro level, whether it is institutional research or event research. on the other hand, research is more dispersed, and the formation mechanism of systemic risk spans the research scope of financial disciplines, which deserves more in-depth and detailed discussion. [ ] [ ] [ ] studied several financial crisis events from high-income and low-income countries, and found that the crisis would cause the average price of real estate to fall by % in the next six years; in the next three and a half years, asset prices fell by an average of %. in two years, real output fell by an average of %. in four years, the unemployment rate rose by %, while the government deficit averaged % higher than the pre-crisis level. once the systemic risk evolves into a financial crisis, the impact on the real economy is obvious. as [ ] put it, this is because external factors that are not related to the fundamentals of the company will lead to market participation shocks caused by changes in capital participation. this will affect the price of securities in the capital market, and thus change the investment behavior of micro-enterprises. the investment of enterprises has externalities and ultimately affects the operation of the real economy. he believes that different financing models have different impacts on the real economy. the equity financing market is suitable for investment projects that use equity financing methods (such as high-tech enterprises). such enterprises have positive externalities to the real economy. therefore, although the bursting of the technology bubble hit the securities market in the early st century, investment in high-tech industries has accelerated technological progress and is conducive to the development of the real economy. the bond financing market is suitable for investment projects that use debt financing (such as fixed assets investment such as real estate). such investments are generally highly leveraged and have negative externalities to the real economy, so once the bubble bursts, the damage to the real economy is significant. the theoretical study of the impact of systemic risk on the real economy has been dissociated from the mainstream of macroeconomic research for a long time after keynes, because whether it considers from the real economic cycle model [ ] [ ] [ ] or the keynesian is-lm model, the market is a complete market due to the alienation of individual heterogeneity or information asymmetry. therefore, the financing method of enterprises does not affect the value of enterprises (mm theorem), so similar financial friction and systemic risk issues are difficult to match with the traditional theoretical framework, which makes the research on such problems lack micro-foundations. until the new dynamic keynesian theoretical framework (dnk) based on the dsge method was put forward ((cee) [ ] , (acel) [ ] ), it was compatible with the assumption of price stickiness, and incorporated the investment and financing behaviors and leverage changes under the information asymmetry into the model. the financial accelerator theory proposed by bernanke et al., the bgg model [ ] , has become a pioneer in this field. due to the limitation of the model's solution, dsge's utility function and production function setting are both in the form of linear functions or quasi-linear functions. however, linear functions cannot explain the nonlinear changes brought about by economic shocks, and leverage has a nonlinear relationship with the economic cycle. the former has the most direct connection with systemic risk occurrence [ ] . to explain the nonlinear relationship between leverage and economic cycles, bernanke proposed a nonlinear investment and financing decision model linked to corporate net assets. in addition, because information asymmetry includes the cost of external investigations (costly state verification, csv), there exists a risk premium between corporate internal financing and external financing (external financial premium). the existence of the premium will make the financing situation of the enterprise worsen when the economic shock occurs, which will accelerate the decrease in investment and bring about the "financial accelerator effect". to simplify the research, bernanke expressed the functional forms of other economic sectors as linear relationships, focusing only on the internal and external financing differences of enterprises and the resulting crisis transmission mechanism. subsequent economists further extended financial frictions to the household sector, the banking system, and the government sector, and further explained the real estate market [ ] , the monetary policy transmission mechanism of government departments [ ] , and the risk transmission mechanism of the banking system [ , ] through the dnk theoretical framework. the transmission path that affects the real economy through leverage is not limited to the ways depicted in figure . the empirical study of the impact of systemic risk on the real economy is relatively infrequently referred only two of the top works of literature in the annual average are related to this field. even empirical studies of the impact of the financial crisis on the real economy are few and far between, which may stem from the following reasons: . the number of observable systemic risk events is limited, and fewer samples are analyzed using time series or panel analysis; . in the quantification of systemic risks due to the existence of many differences, the results of using quantitative indicators to assess the impact of systemic risks on the real economy may vary. . because of the different ways of quantification, there will be large differences in the prediction of real economic fluctuations. if the results are not significant, the value of the research will be affected. [ ] collected all systemic risk event samples after world war ii in the united states and europe to circumvent or mitigate the effects of the above problems, using different methods to quantify and assess systemic risk. the quantile regression method was used to test the predictive power of systemic risk indicators on the deterioration of the real economy. it was found that only a small number of quantitative indicators can capture the risks of the macroeconomic downturn, and they can only be roughly predicted. another reason for the lack of theoretical research on the impact of systemic risk on the real economy is that traditional macroeconomic theory itself has a weak microfoundation, however, the systemic risk is mainly reflected in the systemic problems caused by the interaction of individual heterogeneous behaviours at the micro-level. by using traditional macroeconomic models, it is assumed that individual identity or limited heterogeneity has greater limitations. therefore, [ ] believe that the agent model (agent model) should be introduced from other disciplines to better simulate the micro-individual behaviour, and to obtain a more realistic macroeconomic model. the empirical study of the impact of systemic risk on the real economy is relatively infrequently referred only two of the top works of literature in the annual average are related to this field. even empirical studies of the impact of the financial crisis on the real economy are few and far between, which may stem from the following reasons: . the number of observable systemic risk events is limited, and fewer samples are analyzed using time series or panel analysis; . in the quantification of systemic risks due to the existence of many differences, the results of using quantitative indicators to assess the impact of systemic risks on the real economy may vary. . because of the different ways of quantification, there will be large differences in the prediction of real economic fluctuations. if the results are not significant, the value of the research will be affected. [ ] collected all systemic risk event samples after world war ii in the united states and europe to circumvent or mitigate the effects of the above problems, using different methods to quantify and assess systemic risk. the quantile regression method was used to test the predictive power of systemic risk indicators on the deterioration of the real economy. it was found that only a small number of quantitative indicators can capture the risks of the macroeconomic downturn, and they can only be roughly predicted. another reason for the lack of theoretical research on the impact of systemic risk on the real economy is that traditional macroeconomic theory itself has a weak micro-foundation, however, the systemic risk is mainly reflected in the systemic problems caused by the interaction of individual heterogeneous behaviours at the micro-level. by using traditional macroeconomic models, it is assumed that individual identity or limited heterogeneity has greater limitations. therefore, [ ] believe that the agent model (agent model) should be introduced from other disciplines to better simulate the micro-individual behaviour, and to obtain a more realistic macroeconomic model. besides, the dnk model focuses more on the interpretation of risk-transfer pathways, and the endogenous interpretation of systemic risks is difficult. it is generally assumed that shocks are external, so it is difficult to predict the occurrence of crises. as to the endogenesis, based on the general theory, [ ] proposed that capitalist economies had not shown to follow the neo-classical theory or in the "dis-equilibrium state" as keynesian economics stated, because of the functioning of sophisticated financial institutions. two sets of prices, for current outputs and capital assets, aligned within a capitalist economy are determined by different proximate variables, as well as consumption demand and investment demand having different horizons, the former upon shorter run expectations and the later on longer ones. both form the aggregate (effective) demand. consumption demand is a function of current factors, while investment demand is a function of the price of capital assets, supply price of investment goods, expected profits and external financing conditions. different from the micro-based general equilibrium methodology, minsky initiated his theory from a macroeconomic perspective, based on kalecki profit function, which always stands in a close or an open economy. by decomposition of the profit function, variables including monetary issues are demonstrated as follows: where π is the current profit of the whole economy, i is the current investment of the private department, df is the government deficit, sw is the savings of the private department, and c is the current consumption. thus, profits are not only determined by current productive factors, government activities, savings and consumption, but also by asset prices, which connect closely with financial markets. furthermore, profits, identified as cash flows, are the essential signals for investments, critically linking different payment commitments in the past, present and future. according to different cash flow commitments being availably financed, the financial system and debt structure are composed of a mixture of three types of financial postures (hedge finance, speculative finance and ponzi finance). as the natural growth of the economy, profits, in the form of cash flows, fluctuate due to the endogenous discrepancy in expectation horizons, which causes the ratios of the speculative finance and ponzi finance to increase in prosperous times, leaving the financial system to gradually become more sensitive to interest variations. when the current cash flows cannot sustain the current payment commitments, it initiates a deflationary break, and a financial crisis takes place. the implementation of mitigation policies can only alleviate the destruction yet not solve it, making the whole financial system more fragile to economic fluctuations. (financial instability hypothesis). since the complication of interactions between key factors, as well as variant vast, complicates markets in capitalist economies, minsky mainly demonstrated his theory in a narrative approach. thus, even though minsky's theory became the kernel of post-keynesian economics, it is difficult to further develop a comprehensive mathematical model ( [ ] once put minsky's fih hypothesis into the framework of is-lm model to explain and get the equilibrium result, but the conditional formula that equates the price of investment goods and the price of assets implies the assumption that the capital market and the commodity market will automatically maintain the equilibrium. even though there are endogenous factors that cause deviation from the equilibrium of financial markets and commodity markets, the economy will return to equilibrium because of the implicitly assumed equality condition. besides, the decision of asset price depends solely on investment demand, which is also contrary to minsky's view, who emphasizes that the determination of asset price depends on various factors.). it was also confronted with various criticism. [ ] proposed that, as in the upwards phases of an economy, investment increases cause a higher level of aggregate profits so that the leverage ratio does not necessarily increase. while, in the downside phases, investment decreases negatively affect the aggregate profits more than expected, which will increase the leverage ratio. the paradox of debt goes against minsky's theory. this contradiction should be directed to the preconditions of fih, which assume an extent of monopoly in commodity markets, so that producer can earn excess profits from market power. as the aggregate profits increase in the upward phases while the profit rates decrease, the over-increased investment would bring up leverage ratios, which could imperil future payment commitments. as in the downside phases, shrunk investments decrease aggregate profits while profit rates recover, which is good for bringing down leverage ratio. thus, in the framework of minsky' theory, the paradox of debt is explainable on the presumption of monopoly markets. further discussion can be referred to [ ] . some studies try to expand the kaleckian model [ ] [ ] [ ] by bringing a normal degree of capacity utilization into endogenous investment function. [ ] utilize the profit share instead of the profit rate, [ ] introduced external competition into an imperfect commodity market. all the adjustments provide a supplementary explanation of the demand regime. furthermore, monetary and financial variables are incorporated into the profit function [ , ] . the late research intends to contain fih and the paradox of debt through a neo-kaleckian model [ ] . moreover, by following a centre-periphery structure, the model explains how financial movements in the periphery associate with international financial markets' movements and external vulnerability. recent research in this field mainly focused on empirical research to support and verify fih in different economies [ ] [ ] [ ] . minsky's achievements are more than fih. instead, he focused on the whole system, aiming at constructing a general theory to explain the whole operational law of capitalist economies, including the upward and the downward phases of the economic cycle. the discrepancy in horizons and the amplification mechanism, which is realized through the interaction between profits and investment activities, as well as the positive (negative) feedbacks between asset prices and liabilities, not only explains the endogenesis of financial crises but also demonstrates his economic vision in a dialectical way, so whether the economy attains an equilibrium gives way to the depiction of economic operation processes, as the former is only a temporary stability status compared with the whole process. with regard to the difference in expectations on consumption demand and investment demand, it should not be criticized as a lack of rationality; it should be interpreted as generalized rationality, as in the "wall street view", which is intended to be rationally applied to the real economy and sophisticated financial systems. early research on the formation of the financial crisis from the perspective of micro-market structure mainly began from the following two aspects: . information asymmetry; . liquidity. besides, there are studies on the impact of the financial crisis from the perspective of currency and interest rates and expectations. compared with the study on the financial crisis in the field of market microstructure, the study on the micro-market structure of systemic risk has increased the study of the complexity of the overall system, and it will be reviewed from the following three aspects: before the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis in , the conclusions of the close relationship between institutions and the complex financial network's overall risk resilience were generally positive [ , , ] , and it was considered that sufficiently decentralized inter-bank liabilities could produce a more stable financial system. nevertheless, some scholars then began to link the increase in systemic risk to the complexity of financial networks. for instance, [ ] believes that as banks' counterparties increase, the probability of a systemic crash increase. [ , ] demonstrated that the financial system itself has an amplification effect on the increase in systemic risk by modelling the inter-bank infection behavior. the research idea of this kind of amplification draws on the research methods of the previous network infection model [ , ] , and the amplified transmission pathways are various. from assets and liabilities, studies by [ ] showed that financially interrelated companies were more prone to systemic risk in the face of market shocks due to cross-shareholdings. similarly, [ ] argued that the similarity of assets held between banks determines the extent to which relevant information was disseminated and the likelihood of a systemic crisis. by studying bank exposures in the us and europe, [ ] argued that systemic risk was affected by common risk factors, and the interdependence of financial institutions was mainly due to systemic factors. [ , ] used asset securitization as an example to explain the transmission path of a financial network to amplify systemic risk from the perspective of debt. it is believed that through the interconnected balance sheet network, asset securitization essentially magnifies the financial leverage of the entire financial system, thereby increasing the vulnerability of the system. [ ] showed that the higher the degree of financial integration, the more stable the interbank interest rate under normal conditions, and the higher the interest rate soars during the crisis. combining the positive and negative views, [ ] demonstrated through modelling that a closely linked financial system provides sufficient stability in the face of smaller market shocks. however, when the impact scale exceeds a certain threshold, the tightly connected financial network will amplify the risk and make the financial system more vulnerable, and the structure of the financial network has an important impact on the stability of the financial system. the research of complex financial networks draws on the game model and the research results of the previous network theory. the network theory originated from the seven bridges problem and then developed into the random graph theory, and then evolved into complex network theory. network theory and topological methods provided the basis for theoretical modelling of the structure of the research network itself [ ] and also provided empirical methods [ ] . because how individuals interacting with each other in the network and their importance can significantly affect the results of network structure and impact transmission, the current research in this field is still very popular. [ ] pioneered the use of an interbank debt matrix to describe the network structure of the banking system. this idea was followed by scholars who later studied systemic risk [ , ] . however, early network models used to be a non-direct model, which assumed that the connections between the participants are reciprocal and have the same interaction, even the same importance, such as if the inter-bank liability matrix is assumed to be positive, bank a's claims against bank b are the same as bank b's claims against bank a. this is because the inter-bank liability data is not available (therefore, in the empirical case, the inter-bank liability behavior will be further assumed, and the banking system liability matrix will be determined through technical processing such as the information entropy method). on the other hand, for the sake of simplifying model simulation, as [ ] described, the simplified model and the same subject are to study the relationship between the structure of the financial network itself and financial stability. the results of many empirical tests are contrary to the assumptions of the theoretical model. [ ] studied the italian interbank market structure from to and found that they are in line with the core-peripheral network structure, that is, a few banks continue to play a central role, maintaining lending with peripheral banks and providing liquidity to the market. while capital lending activities between core banks and non-core banks are rare, market liquidity at the time of the financial crisis is often caused by the reduction in borrowing by core banks, which means that the network distribution is not symmetrical. the core-peripheral network structure was first proposed by [ ] , other related works are contributed by [ ] , and [ , ] covered the most core-periphery network structures and a further supplementary version [ ] was published in . a series of empirical studies showed that in other financial markets, such as india, mexico, the netherlands and the uk, the banking system network also presented the characteristics of the core-peripheral structure [ ] [ ] [ ] . thus, more complicated networks with directional connections are introduced, which is more common in the financial contagion subdivision within the same e-n framework [ , ] . moreover, since there are various types of connections between financial institutions, the financial network should have multi-layers, including credit, insurance, derivatives, collateral obligations cross-holding assets. the research on financial multi-layer networks is surging. [ ] study the interaction of short-and long-term bilateral secured and unsecured lending. [ ] study the mexican banking system on all market layers and find that market-based systemic risk indicators systematically underestimate expected systemic losses. the research on the relationship between financial market participants' behavior and systemic risk is more dispersed. the division of financial research segments can be mainly classified into behavioral finance research, corporate finance research, and micro-market structure research. participants vary in different financial markets, the relationships between their behavior and systemic risk, and the transmission pathway, are also various. according to the type of participant, the most studied is the bank. despite the trend of bank disintermediation, in the financial crisis, the irreplaceable role of the banking system and its impact on the financial system determined that it is still at the core of the financial system. the idea that competition promotes the efficiency of financial allocation has promoted the wave of financial liberalization in developed countries in europe and america since the s (the second banking directive issued by the european union in allowed banks to engage in banking, insurance and other financial operations; in the us gramm-leach-bliley act also eased similar restrictions.). financial innovation products and means are constantly emerging, and competition among banks is becoming increasingly fierce, which brings about financial deepening [ ] and improved resource allocation efficiency [ ] , but it may also lead to instability in the banking system [ ] . the relationship between interbank competition and the stability of the banking system has always been controversial. on the one hand, competition is conducive to reducing the cost of capital, thereby increasing the return on investment of enterprises, and increasing profitability, which maintains the controllable credit risk of banks and increases the stability of the system [ ] . on the other hand, it will lead to bank rent-seeking behavior, especially the bank deposit insurance system will make banks tend to take more radical measures to pursue profits in a fiercely competitive environment [ ] . on this basis, without deliberately screening customers, the systemic risk will be increased [ , , ] . this is because it is difficult for perfect competition to exist in the competition between banks. the different scales and core-peripheral banking system structure will inevitably have a monopolistic effect on this market [ ] , and there are moral hazards and adverse selection due to information asymmetry [ ] . an extended study on the [ ] models modifies the absolute inverse relationship between the two proposed [ , ] , and presents that it should be u-shaped, that is, increased competition can improve the stability of the system and also make the banking system more vulnerable. the intensity of competition and other factors are the decisive factors that determine the negative or positive relationship between the two. [ ] considered the role of policy incentives and constraints in the interaction between the two, and empirically tested and compared the relationship between the fierce competition in the banking industry and the stability of the banking system under different policy environments in different countries. it was found that the more standardized the regulation, the more developed the securities market, the more perfect the bank insurance system and the more efficient the credit information sharing, and that increased competition will increase the vulnerability of the system. the method of balance sheet effect is not only adopted to analyze banking defaults, but also applied to study other market participants' behavior. the fire sale and funding correspond to the activities of the bank's assets and liabilities, respectively. when there is a run (trader's run, deposit run or collateral run), the bank has to hedge the risk by recovering the loan in advance or raising the collateral mortgage rate, but there may be a risk of payment due to coordination failure. [ ] believe that when the market lacks liquidity, banks have fewer opportunities to hedge their overall risk or deal with liquidity shocks. this will push banks to begin fire sales in response to future liquidity demands, which in turn will lead to excessive fluctuations in market capital prices. moreover, when monopolistic behavior exists in the interbank market, it will further reduce the effective supply of funds in the market [ ] , and even market freeze appears. [ ] classify liquidity risk into liquidity risk in the market and liquidity risk in trader financing. traders provide liquidity to the market through financing, but the trader's financing capabilities (such as equity and margin financing) rely on the liquidity of the asset market. however, market liquidity will suddenly dry up under certain circumstances and will affect many securities, resulting in large market fluctuations. it also leads to difficulties in the financing of traders and the realization of assets. the interaction between financing liquidity and market liquidity forms a liquidity spiral and triggers systemic risks. the liquidity spiral has a variety of transmission pathways, such as the loss spiral of erosion capital, and the guarantees spiral, which all lead to a fire sale. there are many different interpretations of the reasons for the formation of market liquidity shocks: ( ) information asymmetry some of the research on financial crises caused by the lack of market liquidity is associated with information asymmetry, which is often one of the causes of liquidity exhaustion [ ] . the financial crisis caused by information asymmetry is more typical in bank run events. the global game model proposed by [ ] is also based on the assumption of information asymmetry, that is, participants can only obtain noisy observations, and the lack of common knowledge leads participants to choose risk-dominant equilibrium as the only equilibrium. this global game model is extended to the currency crisis model [ ] and the bank crisis model [ ] . when information asymmetry exists in the interbank market, it will exacerbate the liquidity of the market due to counterparty default risk, leading to system collapse [ ] . moreover, the information asymmetry between the supervisory authority and the regulated institution will cause the central bank to misjudge. since regulators do not have a complete understanding of the asset quality of the entire banking system, therefore, even if a central bank participates in the interbank market to prevent the inefficient allocation of market resources due to adverse selection, moral hazard and monopolistic behaviour, the result of such hedging is difficult to be optimal [ ] . ( ) liquidity mismatch [ ] believe that the common feature of financial markets in the recent financial crisis is that financial institutions generally have more serious mismatches in liquidity. for example, the terms of interest rate fluctuations in the subprime borrower's loan contract will affect their ability to repay and refinance. commercial banks are burdened with over-proportionate contingent liabilities relative to capital under unregulated off-balance sheet business. the rise in the proportion of investment banks that rely mainly on repurchasing commercial paper financing means that the proportion of the entire financial system that relies on market financing is rising, so the excessive leverage ratio is the risk of mismatch in liquidity. in the event of a liquidity shock, market liquidity is rapidly depleted by the balance sheet effect, resulting in the interaction of collateral run, bank run, and counterparty run. the central bank has to ease the crisis by releasing a large amount of liquidity, but this has further increased the moral hazard of financial institutions to increase leverage, which has further worsened the problem of liquidity mismatch. ( ) actual demand shock [ ] argued that the demand for liquidity stems from the mismatch between the supply and demand of goods by consumers in different spaces. once they needed to spend at different times in different locations, they constituted cross-regional liquidity needs, and banks needed to provide liquidity through the crediting behavior of the payment system or the interbank market. [ ] agreed that random demand of consumers for liquidity will become a liquidity shock for a depository institution due to incomplete interbank market transmission. [ ] suggested that systemic risk is mainly transmitted through the payment system, the interbank market and the derivatives market and that the random withdrawal demand of consumers at different times and in different places will have a liquidity impact on the payment system and the interbank market. the existence of the interbank market reduced the incentives for banks to hold non-profit cash; banks had solvency under certain conditions, while the market was caught in coordination failures. the financial accelerator model proposed by [ ] explained the external financing premium problem faced by enterprises from the perspective of the incomplete credit market. the incentive mechanism of the company has prompted the agent to favour debt financing. when the negative impact causes the net value of the enterprise to decrease, the solvency declines, which in turn has an impact on the asset side of the loan bank. when the assets of the loan bank are impaired due to corporate default and further affect the scale of the risk reserves, the bank faces a liquidity shock, and the impact has a nonlinear amplification effect through the interbank market. other factors affecting market liquidity risk were institutional and systemic risk management systems, financial system structures, and the institution's own reputation risk [ ] . moreover, the phenomena associated with liquidity shocks include market freeze, asset sales, contagion effects, and institutional bankruptcy, which also possibly appear when systemic risks occur. financial contagion occurs as the distress of one or a small group of banks risks the stability of other financial institutions, even ultimately spreading to the real economy. the financial contagion can occur due to both local contractual obligation connections, and global market connections, e.g., through the prices of assets due to mark-to-market valuation [ ] . [ ] established a framework for contagion analysis, which studies the spread of obligation default within the financial system due to unpaid liabilities. since there are various types of connections between financial firms, the shocks can transmit in the network via different channels, and the channels also interact with each other in some historic events. according to [ ] taxonomy, there are mainly four types of channels: asset correlated contagion, default contagion, liquidity contagion, market illiquidity and asset fire sales. except for the default contagion, for the rest of the channels, the observed domino or spillover effects are demonstrated through the slump in mark-to-market prices. thus, contagion research can be classified into two main branches: default contagion and price-mediated contagion. ( ) default contagion [ ] explored how the probability and potential impact of contagion is influenced by aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks. they found that the robust-yet-fragile financial system has a low probability of such contagion. [ ] extend the basic default contagion model by introducing default costs into the system. [ ] assume minimal information about network structure, and through such key node-level quantities as asset size, leverage and the fraction of a financial institution's liabilities held by other financial firms, they derive explicit bounds on the potential magnitude of network effects on contagion and loss amplification. other models with extension in default costs include [ , , ] . ( ) price-mediated contagion these contagion models consider the mark-to-market asset price slumps due to the extreme tension in market liquidity and individual liquidity, as demonstrated in fire sales [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] cross-holdings have also been studied [ , ] . [ , ] provide a framework for modelling asset prices during a fire sale. [ ] generalizes the model of [ ] by allowing for differing liquidation strategies. [ ] study the three extensions that are bankruptcy costs, multiple assets and fire sales within a single model. the survey of empirical work on contagion can refer to [ ] . empirical studies are revealing that financial contagion can not be well explained by the base model of obligation default [ , , , ] . system stress tests are usually adopted to study the exposure of the whole system towards indirect contagion [ , ] . in general, the network-based models are mainly rooted in the general equilibrium approach, which brings sufficient economic connotation to these models. it also means that systemic shocks are usually assumed from outside instead of endogeneity. thus, through limited amplification, contagions can suspend automatically and the whole system returns to a new equilibrium. even referring to the multiple assets models, the shock on the prices of assets and consequent price variations distribute independently with the network contagion, otherwise, the mathematical model shall be too complicated to be solved. however, the financial contagion research does offer great achievements in: ( ) explaining the contagion path via networks of all types; ( ) empirically revealing the impact of contagion on the whole financial system; ( ) providing supportive evidence for capital requirements, mark-to-market accounting and limitation of the scale of interbank business. systemic risk identification and measurement are one of the most important aspects of systemic risk research. in recent years, the literature in this field has also increased. the indicators of systemic risk are ses [ ] , mes [ ] , klr [ ] , covar [ ] and capital shortfall [ ] . some scholars have reversed the financial systemic risk through the market prices of derivatives (credit default swaps, cdss) issued by financial institutions [ , ] . a survey of measurements on systemic risk can be referred to [ ] , and they also offered codes for such measures. besides, [ ] adopted the herfindahl index to measure the concentration of credit portfolios of the emergency loans programs provided by the fed in the - crisis. they found that strongly connected institutions received the most of the funds, while small dispersed shocks could have triggered the systemic default event, which indicates that the critical banks are "too-central-to-fail". i [ ] constructed an insurance pricing model based on the put option framework of the merton model, including asset relevance, banking systemic risk and joint default rate, suggesting that systemic risk leads to low insurance pricing, which leads to insufficient liquidity in the event of a crisis. [ ] used a multivariate extremum theory to model the tail dependence between multiple assets and adopted a non-parametric estimation to estimate and then to measure systemic risk. [ ] studied the monthly yield data of hedge funds, banks, securities, insurance and other financial institutions based on principal component analysis combined with granger causality, and concluded that the internal correlation of these four types of finance has increased the systemic risk. [ ] viewed the banking system as a credit portfolio, analyzing the value of the portfolio and the unanticipated losses to calculate systemic risk. [ ] considered financial departments as a time-varying systemic risk of overall measurements, and defined systemic risk as to the conditional default probability, and analyzed the default probability through credit repayment. when the systemic risk is defined as a series of debt contract defaults, systemic risk is linked to credit risk. the biggest characteristic of credit risk is its tail effect. therefore, many researchers have introduced the copula model to simulate the tail dependence of financial institutions' extreme losses under systemic risk [ , ] . [ ] proposed a new systemic risk analysis framework, which incorporated marginal default probability, credit risk structure, consistent information multivariate density optimization (cimdo), generalized dynamic factor model and t-copula model into the framework. [ ] propose the endogenous risk index (eri) to measure the spillovers across portfolios, as well as the indirect contagion index (ici) to capture the importance of a bank via measuring the loss it inflicts on other financial firms. the two indicators provide a complementary measure of interconnectedness. [ , ] provide reviews on more recent measurement studies. therefore, it can be seen that, due to the tail characteristics and nonlinear characteristics of systemic risks, there are many methods for the quantitative assessment of systemic risks. all approaches and definitions should serve their purposes. due to the fast development of systemic risk research, this paper may not cover all the latest methods, while it can provide a series of frameworks for reference. according to the survey work, the approaches are classified into five categories: theoretical foundation, mathematical models, econometric methods, simulation and agent-based models. as to the simulation methods, more can be referred to [ ] , which will not be discussed in this section. systemic risk research rests its theoretic root in equilibrium approaches, which follow a micro-based research paradigm. to achieve the equilibrium, the route of deduction shall be clarified, and the micro-based equilibrium or activities need to be coordinated with the purpose of general equilibrium by a series of preset hypotheses. to explain the frictions on financial markets, the preset conditions are adjusted accordingly, based on more convincing and practical micro-foundations. there are at least three types of endogenous inconsistencies: inconsistency in preference or expectation [ , ] , heterogeneity [ , , ] , information asymmetry [ , ] , and bgg model [ ] . besides, through obligation contracts [ , ] or institutions' capitals [ ] or other generalized agreements [ , ] , connections are established within the financial system, which establishes the network analysis of contagions, domino effects and spillovers. as mentioned above, the study of the generation and transmission mechanism of systemic risk is in virtue of the dnk model framework. linking the activity entities and market structure at the micro-level with macroeconomic growth and volatility makes the performance of macroeconomic fluctuation of systemic risk possess a certain micro foundation. because systemic risk is accompanied by rising leverage, financial friction, large fluctuations before and after liquidity, and other derivative phenomena, it is closely related to individual heterogeneity and the characteristics of the market structure itself. to explain the impact of individual heterogeneity or heterogeneous expectations on financial market asset prices and the real economy, calvo and rotemberg's sticky-price model is used for reference. what's similar is the application of the two-sector model in the utility sector or the constraint function in the family sector, for example, [ ] distinguish the buyers from the superior and sub-optimal levels and separate their constraint functions, explaining the intrinsic relationship between the rapid rise of mortgage loans and the rapid rise in housing prices before the subprime mortgage crisis. the game model is also a more common method for explaining financial friction and systemic risk. [ ] proposed an analytical approach to coordinated games. by dividing the depositor's investment behaviour into two categories, patient and impatient, in the case of incomplete information, the investor will choose whether to withdraw the deposit to the bank in advance according to the expectation and then the bank run may occur due to the individual's rational behaviour. this model successfully explains the reasons for the bank's asset-liability maturity mismatch, and also explains the transmission mechanism that triggered the banking crisis. however, the deficiency is that there are multiple equilibriums in this model, and it is impossible to predict the occurrence of the bank run behaviour. the coordinated game model is then further optimized and expanded [ ] . [ ] proposed a method to ease public information hypotheses, allowing participants' post hoc observations to satisfy certain random distribution characteristics. the game based on this hypothesis is named as a global game. compared to the coordination model, the global game model eases the assumption of public knowledge and reduces the quantity of equilibrium. [ ] introduced the global game method into the study of financial crisis theory and studied the mechanism of currency attack activities; the sequential global game method is also widely used in the fields of macroeconomics and financial crises. chinese scholars also used this model to explain the liquidity crisis of banks and the government's rescue policy [ ] , and infectious mechanisms for the liquidity of informal financial institutions to formal financial institutions [ ] . as for the modelling of contagion and spillover risks among financial intermediaries, the covariance of assets [ ] or liabilities [ , , ] was introduced based on micro-level maximization, in which the agent is either risk-neutral or risk-averse. asymmetric information assumption is also brought in. thus, the general equilibrium approach and its loose conditions can explain these endogenous questions: how participants react to an unexpected shock; what expectation they would form and action they would take thereafter; how the systemic risk is transmitted or spillovers occur within the system. however, although frictions are invited into the equilibrium models, they have to always assume the exogeneity of the shocks. another series of theoretical approaches are based on an analysis of evolutionary history and institutions, like marxism and minsky's theory. the latter inherited the former's essence in explanation of profits in that they both agree that profits go down as investment increases in the phases of economic expansion, and a crisis takes place when profits cannot cover the current payable obligations. while minsky further developed his theory by establishing a profit function on an identical equation, it follows a macro-micro-macro non-equilibrium paradigm, which unravels the necessity of present assumptions. through decomposition, the profit function can embrace various endogenous factors from different departments of an economy, including technical improvements, public policies and the financial institutions, etc., while marxism mainly attributes the profits to the surplus-labour and capital structure. minsky's methodology can also be applied to analyze the household and government behaviours and its subsequent effects on the financial system. this methodology solves the problem of exogeneity, as the financial crisis phases are integrated into a whole theory to explain the operation of capitalist economies. to avoid mathematical formalism, he insisted on delivering his theory via a narrative approach, which leaves more space for his successors to explore [ ] [ ] [ ] , etc. network and contagion models are mainly established in the general equilibrium approach [ ] . after [ ] , the baseline of the network model is proposed by [ ] , which is expanded from explaining default contagions to price-mediated contagions. based on that, [ ] offered a model involving hard defaults, in which interbank debts of defaulted banks recover zero value. there are also other models with extensions on bankruptcy costs, multi assets and fire sales. [ ] provides a framework to prove the existence of clearing asset prices and liability payments for equilibrium in a network contagion. [ ] expand it to a dual-risky-asset equilibrium. no matter the eisenberg-noe model, or the gai-kapadia model or the amini framework, they all belong to static cascade models, which assume the structure and scale of the network itself be static. while networks can evolve due to the interactions of participants' inter-connections of assets and shocks from the outside, so random graph models are brought in [ , , , , [ ] [ ] [ ] . moreover, to capture the stochastic and dynamic structure of the network with a vast volume of nodes, the mean-field models are borrowed from the discipline of physics, which can be applied to explain the herding effect and endogenous contagion [ , ] . these models focus on quite simple interbank interactions that neglect defaults and contagion [ , , ] . the latest models involve credit risk to explain default contagion [ , , ] . since, in most economies, the interaction data of financial institutions in the system is difficult to derive, it is also impossible to acquire the specific counterparty-trading information from a bank's balance sheets. thus, alternatives are adopted to settle this problem, one of which is the maximum entropy approach. the debtrank approach is another measure to estimate the distress contagion without observing failing institutions [ ] . the main methods used are the copula model to simulate the joint distribution of risk factors, and the introduction of option pricing models and multivariate extreme value theory, or principal factor analysis to extract key factors using the dcc-garch model to model the correlation between multiple assets [ ] , and to establish multivariate quantitative indicators. furthermore, to verify the economic structure variation as systemic risk takes place, var is usually adopted [ ] [ ] [ ] tc. [ ] proposed the introduction of an agent-based model (abm) to solve individual heterogeneity problems, and monte carlo simulation can be used to predict the impact of micro-subject heterogeneity on macroeconomic variables. compared with the game model, abm is more compatible with more differences and can link the internal economic evolution logic with external data consistency. the key contributions by [ , ] are to incorporate the leverage accelerator into agent-based simulated network models. the limitation of such models is that it is difficult to calibrate and test their results. in addition to financial heterogeneity issues, systemic risk draws more attention to the stability of the system itself, and complex network models are borrowed to solve such problems. because of its similar structure to infectious diseases and bio-food chains, the financial system network links various financial institutions through financial flows, and triggers a domino effect due to risk events in individual institutions [ , , ] . however, the financial network system is more complicated than the natural food web or infectious disease transmission. this is because the activities of participating individuals are interactive, the interactions are not always symmetrical, the behavioral choices of the entity change with expectations or event shocks, and the results of behaviors are also characterized by uncertainty. this makes the financial system's structural stability research more complicated and has to restrict the behavioral characteristics of the system to individuals through many strict preconditions [ ] . the methods for identifying and quantifying systemic risks have been discussed previously. therefore, in general, the system of research methods for systemic risk is as in figure . in addition to financial heterogeneity issues, systemic risk draws more attention to the stability of the system itself, and complex network models are borrowed to solve such problems. because of its similar structure to infectious diseases and bio-food chains, the financial system network links various financial institutions through financial flows, and triggers a domino effect due to risk events in individual institutions [ , , ] . however, the financial network system is more complicated than the natural food web or infectious disease transmission. this is because the activities of participating individuals are interactive, the interactions are not always symmetrical, the behavioral choices of the entity change with expectations or event shocks, and the results of behaviors are also characterized by uncertainty. this makes the financial system's structural stability research more complicated and has to restrict the behavioral characteristics of the system to individuals through many strict preconditions [ ] . the methods for identifying and quantifying systemic risks have been discussed previously. therefore, in general, the system of research methods for systemic risk is as in figure . systemic risk is understood from the perspective of classical economics as the transformation between multiple economic equilibriums. from the perspective of risk management, it is tail risk management. from the perspective of behavioral finance, it is because the micro-subjects' psychological and behavioral characteristics form a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, which belongs to the systemic overall collapse risk from the perspective of complex network theory. from systemic risk is understood from the perspective of classical economics as the transformation between multiple economic equilibriums. from the perspective of risk management, it is tail risk management. from the perspective of behavioral finance, it is because the micro-subjects' psychological and behavioral characteristics form a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, which belongs to the systemic overall collapse risk from the perspective of complex network theory. from a broader perspective, it also covers the fields of sociology, psychology, and political science. there are a thousand hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people. different starting points focus on different problems, and the methods used are different. it is also the complexity and change of systemic risk that attracts researchers to constantly try to innovate. the systemic risk research branch is extensively involved, both in connection with traditional financial crisis research and expanding research on system structure and risk warning. financial systemic risk research can be said to be the most intersecting field between finance and even economics and other disciplines. the main research methods used are both tools of traditional economic theory, as well as social network models and natural science experimental simulations. for the generation of systemic risks, the endogenous problems of shocks are difficult to solve using traditional economic models. therefore, dnk's dsge model often assumes that shocks are exogenous; to predict systemic risks, it is urgent to introduce interdisciplinary approaches to innovate research on endogenous factors. on the other hand, the adoption of complex network models often requires many rigorous assumptions that are outside of reality, and these assumptions may exclude the potential risk factors of reality. after all, the financial system itself is much more complicated than the food chain, while other new interdisciplinary research methods also have insufficient internal economic explanatory power. it is, therefore, necessary to use appropriate analytical tools based on specific issues of the specific financial sector. to better sort out the hotspots, the latest years' ( - ) systemic risk research was analyzed and was connected with the development of crisis research, articles in total. it turns out that two divisions are mainly focused on ( figure ). intersecting field between finance and even economics and other disciplines. the main research methods used are both tools of traditional economic theory, as well as social network models and natural science experimental simulations. for the generation of systemic risks, the endogenous problems of shocks are difficult to solve using traditional economic models. therefore, dnk's dsge model often assumes that shocks are exogenous; to predict systemic risks, it is urgent to introduce interdisciplinary approaches to innovate research on endogenous factors. on the other hand, the adoption of complex network models often requires many rigorous assumptions that are outside of reality, and these assumptions may exclude the potential risk factors of reality. after all, the financial system itself is much more complicated than the food chain, while other new interdisciplinary research methods also have insufficient internal economic explanatory power. it is, therefore, necessary to use appropriate analytical tools based on specific issues of the specific financial sector. to better sort out the hotspots, the latest years' ( - ) systemic risk research was analyzed and was connected with the development of crisis research, articles in total. it turns out that two divisions are mainly focused on ( figure ). a total of articles are screened and analyzed according to their titles, keywords, abstracts and references. among the subdivisions, more co-citation clusters are formed in systemic risk measurement, financial market structure, and financial stability. this map reveals that more recent studies focus on network stabilization and systemic risk measurements. although the extreme value approach was brought into this area, it caught only a small amount of attention. furthermore, the high concentration on risk measurement may imply that the measuring methods gradually mature, which leaves limited room for subsequent researchers. considering the ongoing worldwide recession, the research directions that may be further expanded in the future are as follows: a total of articles are screened and analyzed according to their titles, keywords, abstracts and references. among the subdivisions, more co-citation clusters are formed in systemic risk measurement, financial market structure, and financial stability. this map reveals that more recent studies focus on network stabilization and systemic risk measurements. although the extreme value approach was brought into this area, it caught only a small amount of attention. furthermore, the high concentration on risk measurement may imply that the measuring methods gradually mature, which leaves limited room for subsequent researchers. considering the ongoing worldwide recession, the research directions that may be further expanded in the future are as follows: ( ) more work on models with multiple shocks and spillover effects be done. no matter endogenous or exogenous shocks, the contagion rotation shall not be limited to a specific market or intermediaries. more than one spillover risk is discussed within a model. moreover, at present, there are many types of research on systemic risks in the banking system, the real estate market and the foreign exchange market. there are few studies on the systemic risks of the shadow banking [ , ] and internet financial markets, which may be related to the lack of available data and difficulties in providing supporting empirical studies. ( ) dynamic multi-layer networks expect further exploration, especially when the prices of assets have a connection with the financial contagions. ( ) more empirical studies of the impact of systemic risk on the real economy are necessary. it is expected that recent advances in large-scale data and computing tools benefit systemic risk studies, acquiring more real-world and large-scale data for empirical analysis [ ] . ( ) event studies shall be focused on the modification of market structure, which is being affected by new technology or policies that help promote information disclosure, for example, the alternative index (like sofr) in place of libor. moreover, digital currency issued by central banks substituting banknotes means that the monetary multiplier is no longer applicable, which will profoundly alter the whole financial system. therefore, these innovative measures should also be paid attention to. besides, there are other areas worth exploring, such as more comprehensive risk warning indicators, more effective econometric means, and crossover with other fields of economics or sociology, psychology, etc. in short, this is an active research field and has a strong practical significance and policy reference value. the research of systemic risk will be more vibrant because of the participation of more researchers. economic networks: the new challenges systemic risk in a unifying framework for 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interbank network topologies bankruptcy cascades in interbank markets risk-sharing and contagion in networks shadow credit in the middle market: the decade after the financial collapse shadow banking shadowed in banks' balance sheets: evidence from china's commercial banks key: cord- -soeakh authors: schomaker, rahel m.; bauer, michael w. title: what drives successful administrative performance during crises? lessons from refugee migration and the covid‐ pandemic date: - - journal: public adm rev doi: . /puar. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: soeakh the covid‐ pandemic affects societies worldwide, challenging not only health sectors but also public administration systems in general. understanding why public administrations perform well in the current situation—and in times of crisis more generally—is theoretically of great importance; and identifying concrete factors driving successful administrative performance under today’s extraordinary circumstances could still improve current crisis responses. this article studies patterns of sound administrative performance with a focus on networks and knowledge management within and between crises. subsequently, it draws on empirical evidence from two recent public administration surveys conducted in germany in order to test derived hypotheses. the results of tests for group differences and regression analyses demonstrate that administrations that were structurally prepared, learned during preceding crises, and that displayed a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with the civil society, on average, performed significantly better in the respective crises. the covid- pandemic challenges not only the health sectors in countries worldwide, but also their public administration systems. executing the necessary actions to assure public health, such as tracking infections or organizing local health care, takes focus and binds capacities. furthermore, implementing a lockdown means more tasks and responsibilities for local administrations: distributing aid for the local economy, enforcing the compliance of citizens and businesses with new rules and restrictions, and last but not least, reorganizing internal routines and procedures as services turn digital. thus, local administrations' capacity to cope with covid- is crucially relevant for the effectiveness of the overall national antivirus strategy. notwithstanding the dramatic societal impact of a pandemic, from an administrative science perspective the current situation is less exceptional than one might think. technically speaking, administrations have had to deal intermittently with crises of different types over the last decades-and research on how administrations learn from such crises is growing (boin and lodge ; kettl ; lalonde ) . the main questions are which factors drive successful organizational performance in times of crisis, and which factors make public administration systems more resilient when facing extraordinary challenges. addressing these questions, this article proceeds as follows. after this introduction, arguments about potential drivers of administrative performance in times of crisis are discussed. based on that review, we develop and subsequently test a model of drivers of successful performance in times of crisis, thereby testing hypotheses related to intracrisis and intercrisis learning and adaption (moynihan (moynihan , ). the results from regression analyses and tests for group differences demonstrate that an administration's quality of networking, the level of structural preparedness, and ability to draw on lessons learned during preceding crises matter most for successful administrative performance in crisis situations as those accepted article this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. administrations that had these factors in place performed significantly better in the respective crises. the covid- crisis constitutes a textbook example of a -wicked‖ or -nonroutine problem‖ for governments and administrations (kettl (kettl , . such nonroutine problems are said to occur with ever greater frequency and are -characterized by high consequentiality, limited time, high political salience, uncertainty, and ambiguity‖ (moynihan , ) . such wicked problem crises are studied, inter alia, by focusing on organizational change and bureaucratic behavior (peters, pierre, and randma-liiv ; simon ) . research questions often revolve around dichotomies informed by innovation and network theories that frame administrative crisis responses as based either on status quo behavior or on innovations that induce disruptive adjustments in procedures and structures. further dichotomies present actor interaction as pursued in a hierarchical, top-down manner or through collaboration in decentralized and horizontal networks; and consider whether learning strategies focus exclusively on current conditions or apply a comparative logic. in this context, the question is -whether governments maintain their well-worn paths of governing, or whether the crisis becomes the source of change, and perhaps fundamental change, in the patterns of governance‖ (peters, pierre, and randma-liiv , ) . this question also applies to how single administrations respond-either by trusting in traditional behavior, or by trying new paths, in other words, innovation. which strategy is better is fiercely debated. on the one hand, it is argued that tradition is more efficient and effectivecrises are hardly the most favorable times to ask administrations to change, let alone reinvent accepted article this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. procedural routines or engage in outright restructuring and adjustment. indeed, quite the opposite, -threat rigidity may occur, whereby people respond to new threats in a rigid and inflexible manner, recycling previous responses and known routines for new problems (moynihan , ) . on the other hand, extraordinary circumstances can sometimes reveal organizational capacity for transformation, motivating staff to excel and leaders to put turf wars aside, thus facilitating beneficial changes unlikely to be achieved in normal times (peters, pierre, and randma-liiv , ) . since learning and innovation in crises are seen as functions of how the relevant actors interact, the mode of crisis coordination constitutes another central issue of the debate. the main alternatives are either investing in strengthening the center's top-down steering capacity or in developing decentral capacities and intensifying horizontal information exchange. opposing logics are at work here, as -a command and control model, often presented by practitioners, champions a hierarchical approach,‖ while -a coordination and communication model argues that crisis response inevitably depends on collaborative processes to succeed‖ (moynihan , ) . many studies contend that bundling as well as centralization are, firstly, preferable in terms of the speed and coherence of decisions, and, secondly, almost impossible to avoid given not only the need for strong leadership, but also the likelihood that opportunistic behavior will emerge in times of crisis, prompting administrations -to defend their own ‗turf,' and perhaps especially to defend their own budgets‖ (peters, pierre, and randma-liiv , ) . however, the greater the complexity of a wicked problem, the more pronounced the doubts that fostering hierarchy constitutes the optimal crisis response, as the center risks becoming overwhelmed. in such situations, networks reveal their strengths. they provide agile horizontal cooperation by referring -to structures involving multiple nodes-agencies and this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. organizations-with multiple linkages, ordinarily working on cross-boundary collaborative activities‖ (mcguire and agranoff , ) . indeed, networks are based on the principle of managing complex issues through decentralized structures in order to adapt more effectively to local circumstances. as such, they perform different though not mutually exclusive functions, from service delivery and information diffusion to direct problem-solving and community capacity-building (milward and provan ) . networks are thus particularly helpful in managing crises as crisis response -requires gaining consensus or, at least, acquiescence across the society and decentralization may be a useful strategy for producing that legitimacy for the proposed changes‖ (peters, pierre, and randma-liiv , ) . especially under conditions of great uncertainty, when it is far from clear what the best response might be, strategies of decentralization and networking are particularly valuable as they are said to enlarge problem-solving capacity (kettl ; edlefsen and staemmler ) . in that sense, a network strategy that brings together a wide range of authorities, professional organizations, associations, and volunteers hedges the administration against threatening overload (alford ; bovaird ) . in sum, what makes networks superior in crisis reaction is their potential to learn and to deviate from beaten paths (moynihan , ; milward and provan ; torfing ) . innovation and learning are intimately linked concepts. innovation implies that established structures and processes that do not function sufficiently in crises are substituted. however, -without learning in advance about how to deal with such threats, we tend to pull old game plans off the shelf to deal with new problems. if all we have are backward-looking plans, we doom ourselves to repeated failure‖ (kettl , ) . in other words, organizations need preparation and capacities to learn in order to respond effectively to wicked problem crises. two issues of knowledge management stand out when it comes to preparedness: how can accepted article this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. lessons learned in one situation be stored, and how can such insights be made available when the next crisis breaks out. in other words, how can evidence-based situational learning be transformed into learning comparatively across cases? (hartley, sørensen, and torfing ; lalonde ; neustadt and may ) . in this respect, documentation is of utmost importance. preserving knowledge of failures, successes, and instrument effectivity is a necessary condition for learning. how exactly an administration draws upon and applies insights gleaned in previous crisis situations may differ and remains an empirical question. however, without storing and documenting past experiences, preparedness probabilities go down. our considerations about the complementarity of the two styles of learning-i.e., focusing on one situation or accumulating and adapting strategies over time-are linked to the concept of -intracrisis learning‖ and -intercrisis learning‖ developed by donald moynihan ( , ) . accordingly, intracrisis learning implies the direct reflection and adoption of new processes or adjustments regarding structures and actors whenever traditional schemes can no longer be usefully applied, while intercrisis learning includes drawing lessons from the past, in particular former crises, and adapting existing strategies to the needs of specific units or departments. each of the dichotomies discussed above-traditional vs. innovation, hierarchy vs. networks, situational learning vs. comparative learning-is a crude and necessarily selective simplification. together, they are neither exhaustive nor even mutually exclusive. nonetheless, they provide a useful analytic framework, specifically positing that, when faced with wicked problems, administrations that respond with innovative solutions, intensifying networks, and intracrisis as well as intercrisis learning capacities work better than administrations that rely on traditional, top-down approaches only. as such, the succeeding empirical analysis is guided by the following hypotheses: this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved.  intracrisis learning: administrations that within a crisis enlarge and in particular deepen networks of different types (in terms of intense and good cooperation) with actors from the civil society, other administrative units, or private enterprises, and document measures undertaken, exhibit high levels of administrative performance.  intercrisis learning: administrations that within a crisis take stock of existing structures, in particular networks with stakeholders that were created in former crises, exhibit high levels of administrative performance. the empirical part of the study is based on the analysis of data from two original online surveys, conducted in germany in and , using the software -unipark.‖ both questionnaires tap into local administrators' work environment, intra-organizational structural change in the context of the respective -crisis,‖ networking activities, knowledge storage and management, as well as the sociodemographic details of the municipality. the first survey was conducted in the aftermath of the increased refugee migration (-refugee crisis‖) in summer . it went to german integration officers as well as immigration and social authorities in the area of asylum in all major german cities with over , inhabitants; additionally, all municipalities with the initial letters d, e, h, k, n, r and s in all federal states were included in the sample, as were all administrators and mayors of germany's districts. the survey was conducted between july and november . overall, , respondents were invited, of whom participated, equaling a response rate of percent. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. the second survey taps into the effects of the covid- pandemic that hit the local level early in . all german health authorities, district administrators, and mayors were contacted as well as all municipalities that begin with the initial letter m. between april and may , from , municipalities, took part, equaling a response rate of about percent. aiming to detect the impact of different influencing factors on administrative performance, this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. using the answers to questions a) and b), we constructed an index, ranging from - , that indicates for low to high performance levels. based on this index, we created the following dummy variables: -performance of pa,‖ which is equal to when the value of the index is equal to or higher than , and otherwise; -performance of pa high,‖ that is equal to once the value of the index is equal to or higher than , and ; and otherwise -effectiveness,‖ which is equal to when question b) is answered with -very effectively‖ or -effectively,‖ and otherwise. as for the independent variables, different dummies were created from survey answers to capture the measures undertaken by the public administrations in the context of the respective crisis. civil society‖ and -quality of network administration,‖ the respective dummy equals when the question -the interaction with the civil society/other administrative units worked well‖ is answered with -fully agree‖ or -agree,‖ and otherwise. administration,‖ the respective dummy equals when the network was intensified in the respective crisis, and otherwise. administrations ex ante‖ and -coordination with civil society ex ante,‖ the respective dummy equals when the respondent indicated that the administration used and revitalized networks with civil society/other administrations created before the -migration crisis,‖ and equals otherwise. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. furthermore, the dummy -documentation‖ indicates that within the -refugee crisis‖ changes and adaptions were documented for future use by other individuals, units, or stakeholders. -preparedness administration,‖ and -preparedness private,‖ a respective dummy was created that equals when the respondent indicated that the administration used and revitalized networks with civil society/other administrations that were created in the -migration crisis,‖ and equals otherwise. furthermore, a dummy -preparedness overall‖ was created that becomes once two or more of the previous dummies turn , and becomes otherwise. applying different models on our data, we found the following links between the different independent variables and the respective indicator for performance of the pa. [ table about here] as can be drawn from table , indicators for documentation, for preparedness of the administration thanks to the use of ex ante established networks, and for the quality of cooperation and networking with different actors display significant positive coefficients, indicating a positive influence of these factors on performance in the -refugee crisis‖. as for our second sample on administrative performance in the current covid- pandemic, we found the following links. [ table about here] as can be drawn from table , indicators for the preparedness of the administration due to the use of networks and cooperations that were installed in the previous -refugee crisis,‖ as well as for the quality of cooperation and networking with different actors, display significant positive coefficients, indicating a positive influence of these factors on performance in the covid- pandemic. additionally, we used a non-parametric mann-whitney u test to detect group differences in the data set for covid- (see table in the appendix). as the grouping variables, we used the three dummies for administrative performance. we found significant evidence of group differences, substantiating our findings that administrations that were prepared, and that displayed a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with civil society, on average, performed significantly better in their respective crises. interpreting the results against the backdrop of the theoretical discussion, we conclude that both intracrisis and intercrisis learning are relevant to achieve or maintain a good performance in times of crisis, and that the two concepts complement each other to a certain extent. first, intracrisis learning in terms of documentation of helpful practices for use within a crisis, as well as cooperation and networking with stakeholders increases performance. other indicators (not displayed) that account for the sheer enlargement of networks intracrisis remain insignificant in all models for the -refugee crisis‖ as well as the covid- pandemic. in other words: the quality of cooperation matters. for both crises, -good‖ and intense cooperation with other administrations and actors from civil society intracrisis has a significant positive effect on the overall performance of the pa. hence, general tensions accepted article between efficiency and networking cannot be identified. this result confirms previous empirical findings (e.g., mcguire and agranoff ) suggesting that operational networks outrank hierarchical solutions in terms of performance. this would justify network-related (transaction) costs for the public sector (agranoff ) , because the stability and quality of networks brings greater effectiveness (moynihan ; provan and kenis ) . second, intercrisis learning resulting in preparedness matters. in the case of the -refugee crisis,‖ a significant positive effect on performance of the administration can be detected, if networks with civil society and other administrations that were extended and intensified before the crisis could be revitalized. for the covid- pandemic, indicators that denote that the respective networks-with civil society, other administrative units, and the private sector-were built ex ante in the -refugee crisis‖ and revitalized in the pandemic, reveal a significant positive effect on performance of the administration during the pandemic. hence, when faced with a new crisis, learning from previous experiences and events helps by augmenting administrative performance (kettl ; moynihan ) . this paper answers the call by boin and lodge ( ) for public administration scholars to focus on the management of crises, especially regarding the collaboration with non-state actors. evidence from refugee migration to germany in as well as from the ongoing covid- pandemic suggests that networks are indeed crucial for the successful performance of local public administration in times of crisis. while the concrete meaning of -successful performance‖ depends on the respective type of administration (and may have a very different signification for a local health authority in the covid- pandemic compared to an immigration registration office in the context of refugee migration), the study identifies this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. drivers of administrative performance more abstractly. in addition to relying extensively on networks, these drivers are documentation of best practices and the ability to revitalize structures and insights derived from former crises. additionally, we found significant evidence of group differences, substantiating our findings that administrations that were prepared, and that displayed a high quality in their network cooperation, on average, performed significantly better in the respective crises. in short, successful performance probabilities rise with the ability to make good use of previous experience. intracrisis and intercrisis learning are thus intimately connected, the former being a prerequisite of the latter. the results of this study suggest further avenues for research. first, the potential of reflexive and adaptive use of multi-actor networks to cope with extraordinary circumstances should be further explored and empirically tested. second, as successful performance in crisis situations seems to depend upon the sharing of knowledge and on the ability to coordinate the public and private divide, investigating the conditions of communication and collaboration across domains should remain central to scholars of public management-especially if they are interested in understanding how crises are overcome organizationally. third, given that one of the very reasons for bureaucracies to emerge was their superior ability to provide accessible memory as the basis to take decisions, it is probably time to revisit this memory function with a view to appropriately translating it to the digital age. this would help to improve our understanding of how lessons already learned are stored and kept accessible to inform subsequent emergency responses. investing in the organizational capacity to benefit from lessons already learned is likely to pay out. what do these findings mean for those in the crisis now and for the future? improving networking could help organizational responses to the current covid- crisis; improving organizational memory and learning could help responses to crises as yet unknown in the future. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. footnotes depending on the concrete answers given-e.g. if specific networks were revitalized in the respective crisis-not all cases from the respective survey could be included in the estimation models. this fact explains for the generally lower number of cases considered in the estimation models, compared to the overall sample size. furthermore, the selection logicaddressing less administrations, focusing on health authorities being addressed in the middle of a health crisis-accounts for the overall lower number of cases in the second survey. while only the results of the logit model that exhibit a high fit of the model are displayed, as a robustness check, we also tested probit models for all specifications. the dependent variable is based on self-reported perception data-the answer is not a neutrally observable number or measure, but an own assessment or the perception about the performance of the administration in the respective crisis as reported by the respondent. selfreported and perception data may suffer from specific disadvantages, as answers may be exaggerated, respondents may be too embarrassed to reveal details of more personal nature, or biases towards social desirability or overestimation of results due to missing neutral information may occur. nonetheless, these effects tend to be most problematic when it comes to personal sentiments or achievements, but less so when organizational performance can be relatively precisely judged by individuals from within the organization. biases are less likely in these cases as no personal information is asked for and the focus is not on personal performance. for our study, one can assume that internal validity is given, as, first, the -cause‖ precedes the -effect‖ in time, and second, the -cause‖ and the -effect‖ tend to occur together, and lastly, because there are no scientifically justifiable alternative explanations for the observed covariation. external validity can be seen as given as applying the conclusions outside the context of this specific study is possible. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. , *** , *** , *** significance level *** %, ** %, * % source: authors' calculations. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. inside collaborative networks: ten lessons for public managers.‖ public administration review (special issue collaborative public management public value from co-production by clients designing resilient institutions for transboundary crisis management: a time for public administration crisis-induced learning and issue politicization in the eu: the braer, sea empress, erika, and prestige oil spill disasters beyond engagement and participation. user and community coproduction of public services collaborative innovation. a viable alternative to market-competition and organizational entrepreneurship disaster management collaboration in turkey assessing progress and challenges of hybrid network governance the next government of the united states: challenges for performance in the st century crisis management and organizational development: towards the conception of a learning model in crisis management the limitations of public management networks a manager's guide to choosing and using collaborative networks learning under uncertainty: networks in crisis management the network governance of crisis response: case studies of incident command systems thinking in time: the uses of history for decision-makers global financial crisis, public administration and governance: do new problems require new solutions? modes of network governance: structure collaborative innovation in the public sector accepted article appendix key: cord- -q ojig authors: berger, allen n.; roman, raluca a. title: conditions that generally bring about bank bailouts, bail-ins, and other resolution methods date: - - journal: tarp and other bank bailouts and bail-ins around the world doi: . /b - - - - . - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: q ojig this chapter discusses the conditions that typically bring about bailouts, bail-ins, and other types of bank resolution. bailouts and bail-ins are usually triggered by financial crises, but may also occur during normal times in response to the distress of too-big-to-fail (tbtf), too-important-to-fail (titf), or too-many-to-fail (tmtf) banks. as noted above, we focus on the two recent crisesdthe global financial crisis and european sovereign debt crisisdthat brought about most of the bailouts and bail-ins discussed in the book. these two crises are inexorably linked, and so any separate discussions of them are inevitably flawed. the global financial crisis began in the us as the us subprime financial crisis and spread through many linkages to europe and the rest of the world, and so it is an integral part of the european sovereign debt crisis. the distresses of banks and governments during the european sovereign debt crisis are also inescapably linked. in some cases, government finances came under pressure because of the economic damages caused by the bank distress and the costs of the bank bailouts. in other cases, bank distress was exacerbated by sovereign debt problems because the banks invested substantially in sovereign debt, particularly the debt of their home countries. despite these links, we briefly describe these two different crises separately. the global financial crisis began as the us subprime financial crisis in :q when losses on us mortgage-backed securities (mbs) backed by subprime mortgages started to spread to other markets, including the syndicated loan market, the interbank lending market, and the commercial paper market. in some cases, these other markets at least partially froze up. many banks experienced substantial capital losses and at least partially withdrew from these markets. a number of large financial institutions, especially thrifts that were heavily involved in subprime lending (e.g., countrywide, washington mutual, indymac bank), investment banks that purchased and/or packaged subprime mbs (e.g., bear stearns, merrill lynch, lehman brothers), and a large insurance company that sold many credit default swaps (cdss) on subprime mbs (american international group (aig)) suffered capital, liquidity, and public confidence problems and either failed, were taken over, or were individually bailed out. as the crisis spread to many commercial banks, the tarp program, expansion of the discount window and term auction facilities (tafs), and many other bank bailouts shown in the introduction and described in more detail in chapter occurred. it is also notable that bank and thrift failures became so widespread that the fdic deposit insurance fund fell into a deficit position and assessed banks for years of deposit insurance premiums in advance to try to fill this hole. us stock market values also plunged significantly, with the dow jones industrial average falling by more than half. as a result of these financial problems, the us economy also suffered the most severe recession since the great depression. the recession resulted in a number of government programs to stimulate the economy, including a massive stimulus government spending package and expansive conventional and unconventional monetary policy stimulus by the federal reserve. despite all the bailouts of financial institutions and government stimulus programs, economic losses in the us totaled in tens of trillions of dollars, as noted in the introduction. the us recession officially ended in mid- , but economic growth remained slow for many years afterward. the financial crisis in the us was more or less concluded by the end of , by which point much of the tarp funds invested in financial institutions had been repaid, order had been restored to most of the financial markets, and the federal reserve shortly thereafter began rolling back expansions to the discount window and concluded the taf auctions (berger and bouwman, ) . however, the financial issues continued in other nations. the us subprime financial crisis became the global financial crisis as financial losses spread to other countries through financial linkages. there are too many such linkages to discuss here, but we simply mention one. the basel ii capital requirements, which had been earlier adopted in europe, gave very low capital weights to aaa-rated tranches of us subprime mortgage-backed securities (mbs). this encouraged their purchases by european banks, helping to spread the problems created by these securities across the atlantic. the european sovereign debt crisis began in , with the collapse of iceland's banking system, and then spread to the giips countries, greece, italy, ireland, portugal, and spain. the crisis was significant through , and some might argue that remnants still exist as of this writing. some government debt remains on shaky grounds, european authorities, such as the ecb, are still engaging in stimulus, and interest rates in a number of nations are negative. as indicated above, this crisis was precipitated in significant part by the global financial crisis, and it involved sovereigns as well as banks, which are also linked (pagano and sedunov, ) . other contributing factors include the recessions that covered a number of countries, the real estate market crisis and property bubbles in several countries, and fiscal policies in some nations. regarding the latter point, greece revealed in that its previous government had underreported its budget deficit, a violation of eu policy, prompting fears of a eurozone collapse via political and financial contagion. in , with the growing fear of excessive sovereign debt, lenders demanded higher interest rates from eurozone states with high debt and deficit levels, aggravating their fiscal problems. some affected countries raised taxes and cut expenditures to battle the crisis, which added to social unrest and confidence problems in their governments. during this crisis, several of these countries, including greece, portugal, and ireland had their sovereign debt downgraded to junk by international credit rating agencies, augmenting investor fears. greece, spain, ireland, portugal, and cyprus were incapable of repaying or refinancing their government debt or bailing out their struggling banks without the help from third-party institutions such as the european central bank (ecb), the international monetary fund (imf), and the european financial stability facility (efsf). seventeen eurozone countries voted to create the efsf in , specifically to resolve the european sovereign debt crisis. these other eurozone countries were partially driven by desires to preserve the eurozone and/or eu, and partly driven by worries related to large investments by the banks in these healthier nations in the sovereign debt of the weaker nations. some of these bank investments in risky sovereign debt were brought about in part by the low risk weights on this debt assigned by the basel ii capital requirements. a number of parties are blamed for creating or exacerbating the effects of the global financial crisis, and by implication, the european sovereign debt crisis that followed. in some cases, the blame is not fully deserved either because the reasoning is incorrect or because the ex post consequences of some of the pre-crisis period actions could not be reasonably anticipated ex ante. the federal reserve and its leaders receive blame for ( ) keeping interest rates too low for too long in the pre-crisis period, encouraging risky lending; ( ) not recognizing the dangers of the build-up of correlated risks in real estate lending; ( ) not devoting sufficient resources to their financial stability mission to identify future stability and systemic risk threats; ( ) pushing for basel ii capital standards, which lowered requirements for large, systemically important banking organizations and encouraged risky investments by european banks by putting low capital weights on aaarated tranches of mbs backed by subprime mortgages and sovereign debt of risky national governments; ( ) not regulating the new complex and opaque instruments of finance, which were built on faulty models that underweighted the probability of housing price declines; and ( ) not applying safety and soundness and consumer protection regulations consistently across intermediaries which gave rise to regulatory arbitrage; and ( ) not pursuing accusations of consumer predatory lending. blame is also often assigned to government sponsored enterprises (gses) fannie mae and freddie mac, which were undiversified entities that operated with very little capital and were able to borrow cheaply due to implicit government guarantees, which were realized during the crisis. with the backing of the us president george w. bush and congress, the gses began investing in subprime mbs during the pre-crisis period, encouraging lenders to make more such loans. in addition, the securities and exchange commission (sec) is blamed for allowing the investment banks to operate with very low capital ratios, despite very high portfolio risks in packaging and holding opaque mbs. the investment banks that engaged in these risky activities are also held responsible for their behavior. rating agencies are blamed for faulty ratings on mortgage-related securities in which additional aaa-ratings were assigned to riskier and more opaquetranches. accounting firms are criticized for unrealistic values placed on opaque mbs. mortgage bankers and underwriters are charged with overlooking unfavorable credit information and in some cases, complicity in creating false favorable information. finally, a prior president and congress were blamed for allowing combinations of commercial and investment banks under the financial services modernization act of , aka the grammeleachebliley act. we argue that this blame is misplaced, given that the main financial institutions that created the crisis were not combined commercial banks and investment banks. to the contrary, one of the solutions to the crisis was to encourage such combinations because the stand-alone investment banks had significant liquidity problems during the crisis. there are many other financial crises that are not discussed in this section in the interest of brevity. we refer readers to literature that discusses these crises in detail for the us by berger and bouwman ( , , ; and worldwide by demirgü ç-kuntand detragiache ( ), von hagen and ho ( ) , reinhart and rogoff ( ) , and laeven and valencia ( ) . there are as many causes as there are financial crises, and each one is different (reinhart and rogoff, ), so it is not possible to review all of the causes. in the interest of brevity, we focus here on just two recurring causesdlending booms and liquidity buildups. these two causes are not entirely independent, as bank credit also creates liquidity for the economy. it is often argued that unusually high quantities of bank lending and bank loan commitments may help result in financial crises. loans are a form of on-balance sheet bank liquidity creation and loan commitments are a type of off-balance sheet bank liquidity creation (berger and . research on lending booms and liquidity buildups bouwman, ). excessive credit of either type can result in asset price bubbles that burst and result in financial crises (rajan, ; acharya and naqvi, ) . brunnermeier, gorton, and krishnamurthy ( ) also argue that liquidity build-ups in the financial sector can create systemic risk. the quality of credit issued may also significantly deteriorate during lending and liquidity booms because of an institutional memory problem in banks. veteran loan officers may have difficulty remembering how to deal with problem loans when it has been a long time since they dealt with significant problems, and turnover results in newer loan officers who have not previously faced such problems (berger and udell, ) . in a theoretical setting, thakor ( a thakor ( , show that good times corrupt risk management in banks and also lead to an "underpricing" of risk from an ex post perspective. this is because an extended period of profitable bank growth may also create a false sense of security among bankers and regulators that banks can withstand significant shocks (thakor, b) . excessive risk-taking may also occur off the balance sheet during economic booms, as banks shy away from exercising material adverse change (mac) clauses on loan commitments due to reputational concerns during such booms (thakor, ) . consistent with these views, former federal reserve chairman, alan greenspan argues that "the worst loans are made at the top of the business cycle." (alan greenspan, chicago bank structure conference, may , ). both excessive credit and poor quality of credit were evident in the us in the buildup to the global financial crisis. subprime mortgages in great numbers were issued to overlevered consumers. in some cases, these mortgages were issued based on the optimistic assumption that housing prices would continue to rise, given that many of the subprime borrowers would be unable to make the future payments without refinancing at higher home prices. in addition, fannie mae and freddie mac lowered their credit standards by buying subprime mortgages in the mid- s, further encouraging banks to make such loans. finally, another reason for bank failures and crises is that regulatory career concerns may lead bank regulators to pursue selfinterest and delay closures of financial institutions until things get really bad (e.g., boot and thakor, ) . for the interest of brevity, we review one empirical paper on lending booms and one on liquidity buildups, both using us data. dell'ariccia, igan, and laeven ( ) examine factors related to the rapid expansion of the us mortgage market prior to the global financial crisis. using a large data set of loan applications, they find that the denial rates were lower in mac clauses are intended to protect the lender against gaps in due diligence or unforeseen "material" changes to the borrower's financial condition and assets that could affect the borrower's ability to repay the loan. if a change is deemed material enough, the lender can modify terms or terminate its agreement with the borrower. areas that experienced faster credit demand growth, and that lenders in these high-growth areas put less weight on applicants' loan-to-income ratios, after controlling for other economic fundamentals. the other study explicitly tests the propositions that excessive onbalance sheet and off-balance sheet liquidity creation increase the likelihood of future financial crises. berger and bouwman ( ) use data on five financial crises in the us. they essentially use empirical models to predict when the fifth crisis (the subprime crisis) would occur, controlling for a number of other aggregate factors that might cause financial crises. they find that lagged detrended aggregate liquidity creation has a statistically and economically significantly positive effect on the probability of a future crisis, supporting the theories discussed above. they also find that the effects are primarily driven by off-balance sheet liquidity creation, which is mostly composed of loan commitments. as discussed above, the distress of tbtf, titf, and/or tmtf banks may trigger bailouts or bail-ins outside of crisis times. the tbtf term was introduced in by the bailouts of continental illinois national bank and trust company, which failed at that time, but was not closed. it was propped up by government bailouts for a number of years, and was eventually bought by bank of america. the chicago bank was the seventh largest bank in the us, with about $ billion in assets (fdic, ) , and its failure was the largest in us history as of that time. after continental illinois, investors had reasons to believe that the creditors of large banks were likely to be protected. in addition, in congressional hearings after the event, comptroller of the currency, c. todd conover, the primary supervisor for national banks, explicitly stated that regulators were unlikely to allow the nation's largest banks to fail. congressman https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/failure_of_continental_illinois. although conover did not name the banks, barth and wihlborg ( ) collected information from the wall street journal, the banker, federal reserve, and milken institute and identified the largest banks and their associated bhcs in as: citibank; bank of america, san francisco; chase manhattan bank; morgan guaranty trust, new york; manufacturers hanover trust, new york; chemical bank, new york; continental illinois national bank and trust, chicago; security pacific national bank, los angeles; first national bank of chicago; bankers trust new york; and wells fargo bank. the authors follow these banks through time and note that many of them got integrated into larger organizations, while two of the original bhcs remain, and all became much bigger over the past three decades. stewart mckinney responded, "let us not bandy words. we have [created] a new kind of bank. it is called too-big-to-fail, tbtf, and it is a wonderful bank." this was the first time that government officials confirmed the existence of such a government policy. tbtf theory describes the motivations of the regulators in bailing out tbtf banks and the incentives that the expectations of such bailouts create for the banks and their stakeholders. regulators' bailout decisions may be motivated by the desires to reduce damages to the financial system and the real economy. the failure of a large bank may spill over to other financial institutions and increase the likelihood of future financial crises. supporting this, acharya ( ) finds that the limited liability of banks and the presence of a negative externality of one bank's failure on the health of other banks give rise to a systemic risk-shifting incentive where all banks undertake correlated investments, thereby increasing economy-wide aggregate risk. the loss of credit and other banking services of a single large bank may also cause significant economic losses. in addition, they may bail out large banks to avoid personal embarrassment about failures on their watches or to direct credit according to their preferences (e.g., kane, kane, , stern and feldman, ; mishkin, ) . the expectation that the largest banks are likely to be bailed out in the event of their distress from tbtf policies is a subsidy to large banks in conditions of financial distress and good financial health as well because the lessened probability of failure allows the large banks to raise equity and debt capital more cheaply. this motivates the banks to become larger to be able to raise capital more cheaply, and motivates shareholders, creditors, and other counterparties to do business with them (e.g., cetorelli and traina, ) . table . provides some data indicating how large banks have grown since the tbtf policy was introduced in . the number of fdic insured banks has fallen by about % as of :q , while the number of banks with at least $ billion in assets has increased by about %, and their share of industry assets has more than tripled. of course, both inflation and real growth of banks play roles in these figures, but it seems likely that tbtf be responsible for some of the growth of the large banks. the theoretical motivations behind titf and tmtf mostly follow those of tbtf. they also involve regulators avoiding risks to the financial system and the economy, circumventing personal embarrassment, and/ or maintaining the ability to direct credit, and banks and their stakeholders taking actions to gain the subsidies of bailout expectations. titf theory differs from tbtf theory in that it takes into account the highly interconnected network among banks, rather than the size of these institutions. banks may be interconnected either directly or indirectly. direct interconnectedness arises from bilateral transactions or relationships between banks, such as interbank deposits, loans, or derivatives (e.g., interest rate swaps). if the bank that owes money or is out-of-the- money on derivative contracts becomes financial distressed or fails, the banks with direct interconnections to it suffer losses on the values of their claims, losing all of the values in the event of failure. indirect interconnectednessdin which the financial distress or failure of a bank may spread losses to banks without direct bilateral exposures to itd stems from many potential sources. these include mark-to-market losses on similar assets, margin calls, and/or increased haircuts on posted collateral triggered by fire sales by other banks, or information spillovers from other banks that result in runs (e.g., lui, quiet, and roth, ) . under titf theory, the financial distress or failure of more interconnected banks causes more damage to the financial system than problems of less interconnected institutions. thus, regulators are more likely to bail out more interconnected banks and banks have incentives to become more interconnected to increase their likelihoods of receiving such bailouts. the theoretical arguments in choi ( ) suggest that bailouts be allocated to the stronger of the interconnected banks, who are in better positions to reduce systemic risk than the weaker banks. tmtf theory posits a more dynamic view that includes multiple banks. holding the total number of banks constant for a period of time, when the number of failed banks increases and the number of surviving banks decreases, the investment opportunity set for surviving financial institutions grows large, but the total investment capacity of surviving banks decreases (acharya and yorulmazer, ) . to prevent widespread damage, the optimal choice for regulator is to bail out when the number of failures is large. the expectations of such widespread bailouts may encourage banks to engage in herding behavior that results in highly correlated portfolios to be able to benefit from future bailouts (e.g., acharya and yorulmazer, , ; brown and dinc, ; farhi and tirole, ; acharya, mehran, and thakor, ) . perhaps surprisingly, some empirical research suggests that the asset similarity created by tmtf may actually reduce systemic risk because the market expects banks with greater similarities to be more likely to survive during financial crises (cai, ) . distress or failure of tbtf, titf, and/or tmtf banks in this section, we focus on what might cause tbtf, titf, and/or tmtf banks to become financially distressed and potentially fail that would result in bailouts or bail-ins. most of the studies on the determinants of bank problems focus on bank failure, rather than financial distress, and so we review the bank failure literature. presumably, the factors that bring about financial distress are largely in common with those that cause failure, given that banks usually fail before a period of financial distress. most of the literature on bank failure concentrates on accounting variables. virtually all such studies find that low capital ratios raise the probability of bank failure. other weak accounting performance measures such as low profitability and poor loan quality raise the probability of failure, as do certain activities, commercial real estate credit, particularly construction and development loans, and nontraditional activities (e.g., lane, looney, and wansley, ; gunther, , ; wilson, , ; mason, , ; elsinger, lehar, and summer, ; schaeck, , cole and white, ; knaup and wagner, ; admati, demarzo, hellwig, and pfleiderer, ; berger and bouwman, ; deyoung and torna, ; berger, imbierowicz, and rauch, ) . sampling a few of these studies, cole and gunther ( ) find that capital, troubled assets, and net income are key indicators in explaining bank failure. berger and bouwman ( ) find that low capital ratios reduce the probability of survival for small banks under all general economic conditionsdbanking crises, market crises, and normal timesdwhile low capital hurts medium and large banks primarily during the banking crises. schaeck ( ) finds that liability structure affects a bank's time to failure. fee-based nontraditional activities (e.g., securities brokerage and insurance sales) decrease and asset-based nontraditional activities (e.g., venture capital, investment banking, and asset securitization) increase the probability of distressed bank failure (deyoung and torna, ) . some also find that commercial real estate loans, particularly real estate construction and development loans, play important recurring roles in explaining bank failure (e.g., cole and fenn, ; cole and white, ) . in addition, some composite measures of bank soundness or risks forecast bank failure, including the traditional measure of bank soundness, camels components (cole and white, ) , and a marketbased measure of credit portfolio quality and bank performance, credit risk indicator (cri) (knaup and wagner, ) . others focus on corporate governance with mixed results on both bank performance and failure (e.g., fahlenbrach and stulz, ; beltratti and stulz, ; berger and bouwman, ; berger, imbierowicz, and rauch, ; calomiris and carlson, ) . one study also finds that bank cost inefficiency during normal times, a signal of poor management, predicts both performance problems and failure during subsequent financial crises (assaf, berger, roman, and tsonias, ) . a theory of systemic risk and design of prudential bank regulation caught between scylla and charybdis? regulating bank leverage when there is rent seeking and risk shifting. the review of corporate finance 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banking sector is weak risk topography bank herding and systemic risk (working paper) corporate governance and risk management at unprotected banks, national banks in the s contagion and bank failures during the great depression: the june chicago banking panic fundamentals, panics, and bank distress during the depression resolving 'too big to fail heterogeneity and stability: bolster the strong, not the weak the role of commercial real estate investments in the banking crisis of - separating the likelihood and timing of bank failure predicting bank failures : a comparison of on-and off-site monitoring systems déjà vu all over again: the causes of us commercial bank failures this time around credit booms and lending standards: evidence from the subprime mortgage market the determinants of banking crises in developing and developed countries nontraditional banking activities and bank failures during the financial crisis risk assessment for banking systems bank ceo incentives and the 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corporate finance studies lending booms, smart bankers, and financial crises the highs and the lows: a theory of credit risk assessment and pricing through the business cycle money market pressure and the determinants of banking crises explaining bank failures, deposit insurance, regulation, and efficiency. the review of economics and statistics why do banks disappear? the determinants of us bank failures and acquisitions key: cord- -ibmnuj u authors: ratten, vanessa; jones, paul title: covid- and entrepreneurship education: implications for advancing research and practice date: - - journal: nan doi: . /j.ijme. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ibmnuj u this article aims at critically examining the linkage between entrepreneurship education and covid- in order to help understand future research and practice paths. due to the large global impact covid- has had on society, new entrepreneurial education management practices are required to deal with the change. to do this, this article discusses why covid- can be a transformational opportunity for entrepreneurship education research due to the new thought processes raised by the pandemic. the article suggests several assumptions that have changed as a result of covid- and how entrepreneurship education is required in order to help solve the pandemic. by doing this, the article suggests that more entrepreneurship education research embedding a covid- context is required to breakthrough new frontiers and reset the research agenda. by taking an entrepreneurial stakeholder perspective that looks at entrepreneurship education as a holistic process, an enhanced analysis of how response mechanisms including recovery and change are conducted can be made. this enables a way to view the covid- crisis as an opportunity for more attention placed on the importance of entrepreneurship education for society. covid- is posing a significant challenge to management education especially for international students and courses that have an experiential nature (brammer and clark, ; marshall and wolanskyi-spinner, ) . restrictions on mass gatherings and social distancing requirements have limited in class teaching, which has resulted in a massive quick shift to online teaching methods as a result of the covid- pandemic (ratten, ) . this has meant an increase in courses taught through digital communication methods (krishnamurthy, ) . border closures and cuts to international travel have further restricted international student mobility and business activities (donthu and gustafsson, ) . to respond to these changes there has been a rapid uptake in remote and digital learning entrepreneurship education methods (bacq, geoghegan, josefy, stevenson and williams, ) . entrepreneurship education is considered as an important way to influence the competitiveness of any country or industry, so it provides opportunities in the pandemic to progress to a more competitive educational environment (liguori and winkler, ) . whilst there are many debates about whether entrepreneurship can be taught, the general consensus is that any form of education regardless of an individual's personality can have beneficial outcomes (glaveli, ) . this means that the design and structure of an entrepreneurship course can be moulded to suit an individual's learning preference (suseno and ratten, ) . these preferences are embedded in more tailored courses that incorporate cultural dimensions to entrepreneurship education. the goal of these courses is to inculculate a specific orientation whether it be an industry or experience within the teaching philosophy (miragaia, da costa and ratten, ) . entrepreneurship education generally tends to be defined as study that teaches skills to start and manage a business for growth (mentoor and friedrich, ) . however, more recently this has changed due to more students interested in acquiring knowledge about j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f entrepreneurial behaviour that does not necessarily equate to starting a business . for this reason, studying entrepreneurship is encouraged as a way of getting students to think about future career directions. this means that students learn about different possible careers that range from a start-up, to include small business management and corporate venturing (peterman and kennedy, ) . thus, entrepreneurship education is recognised not just for its ability to teach practical skills but to also obtain knowledge about how to help communities and promote a improved quality of life (ratten, ). an entrepreneurial attitude includes an emphasis on a personal control over a situation that incorporates some degree of innovation, which is important during the covid- crisis (brown and rocha, ) . this means emphasizing an individual's ability to change a course of action because of their self-esteem and need for achievement (rauchand hulsink, ) . the growth of entrepreneurship education during the past decade has been phenomenal and is now a common course in most business schools (santos, neumeyer and morris, ) . this importance of entrepreneurship education in changing student's perceptions is reflected in numerous studies (souitaris, zerbinati and al-laham, ) . for example, zhang and cain ( ) found that more than % of entrepreneurship education students intended to become entrepreneurs after finishing their courses. this is supported by kubberod and pettersen ( ) who found that students who took entrepreneurship training were more positive towards entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship education has become more complex due to the need to teach a range of topics related to innovation and futuristic thinking (oosterbeek, van praag and ijsselstein, ) . consequently, pedagogical approaches now focus on managing expectations by teaching students how to be resilient (ahmed, chandran, klobas, linan and kokkalis, ) . this means embedding a real world context that exposes students to service learning (santos et al, ) . addressing world problems is part of entrepreneurship curricula as it provides a j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f way for students to help solve societal issues through focusing on their intention to become entrepreneurial (beynon, jones and pickernell, ). an entrepreneurial intent is defined as "a clear and conscious decision to start a new venture" (elliott et al, ) . this means students can apply entrepreneurship principles that empower them to take strategic action. a recent review article on entrepreneurship research by ferreira, fernandes and kraus ( found that entrepreneurial principles can be analysed in many different ways depending on the environmental context including health, technology and social-related concerns. in this commentary, we explore the way to encourage entrepreneurial intention in students by focusing on the effects of covid- on entrepreneurship education. to do this we draw on existing and emerging management education practices surrounding covid- (beech and anseel, ) . these reflections will enable a better understanding about the current state of play in management education regarding entrepreneurship (duval-couetil, ladisch and yi, ) . crisis are complex and their effects are felt immediately but also over a long period of time (ansell and boin, ) . the covid- crisis was a low-probability event that was unpredictable. doern et al ( : ) state that crises can be classified as "extreme unexpected unpredictable events or as more mundane everyday disturbances, sudden or gradual, crisis have also been categorizes as 'major' or 'minor', 'internal' or 'external' and as 'technical/economic' in nature or 'people/social/organizational centric'". this dichotomy in approaches reflects the varying nature of crisis from natural ecological events to economic disasters (buchanan and denyer, ) . whilst the nature of a crisis can be ranked on a scale of severe to inconsequential, all crisis influence human life in some way or another (eggers, j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f ). this results in some businesses perform better than others due to their level of resilience, which means they can cope due to creating solutions based on available resources (faulkner, ) . the covid- pandemic was unpredictable and a surprise (world health organisation, ). as clark, davila, regis and kraus ( ) state, there are many different ways countries have responded to the covid- crisis depending on their regulatory policies. as a result, the covid- pandemic has resulted in significant societal upheaval and it has been a career shock for many students and educators (akkermans, richardson and kraimer, ) . most management educators had not considered a need to move rapidly to working and studying from home and in a digital environment. the good news is that for most students and educators the change meant they could continue their studies albeit in a different environment. this continuity in education was needed particularly in terms of ensuring students course progression (jones, ) . unlike other industries, the education industry could move online in a short time period, which enabled students to continue their studies but also enabled others to learn through online courses. this has been helpful in ensuring society continuity and also providing a way for individuals to learn during times of crisis (doern, ) . since the world health organization on march , declared the covid- crisis a pandemic, there has been an enormous impact on management education. this impact can be analysed through a geography approach using the space dimensions of territory, place, scale and network (brinks and ibert, ) . as different countries and regions have varying policies regarding in-class versus digital class participation there are conflicting views about the best way to change educational practices as a result of the crisis (donthu and gustafsson, ) . this means the scale of the impact can be high or low depending on the amount of educational courses that are moved to a fully online environment. as a result, education and j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f learning networks make a difference in finding the right approach to take. thus, as its effects continue to be felt in the education sector, policy makers have issued and implemented improvements. crisis are not new to the education sector but the impact of covid- has had the biggest impact on education practices compared to other crisis. as a result, the crisis has brought forth new questions about the role of education in society and how the education industry can respond to the crisis. over the past decade, management education as a scientific area of inquiry has blossomed with the continued growth in enrolments (ferreira, fayolle, ratten and raposo, ) . this means there is an already existing substantial body of knowledge that can help decipher ways to deal with crises (williams, gruber, sutcliffe, shepherd and zhao, ) . however, due to the impact of covid- being high, a complex solution that takes into account multiple stakeholders is required (bailey and breslin, ) . there is some confusion about pandemics due to pre-pandemic stages being communicated that might not lead into a serious situation (alon, farrell and li, ) . this means the public health response to a pandemic can change depending on the severity of a disease and how it progresses (watson, ). there was a delay in declaring the covid- a pandemic despite the seriousness of the situation, which meant there has been some controversy over whether it was managed by global health authorities (cortez and johnston, ) . in addition, as there are political repercussions from having a pandemic declared, this created accusations of politicization (hall et al, ) . whilst a coordinated international approach to dealing with a pandemic is required, the current closure of country borders means this is hard to do (hall, scott and gossling, ) . in addition, each country is competing for medical personnel and other health experts (he and harris, ) . this has created a talent war but also increased competition for required medical devices. the covid- pandemic is global whereas previous pandemics have been largely focused on specific areas (he and harris, ) . this has meant it is difficult or almost impossible for health professionals to travel to other geographic regions. this has resulted in a sense of national interest instead of international solidarity (hall et al, ) . in addition, many developed countries have had significant outbreaks of the disease and required help from developing countries. this reversal in health policy has been unprecedented and is surprising given the increased levels of internationalisation we have seen in the past. therefore, the covid- pandemic represents a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to transform existing practices (kirk and rifkin, ) . linnenluecke ( ) suggests three main ways to build resilience: develop adaptable business models, alter global supply chains and strengthen employees. by adapting business models, organisations can move their production facilities to focusing on relevant market needs. this enables rapid innovation by shifting the market focus into new business practices. in the current covid- crisis contactless and online services have been emphasized so organisations have had to change their business models to reflect this (kirk and rifkin, ) . as supply chains have become more global, it is useful to have alternative countries for sources of production. this helps to decrease the reliance on one country and means that in times of a crisis there are multiple source of supply. as a result, employees in the education sector need to be strengthened in terms of the autonomy and independence they have in making decisions (hahn, minola, bosio and cassia, ) . this enables teaching and mentoring employees about business ideas. in addition, businesses that have a higher level of reliance are better able to cope with change, which can enable them to act swiftly by preparing new business ideas (hills, ) . this means that in times of a crisis some degree of improvisation with educational methods that incorporate entrepreneurial thinking is needed (krishnamurthy, ) . entrepreneurship education is defined as "any pedagogical program or process of education for entrepreneurial attitudes and skills" (fayolle et al, : ) . this definition reflects the notion that the field of entrepreneurship education involves the application, design and implementation of innovative, futuristic and proactive strategies to an educational environment. this involves analysing new market potential and technological solutions. fayolle and klandt ( : ) also took a pedagogical approach in defining entrepreneurship education as "any pedagogical programme or process of education for entrepreneurial attitudes and skills, which involves developing certain personal qualities". therefore, most definitions of entrepreneurship recognise the need for concurrent study of multiple topics that lead to change. part of entrepreneurship education involves taking an inter-disciplinary perspective that incorporates different study areas for a practical solution. jones ( : ) mor recently describes entrepreneurship education as a "collective of initiatives operating in universities, community colleges, vocational (or trade) schools, high schools and elementary (or primary) schools, that are held together by a common desire to develop in students a greater capacity for entrepreneurial agency". this reflects the emphasis on entrepreneurship education on its real life suitability that reflects changing societal conditions. therefore, entrepreneurship education unlike other scientific areas that are more theory based offers a promising way to teach others how to deal with the covid- crisis. in higher education there is a tendency to evaluate employability in the form of hard skills rather than soft skills (clinkard, ) . entrepreneurship education tries to include both hard and soft skills in order to contribute to lifelong learning. this means hard skills that are technical or role-specific are combined with soft skills such as personability. employability is a key issue facing graduates as they embark on their career. increasingly students after they finish their courses will have multiple jobs due to a reliance on project-based work (marginson, ) . this means students will need to continually upgrade their skill repertoire depending on market conditions. in addition, the increased casualisation of the workforce means some individuals will need to have a number of jobs. helyer and lee ( ) discuss how work experience is crucial to the future employability of higher education graduates. therefore, internships have been advocated as a way to mix workplace learning with study needs (guile and lahiff, ) . internships enable a more economically efficient way of learning on the job whilst acquiring knowledge. there are different streams within entrepreneurship education that reflects its intricate nature (ferreira, fayolle, ratten and raposo, ) . entrepreneurs are change agents that pursue opportunities in the marketplace so entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on student's capabilities and ability to adjust to emerging technologies (beynon, jones and pickernell, ) there is a multitude of existing studies on entrepreneurship education at the undergraduate (eg von graevenitz et al, ) , masters (eg raunch and hulsink, ) and doctoral level (eg munoz et al, ). these different levels reflect how entrepreneurship is taught from a number of different perspectives including at the micro, macro and meso level. at the micro level, the emphasis is on small businesses and teaching individuals to become entrepreneurs whilst at the macro level it focuses more on global entrepreneurship issues evident in large scale companies. at the meso level social entrepreneurship and communitybased entrepreneurship topics are at the heart of entrepreneurship courses (ferreira, j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f fernandes and ratten, ) . thus, most research on entrepreneurship education tends to associate positively the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention and attitude (ahmed et al, ) . for example, kolvereid and moen ( ) found that participants in entrepreneurship education classes were more likely to start their own businesses than non-participants. peterman and kennedy ( ) found that participation in entrepreneurship education classes increases the desirability of pursuing an entrepreneurial career. whilst most research on the link between entrepreneurship education and behaviour is positive, some studies find no positive effect. for example, in a study on undergraduate students, oosterbeek, van praag and ijsselstenn ( ) found that intentions to start a business decreased after finishing an entrepreneurship class. similarly, mentoor and friedrich ( ) found that participation in entrepreneurship education did not affect intention to be an entrepreneur. entrepreneurship education involves a variety of activities that include both in-class and outof-class learning (jones, penaluna and pittaway, ) . this means a holistic and more longterm approach to evaluating the effect of entrepreneurship education on behaviour is needed. increasingly entrepreneurial education is viewed as a programme consisting of a number of components that can alter based on contextual situations. ahmed et al ( : ) describe an entrepreneurship education programme as consisting of "several components including course content (eg lecture material, guest speakers, online resources, modes of delivery etc) and course goals (eg learning introductory concepts and theory) compared to learning specific skills". this means in the covid- environment course content can change to reflect new environmental contexts whilst the course goals can remain the same depending on the entrepreneurial intent (iivari, sharma and venta-olkkonen, ) . to understand the link between entrepreneurship education and intentions different theories can be applied (secundo, mele, sansone and paolucci, ) . human capital theory proposes that individuals study entrepreneurship as a way to build their business skills (ahmed et al, ) . this means individuals acquire certain skills and knowledge by studying certain subjects. unger et al ( ) suggest that human capital is linked to entrepreneurial success as individuals acquire more practical training. entrepreneurial self-efficacy theory has also been used as a way of understanding how individuals develop skills through entrepreneurship training. this is evident in chen et al ( ) finding that entrepreneurial self-efficacy distinguishes entrepreneurs from managers. this means entrepreneurship education can embed a more independent and risk-taking spirit in students. this helps them build confidence about their ability to start a new business. jena ( ) this results in some inequity in terms of attitudes towards entrepreneurship education. the social environment in terms of family, school and work interaction will also play a part in influencing feelings towards education (jones, klapper, ratten and fayolle, ) . the affective component concerns feelings and emotions an individual has towards education. this means some individuals will react differently to learning stimuli. in order to increase the perceived desirability of entrepreneurship education it is important that consideration regarding intuition is acknowledged. some individuals will express themselves j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f in different ways that impact on the entrepreneurship experience (jones, jones, williams-burnett and ratten, ) . in addition, courses will be evaluated differently depending on the perception of value co-creation. this is due to students having different motivations and reasons for studying entrepreneurship. the behavioural component involves the responses an individual has towards education, which means that individuals will act differently depending on how they learn . for some students, the desire to study entrepreneurship is motivated by a financial incentive whilst for others non-financial reasons such as contributing to society are paramount. therefore, the expected responses to entrepreneurship education are based on the aspirations of students (ratten, ) . students will have different attitudes towards entrepreneurship education depending on whether they are taking the subject as an elective or compulsory part of their course. this means there will tend to be more positive feelings towards the experience if the student chooses to study the topic. the covid- pandemic emerged at the start of the academic year for students in australia and asia that begin studies early in the year. for most european and north american universities, the crisis happened in the middle of the teaching year. in australia, the crisis initially meant many international students predominately from china could not enter the country so the focus was moving to online teaching to accommodate these students. this students particularly those in management courses requiring experiential learning have been highly affected. whilst classes have altered new pedagogy and assessment to suit the new conditions, student have had to quickly adapt to new learning methods. in addition, students have been physically and socially isolated from their peers that has caused mental hardship. this has been mitigated in some way through online social activities that try to recreate physical environments. for many students the campus environment plays a big role in their intellectual development. with many campuses closed this has affected the way students learn and their ability to learn through peer networks. extra-curricula activities including sport and drama societies have closed impacting the social life that students experience in conjunction with their academic activities. in addition, internships, international study tours and site visits have stopped. this has limited the interaction students have with communities. however, there has been a positive increase in online activities that re-create normal environments. this has had a favourable impact in terms of students thinking and acting in creative way and helped to build resilience and entrepreneurial thinking in students that is needed in the competitive global marketplace. entrepreneurship students can be considered as nascent entrepreneurs as they are involved in business activities whilst studying (souitaris et al, ) . this means sometimes entrepreneurship students are already entrepreneurs and are taking the class as a way to learn j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f more about entrepreneurship. university students near the end of their courses are more likely to want to start a business (ahmed et al, ) . thus, in times of crisis entrepreneurship plays a key role in retraining individuals for new industries that are emerging in society. traditional employment channels are changing as there is more reliance on the gig economy. this means students are likely to have a portfolio career in which different employment paths become available. this has meant that there is less emphasis by students on finding employment in large firms and the government sector. as a result, more students have become interested in startups and starting their own business. young people are being encouraged to apply for jobs in new industries some of which were not in existence in the previous year. this means the emphasis in young people is to think creativity and a way to learn this is through entrepreneurship education. there has been much uncertainty associated with covid- that has resulted in misinformation (krauss, clauss, breier, gast, zardini and tiberius, ). in addition, rumours about its origin continue to cause political effects which has had an impact on students. as there is scarce work integrating a medical and entrepreneurship approach more collaboration is needed in terms of student learning. the link between medical science and entrepreneurship is intuitive and natural due to both being about innovation. this means taking a big-picture perspective to covid- makes sense due to the complementary strengths of both science and entrepreneurship (kuckertz, brandle, gaudig, hinderer, reyes, prochotta and berger, ) . this will help to unveil digestible knowledge that can be used in different segments of society. another way to look at the interdisciplinary nature is to focus on the hard or soft sciences. typically the hard sciences such as medicine and engineering are rule and results orientated whilst the soft sciences such as entrepreneurship focus more on creativity. this means it is worth noting that due to the current covid- crisis causing much panic in society j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f interdisciplinary research using hard science but with a soft science mentality can help. this will enable strategies to be developed to protect public health whilst reducing negative effects on students. by leveraging the abilities of both the hard and soft sciences it can showcase innovative developments for societal good. therefore, raising awareness of an interdisciplinary approach for enabling medical and social scientists to work together. entrepreneurship education normally involves some form of interactivity in which students are immersed in an environment that involves them learning about how to perform a task. the environment whilst normally physical can be virtual in terms of augmenting reality to enable students to learn about a behaviour. examples of learning platforms include writing a business plan, pitching an idea or conducting a market analysis (ahmed et al, ) . within an entrepreneurship course there are normally some tasks involving how to develop creativity that can lead to a business venture. another key learning benefit of entrepreneurship education is the exposure students have to real entrepreneurs. this can involve role models or mentors that inspire students to be entrepreneurs. management education at all levels from undergraduate to graduate has been dramatically affected by the covid- pandemic. practical placements in most entrepreneurship courses have been removed or significantly reduced. this means that developing innovative methods of entrepreneurship education is challenging without traditional classroom environments. therefore, it is essential that entrepreneurship educators sustain high-quality teaching methods as the success of future entrepreneurs depends on it. an entrepreneurs role in society can be culturally acquired due to societies expectations about individual behaviour based on economic conditions. this means in times of crisis, an entrepreneur will experientially j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f acquire certain skills. guest speakers are often used in classes as a way of describing their experiences. although online guest speakers can also be done when social distancing limits physical contact. in addition, it can be beneficial to have guest speakers from international locations via online platforms that overcome geographical distance limitations. in addition, incubators and accelerator programs are increasingly being used in entrepreneurship programs. this is due to initial ideas needing help in terms of making them commercially viable. most universities have programs designed to nurture an idea and enable participants to access required resources. this can include competitions and internships designed to expose students to outside ideas that provide helpful feedback. in addition, science and technology parks are often located on university grounds enabling students to have more interaction with business. krishnamurthy ( ) suggest that there are five main trends impacting business education as a result of covid- : algorithms, service, assessment, personalisation and problem solving. algorithms mean that students can learn via artificial intelligence rather than through direct human interaction. this means that increasing amounts of theory will be taught via online activities rather than through human contact. service means that relevant and contextual information will be taught. this means instead of students studying a set number of subjects, there will be more timely courses taught that depend on current events. thus, the emphasis will be on continuing learning rather than a discrete number of subjects. assessment means that objective learning outcomes will be emphasised so that learning is the result of a multitude of factors that are interwoven to create a specialised learning experience. personalization refers to making changes to an educational offering to suit a specific individual. this helps to cater for specific learning needs that can enable better performance. problem solving means finding answers to issues facing society. increasingly this skill is viewed in a positive way in light of increased inequalities amongst members of society. given that the global management education environment has significantly changed as a result of the covid- pandemic the content of entrepreneurship education programs varies with some valuing a practical and immersive experience more than others. this means there is a debate about the right approach to take in entrepreneurship education from a practical approach to more of a hybrid model including both practice and theory. this is due to the importance played on learning concepts and theory related to entrepreneurship whilst engaging in the act of being an entrepreneur. therefore, the emphasis is placed on learning about business planning and how to take calculated risks. more recently skills such as creativity and decision making have been emphasised. the most commonly referred to objectives of entrepreneurship education programs is to acquire knowledge about action plans related to business and to stimulate an entrepreneurial mindset towards change (glaveli, ) . this means skills related to management including accounting and marketing are embedded in the teaching of attitudes towards entrepreneurship. due to the wide ranging number of objectives in entrepreneurship courses it can be hard to align the design of the course with the outcomes. hence, the content of entrepreneurship education courses needs to be treated in an analytical manner. as the covid- crisis has deepened around the world, so does the need to practice and think in an entrepreneurial manner (parnell, widdop, bond and wilson, ) . the effects of the covid- crisis are felt in diverse parts of society and has resulted in increased inequality gaps between rich and poor (pantano, pizzi, scarpi and dennis, ) . the interest in entrepreneurship education has grown due to changing economic conditions emphasising ecological sustainability and social equity. this has resulted in more entrepreneurship education courses that incorporate both economic activities and social objectives. the covid- crisis has the potential to transform management education but to realize this potential management education needs to critically evaluate its epistemological foundation in order to challenge existing paradigms (nicola, alsafi, sohrabi, kerwan, al-jabir, iosifidis, agha and agha, ) . finding solutions to how education can evolve as a socio-economic activity is crucial. technology plays a key role in this due to the need for digital learning environments. since the introduction of the internet and online forums for education, information technology has been an important enabler and disruptor for management education. this is especially true in today's education environment in which most aspects of teaching have a technology component. technology is now interwoven into education and has become even more important during the covid crisis. technology has been adapted and developed to solve some of the issues faced by changing environmental conditions. to build resilience in education, technology is used as an effective way to manage change (liu, shankar and yun, ) . whilst there are many benefits of technology it cannot fully replace physical contact in which non-verbal communication is important. the arrival of covid- has been a watershed moment as it totally changed how life is conducted (higgins-desbiolles, ). previously there was a large trend towards international entrepreneurship and transnational entrepreneurship so the introduction of border closures as a result of covid- has significantly altered existing business models. social activities have been reduced and people told to communicate via digital technology. these changes have been made due to an effort by governments to control the pandemic. this has meant trying to strike a balance between public health requirements and economic needs (perrow, ) . as a result, difficult circumstances have emerged in which governments have kept essential services whilst trying to reduce the impact on public health (milliken, ) . the unprecedented size of government interventions have helped reduce the impact of j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f covid- on society so the covid- crisis offers a way to grow better and prioritize entrepreneurship education. there is little clarity in the entrepreneurship education literature about the inputs and intended outputs (pittaway and cope, ) . this means there is significant diversity about what the right teaching and learning methods are in entrepreneurship education. this is due to a variety of attitudes and skills needed for entrepreneurship. entrepreneurship education research has experienced an extraordinary increase recently due to its practical nature. this means it is challenging to find a specific answer to deal with the problems. this article offers at least two contributions to the study of entrepreneurship education in the covid- crisis can be analysed in terms of entrepreneurship from before, during and after the event (sharma, leung, kingshott, davcik and cardinali, ) . this enables different time frames to be compared in order to understand the changes occurring in the global business environment. by taking a multi-time period approach it will enable an overview of how the covid- crisis has impacted stakeholders in terms of demand, supply and policy issues (toresdahl and asif, ) . by doing so entrepreneurship education research can be transformative as it can embed a covid- perspective into new research studies. this enables a significant unravelling of the way entrepreneurship educators have responded to the crisis and how relationships have changed. based on the discussion included in this article, there are a number of policy implications that have emerged. this involves the need for government investment on entrepreneurship education programs in times of crisis (shrivastava, ) the shutting down of many industries most notably the sport and tourism sectors provides an opportunity to rethink current strategies (veil, ) . to do this, entrepreneurship is required to reset business approaches that focus on a community-centred initiative. this will enable a reorganisation of entrepreneurial practices to build on local communities and people (weick and sutcliffe, ) . this helps entrepreneurship to be used as a way to focus on social good. in addition, the spread of covid- around the world indicates how global and networked our society has become. covid- is more contagious than the seasonal flu and has a higher death rate so the impact of the virus will have lasting effects particularly in terms of human interaction (wen, wang, kozak, liy and hou, ) . governments have responded to the virus by implementing more hygiene practices and social distancing procedures. this is in conjunction with restricting individual movement through border closures and city lockdowns. in addition, other activities such as sport and socialising have been restricted. the reduction in close contact activities is a radical change to previous behaviour that emphasises close interaction. covid- likely came from an initial zoonotic (animal to human) transmission event. entrepreneurship research needs to assess the impact of the covid- using financial and non-financial metrics. financial implications might be more readily available and easier to understand. global economic data shows there has been a decrease in share markets resulting from the coivd- crisis. non-financial implications are harder to understand due to the perceived effects often being subjective. more research is needed on how economies can bounce back from the covid- crisis and how policy makers can help. the answers to this is not simple and require care in terms of managing the associated costs. resolving the covid- crisis immediately is not possible as it will take time to handle. this means restoring social and economic stability is a priority. policy makers need to balance short term health and social objectives with long term economic considerations. in the short term, governments need to support entrepreneurship that can bring increases in economic growth. to do this requires entities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem working together. this will enable more positive flow on effects in the economy to emerge. in the long term, entrepreneurship education can enable better societal conditions and help prevent or minimise future crisis. this means entrepreneurship educators need to work together with other stakeholders in the ecosystem in order to lessen the effect of the crisis. as there is no magic billet to solve the covid- crisis as it has been an unexpected and highly impactful event, complex trade-offs need to be considered that incorporate creative thinking endemic in entrepreneurship education. entrepreneurs have experienced the uncertainty caused by the covid- crisis through personal or shared experiences of others. increasingly user-generated content about the covid- crisis has provided exposure to other's experiences that is magnified in social media settings. moreover, the emotional contagion of the crisis has meant entrepreneurs intentions and behaviours have been affected. business environments have become unstable as a result of the covid- crisis and an entrepreneurial approach is the best way to go for the sustainability of the global economy. the past reliance of businesses on government subsidies does not guarantee survival as the government is having to spend money on health and social needs. in the context of the covid- crisis, entrepreneurship education remains very relevant. an ability to navigate the business environment in uncertain times is intrinsic to having a successful business. inherent in conducting business in the crisis is the need to reconcile the urgency of delivering services with the need to move forward. the availability of government support is time limited so business need to be proactive about finding alternative support. in addition, countries (eg australia) that have recently suffered devastating natural disasters (eg bushfires) have had to struggle on multiple fronts. educators and practitioners can derive valuable suggestions from this paper. now more than ever entrepreneurship education is needed. this means making entrepreneurship education programs accessible to more people that can help alleviate some current societal problems. due to there being many different ways to teach entrepreneurship, the role of crisis management needs to be embedded in all courses. this means being aware of the underlying reasons for the course and the resulting impact on entrepreneurial intention. the covid- crisis will make firms rethink their current business models in order to make them more agile and flexible in the future. due to the closing of state and country borders, locations will become more nationalistic. this is in contrast to the internationalisation trends of the past. most businesses are struggling due to the impacts of covid- although some businesses particularly online ones are flourishing so encouraging entrepreneurship training is needed. this conceptual article has discussed the impact of covid- on entrepreneurship education. due to the recent and ongoing nature of the covid- crisis at the time of writing this article, longitudinal data could not be collected. thus, more information about how entrepreneurship educators have adjusted to the new environmental conditions are required. this includes focusing more on how technological innovation has been utilised both by educators and students. to do this it would be useful to conduct international cross-country comparisons to see the differences and similarities with responses to covid- related entrepreneurship education changes. the current thinking in the field of entrepreneurship education needs to include a covid- lens in order to understand the change. this is due to context-wise, the covid- pandemic has had a lot of influence on entrepreneurship education so this needs to be acknowledged. in addition, the role educators play in crisis j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f settings needs to be stressed and this can be conducted in real time or via proxy in order to help uncover the contributions. most existing studies are concerned with crisis planning and response without considering the intricacies of the experience (runyan, ) . therefore, research is required on how entrepreneurship educators learn from crisis and their knowledge management techniques. studies on covid- and entrepreneurship need in turn to incorporate an education perspective in order to be more definitive about their contribution. in addition, more research on different time periods during the covid- crisis from the initial world health organisation declaring it a pandemic in march to the second wave of infections occurring in melbourne, australia in august . comparing how students and educators adjusted to these different time periods would be useful in terms of analysing the effect of the crisis on learning levels. it would be interesting to see if because of the stay at home restrictions students study more or alternatively if they are too stressed by the pandemic to learn in an efficient manner. table below states potential research issues in each of the time periods of the covid- crisis. to what extend did entrepreneurship education move back to where it was prior to the pandemic? how different is existing entrepreneurship education compared to prior to the crisis? in conclusion, this article has discussed the changing nature of entrepreneurship education as a result of the covid- pandemic. the way crises affect business and the resulting affects on management education were discussed. this highlights the need to think more strategically given the continued nature of covid- and its ongoing affects on entrepreneurs in society. as a result there is a greater need now more than ever to embed an entrepreneurial spirit in management education courses and standalone entrepreneurship subjects in order to help focus on the positive benefits of finding solutions for the crisis. the article has focused on the different affects of the crisis from a student learning, technological environment and course content perspective. this will help to build better learning and teaching methods in entrepreneurship education courses that can use crisis analogy as a way of finding productive solutions. j o u r n a l p r e -p r o o f entrepreneurship education programmes: how learning, inspiration and resources affect intentions for new venture creation in a developing economy the covid- crisis as a career shock: implications for careers and vocational behaviour regime type and covid- response taming deep uncertainty: the potential of pragmatist principles for understanding and improving strategic crisis management the covid- virtual idea blitz: 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response to adversity: fusing crisis management and resilience research streams who, coronavirus disease (covid- ) outbreak reassessing the link between risk aversion and entrepreneurial intention: the mediating role of the determinants of planned behavior key: cord- -d opzb m authors: seo, mihye title: amplifying panic and facilitating prevention: multifaceted effects of traditional and social media use during the mers crisis in south korea date: - - journal: journal mass commun q doi: . / sha: doc_id: cord_uid: d opzb m in the context of the middle east respiratory syndrome (mers) outbreak in south korea, this study examines the multifaceted effects of media use considering the current complex media environment. analysis of a two-wave online panel survey found that traditional media use had a positive influence on mers knowledge while social media use did not. however, knowledge did not facilitate preventive behaviors. in contrast, negative emotional responses due to media use stimulated desirable behaviors. furthermore, social media use directly influenced behavioral responses but traditional media use did not show the same effects. different functions of traditional and social media during an epidemic are discussed. changed that understanding considerably (petersen, hui, & zumla, ) . this unforeseen crisis induced not only morbidity and mortality but also fear and panic in korea. in fact, the panic epidemic caused more widespread damage than the disease itself by slowing the economy and interfering with people's daily routines. in times of crisis, the importance of the media is heightened. government and responsible organizations consider media to be an essential part of crisis management (reynolds & seeger, ) , and the public relies on the media to make sense of confusing or chaotic situations (tai & sun, ; zhang, kong, & chang, ) . given the importance of media in times of crisis, scholarly attention has been largely paid to the following questions: (a) how government and other organizations work (or should work) with media to prepare for and respond to crises and (b) how the media reports (or should report) on crises. relatively less attention, however, has been paid in existing research to examining informational, emotional, and behavioral consequences of individuals' media use in times of crisis. as the importance of social media has risen in general, its importance in the context of crises has also increased. evidence shows that many people turn to social media to seek crisis-related information, such as safety instructions and news updates (veil, buehner, & palenchar, ) , which stands to promote proper behavioral responses to facilitate effective crisis management. however, both researchers and practitioners caution that media-social media in particular-may create misperceptions and amplify public fears by fostering public panic and proliferating unverified information (kasperson, ) . in comparison to traditional media, social media use is particularly susceptible to the aforementioned concerns due to enhanced speed of information transmission and distinctive features of open access platforms (zeng, starbird, & spiro, ) . in the context of the mers outbreak in korea, this study provides an empirical examination of the multifaceted effects of media use in times of crisis in the complex and dynamic media environment of today. using two waves of online panel data collected at two different time points during the mers crisis, i investigate how individuals' traditional and social media use during the crisis produced various consequences, including increased mers knowledge, negative emotions such as fear and anxiety, and direct and indirect facilitation of mers preventive behaviors. i also scrutinize the differences in these effects caused by traditional and social media use. the term crisis is defined as "some breakdown in a system that creates shared stress" (coombs, , p. ) , which includes a very broad range of situations. an infectious disease outbreak is a typical example of crisis in the public health context. prior research has focused on how governments or other responsible organizations can achieve positive relationships with the public in managing a particular crisis. based on the organization-public relationship (opr) approach, scholars have theorized and investigated various (pre)conditions, attributes, and communication strategies of organizations to bring about positive relational outcomes with the public, such as satisfaction, commitment, trust, and mutual understanding (s.-u. yang, ) . with respect to the mers crisis in korea, s.-u. yang ( ) showed that the government's lack of dialogic competency negatively affected government-public relationships. those findings indicate that the korean government's lack of mutuality and openness weakened the credibility of its risk information, which produced negative relational consequences such as distrust and dissatisfaction and the intent to dissolve the relationship. cooperation with the media on the part of government and responsible organizations is a major portion of effective crisis management processes (coombs, ) . from a crisis management perspective, prior research has mainly focused on how to understand and work with the media to accomplish various goals (reynolds & seeger, ) . for instance, researchers have identified the kinds of communication strategies that work best to reduce public-relations damage and generate compliance with desired behaviors in hazardous situations (glik, ) . for instance, seeger, reynolds, and sellnow ( ) emphasized the importance of coordinating specific communication tasks for each crisis phase in the context of hurricane katrina and the h n outbreak. based on the existing literature and case studies, scholars have also attempted to provide guidelines for best practices in crisis communication (veil et al., ) , which could also be used as evaluative criteria in crises (plattala & vos, ) . another line of research focuses on how media channels cover crises by analyzing the content of crisis reporting and discussing its implications. as manifested by terms such as disaster marathon (liebes, ) , the unexpected and impending nature of crises triggers media hype, which produces a prolific amount of reporting. much research has investigated the characteristics of crisis coverage (shih, wijaya, & brossard, ) . shih and colleagues ( ) , for instance, found that the coverage of epidemics showed common patterns across discrete diseases, such as a high eventbase and emphasis on newly identified cases and government actions. with respect to the mers crisis in korea, jin and chung ( ) performed semantic network analysis of korean and foreign media coverage of the crisis. they examined the most frequently used words (e.g., patient, hospital, infection, government, and case) and concluded that korean media focused heavily on the number of cases and the government's responses, consistent with shih and colleagues' findings (see kwon, , for similar findings) . based on content analyses of crisis reporting, past research has also identified persistent problems in crisis reporting, such as excessiveness (rezza, marino, farchi, & taranto, ) , inaccuracy (auter, douai, makady, & west, ) , and sensationalism (moeller, ) . korean media's mers reporting was not exempt from sensational and excessive coverage of the contagious nature of the disease and patient counts (kim, ; kwon, ) . as population mobility and trade in goods and services have increased, newly emerging infectious diseases have become global public health concerns. some emerging infectious diseases have derived from a known infection, such as influenza, and have spread into new populations. the mers outbreak in korea can be understood as one such example. an outbreak of infectious disease causes not only human casualties but also massive economic harm. different from chronic health risks, infectious pandemics trigger spontaneous and intense media attention (posid, bruce, guarnizo, taylor, & garza, ) , which could create cascading effects in various public responses. however, relatively little empirical research has considered the various consequences of media use by individuals during a public health crisis. one of the most desirable public responses to a public health crisis is engaging in preventive behaviors (mitroff, ) . public adoption of precautionary behaviors is critical to preventing large outbreaks of infectious disease, particularly in densely populated countries such as korea. people need to behave in ways that prevent the spread of infectious disease and its consequences, and the media plays an important role in facilitating those behaviors (gammage & klentrou, ; zhang et al., ) . learning from media is one potential pathway to engagement in preventive behaviors (sayavong, chompikul, wongsawass, & rattanapan, ) . besides cognitive responses, another way to galvanize preventive behaviors could be through emotional responses, which could alarm people enough to take proper actions with respect to a given risk. research on risk and health communication has offered various theoretical models and empirical evidence for each approach (boer & seydel, ; griffin, dunwoody, & neuwirth, ). yet, there has been little research testing and comparing the two potential paths to preventive behaviors in the context of a pandemic crisis. first, media use could increase knowledge about a crisis, which could stimulate the public to enact preventive behaviors. the heavy emphasis on knowledge is largely drawn from the traditional knowledge deficit model of communication (rutsaert et al., ) , which claims that a lack of understanding is the major obstacle to reasonable public responses to a risk or crisis. therefore, it accentuates the scientific knowledge transfer from experts to the layperson and media have been regarded as a major conduit of knowledge transfer (hilgartner, ) . thus, when a crisis happens, government and responsible organizations attempt to work with media to disseminate crisis-related information, and the general public turns mainly to the media to acquire the information to deal with the atmosphere of uncertainty. despite that widespread expectation, relatively little empirical attention has been given to whether public crisis knowledge is indeed increased by media use or whether understanding of a crisis indeed facilitates preventive behaviors in times of crisis. media is known to be more suitable for diffusion of knowledge than other channels, such as interpersonal communication (price & oshagan, ) . prior research shows that media use increases health knowledge in the general public, which in turn encourages desirable health behaviors (gammage & klentrou, ; sayavong et al., ) . little empirical evidence, however, has been collected in the context of urgent public health crises such as epidemics. on the contrary, disaster studies have extensively examined individual and group responses to impending threats (e.g., natural disasters or terrorist attacks). according to that body of research, in the face of an impending threat, people become more sensitive to cues about social environments and engage in searches for information as a basis for protective behaviors (lindell & perry, ) . however, despite the known contribution of media channels to these disaster research models, media variables have received insufficient attention in explaining the behavioral responses of individuals to crises. second, media use could stimulate proper behavioral responses via mobilizing information (mi). in the health communication literature, mi is designed to encourage a specific health behavior (friedman & hoffman-goetz, ) . applied to a crisis context, mi offers specific "how to" and "where to" information, such as checklists for preparedness supplies, evacuation information, phone numbers or websites for further information, or specific instructions for precautionary behaviors, meant to encourage people to take specific actions (tanner, friedman, & barr, ) . facing a crisis, the public needs to learn about both the nature of the crisis and how to mitigate its effects and defend themselves (guion, scammon, & borders, ) . a handful of prior studies in the communication discipline have documented the direct and indirect effects of media use on preventive behaviors via knowledge in a crisis situation. ho ( ) , for example, found that attention to newspaper and television news increased public knowledge about the h n pandemic. zhang et al. ( ) also found that media use potentially influenced h n preventive behaviors through fear and perceived knowledge. the results of national surveys in the united kingdom indicate that exposure to media coverage or advertising about swine flu increased the adoption of recommended preventive behaviors (g. rubin, potts, & michie, ) . lin and lagoe ( ) also showed that tv and newspaper use increased h n risk perception and vaccination intent in media users. based on those discussions and findings, it is expected that media use will facilitate public understanding of an emerging infectious disease and encourage appropriate precautionary behaviors. media use in large-scale emergencies, however, still requires empirical scrutiny because of the many unexpected twists that characterize fluid crisis situations. human beings facing a crisis often experience a range of negative emotions. the intense uncertainty inherent to a crisis situation galvanizes fear, worry, and panic (sandman & lanard, ) . in the outbreak of an unfamiliar contagious disease, both the unknown cause and fatal outcome and the interruptions of daily routines and stigma could strengthen negative emotional responses (lee, kim, & kang, ) . prior research indicates that individuals often feel more threatened during crises than is warranted by the actual risk level (coombs & slovic, ) . according to social amplification theory, the risk people feel when facing a crisis could be amplified or weakened by exchanging various forms of information via the news media or informal networks (renn, burns, kasperson et al., ) . once a perceived risk is officially acknowledged, the distortion and exaggeration of information tend follow (song, song, seo, jin, & kim, ) , feeding a range of negative emotional responses. prior research has found that the media tends to overemphasize risk and sensationalize crises. for instance, the media overstresses the horrific symptoms of contagious diseases regardless of facts about the prevalence of those symptoms in a time of outbreak (moeller, ; ungar, ) . the media also tends to focus more on the spread of a disease and the body counts rather than scientific causes (d. rubin & hendy, ) . these types of sensationalism can produce disproportionate public fear and panic responses to infectious diseases. scholars such as muzzatti ( ) have gone a step further and demonstrated that the media can actually manufacture threats to public health. some prior works have examined the effects of media use on emotional reactions toward a crisis. hoffner, fujioka, ibrahim, and ye ( ) , for instance, found that people who learned about the september terrorist attacks through mass media were more likely to report negative emotions than those who heard the news interpersonally. they attributed that difference to the nature of the live pictures and content in mass media crisis reporting. people's negative emotional responses as influenced by media use could lead to inappropriate behaviors, such as avoidance of precautionary behaviors or unnecessary or excessive behavioral reactions (liu, hammitt, wang, & tsou, ) . however, other convincing literature has claimed that emotions can trigger behavioral responses that are benign and adaptive (baumeister, vohs, dewall, & zhang, ) . negative emotional experiences can stimulate people to seek pertinent information (e.g., the risk information seeking and processing (risp) model, griffin et al., ) and encourage them to take preventive actions (e.g., protection motivation theory [pmt], boer & seydel, ) . unlike the cognition-based approach, which emphasizes the role of knowledge, these theoretical models focus on how negative emotions work as motivational drivers to guide people to protect themselves. empirical work has supported those claims by showing that negative emotion can drive positive behavioral responses, including adopting recommended health behaviors (ruiter, abraham, & kok, ) and engaging in information seeking (z. j. yang & kahlor, ) . as discussed, korean media coverage of the mers crisis did not deviate wildly from the patterns reported in the literature (kim, ; kwon, ) . the terms most frequently and centrally mentioned by the major news outlets mainly related to the contagious nature of the disease and patient counting (kwon, ) . sensational reporting and delivering government press releases without critical validation were also characteristic of the mers coverage (kim, ) . in addition, poor government handling of that crisis reduced the credibility of the information it provided (s.-u. yang, ) . against that backdrop, it is worth investigating the potential association between media use related to mers and the negative emotional responses of media users to determine the extent to which they influenced the behavioral responses of those users. along with traditional media channels such as television and newspapers, the importance of social media increases during large-scale events. these trends are particularly salient in the context of crises, which are traditionally marked by high levels of information seeking by the general population. evidence shows that people turn to social media during times of crisis to find information about safety instructions, news updates, and damage reports. increasingly, the public expects even official agents to respond to public requests via social media in times of emergency, concurrent with traditional crisis management (veil et al., ) . these heightened expectations are due in large part to perceptions of the benefits of social media for crisis communication. it is believed that social media can accelerate information dissemination in crisis situations by linking end users directly to critical information sources in real-time (hughes & palen, ) . during the h n virus outbreak, people exchanged information and experiences through social media (chew & eysenbach, ) . social media, such as twitter, has been used to quickly share initial information and updates during various types of crises, as well as to encourage specific actions, such as volunteering and precautionary behaviors (potts, ) . the presence of social media as an information source becomes salient when traditional media provides limited information. for instance, tai and sun ( ) showed that, during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) epidemic in , chinese people turned to the internet and message services to find information unavailable from the traditional media, which operate under close censorship by the chinese government. likewise, at the beginning of the mers crisis, the korean government withheld the list of hospitals affected by mers, and the mainstream media adhered to the information embargo requested by the government. limited access to needed information fueled fear, so people turned to social media instead of traditional media outlets (kim, ) . social networking service (sns) users are likely to be exposed to messages that affect their perceptions and their use of preventive behaviors related to health risks and the crisis event. vos and buckner ( ) found that sns messages in the outbreak of the h n virus consisted mainly of sense-making messages to educate users about the nature of the risk and efficacy messages to encourage appropriate responses. in a similar line, yoo, choi, and park ( ) found that receiving information about mers through sns directly encouraged mers preventive behavioral intentions. social media is filled not only with information but also emotional expressions (chew & eysenbach, ) . negative emotions are more likely than positive emotions to be floating around social media during an infectious outbreak, which could increase risk perception (choi, yoo, noh, & park, ) . for instance, song et al. ( ) found that negative emotions (e.g., anxiety or fear) prevailed in online boards and social media during the mers crisis. often, information intertwined with emotional markers travels around social media, and emotionally charged messages are more likely than purely informational posts to be shared and diffused (pfeffer, zorbach, & carley, ; stieglitz & dang-xuan, ) . s. choi, lee, pack, chang, and yoon ( ) mined internet media reports about mers in and examined their effects on public emotion expressed online, which they captured using a sentiment analysis. they mined all mers-related news articles from media companies, including the comments about each one. in a time-series analysis, they found a flow from internet media to public fear. according to song et al. ( ) , negative emotion accounted for % of all posts throughout online networks, especially twitter, during the mers crisis. therefore, i have drawn the following four hypotheses. i expected that both traditional and social media use in times of crisis could directly and indirectly facilitate preventive behaviors (via mers knowledge) and negative emotional responses to the mers situation. emerging social media channels have reshaped the crisis information context, which potentially complicates the relationships among media use and informational, emotional, and behavioral responses in the general public. although social media has been considered a powerful tool for disseminating information, both researchers and practitioners have cautioned against the propensity of social media to proliferate inaccurate data, unverified rumors, and even malicious misinformation (zeng et al., ) . because information disseminated through social media is often unverified, identifying accurate data and valid sources can be challenging and could both undermine relevant knowledge and exacerbate the consequences of emotional and behavioral responses. together with the characteristics of open access platforms, this concern is heightened by the dynamic nature of crisis communication and information overload in times of crisis (zeng et al., ) . social media networks are mostly composed of acquaintances and thus share common characteristics with interpersonal channels. prior works have shown that interpersonal channels tend to show stronger effects on behavioral change than traditional media, mainly through normative pressure (price & oshagan, ) . in addition, social media generally deal with a rapid exchange of information, which could be more appropriate for short and clear mi than for scientific knowledge about a crisis. for instance, won, bae, and yoo ( ) conducted an issue word analysis of sns messages during the mers outbreak and reported the six most frequently mentioned words on sns at that time. two of the six words were mask and hand sanitizer, which are clearly related to preventive behaviors. the other four words were hospital, infection, coughing, and checkup, which are also at least indirectly related to preventive behaviors. however, a big data analysis examining online news sites found that posts about symptoms, government reaction, disease treatment, business impacts, and rumors ranked higher than prevention-related information (song et al., ) . therefore, the effects of social media use on crisis knowledge and preventive behaviors might differ from those of traditional media. in terms of emotional responses, social media and traditional media might also show some differences. social media is known for its ability to spread information in a speedy and viral manner, but that information tends to be integrated with emotions. furthermore, emotionally charged messages are more likely to be shared than neutral messages (pfeffer et al., ; stieglitz & dang-xuan, ) . recent works on the mers crisis have shown that about % of the buzzwords on social media during the mers crisis were negatively charged emotional words such as fear and anxiety (s. choi et al., ; song et al., ) . those works suggest that social media might be more likely than traditional media to magnify negative emotional responses. on the contrary, some prior works have found that people use social media for social support in crisis situations (y. choi & lin, ) . that phenomenon could lessen the negative emotional responses in social media users. therefore, it is worth investigating how the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to social media use differ from those to traditional media use, which raises the following research question: are there any differences between traditional media use and social media use in terms of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses during the mers crisis? the proposed research model is based on the preceding discussion (see figure ) . specifically, i expect that both traditional and social media use related to mers was associated with mers knowledge, and that it directly and indirectly encouraged mers preventive behaviors in media users. i also expect that traditional and social media use about the korean mers crisis stimulated negative emotional responses, which in turn influenced both precautionary and panic behaviors in media users. finally, i examine whether social media use showed informational, emotional, and behavioral consequences similar to those of traditional media use. the data for this study were obtained from a two-wave online panel survey. wave survey was conducted in the first few days of june , when hype about the mers situation was escalating, and wave survey was conducted about month later. the respondents were adult members of an online panel recruited and maintained by a survey company in seoul, korea. about million online users compose the company's panel, and participants were randomly drawn from that list to meet the specified constraints (e.g., areas of residence based on census composition). the selected panel members received a soliciting e-mail from the company and had full liberty to decline participation. the first page of the online survey included an explanation of the study purpose and researcher contact information. study participants gave informed consent by clicking the start survey button. they were free to stop taking the survey at any time, and they received small monetary incentives (e.g., cash-equivalent points) from the company. a total of , members of the online panel participated in wave survey. about month later, the same respondents were recontacted by the survey company to participate in wave survey. the number of participants who completed both waves and online surveys was , which is the final subject sample used for the analyses herein. the final sample was . % male, with a mean age of . years (sd = . ). with regard to level of education, . % of the sample had some level of college education or a bachelor's degree, . % had a -year college degree, and . % of the sample had some level of high school education or were graduates of high school. the median monthly household income was between , , and , , won. of the total sample, . % were married, with an average of . children (sd = . ). traditional news use. traditional news use of mers-related content was measured based on media use frequency questions. specifically, on a -point scale ( = never to = very often), respondents were asked to measure how much they relied on tv news or tv news websites and newspapers and newspaper websites in the context of the korean mers crisis (r = . , m = . , sd = . ). social media use. social media use of mers-related content was measured using three -point scales ( = never to = very often) in wave survey. the specific use behaviors were (a) seeking mers-related news or information using social media, (b) receiving mers-related news or information from others via social media, and (c) talking about mers with others via social media (α = . , m = . , sd = . ). negative emotional reactions to the mers situation. negative emotional reactions to the mers situation were measured in both waves and surveys. on a -point scale ( = not at all to = feel strongly), respondents were asked to report how strongly they felt fear and anxiety about the mers situation (wave , r = . , m = . , sd = . ; wave , r = . , m = . , sd = . ). mers knowledge. mers knowledge was measured using six quiz-type questions in both waves and surveys. knowledge items covered mers symptoms, lethality, maximum latent period, and institutions where a formal diagnosis of mers could be made during the outbreak. for each question, correct answers were coded as , and incorrect answers were coded as . subsequently, the answers to those six questions were combined and used as the mers knowledge measure (wave , with scores ranging from to , m = . , sd = . ; wave , with scores ranging from to , m = . , sd = . ). wave survey using five items. on a -point scale ( = never to = very often), respondents were asked how often they engaged in behaviors to prevent mers: wearing a mask when they were out, washing hands frequently, avoiding contact with people with mers symptoms, avoiding hospitals, and avoiding daily activities such as grocery shopping to avoid crowds (α = . , m = . , sd = . ). before running the path model to test hypotheses, a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was conducted to test validity of the measurement model. two knowledge measures were excluded from cfa because measures were composed of all dichotomized items. model modification was not utilized: χ ( ) = . , p = . ; normed fit index (nfi) = . ; incremental fit index (ifi) = . ; comparative fit index (cfi) = . ; root mean square error approximation (rmsea) = . with % confidence interval (ci) = [. , . ]. factor loadings ranged from . to . and two factor loadings were rather low of . (one of mers preventive behaviors) and . (newspaper use item). however all ave (average variance extracted) were higher than . and factor loadings were still within acceptable range (fornell & larcker, ) . therefore, all items remained. path analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses with latent variables and two observed knowledge variables. the tested model included two control variables from wave data. specifically, mers knowledge and negative emotions about the mers situation measured in wave controlled each of the wave variables accordingly. the research model showed a reasonably good fit according to commonly used criteria (hu & bentler, ) : χ ( ) = . , p = . ; nfi = . ; ifi = . ; cfi = . ; rmsea = . with % ci = [. , . ]. figure presents the overall results with path coefficients of the hypothesized model. h predicted that the more individuals use traditional news media (h a) and social media (h b), the more mers knowledge they would acquire. as expected, mers knowledge increased with increasing use of mers-related traditional news media (β = . , p < . ), which supported h a. on the contrary, mers-related social media use was not significantly associated with mers knowledge (β = −. , ns), which did not support h b. therefore, h was only partially supported. h predicted that two types of media use would be positively associated with negative emotional responses to the mers situation. results showed that the more traditional media one used, the more anxious and worried about mers one became (β = . , p < . ), which supported h a. however, mers-related sns use and negative emotions was not significantly associated (β = . , ns), which failed to support h b. therefore, h was also partially supported. the next set of hypotheses predicted that positive effects of mers knowledge (h a) and negative emotional responses (h b) on mers preventive behaviors. as predicted, negative emotional response was positively related to engagement in mers preventive behaviors (β = . , p < . ). on the contrary, mers knowledge was not significantly associated with mers preventive behaviors (β = . , ns). therefore, h was also partially supported. the final set of hypotheses expected that both traditional news media use (h a) and social media use (h b) would have direct positive effects on mers preventive behaviors. results showed that only social media use showed note. dotted arrows denote paths that are not statistically significant or only marginally significant. the numbers presented in figure are the standardized path coefficients. all exogenous variables, including mers knowledge (w ) and negative emotions (w ), were correlated with one another. no error term was correlated. w = wave ; w = wave ; mers = middle east respiratory syndrome. *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . . direct positive effects on mers preventive behaviors (β = . , p < . ) not traditional media use (β = . , ns). finally, rq asked whether traditional media use and social media use show any differences in terms of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. results showed that individuals during the mers crisis showed different responses depending on two types of media use. with respect to cognitive responses, as reported above, only traditional media use was positively associated with mers knowledge. likewise, in terms of emotional responses, traditional news media use showed a positive association with negative emotional reactions. with respect to behavioral responses, only social media use showed significant positive direct effects on mers preventive behaviors. wald tests comparing the path coefficients confirmed that the difference between effects of social media and traditional media on behavioral responses (wald test = − . , p < . ) was statistically meaningful. wald test result also validated that the difference in cognitive response between social and traditional media use was also statistically significant (wald test = − . , p < . ). despite a consensus that the media play an important role in times of crisis, the informational, emotional, and behavioral effects of traditional and social media use by individuals have been understudied in previous research. using two sets of data collected at two different time points during the mers crisis in korea, i investigated how traditional and social media use influenced mers knowledge, fear and anxiety about the mers situation, and adoption of preventive behaviors. to reflect the complexity of today's media environment in times of crisis, i focused on potential differences between the effects of traditional and social media use. first, this study found that traditional media use and social media use have different effects. as expected, traditional media use galvanized public understanding of mers. the more people read newspapers and watched tv news about mers, the more knowledge they acquired about mers symptoms, lethality, and maximum latent period. social media use neither increased nor decreased mers knowledge. the role of social media in times of crisis has received growing attention, at least in part because of its potential for viral information transmission. however, i did not find significant cognitive effects from social media use. compared with traditional media, which mainly report information verified by expert sources (lowrey, ) , social media can not only convey knowledge but also disseminate false or unverified information during a crisis. the null effect of social media use on mers knowledge might thus result from the conflicting content of social media. this speculation, of course, should be verified with a robust empirical examination. second, i found that negative emotions played a prominent role in facilitating preventive behaviors in the mers crisis. experiencing fear and anxiety is a natural reaction when people are faced with a crisis. a lack of familiarity with newly emerging infectious diseases such as mers tends to deepen fear and anxiety (sandman & lanard, ) , and media use could amplify those emotional experiences (kasperson, ) . finding of this study also indicate that traditional media use increased negative emotional responses. the more media respondents consumed, the more fear and anxiety they felt about the mers situation. more importantly, i found that the negative emotional responses people experienced when facing a crisis caused them to protect themselves from mers instead of pushing them into illogical or destructive behaviors. the positive role of negative emotions in promoting adaptive behaviors is consistent with what theoretical frameworks such as pmt and risp suggest. however, most prior studies based on pmt have been developed and tested within the context of public health campaigns. compared with carefully designed campaign messages intended to scare people to act properly with respect to a given risk, media messages could more likely be crude and mixed with various intentions (e.g., sensational reports to secure audience attention). indeed, there is a lack of empirical research examining what kinds of crisis-specific responses could be elicited from the media individuals choose to use in times of crisis. in addition, risp research provides a useful theoretical framework to predict that negative emotions could motivate people to seek information about a risk. however, this framework did not pay attention to media use, which can lead to behavioral consequences such as preventive behaviors beyond information seeking. this study addressed these gaps in the literature by directly testing the roles of negative emotions and media as potential sources of those emotions during a pandemic, which has been rarely examined in previous studies. this finding has clear implications for governmental communication strategies and media reporting. this study's results suggest that it may not be effective crisis management to brush off negative emotions among the public as illogical overreactions. instead, admitting fears and anxiety people may feel and designing messages channeling those emotions into desirable health behaviors needs to be considered even in times of crisis. sympathizing with people's feelings can be an effective means to boost the evaluation of communicators' dialogic competency which was found to be positively related to information credibility and trust in the government during the mers endemic (s.-u. yang, ) , which in turn may promote government and media health message effectiveness. this seemingly positive role of negative emotions, however, does not advocate for sensationalizing crisis situations. instead, both government and media may consider applying knowledge about the potentially positive function of negative emotion to public communication during a crisis. for instance, risk and health communication research has developed guidelines on how to write a good fear appeal message in the public health campaign context. government and news media may consult with these guidelines to compose a message to help people to cope with an epidemic risk. third, the findings of this study indicate that the role of knowledge for preventive behaviors in the mers crisis was rather limited. only traditional media use significantly increased the public's knowledge about mers but the increased understanding did not facilitate precautionary behaviors. disseminating knowledge has been a top priority in times of crisis under the assumption that understanding could lead the public to protective behavioral responses. the results of this study imply that filling the deficit of knowledge may not be the most efficient way to promote behavioral responses. the findings here suggest that an emotional pathway may work more efficiently than cognitive drives in promoting the adoption of preventive behaviors during a public health crisis. however, it is also important to point out that the findings related to knowledge should be interpreted with caution in the context of the mers crisis. s.-u. yang ( ) noted that koreans in general tended to perceive the government's mutuality and openness in communication somewhat unfavorably, which often negatively affected government-public relationships. as s.-u. yang ( ) showed, the korean government's lack of mutuality and openness seems to have deteriorated the credibility of its risk information, which may have worsened the public's trust and satisfaction with the government. this unique situation might have lowered not only the credibility of government information but also the credibility of information from news media that relied heavily on the government for information. accordingly, the low credibility of public information on mers can explain the limited role of knowledge in promoting desirable behavioral responses. prior work examining a different epidemic crisis found that one material factor influencing preventive action was respondent opinion about authorities (quah & hin-peng, ) . my finding thus suggests that simple acquisition of disseminated scientific knowledge might not necessarily produce desirable behavioral responses from the public. it also implies that contextual factors, such as government dialogic competency, should be considered to fully grasp the role of knowledge in times of crisis. fourth, the findings of this study show that, unlike traditional media use, social media use produced strong direct behavioral responses during the mers crisis. traditional media use did not show direct effects on preventive behaviors. this distinction between social media use and traditional media use could be explained in the following two ways. first, compared with traditional media, which is known to be powerful in knowledge diffusion, the interpersonal channel has been considered effective on behavioral responses via the normative route (price & oshagan, ) . the role of normative pressure on behavioral adaptation has been well documented in the health communication literature (e.g., planned behavioral intention model, ajzen, ) . given that social media networks are mainly composed of acquaintances, it is possible that social media might have formed specific behavioral norms related to the mers crisis (e.g., avoidance of hospitals and crowded places). the other explanation is related to potential differences in the content of traditional media and social media. social media might have delivered more mi than traditional media. indeed, a prior work analyzing social media content during the mers crisis reported that preventive behavior-related terms (e.g., masks and hand sanitizers) were the most frequently mentioned words (won et al., ) . furthermore, the most needed information at the beginning of the mers crisis was the list of mers-affected hospitals, which the korean government had withheld. given the government's unwillingness to share the list of hospitals, the public resorted to social media to actively seek, exchange, and share the hospital-related information. that piece of information could single-handedly trigger one preventive behavior (i.e., avoiding specific hospitals to protect themselves). indeed, hospital was one of the terms most frequently used on social media during the mers crisis (won et al., ) . however, a big data analysis of traditional media reported that words such as infection, confirmed cases, and death were centrally located in traditional media content (kwon, ) . in short, compared with traditional media, social media might play an essential role in virally diffusing mi (specific behavioral information, including where not to go and what to do). given the importance of dialogic competency for effective crisis communication (s.-u. yang, ) , some technological features of social media may have enhanced communication mutuality and openness which the korean government and media lacked. communication through social media may allow users to share empathy and social support. at the same time, social media-mediated communication can be perceived as more accessible and open than media-mediated communication. strong mutuality and openness perceived through communication with network members on social media could have increased the credibility of mi which could have enhanced behavioral responses at least during the mers crisis in korea. another notable finding regarding social media is that social media did not generate public anxiety and fear, at least during the mers crisis in korea. this is quite an interesting finding because the korean government strongly criticized media, especially social media, for releasing unverified rumors and fears. the lack of association between social media use and negative emotional responses could be a result of canceling out effects. in other words, social media might induce fear and anxiety, but social media might effectively cancel out the negative emotions by providing wanted social supports or mi, which should be under solid empirical scrutiny in the future study. in the interest of future research, it is important to discuss some of the limitations of this study. the data are not based on a representative sample, which means the study findings must be interpreted with caution. for instance, online panels tended to include the younger and the more educated compared with the general population, which could influence the interpretation of the role of social media and traditional media use during the mers crisis in korea. the measurement of key variables also has limitations. for example, traditional media use was assessed only for newspaper and television. omitting radio and general internet use should be recognized as another major limitation of the study. also, using quiz-type questions to tap mers knowledge without close validation and planning might have contributed to the low correlation between the two mers knowledge measures, which also raises a concern about a test-retest error involved in the panel data. these measurement issues could produce errors, which would be carried into the hypothesized path model this study proposed. in addition, wave data did not include mers preventive behavior measures, which made it impossible to control all the endogenous variables in wave data. therefore, it is hard to argue that an ideal panel data analysis was conducted for testing the proposed hypotheses. with these limitations in mind, this study contributed to the scholarship by testing the predictions drawn from existing theories that have rarely been examined in the context of a real epidemic crisis. major scholarly focus in the communication field has been on how government and responsible organizations manage or should manage crises. shifting away from that focus, this study investigated the associations between individual media use and consequent responses which have been relatively understudied. the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. mihye seo https://orcid.org/ - - - the theory of planned behavior. organizational behavior and human decision process circulating health rumors in the "arab world": a -month content analysis of news stories and reader commentary about middle east respiratory syndrome from two middle eastern news outlets how emotion shapes behavior: feedback, anticipation, and reflection, rather than direct causation predicting health behaviour: research and practice with social cognition models pandemics in the age of twitter: content analysis of tweets during the h n outbreak mining internet media for monitoring changes of public emotions about infectious diseases consumer responses to mattel product recalls posted on online bulletin boards: exploring two types of emotion the impact of social media on risk perceptions during the mers outbreak in south korea ongoing crisis communication: planning, managing, and 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crisis-related social media messages mihye seo (phd, the ohio state university) is an associate professor in the department of media and communication at sungkyunkwan university, seoul, south korea. her research focuses on media use and its influence on individuals' daily life and on community-building efforts. key: cord- -bbdls jv authors: henderson, joan c. title: economic tourism crises date: - - journal: managing tourism crises doi: . /b - - - - . -x sha: doc_id: cord_uid: bbdls jv nan economics is a key infl uence on both the demand for tourism and supply of facilities and services. economic circumstances in generating and receiving countries help to shape fl ows of tourists and their spending patterns and the nature and speed of development, which also react to general economic movements. such economic forces may operate to create both opportunities and problems for the tourism industry, certain of the latter having the potential to evolve into a crisis. tourism crises of an economic origin are discussed in this chapter, which examines tourism's vulnerability to economic conditions in the wider environment and approaches to alleviating any damage arising from these conditions. attention is also given to how the economic impacts of tourism may themselves be a cause or catalyst of crises and measures that can be adopted to lessen the risk of these occurring. case studies at the end of the chapter explain how outbound tourism from japan has been damaged by economic uncertainty and describe the repercussions of the asian fi nancial crisis for tourist activity, both indicative of the linkages which connect tourism and economics. characteristics of local, national and international economies and any alterations in them exercise a crucial infl uence on the tourism industry (bull, ) which has its own internal economic dynamics (lundberg et al., ) . depending on the nature of change, it will stimulate or depress demand in source markets and make destinations more or less attractive regarding prices and products. costs of travel and perceptions of these costs, as well as an individual's fi nancial position, also play an important part in vacation decisions. the health of an economy additionally helps to determine resources available for investment at home and abroad in the transport, accommodation and attractions sectors which are essential to tourism. business travel too benefi ts from the heightened trading which is generated by economic progress (davidson and cope, ) . income is a key variable of levels of participation in leisure tourism and there appears to be a close relationship between economic prosperity and a buoyant market. this was evident during the years following the second world war in the west when rises in personal disposable income allowed lower and middle income groups to spend more on tourism than ever before. destination choices expanded from nearby locations to more distant centers with a corresponding shift from national to intra-regional and then inter-regional travel (murphy, ) . such a trend was later apparent amongst the asian "tiger" economies of korea, taiwan and singapore and is now spreading to other countries experiencing development. affl uent middle classes of consumers are emerging, notably in china which has seen rapid expansion in domestic and international tourism fueled by its exceptional economic achievements (zhang et al., ) . however, economic downturn can undermine demand and possibly result in crises for industries in origin and destination countries if the slump is suffi ciently intense or prolonged. the recession of the s on the us mainland contributed to a decline in hawaii's tourism from to , and japan's economic diffi culties had adverse consequences for its outbound tourism in the same decade, including travel to hawaii (see case one). deterioration in the global economy at the end of the twentieth century was considered partly responsible for a slowing down in worldwide tourism, recovery believed to be driven partly by the economic cycle. at the same time, domestic industries can gain from these reversals as it seems that many tourists choose less expensive options and remain closer to home when anxious about monetary and employment matters. such a pattern of response suggests the importance of drawing tourists from a range of overseas markets, rather than relying on only a few, together with the need for domestic promotion. it should also be noted that much of the world's population is debarred from tourism because of poverty, although there may be great disparities in income dis-tribution with the presence of a wealthy elite of international travelers in the poorest of countries. a less advanced stage of development does not preclude countries from receiving visitors, but a certain amount of fi nance is required to permit the construction and maintenance of the necessary tourism infrastructure. one reason the african continent as a whole has been prevented from reaching its tourism potential is the parlous state of the economy (christie and crompton, ) and similar barriers apply in parts of central and south america and asia. an absence of funds and uncertain investment climate could lead to a crisis for the tourism industry, compounded by the political and social tensions that frequently accompany economic turbulence. government economic programs and fi scal policies can impinge on travel behavior and the operation of the industry directly and indirectly, not least in the arena of taxation. the world travel and tourism council (wttc) uses the four indices of car rental, lodging, meals and air passenger charges to monitor taxes levied. it claims that these have steadily increased around the world in recent years (wttc, ) and cities with the highest rates are depicted in table . . there are also departure taxes applicable to all modes of transport and visa fees are another offi cial revenue earner. such fi nancial burdens are opposed by commercial practitioners and destination marketers who argue that they project a poor image, alienate visitors and may undermine the fi nancial viability of tourism enterprises (lipman, ) . their sudden imposition and defi ciencies in administration can be disruptive and there is scope for corrupt practices in certain instances. currency values and their fl uctuation are an additional determinant of tourist trends and investment. substantial alterations are felt by tourists and refl ected in the prices charged by operators and agents with consequences for demand. an exceptionally strong currency may deter inbound visitors but encourage outbound travel, as demonstrated by switzerland, where the hotel industry confronted a crisis due to uncompetitive prices in the s. switzerland became an expensive destination for foreigners while its nationals were lured abroad to take advantage of their enhanced purchasing power there, accommodation occupancy levels declining as a result. hotels were advised to be more creative and energetic in their marketing in order to regain lost market share and attract more mature travelers interested in escaping from the stresses of everyday life to the delights of an alpine environment (marvel and johnson, ) . a markedly appreciating currency and prevailing notions of the costliness of locations are thus challenges for the tourism industry, which must strive to offset a drop in arrivals by stimulating greater expenditure among those who do elect to visit. a currency which is falling dramatically in value does not inevitably boost arrivals and excessive volatility may deter investors and make tour operators and travel agents cautious about selling places thus affl icted. the turkish lira depreciated by % over a few days at the beginning of , but this did not have a favorable effect on inbound tourism and severely curtailed departures (okumus et al., ) . brazil's currency crisis led to an overall contraction in inbound visitors, especially from other latin american countries (euromonitor, ) like argentina where there was also economic and political turmoil. visitors caught up in the chaos were seriously inconvenienced and tourists in buenos aries described being unable to cash travelers checks or use credit cards because of emergency banking measures intended to stem cash withdrawals. surcharges were imposed and retailers raised prices in anticipation of a continuation in the collapse of the peso. outbreaks of violence were reported (bbc news, b) , indicative of how economic anxieties can fuel broader unrest which might endanger tourist safety. the asian fi nancial crisis and its aftermath have been well documented and the case provides insights into the complex dynamics of an economic tourism crisis initiated by currency volatility (see case two). studies suggest different experiences and the presence of success factors which enabled some destinations to manage the crisis better than others. while at the heart of the economic turbulence, thailand exhibited an ability to weather the storm attributable to its long-standing reputation as a tourist destination, range of attractions and amenities and intensive advertising. indeed, the crisis was exploited as an opportunity to reposition thailand as a country of nature-based, cultural and mice (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) tourism rather than mass tourism coastal resorts. indonesia lacked these advantages and the economic crisis there was a source of a social and political agitation, posing a more serious threat to tourism and impeding effective action and the pace of recovery (henderson, a) . the introduction of the euro as the common currency for most members of the european commission in created a single market of million residents who, alongside visitors, no longer had to worry about currency transactions when traveling within the euro zone. however, it was a threat to some destinations where a lack of price competitiveness was revealed by comparisons which were easier for tourists to make. there was negative publicity about struggles with software and price hikes, particularly in italy, where it was reported that visitors had to pay more for public transport and museum admission. the adoption of the euro also meant a drastic loss of currency exchange business and a doubtful future for smaller scale providers of this service (bbc news, a) . offi cial attempts to control balance of payments defi cits may incorporate limits on money taken out of a country and the purchase of foreign currency. some countries also enforce compulsory currency exchange, insisting that visitors convert a minimum sum of local currency and restricting amounts they can leave with. in an example of the former, an individual's foreign travel allowance was set at £ in the uk in the late s. the decision proved benefi cial for the domestic industry and companies selling all-inclusive foreign package holidays (holloway, ) , but constrained aspects of independent international travel. certain sectors of the tourism industry are characterized by the intensity of competition which is often expressed in terms of price. minimization of costs is therefore essential, and signifi cant rises can precipitate crisis, especially if unexpected and beyond the control of management. this is demonstrated by rapidly rising oil prices, which have the capacity to slow down growth in global, domestic and tourism economies. economic recession damages consumer and investor confi dence in general and within the context of tourism, as already noted, while all businesses have to contend with higher fuel bills. transport companies and especially airlines are likely to be among the worst hit with fuel accounting for between % and % of the latter's costs, the second highest after labor. the issue acquired greater urgency when a surge in prices for crude oil added to the problems of airlines in the early years of the twenty-fi rst century (see boxed case one). business had already slumped because of terrorism, the iraq war and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) virus which resulted in a number of airline bankruptcies worldwide and government intervention and fi nancial aid to prevent further collapses (bbc news, ) volatile oil prices seem set to continue, but the civil aviation industry appears to have learned lessons from recent experiences about the necessity of planning ahead and taking action to reduce exposure to escalating charges. these charges cannot always be passed on to customers in their entirety for fear of compounding the original crisis by alienating passengers and depressing demand. iata also launched when fuel costs spiraled at the beginning of the current decade, certain airlines were in a stronger position than others. this partly depended on the extent of hedging, which is a term used to describe buying fuel in advance at a set rate. the practice does, however, carry the risk of prices falling below those agreed on. european companies appeared to be better protected than others and also gained from the weakness of the us dollar, in which oil is traded, against the euro. british airways had hedged % of its fuel needs for at us$ . a barrel and lufthansa had covered % of its requirements for and % for . delta and continental in the usa were reported not to have hedged for ; american airlines had hedged % for the fi rst quarter of , reduced to % thereafter. the limited activity in the usa was attributed to a belief that excessively high oil prices would eventually drop, credit ratings which discouraged the purchase of oil on the futures market and a need for cash which had led to the disbanding of former hedging arrangements. the exception was southwest, which had hedged % of its demands for at us$ . a barrel and a proportion in subsequent years up to as part of a long-term cost control strategy. in response to the crisis, several companies started to hedge again and some waited in anticipation of a price fall while all tried to cut costs. a common reaction was the introduction of fuel surcharges which was supported by iata and price hikes. nevertheless, these surcharges could not apply to advance bookings and over capacity and intense rivalry among american carriers made it diffi cult for them to increase fares signifi cantly compared to their european counterparts, although undercutting by budget carriers was a concern in the latter case. there were additional concerns about effects on demand. sources: airwise news, ; daniel, ; usa today, . a "fuel action campaign" to help member airlines by promoting greater effi ciency in fuel usage, a reduction in taxes and lower hedging costs (iata, a). the potential economic gains from tourism are widely recognized and a powerful rationale underlying growth strategies in many countries at differing stages of development. however, there are also negative economic outcomes (dwyer et al., ; mathieson and wall, ; unep, ) which may precipitate crisis or play a part in its emergence. major problems are outlined below and are particularly acute in the less-developed world, where several states may be looking to tourism to diversify their export base and earn hard currency, yet are not always able to secure these goals and are vulnerable to the hazards of over-dependence. while income is generated by tourism, the public sector also has to spend in order to develop and support the industry. national and sub-national governments have responsibilities for the building and running of the necessary infrastructure, including communications and utilities such as water and power. they may also be providers of amenities like museums and parks and owners, or part owners, of transport companies. there are other less obvious areas of expenditure. frechtling ( , p. ) identifi ed life quality and fi scal costs borne by communities and offi cials which are depicted in table . . such environmental damage must be factored into any analysis which attempts to calculate the overall value of tourism for destinations (tisdell, ). there will be additional spending on administration, planning and marketing and authorities may offer an assortment of subsidies and rebates to developers and operators in a bid to win projects and investment. in some situations, host communities appear to be subsidizing tourism and this could provoke hostility which is aggravated when tourist demand infl ates prices for goods and services. land and property may become more expensive and perhaps exceed the reach of the local population. outsiders from second home owners to foreign hotel developers are thus privileged at the expense of residents and these issues can be a matter of political contention, any disputes interfering with the functioning and prospects of the tourism industry. as tourism grows so do the costs and more money leaves the economy to pay for imported equipment, materials, and goods as well as interest on loans. design, consulting and management fees of external agencies may have to be paid and not all profi ts and salaries will be retained. leakages are heaviest in smaller economies and the magnitude of multipliers too depends on the size of the economy, resources, access to supplies, diversity, import substitution possibilities, local skills and labor availability. when these aspects are unfavorable, multipliers may be extremely low and caution should be exercised about the priority allocated to tourism. there are also opportunity costs associated with tourism when it draws capital, land and labor away from other sectors. traditional economic structures may thereby be weakened and social welfare projects deprived of funding, provoking criticism of tourism. in less-developed countries, indigenous businesses may not possess the capital requirements for entry into parts of the tourism industry so that there is a reliance on foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises. these companies are often based in tourist generating countries and in a position to exercise considerable control. such economic relationships can erode the authority of local decision makers and the profi tability of the private sector, leaving residents feeling excluded and alienated. enclave tourism typifi es these tensions with its self-contained resorts designed so that guests do not have to leave the compound, restricting their contribution to the surrounding formal and informal economies. these economic impacts can incite animosity which has the potential to erupt into crisis, especially if reinforced by social and political grievances. tourism employment is another controversial matter and its merits have been questioned due to work which is largely low skilled and poorly paid. other limitations relate to unsociable hours, seasonality and seasonal unemployment, infl ows of migrant labor and workforce displacement. nationals in less-developed countries also are likely to occupy menial posts while expatriates are found in management positions; this also means the drain of their salaries being remitted home. strikes over pay are rare among hotels, especially in the third world, but there was an example in cambodia in (see boxed case two). in another unusual case, three aggrieved employees set fi re to a hotel in san juan, puerto rico, on new year's eve , killing , to protest against their low wages and working conditions. inequalities of income between tourists and those who serve them are symptomatic an international hotel management company included two luxury properties in cambodia among its portfolio. staff from both hotels fi rst went on strike at the end of and industrial action continued into in a dispute over the % service charge levied on customer bills. workers wanted to receive the money thus collected directly whereas the hotel management preferred distributing it indirectly through set monthly allowances and meals and training. cambodian law required that employees receive the service charge, but did not specify in what manner and the issue had become a cause of disagreement between local unions and foreign hotels in particular. two judges ruled the strikes illegal in april and the company sacked about personnel who were participating. however, other judges found in favor of the workers and an arbitration council later advised that those who had been dismissed should be re-employed. there were demands for a boycott from the cambodian tourism and services workers federation (ctswf) which was supported by international unions and labor agencies. protestors, sometimes as many as , gathered regularly outside the hotels and a loss of business was reported. for example, the us embassy changed its plans to hold a july reception at one hotel and the other was closed for much of april. press articles commented on the extent of poverty in a country where % of the population existed on us$ per day with government estimating that a family needed an average monthly income of us$ and us$ in order to live comfortably in the capital and other areas, respectively. average monthly salaries at the hotels were said to be us$ and us$ , but the ctswf argued that some staff were paid only us$ or us$ daily. guest rates for a double room ranged from us$ to us$ in . a representative of the company claimed its actions were legal and that "we just need to step out and walk the streets to be reminded what wonderful employment it is to work in a hotel." a settlement was reached between the company and ctswf in september when it was agreed that % of those sacked would be reinstated and receive % of their salaries for the previous six months. others had found alternative employment, but would get redundancy pay. the agreement was to last one year and the service charge question had still to be resolved by the labor ministry. sources: asian labour news, ; associated press, ; dow jones, ; far eastern economic review, ; new frontiers, . of the gulf which can separate visitors and residents, disparities which may lead to crises of a socio-economic nature if inappropriately managed. tourism can make a positive difference to economies of contrasting size and character, but there are also constraints which destination authorities need to acknowledge. plus, it may not be the best solution to economic problems or the most suitable vehicle for general development. a heavy reliance on tourism could lead to economic weaknesses, so an effort must be made to integrate it into a wider economic program which incorporates diversifi cation. these imperatives are more pressing in less-developed countries which are striving to overcome what is often a relationship of dependency on wealthy tourist markets (harrison, ) . there are, however, signs of movement in the direction of achieving more equitable relations between third world governments and the international tourism industry. some of the former now insist that hotel companies from overseas purchase a specifi c amount of materials locally, hire a proportion of local labor, train a number of these employees for management positions, contribute to an improved infrastructure and donate to natural and cultural heritage conservation schemes (kusluvan and karamustafa, ) . such undertakings may be a prerequisite to gain approval to do business, but organizations should be prepared to take these actions voluntarily and exercise corporate social responsibility which incorporates a "triple bottom line" of environmental, social and economic returns (zadek, ) . the effi cacy of tourism taxation remains debatable. it can be both a factor underlying crisis and a possible remedy. the wttc has campaigned against fi scal measures that harm the competitiveness of the industry, calling for participation by the private sector in tax policy formation. nevertheless, there is support for the principle that those who enjoy a product or service should pay for it (lipman, ) . a similar argument can be applied to meeting the expense of environmental pollution and other damage caused by tourism, acceptance of these obligations by tourists and the tourism industry providing useful funding and helping to avert local opposition to tourism. the industry can also seek to communicate the many economic advantages of tourism to communities, interest groups and politicians; this is especially important in circumstances in which development might be fi ercely resisted. adopting such a measure and the others noted above could assist in the amelioration of some of tourism's negative economic outcomes, frustrating the evolution of crises connected to the costs of tourism and criticism of these costs. participation in tourism and public and private sector activity is closely related to prevailing economic circumstances in countries which generate and receive visitors. economic growth stimulates demand and new investment, but its absence may result in crises for outbound and inbound industries. tourism development can itself harm economies, especially those of less-developed nations, and such repercussions may trigger crises. external economic structures and processes are beyond the control of the tourism industry which can only react to changes which occur, although some can be anticipated and planned for. in comparison, appropriate measures can help to minimize economic disruption due to tourism and thereby lessen the intensity of related crises or avoid those which might otherwise evolve. japan saw substantial growth in overseas travel after government restrictions were relaxed in the s. international outbound travelers increased from approximately . million in to just under fi ve million in , over million in , and . million in . the main factors accounting for this strong upward trend were greater prosperity, more leisure time, and the availability of package tours. expenditure also rose at a corresponding rate to produce what has been described as one of the most spectacular success stories of the modern tourist era, the volume of japanese tourists and their high per capita spend attracting the attention of many destination marketers. the onset of recession and a decline in value of the yen started to have an impact by the middle of the s, and over % of respondents cited costs as a barrier to international travel in a japan travel bureau survey. as the asian fi nancial crisis unfolded, the japanese economy deteriorated further with problems in the banking sector, fl uctuating stock exchange prices and unemployment. tourism fi gures, already showing much slower growth, responded by entering a decline for the fi rst time in years. numbers fell from . million in to . million in and travel agency bankruptcies rose by about %. an offi cial of the all nippon travel agents association described the industry as a casualty of the economic situation, with the emergence of a new type of budget traveler who was looking for value for money and likely to travel independently rather than in the traditionally organized tour group. japan did, however, manage to retain its third position in the list of the world's top tourism spenders in , even though expenditure had shrunk by over % compared to . nevertheless, the yen lost a third of its value in us dollar terms between and . these trends were of concern to many centers which were heavily reliant on japanese tourists such as hawaii where they comprised two-thirds of the eastbound visitors on which tourism, and the economy as a whole, depended. japan's faltering economy and stagnation in demand caused a revision of forecasts and reassessment of the segment's signifi cance, prompting diversifi cation with regard to new markets and products. the bank of hawaii recommended stressing the state's function as a center for business and conferences, exploiting its location and access to other asian pacifi c and latin american markets. sources: bank of hawaii, ; jnto, ; jtb, . the asian fi nancial crisis was centered on south east asia and had its origins in a combination of factors which included structural economic weaknesses, inappropriate government policies and global liquidity problems. diffi culties started in thailand, which devalued its currency in the middle of and asked for help from the international monetary fund, and quickly spread to neighboring countries. currencies declined sharply, indonesia's losing % of its value against the us dollar with a fi gure of % in the case of malaysia and thailand. there was also intense speculation on stock markets and recessions ensued. the stronger economies of hong kong, singapore, south korea and taiwan were not spared and there was a general erosion of confi dence. many investors in the region decided to withdraw funds and postponed planned investment or channeled it elsewhere. excessive economic volatility was followed by mounting unemployment, rising prices and business failures. such conditions were accompanied by social disturbances and some political unrest, notably in indonesia, and all of these developments had consequences for tourism. unprecedented exchange rates were attractive to some long-haul visitors from countries unaffected by the economic turmoil, but travel within the region declined sharply. asian pacifi c countries as a whole recorded a fall in arrivals and spending from within and outside the region by the end of . there were exceptions to the trend; thailand and south korea, for example, reported an expansion in volume. nevertheless, income generated was disappointing when converted into us dollars. the spending power and confi dence of asian consumers, who traditionally account for about % of the region's tourists, had been badly hit by the crisis which depressed their demand for travel. the slight growth seen in european and north american arrivals in some destinations was unable to offset the contraction of the regional market. economic uncertainty inhibited tourism investment and planning by both public and private sectors. financial constraints delayed existing and new projects, some of which were abandoned. there were doubts about the survival of some businesses and a number of hotels chose to charge in us dollars so that guests were denied the advantages of lower prices due to weak currencies. events attracted widespread media coverage around the world and several stories were devoted to the social and political tensions associated with economic collapse. such material served to communicate negative images and a sense of risk. there was a common pattern of response to the crisis by tourism industries and authorities, although circumstances did differ from country to country. emphasis was given particularly to increased domestic and international promotion. attempts were made at innovation in pursuit of a more diversifi ed product offering and wider market. however, national tourism organizations (ntos) found that the purchasing power of their budgets was substantially reduced outside asia and therefore explored possibilities of partnerships and greater private sponsorship. the fi nancial allocation of marketers was cut in some cases and they had to cope with this alongside rationalization of air services due to declining passenger traffi c, higher accommodation costs and a heavier taxation burden on tourists. there had been some discussion at the height of the fi nancial crisis about whether it was the beginning of the disintegration of the world economy due to a contagion effect, but such dire forecasts were not realized. conditions were more ordered by mid- and economies were expanding again by . most of the tourist destinations which had been hit were also returning to normality and actually drawing more international arrivals than they had been prior to the onset of the crisis. nevertheless, tourism was revealed to be very vulnerable to economic change and its full recovery was also dependent upon economic improvement. confi dence in the region as a whole had been badly shaken and the crisis had a lingering impact. sources: de sausmarez, ; henderson, a henderson, , b henderson, and c muqbil, ; prideaux, ; roubino, ; wto, . economic tourism crisis: a crisis for the tourism industry which arises from economic changes within the tourism system or wider economy. tourism economic impacts: the consequences of tourism for a destination economy. over-dependence: a situation in which destinations are economically reliant on the tourism industry. tourism taxation: taxes levied on individual tourists and the tourism industry which can be both general charges and those specifi c to tourism. leakages: money fl owing out of a destination economy in assorted forms in order to develop and maintain inbound tourism. . how might demand for tourism be adversely affected by economic movements? . why might economic conditions in destination countries result in tourism crises? . which economic impacts of tourism could result in a crisis for the industry? . can the industry exercise any control over crises which owe their origins to developments in the wider economy? . what steps can destination authorities take to reduce the likelihood of a crisis related to tourism's damaging economic consequences? . in what ways was the slowdown in japanese outbound travel a potential crisis for some tourist destinations? . what does the asian fi nancial crisis reveal about the relationship between economics and tourism? european airlines review hedging as oil prices rise cambodia: staff woes at raffl es hotels in cambodia drag on hotel workers in cambodia jobless over claim to tips hawaii annual economic report tourist gripes in italy unwitting victims of crisis oil prices to hit airline profi ts the economics of travel and tourism tourism in africa from financial times. economist intelligence unit executive briefi ng malaysia's response to the asian fi nancial crisis: implications for 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( ). economic impacts of tourism. unep website at http://www.uneptie. org, accessed march . key: cord- -u jm y authors: catty, jocelyn title: lockdown and adolescent mental health: reflections from a child and adolescent psychotherapist date: - - journal: wellcome open res doi: . /wellcomeopenres. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: u jm y the author, a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in the uk nhs, ponders the varied impacts of ‘lockdown’ on adolescents, their parents and the psychotherapists who work with them, during the covid- pandemic. she asks, particularly, how psychological therapies are positioned during such a crisis, and whether the pressures of triage and emergency can leave time and space for sustained emotional and psychological care. she wonders how psychoanalytic time with its sustaining rhythm can be held onto in the face of the need for triage on the one hand and the flight to online and telephone delivery on the other. above all, the author questions how the apparent suspension of time during lockdown is belied by the onward pressure of adolescent time, and how this can be understood by, and alongside, troubled adolescents. the time of the covid- virus brings a strange shifting of priorities to my professional life as a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in a child and adolescent mental health service (camhs). covid- : the name itself encapsulates delay (flexer, , waiting in pandemic times) . building into the term the origins of the virus in , it provides a stark reminder that, having ignored warnings from the medical world and then the evidence before our eyes, we are now always already trying to catch up (horton, ) . the world is in crisis, but it is hard to position the acute and chronic crises of mental health work in the nhs against the unfolding crisis we see on our screens. are we high priority or low? frontline or routine? do we, like primary care staff, rush to 'man the barricades' (davies, , waiting in pandemic times) -anxiety about the possibility of redeployment is spreading among mental health staff even where they are entirely untrained for physical health care -or do we hunker down at home to conduct therapy online for the foreseeable future? (what is foreseeable about the future, now, for the young patients, depressed, anxious or enduring the turbulence of adolescence, for whom the future was only hazily in view in the first place?) mental health has traditionally been lamented as the poor relation within the national health service (nhs), with psychiatry under-valued and repeated cries to achieve parity between mental and physical health ignored. how, then, are we to consider the seriousness of psychological and emotional labour conducted in services such as camhs during a national crisis? talking to young people and children about their anxieties, or even their considerable distress, appears low priority when compared to doctors and nurses battling covid; yet an adolescent death by suicide remains one of the most catastrophic events imaginable, for family, friends and professionals alike. in the time of the virus, we are thus adrift in the prevailing geo-spatial metaphors of the age: nowhere near the 'front line', we may find ourselves thrust suddenly towards it if a teenager attempts to harm him-or herself. the world gives the impression of having halted adolescent time. exams are cancelled; school is out, or virtual; universities have sent their students home. for those in their teens, the covid- pandemic arrives at a crucial time in development, as they transition from childhood to adulthood. yet the time of adolescence itself often feels both chronic and acute, its difficulties regarded as perennial, even predictable, yet often plunging the young into crisis. disturbed adolescents may try to arrest a march of time that feels relentless by retreating into depression, or into their bedrooms: to halt their progress towards a future that is perceived as bleak, or simply unimaginable. what can we learn about time -now, in the time of covid- -from this sudden suspension of time which is not actually a suspension at all? this questioning of the future which is, curiously, so familiar to many of the young people whose mental health elicits our care? the decision to award gcse and a level results, rather than postpone the exams, could be seen as a shocking pronouncement: that time waits for no one, that adolescent progress cannot, must not, be halted -even if, for those awarded a grade less than that which they might have achieved, progress is thwarted. like their younger counterparts at the top of primary school, they must, even from their bedrooms, be ushered forwards to the brink at which they bid their school lives farewell. those struggling with the pressure of work and exams may be relieved, but their world has also crashed down upon them and many are disappointed. some lament a lack of control: the final academic effort, for which they were preparing, is denied them, and teachers, or government, will decide upon their grades. yet for some, for whom the pressure of external life has been unbearable, perhaps there is the possibility of respite, and the lockdown may provide them with much-needed time for recovery. adolescent development 'runs unevenly' (waddell, , p. ): how the time of covid- intersects into each individual trajectory will vary hugely. while the media portray the young as oblivious -gathering in parks, spitting defiantly in the faces of police or the elderly -we hear our young patients report their varying responses, almost always ambivalent, anxious. for those with depression, existential despair, sometimes born of inter-generational trauma and loss, is known to dominate (catty ed., ): how are they to believe that the future holds any promise when it appears to have been cancelled, or at least indefinitely postponed? for some, this will confirm a pre-existing belief, a bleakness. meanwhile, they worry about grandparents, parents and, increasingly, each other. there is an idea that psychoanalytic work with adults involves the recollection and processing of remembered trauma -that it is, as wordsworth wrote of poetry, 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' ( / , p. ) -while therapy with children and adolescents is conducted during and alongside the unfolding of their key emotional dramas. theory and clinical practice afford many contradictions of this dichotomy; yet it remains meaningful to conceptualise adolescent therapy as a 'being alongside' a teenager as they live through their most turbulent of times. how does lockdown impact on this sense of immediacy? during lockdown, young people are suffering a crisis that we appear to share with them, at least in this basic way: we too sit in our homes as we engage them in their therapy. keeping a focus on the particularity of their experience -the extent to which the national crisis may or may not be impacting on their internal dramas -will need close attention. yet perhaps they have something to tell us about uncertainty -about the future, about the passing of time -that they have long feared we did not understand. for some, we have finally entered into their world. there are implications here, too, for our work with their parents, now that we feel ourselves to share their most immediate circumstances: we are all in lockdown; we are all worried about our ageing parents; we are all, increasingly, worried about the young. crisis time in adolescent mental health services relies on a redamber-green system of case-flagging. now only the reddest of the red cases can be seen in person, anxiously diverted from accident and emergency departments to the community clinic to avoid contamination. while those on duty manage these most critical of crises in person, the rest of the team connect to their patients via telephone and video-conferencing. fears that mental health work will be deemed such low priority as to justify sending therapists into the medical settings for which they would be entirely, shockingly, unprepared, seem to abate as authorities determine that mental health emergencies are themselves 'priority'. at the same time, the urgency of attending to an unfolding mental health crisis is becoming clearer: articulated in a recent 'call for action' to include data collection on the psychological, social and neuroscientific effects of the pandemic on both the general population, vulnerable groups and those with the virus (holmes et al., ) . what, then, are the implications of mental health triage in this new world? in the early weeks of the lockdown, we wonder whether to activate a crisis response by focusing only on emergencies, keeping in touch with our regular patients for more frequent, but briefer, telephone updates. implicitly, we are invoking ideas of triage (focusing only on emergencies in any detail or depth) and support (finding out how our patients are managing, rather than working with them). yet it is clear that such a model will not serve us well in the longer-term: if nearly the whole camhs population is provided with brief, intermittent support rather than treatment, logic dictates that their mental health will deteriorate. yet does such a distinction between support and treatment hold in a time of crisis? it is a distinction that has always been uncomfortable where it privileges the activity of psychological therapists over other mental health specialisms, such as nursing, occupational therapy or social work (deemed to be providing 'support' or 'risk management'); yet it has enabled us to retain an emphasis on the 'work' that is involved in psychological treatment and the process that unfolds between the participants in psychotherapy, patient and therapist. what the nature of such work may be during lockdown remains to be seen. meanwhile, mental health emergencies among the teenage population seem to have plummeted: we wonder, where are they? have they too been suspended? there is anxiety about when the dam may break; an increase in anxiety, depression and self-harm are expected in the population as a whole (holmes et al., ) . for those that come in, we find ourselves contorting the familiar nhs language of 'risk': do we mean suicide risk or covid- risk? where is 'safe' for a year-old determined to kill herself, or a year-old who has taken an overdose? a mother asks whether, were her teenage son to harm himself, she would be allowed to be with him in hospital; we cannot advise her. the focused maternal care that a teenager may specifically crave in such desperate moments becomes the one thing he would deprive himself of; the choices facing those with suicidal thoughts become starker now. we ask ourselves, can we provide a reassuring presence dressed in protective mask and goggles? or should we retreat behind a computer or smartphone screen, through which we can, at least, be seen as ourselves? how do we keep time in such a crisis? there is a rhythm that psychotherapists and their patients come to live and breathe: the regular pulse of the psychoanalytic session, whether weekly or more frequent; the predictability of the starting time; the inevitability of the session end or the week's wait. this rhythm underpins the duration of a therapy as it unfolds in time and is the bedrock of the 'containment' (bion, ) that psychoanalysis offers (baraitser & salisbury, , waiting in pandemic times) . can this rhythm, based on the fifty-minute hour, be maintained over the telephone or protected with the same boundaries as in the clinic? in the rush of psychotherapists to online platforms and the telephone, can we maintain this steady pulse? for a teenage patient, does it still feel like his session time if he knows his therapist is going to ring? will it still feel like time to stop if we are wrapped in the cocoon of sound provided by a telephone call in a quiet room; or if we have been trying to focus on each other's faces in a shaky video call? despite the fact that most teenagers are more familiar with online discourse than we are, this shift raises issues of space too. is it intrusive to conduct therapy online with an adolescent, looking into that most private of spaces, their bedroom? alternatives are unlikely when families are crammed together conducting school and home lives under one roof. what is it like for a depressed adolescent to know that his therapist is telephoning from her own home? or for a troubled teenage girl, reliant on self-harm to embody her misery, to bring her therapist into her home on a smartphone screen? decisions continue to need making: despite the impression that time has been suspended, in fact it waits for nobody. an offer of time-limited psychotherapy for a girl of seventeen-and-a-half is paused: can it still be done? the time-frame provided by the therapy model was to fit neatly into the time that remains for her as a camhs patient: upon her eighteenth birthday, she will be discharged. despite the impression that the world has stopped turning, time is marching on. nothing sums up better the paradox of the crisis for adolescents or gives the lie more obviously to the notion of shutdown, suspension or postponement. time is still passing. all data underlying the results are available as part of the article and no additional source data are required. this paper was written in the first two weeks after lockdown, when emergency presentations nationally were hugely reduced (bmj, ); by the time of publication, it could be anecdotally observed that emergency presentations of adolescents in a state of mental health crisis had increased. the child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist, jocelyn catty reflects on how psychological therapies are positioned during a crisis such as the covid- pandemic. the author questions how the psychoanalytic session is maintained over online platforms and telephone consultations. furthermore, catty addresses essential reflections of how the crisis leaves time for emotional and psychological care in a time characterized by the pressure of triage and emergency. the introduction outlines the immediate and dark consequences for young people, their school achievements, mental health, social development, and the opportunity to get adequate treatment. she points at the specific developmental challenges of covid- putting young people at high risk for lagging behind in this important transitional phase into adulthood. the manuscript is well-written and contains highly needed questions regarding adolescent mental health during a crisis as the pandemic. it emphasizes the uncertainness in therapy rooms and improvised therapy rooms at home worldwide. the paper raises the urgency for young people and the need for society to take their situation seriously. jocelyn catty fears that only mental health triage will be offered to young people and a generation will be deprived of the opportunity for treatment. the paper is formulated as a warning bringing into the discussion some problematic sides of video consultations. the paper is submitted as a research article, however, we read it to be an opinion article. thus, evaluation according to research standards is not applicable. the paper does not provide sufficient details of method and analysis to allow replication of others, neither are any conclusions drawn -as there are no results and the manuscript is lacking both qualitative and quantitative data. however, as an opinion article, the paper is a structured and well written, article. however, the manuscript might be more useful to a broad clinical readership if the author moved beyond the rather pessimistic undertone regarding psychotherapy during a crisis and explored alternative perspectives. as there is evidence as well as clinical experiences during the ongoing pandemic that some young people in some periods of therapy might profit even more from video consultations. in addition, video consultations give the therapist an opportunity to follow the young person and offer treatment even when students according to change in school or study situation move to other places. some questions the author may consider: how does the therapists' attitude towards online therapy or telephone consulting affect the therapy delivered on these platforms? how is the therapist marked by the current crisis and shaped by being forced to deliver therapy on alternative platforms? might it be that the physical distance to the therapist for some adolescents facilitates a greater emotional closeness to the psychotherapy -and therapist? the manuscript ends rather abruptly with loads of important questions to reflect on without stating a clear take-home message. overall, this is a timely and much-needed essay. it is written nicely with rich metaphor and moving examples of how these last months has changed the entire field of psychotherapy -both for patients and most therapists. the paper might be improved by modifications addressing the detailed comments below and perhaps a mention of alternative perspectives to better recognizing the complexity of this important matter. are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? no source data required are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? partly containment, delay, mitigation': waiting and care in the time of a pandemic this paper was developed in collaboration with colleagues working on the waiting times research project (see waitingtimes. exeter.ac.uk). we confirm that we have read this submission and believe that we have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. this is a provocative and timely article. catty has used the remarkable interruption of normal camhs psychotherapy practice by the covid- crisis to explore and illuminate the importance of time and 'the future' for adolescents and the, often overlooked, impact of rhythm in the psychotherapeutic process.the importance of the article would seem to lie in its engagement with a rapidly changing (and novel) challenge to practice. the trade offs between (masked) face to face sessions with digital but unmasked consultations are well noted.like many writing about covid catty appears to accept the 'looming mental health' epidemic it will cause while observing that initially referrals fell. it might be worthwhile to revisit previous national crises (eg. wwii) when predictions of mass psychological casualties were found to be baseless.catty acknowledges that her thinking is based on the first few weeks of lockdown and a folllow up article after a couple of months to compare her thoughts with what transpires would be of considerable interest. are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? no source data required are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes competing interests: no competing interests were disclosed.reviewer expertise: social psychiatry and the application of psychotherapeutic principles in adult disorders.i confirm that i have read this submission and believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. key: cord- -kn q nb authors: flinders, matthew title: democracy and the politics of coronavirus: trust, blame and understanding date: - - journal: parliam aff doi: . /pa/gsaa sha: doc_id: cord_uid: kn q nb this article explores the relationship between crises and democracy through a focus on the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. its central argument is that to interpret the current pandemic purely in terms of its epidemiology and public health implications risks overlooking its potentially more significant socio-political consequences. this is because the challenges posed by the coronavirus crisis have themselves become overlaid or layered-upon a pre-existing set of concerns regarding the performance, efficiency and capacity of democratic political structures. the aim of this article is to try and understand and warn against what might be termed a rather odd form of cross-contamination whereby the cynicism, negativity and frustration concerning politicians, political processes and political institutions that existed before the coronavirus outbreak is allowed to direct, define and automatically devalue how democratic structures are subsequently judged in terms of how they responded to the challenge. as such, this article focuses on the link between the coronavirus crisis and the democratic crisis; or, more precisely, the risk that the coronavirus crisis may mutate into and fuel a broader crisis of democracy. keeping democracy healthy during a pandemic has already proved problematic in many countries where politicians have seized upon the crisis in order to claim emergency powers and strengthen their position (hungary, israel, etc.) . at the same time, the victorious claims of countries such as china and singapore have raised potentially far-reaching questions about whether authoritarian regimes handle pandemics more effectively than democratic ones (see, e.g. kleinfeld, ) . the fact that this is happening in a global context that already contained an 'autocratization alert' (see v-dem, ) , concerns about 'democratic backsliding' (see idea, ) and an increase in populist pressures simply underlines this article's emphasis on the need to understand the link-or more specifically the interplay-between the 'new' covid-focused crisis and the pre-existing democratic crisis (on the latter see keane, ) . although this article is primarily focussed upon the uk the themes, issues and challenges that it highlights have a far broader international and global relevance. the link between the coronavirus and the crisis of democracy is explored and developed through a focus on three inter-related themes: trust, blame and understanding. the first section focusses on public trust in politics before the pandemic emerged and how the outbreak appears to have affected public attitudes. the interesting element of this discussion is the contrast it offers with the public's trust in scientists and experts and the implications this has in terms of culpability, credit and censure. this brings the discussion to a second focus on the issue of blame in the second section. the simple argument is that if previous pandemics offer insights into the post-crisis politics of coronavirus it is likely that a series of intense and multi-dimensional blame games will rapidly emerge. the main focus of this section is upon the early emergence of potential blame-limitation strategies within the british government's approach. this focus on scapegoats, sacrificial lambs and self-preservation strategies flows into a third and final focus on tolerance and understanding. the aim being to acknowledge the realities of decision-making and governing under pressure in times of crisis and through this develop an argument concerning balance, empathy and proportionate scrutiny. the manner in which a large number of legislative select committees have already announced their intention to launch pandemic-linked inquiries, not to mention demands for wider national and international in-depth reviews, underlines the contemporary relevance of this argument. taken together, a focus on these three topics (trust, blame and understanding) provides a buckle or link through which the relationship(s) between the coronavirus crisis and crisis of democracy can be understood. the aim of this section is to make three relatively straightforward arguments about levels of public trust in elected politicians. the first is that the coronavirus crisis emerged at a time of fundamental concern about the global state of democracy; the second is that the limited data that is currently available suggests the existence of a common crisis-linked 'rallying around the flag' effect; and (third) that this uplift in public confidence and trust may well prove to be short-lived. as a first-step to substantiating these arguments, table provides a precis of the core findings of a number of authoritative and evidence-based reviews on the taken together, the core conclusions suggest that the anxieties that have surrounded democracy for at least half a century have in recent years grown in scale, complexity and intensity. this is linked to the emergence of a clear populist signal, the growth of anti-political sentiment and-critically-the emergence of a clear 'trust gap' between the governors and the governed. within this democratically dubious context the uk held a particularly prominent position due to a combination of generalised and long-standing concerns regarding the nature and limits of a majoritarian power-hoarding democracy plus more specific and related concerns regarding the country's relationship with the european union. the hansard society's th audit of political engagement ( ) provides a powerful evidence base for these arguments and its headline findings can be summarised as: • opinions of the system of governing are at their lowest point in the -year audit series-worse now than in the aftermath of the mps expenses scandal; • people are pessimistic about the country's problems and their possible solution, with sizable numbers willing to entertain radical political changes; and • core indicators of political engagement remain stable but, beneath the surface, the strongest feelings of powerlessness and disengagement are intensifying. it would at this point be possible to drill-down into each of these points through the provision of evidence-based insights such as: % of those surveyed said the system of governing needs 'quite a lot' or 'a great deal' of improvement; asked whether the problem is with the political system or the people running it was the th consecutive year of decline in global freedom drift towards 'division and dysfunction' global phenomenon in which freely elected leaders distance themselves from political norms the largest response group ( %) replied 'both'; % of those surveyed believed the main parties and politicians did not care about people like them; % thought political parties were too internally divided to serve the best interests of the country; % thought britain's system of government is rigged to advantage the rich and the powerful; the number who 'strongly disagree' that political involvement can change the way the uk is run ( %) had hit a -year low; as had the % who felt they had no influence at all over national decision-making. if this was not bad enough, then the survey also detected hints of what might be interpreted as an illiberal swing away from the core tenets of liberal democracy. when it came to the public's levels of confidence and trust in different professions, for example, the 'military/armed forces' ( %) and 'judges/courts' ( %) scored far higher than mps ( %) or members of the government ( %). added to this was the fact that only % of the public had confidence in mps' handling of brexit (with the government faring only slightly better on %). of particular concern was that over half ( %) of those surveyed agreed with the statement that 'britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules', and % thought that many of the country's problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government did not have to worry so much about votes in parliament. the ipsos mori veracity index-published just days before the general election-found that public trust in politicians had fallen to just %, a % fall from . professors were, by contrast, highly ranked at % but government ministers lowly ranked at % which represented a level of distrust far greater than that even suggested by the hansard society's audit of political engagement but which did resonate with the broader data and evidence on the global state of democracy (see table , above). the gap, or more precisely chasm, between public trust in scientists/experts/professors, on the one hand, compared with politicians on the other, is striking and forms a central element of arguments offered later in this article. it is, however, worth noting at this early point that the edelman trust barometer's 'trust and the coronavirus' report of april that surveyed , people across ten countries found that: % of respondents agreed that 'we need to hear more from the scientists and less from politicians'; % were concerned about the politicisation of the crisis ('certain people are making the situation seem worse than it is for political gain'); and that scientists were trusted to tell the truth by % of those surveyed, compared to % who trusted their prime minister or president. the aim of emphasising these statistics on (dis)trust is simply to underline that the health of democracy was not in good shape when the pandemic emerged and that populists had for some time been fuelling and funnelling public frustration in an attempt to gain power and legitimate the construction of 'strong leader' illiberal democracies (i.e. what the institute for democracy and electoral assistance refer to as 'democratic backsliding'). the obvious risk, and one that has already come into fruition in some countries, is that the pandemic will be used by populists to further dilute or remove democratic safeguards (what daniel levitsky and daniel zilatt refer to in their hopefully not prophetic book how democracies die as the 'soft handrails' that checks-and-balances provide) as part of the 'autocratization' process that the varieties of democracy project has warned against. the issue of public trust therefore provides the first strand in the link between the coronavirus crisis and crisis of democracy. but what is interesting in this regard is that the immediate impact of the pandemic appears to have been a sharp increase in the popularity of incumbent national leaders (see jennings, ) . two elements stand out within this general trend: the first is that the 'boris bounce' was exceptional, rising to % by mid-march (up % from his ratings just before the december general election); the second is that the 'trump jump' fell fairly flat when compared with the spike in public support enjoyed by most leaders. although approval ratings are very different to precise trust-based assessments, they do point to the existence of a social phenomenon that political science has identified for some time and that is certainly related to questions of trust-'the rallying around the flag effect'. this concept was first coined by john mueller in and relates to the observation that groups tend to unify in times of crisis and at the national level, this is commonly exhibited through support for national leaders. the march 'boris bounce' is essentially the uk's equivalent of a 'rallying around the union jack effect' but it is dissecting and understanding this change in social attitudes that more light can be spread on the emergent politics of coronavirus and in this regard three issues deserve brief comment. the first two issues concern the two main and inter-related variables that are generally offered by scholars to explain this effect. the first of these emphasises the social-psychological dimensions of a crisis and particularly the power of patriotism (for a discussion, see baker and oneal, ) . in times of crisis, national leaders are, the theory suggests, viewed as almost the embodiment of national unity fighting the crisis for the public good, which is especially significant when the leader is both head of state and head of government as in the usa. the second theory, that has been explored in the work of hetherington and nelson ( ) amongst others, believes that the rallying effect occurs due to more institutional reasons and particularly due to the opposition's general reluctance to openly attack the government during a clear crisis. a reduction in 'attack politics' by opposition parties leads to less conflict being reported in the media and so, this approach suggests, the public assumes the government must be performing better than normal. the public may not trust their political leaders but they might view them as competent in terms of governing capacity which leads to a third and final point about rallying around flags-it usually does not take long for 'fleeing the flag' to occur. this is a critical point. although most analyses of 'rallying around the flag' effects are concerned with wars, invasions or terrorist attacks with a clear enemy, rather than public health pandemics in which the enemy is a new strain of virus, the overall conclusion is that the 'rally effect' is usually short-lived. the public is fickle and it may be just one or two months before public opinion returns to pre-crisis levels. in the uk, there are already suggestions that the public's support for the government's approach and levels of trust in key ministers was by early april already waning (see opinium, ) . this fall in public support may well reflect the existence of major concerns about unpreparedness and indecision within the government which was underlined in the sudden shift from a focus on 'herd immunity' and basic precautions (notably handwashing) to a policy of legally enforced social distancing and 'lockdown'. from personal protective equipment to the repatriation of citizens, through to the availability of ventilators and questions concerning the police's use of 'lockdown' powers, not to mention mix-ups, muddles and misunderstandings concerning virus-testing and care home policy, a range of issues have combined to produce accusations that the government's response has been little short of 'a disaster' (see jenkins, ) . this raises at least two issues that emerge out of this section's focus on trust and serve to refocus attention back on the link between the specific 'covid crisis' and broader 'crisis of democracy'. the first revolves around the issue of blame and warns against the political system going 'mad' in the sense of falling victim to 'multiple-accountabilities disorder' (koppell, ) and the scapegoating, scalp-hunting and sacrificial practices that usually come with it. the second (flip-side) issue underlines the need for public understanding in the sense of not only appreciating the realities of crisis management situations but also about the manner in which coronavirus is itself being politicised by different actors. the first of these themes is the focus of the next section. amongst the contemporary chaos, there are three predictions that can be made with relative certainty. the first is that around a year from now there is going to be a baby boom which will reflect what those couples that have enjoyed spending time together have been up to. the second is that the baby boom is likely to be matched by a similarly spectacular increase in divorces (reflecting those couples that did not enjoy spending so much time together). the final confident prediction is that in just a matter of weeks or months the 'covid crisis' will lead to an outbreak of divisive and disruptive political blame games as politicians, policymakers, advisers and experts all seek to avoid carrying the can for those decisions or opinions that inevitably turned-out to be wrong. it is in the context of this core prediction that this sub-section makes three arguments: (i) the analysis of previous pandemics exposes the existence of a powerful socio-political 'negativity bias'; (ii) politicians will try and manage this situation through a mixture of blame-games and self-preservation strategies; and (iii) it is already possible to identify a dominant strategy in the uk context that for the sake of brevity can be labelled 'hugging the experts'. when it comes to considering the link between public trust and blame even the most cursory review of the existing scholarship on how governments have attempted to cope with pandemics in the past reveals a body of work that is primarily framed around the notion of 'policy failure'. this is a critical point. no matter what steps a government might take or how quickly measures are put in place the fact that by its very existence a pandemic brings with it crisis and chaos intermixed with death and suffering ensures that any governmental response will be seen in generally critical terms. the title of greg behrman's book the invisible people: how the u.s. has slept through the global aids pandemic, the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our time reflects this point. although it could actually be seen as fairly successful in terms of protecting life, the political reaction to the severe acute respiratory syndrome pandemic at the beginning of the millennium is generally critiqued in terms of either over-reaction or under-reaction (see, e.g. freedman, ; hooker and harr aliis, ). add to this, the manner in which 'what went wrong?' seems to be the dominant lens through which responses to both swine flu and ebola are judged and the link between pandemic control and blame attribution becomes clear (see kamradt-scott, ) . but what is also interesting about this seam of scholarship on pandemic crisis management is the manner in which it is infused with discourses not only of political blame and counter-blame, but also with discussions of self-blame, notions of shame and an awareness of the cultural apportionment of blame to specific countries or communities that is generally not discussed within the fields of public administration, executive studies or mainstream public policy (see, e.g. abeysinghe and white, ; nerlich and koteyko, ) . a link is, however, provided in the work of cáceres and otte in their work on blame apportioning and the emergence of zoonoses (i.e. diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans) during the last years when they note: [b]lame games take place between infected and non-infected regions, as well as between developed and developing nations. apportioning of blame, more commonly known as finger pointing, is an inherent feature of human beings. this blaming process can be either active or passive depending on the issue(s) and given context(s). evidently, blaming is used to shift responsibilities onto others, it singles out a culprit, finds a scapegoat and pinpoints a target, regrettably however, apportioning blame comes at a cost to those that are blamed. expanding our epidemiological understandings into the realms of blamers and blamed permits a more realistic, emphatic and conscientious look into the unintended consequences of individual and institutional actions, and the extent to which other countries or regions are detrimentally affected by misguided pre-conceptions. (cáceres and otte, , pp. - ) this focus on the 'cost' of blame and 'unintended consequences' brings us to a second argument and the suggestion that the politics of the coronavirus pandemic (in the uk and beyond) is already beginning to revolve around the issue of blame (blame-shifters, blame-shiftees, blame-boomerangs, etc.). in this regard, political science offers a rich seam of scholarship on blame avoidance behaviour that arguably dates back to at least machiavelli but has more recently been developed in the work of scholars including r. kent weaver ( ) and christopher hood ( ) . synthesised and simplified down to its core elements, this body of work reveals how politicians are primarily motivated by avoiding blame for failure rather than trying to claim credit for success for the simple reason that the public possess a strong 'negativity bias'. praise will be as fickle as it is short-lived, whereas vitriol will be as strong as it will long-lived. the implication being that politicians will use all sorts of tricks and tactics-agenda-shaping, scapegoating, buck-passing, deflection and secrecy as part of a deeper 'teflon immorality' (see smilansky, ) -in order to keep themselves blame free. the relevance of this literature to the link between the coronavirus crisis and the broader crisis of democracy is the manner in which it connects the focus on public trust (discussed above) with the performative and substantive content of governmental policy responses. in this regard, the work of christopher hood on 'the risk game and the blame game' (see table , above) is particularly valuable for at least three reasons: first, it highlights the range of blame-avoidance strategies that politicians can utilise (notably presentational strategies, policy positions and the delegation of responsibility to arm's-length agencies); secondly, it contextualises the use of these strategies through an emphasis on public attitudes; and thirdly, it highlights that blame-shifting can backfire if those to whom responsibility is directed push back (hence the emphasis on blame-reversion, boomerangs and lightning-rods). the key question then becomes how this framework contributes to our understanding of the unfolding politics of coronavirus? working across a very wide and fluid empirical landscape and using a fairly broad analytical brush, the main answer to this question can be summarised as follows. first and foremost (and as the previous section emphasised), public attitudes to politicians, political processes and political institutions were in fairly poor health in most advanced liberal democracies as the pandemic emerged. high levels of political frustration, apathy and anger were identified within large sections of the public and this had led to the emergence of a potentially democratically dangerous level of anti-political sentiment. in contextual terms and with table in mind, public attitudes were arguably leaning more towards the 'vindictive' than the 'sympathetic' vis-à-vis hood's schema and this matters because the literature on pandemics and disease control clearly shows that whether the public is willing to follow government advice is highly dependent on preexisting levels of political trust, hence its common focus on 'crying wolf', metacommunication patterns, 'epidemic intelligence' and 'vaccine hesitation' (see nerlich and koteyko, ; mesch and schwirian, ) . the lack of pre-existing public trust may well have significant implications in terms of preventing what has been variously labelled 'crisis fatigue' or 'lockdown fatigue' (flinders, ) amongst the public and a reluctance to abide by social isolation advice. the fact that in the uk these risks exist in the context of well-documented 'brexit fatigue' underlines the manner in which the coronavirus crisis cannot be studied in isolation and should more accurately be conceived as being layered-upon or interwoven with a complex patchwork of challenges. a second way in which hood's framework helps focus attention on the pandemic-democracy link, in general, and blame, in particular, is through the identification of specific blame-avoidance strategies. in the uk, there has arguably been a very clear strategy at play which has revolved around the adoption of a technocratic, science-based and evidence-led approach that has ensured that no government statement has been made without the explicit caveat about 'following the advice of the experts'. this 'hugging the experts' is possibly even a future blameavoidance tactic in preparation that represents an amalgam of presentational, policy and delegatory elements. the sight of boris johnson or other senior ministers flanked at the daily press conferences by the chief medical officer and chief scientific advisor is without doubt a strategic performative act of blame-sharing and blame-displacement. this is by no means unique to the uk. in some countries, a new public service bargain seems to have emerged whereby the politicians depart the stage to an almost total extent and let the experts become the public face of the crisis. take, for example, anthony fauci, the director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases in the usa, fernando simó n, the head of health emergency centre in spain, christian drosten, the head of virology at charité hospital in germany, jérô me salomon, head of the national health authority in france and prof. chris whitty and sir patrick vallance in the uk (the chief medical adviser and government chief scientific adviser, respectively). as jon henley ( ) has illustrated, its 'the experts' that are now the household names. not only does this raise issues about the political selection of expert advice (discussed below) but it also raises questions about the political protections afforded to scientists who become drawn into major debates and may become blame-shiftees or sacrificial lambs when the scrutiny industry kicks-in. and 'kick-in' it will. a third way in which the literature on blame games is relevant to the current coronavirus crisis is due to the manner in which it underlines the aggressive and adversarial nature of public accountability. this is encapsulated in the notion of the 'negativity bias' and simply reflects that manner in which political decisions are generally taken in a low-trust, high-blame environment. put slightly differently, public accountability is generally of the 'gotcha!' variety (which is a particularly problematic paradigm when placed within the contours of hilliard et al. ( ) scholarship on 'the perils of accountability after crisis'). the aim is very rarely to undertake a reasoned, balanced or proportionate review of what happened in order to learn lessons but primarily to apportion blame and demand some form of sacrificial responsibility. this is particularly true in power-hoarding majoritarian democracies like the uk and especially due to the focussing impact of the convention individual ministerial responsibility to parliament. any attempt by ministers to deflect blame therefore risks bouncingback on them in the form of a 'blame boomerang' if the expert, scientist or publicly trusted professor refuses to be scapegoated. the fact that the dark clouds of intense public and parliamentary scrutiny are already visible and hanging over the coronavirus is symptomatic of the potentially pathological politics of accountability that this section is attempting to underline. the world health organisation declared the outbreak to be a pandemic on the march and by the end of the second week of april , parliamentary committees had public administration and constitutional affairs has announced its intention to call ministers to account on the topic but it has not launched a formal inquiry (yet). already announced inquiries (some multiple inquiries) into various elements of the government's response (see table , below). the number or range of select committee inquiries-or, for that matter, any forms of public accountability process-is not the issue. the point being made relates to the nature and ambitions of those scrutiny processes and whether they themselves become part of the problem with democracy, due to a focus on scalphunting and shallow adversarialism that is devoid from any appreciation of the realities of crisis management, or part of the solution, in terms of promoting a balanced assessment of what went wrong, why and how similar patterns might be avoided in the future. in essence, this is the argument relating to understanding that forms the focus of the next and final section but before engaging with this argument it is necessary to conclude this section with a very brief discussion of three final blame-related insights. the first is that it is likely that the coronavirus crisis will serve to redefine the scholarship on blame-shifting just as it is likely to alter the contours of the debate concerning democracy. the complexity and intricacies of crisis responses will somehow have to be accommodated within models that have generally been constructed around and within the notion of national systems. and yet we can already see the emergence of global blame games wherein specific and primarily american politicians and organisations are attempting to blame china for the crisis (see henderson et al., ) ; while china seeks to pass the buck back to the usa in what has become a 'war of words' amidst covid- (see the straits times, ). donald trump is widely interpreted as trying to scapegoat the world health organisation by withdrawing american funding. european blame games are also beginning as, for example, italy blames the european union for being too slow to help member states (see boffey, ) . within the uk cracks and pressure-points are already beginning to appear as tensions grow between departments, ministers, officials, agencies and advisers as the prospect of public scrutiny become ever more immediate. this brings us to a second issue and the 'blame attraction' or 'buck stops here' qualities (see table , above) that come with being a minister. despite the cross-governmental nature of the challenge, in strict constitutional terms, it is the secretary of state for health and the prime minister who are likely to emerge as the 'lightning rods' when it comes to the allocation of blame and as key targets when it comes to demands for a 'sacrificial lamb' to carry-the-can. and yet even here the curiosities of coronavirus may well defeat conventional understandings. on the one hand, the emergence of the health secretary from virus enforced self-isolation on the nd april to announce that mistakes had been made and that a u-turn on testing policy was needed that would see capacity increased to , tests a day by the end of april was a clear attempt to bolster public confidence by taking very clear personal responsibility for the target; on the other hand, the announcement that the prime minister had been taken to hospital and then moved into intensive care potentially insulates him from some element of blame, and may well fuel a second 'rallying around the flag' effect for the government as the media and opposition parties soften their stance. although there is evidence to support this claim, it might be more accurate to identify the existence of a post-hospitalisation surge in support for the prime minister rather than the government. boris johnson was discharged from hospital on the april and a yougov approval rating poll conducted at the time found a staggering leap in the proportion of the public who thought he was doing 'very well' as prime minister ( %, up from % in mid-march), with % suggesting he was doing 'fairly well' (up from %). boris's teflon-coated qualities and blame-avoidance behaviour have been discussed throughout his political career and he has been known to adopt cunning exit strategies in the past when faced with tricky situations. nevertheless, the notion of 'medical distancing' as a blame avoidance strategy would be extreme even for this most unconventional politician and boris appears to be more popular than ever, possibly to the despair of his opponents. that said, the core argument of this section remains true: the coronavirus crisis is likely to spark a veritable tsunami of complex and aggressive blame games. this creates a strong risk that the structures of democratic governance will themselves fall victim to the painful politico-administrative malady that is generally labelled going 'mad' (i.e. koppell's ( ) 'multiple accountabilities disorder'). this occurs when politicians and their officials are expected to account through so many different accountability channels and to so many scrutiny bodieswhich themselves often demand very different forms of information and are blame-orientated rather than understanding-focussed-that they are distracted from focussing on their core tasks. put slightly differently, mad occurs when senior staffs are expected to spend too much time 'accounting-up' instead of focussing on 'delivering-down' which, in turn, increases the chances that mistakes and errors will be made which would, in turn, simply increase the scrutiny placed upon them. the potential pathologies of highly politicised accountability, as matthew flinders ( ) has demonstrated, means that too much accountability can be as problematic as too little. this leads the discussion to a possibly unexpected focus on understanding as the final strand that connects the coronavirus crisis to the crisis of democracy. democratic politics, as bernard crick sought to explain in his defence of politics ( ), is a rather rough and ready affair. it grates and it grinds, it is frequently cumbersome and generally clunky, it can be inefficient and its basis on the art of compromise can make it difficult to understand for those that are not intricately connected with those processes. it is messy. and yet those characteristics are from crick's perspective not failings but elements of the very beauty of politics; they reflect the simple manner in which politics is charged with somehow generating broadly acceptable decisions and choices in an environment that is increasingly defined by complexity and incompatibility. it would, of course, be possible to make politics smoother and more efficient, to impose clarity and clearer control mechanisms through a uniformity of style and structure. but the cost of such measures would in all likelihood be a decline in the sensitivity of that system to the rights and views of the individuals and communities within it. this matters because at the heart of any understanding of the link between the coronavirus and the crisis of democracy, there has to be a fundamental understanding of the existence of inevitable trade-offs and dilemmas. the existence of these dilemmas is generally far more apparent in times of crisis due to the emphasis that is generally placed on the responsive capacity of the state rather than on the democratic sensitivity of the system. tough decisions will have to be taken quickly, on the basis of imperfect information and without the possibility of extensive consultation and compromise in what might be seen as a capacity/democracy trade-off. understanding the rationale, logic and implications of this shift are critical not just in terms of how it flows through to influence public trust, or how it structures subsequent blame-games but also due to the manner in which it shapes the ideational space-the simple realm of ideas-about how assessments regarding the future of democracy should be made. in order to understand this focus on understanding and demonstrate its centrality to this article's central focus on the nexus between the current covid- crisis and broader debates concerning the crisis of democracy, this section adopts a multi-levelled approach. this takes us from a micro-level understanding of politicians as individuals operating in a crisis context; through to a mid-range governmental focus on understanding and gauging 'policy success' as well as 'policy failure'; to a final macro-political focus on the grand narratives and regime battles that coronavirus appears to have unleashed. taken together, what this three-level focus on understanding provides is a fresh and timely analysis of how two very different crises have come to be inter-woven with the risk that one (i.e. covid) will be politicised and utilised in order to inflame the second (i.e. democracy). defending democracy-or more specifically promoting an understanding of its inner beauty, inescapable inadequacies and the inevitable trade-offs that come with any choice of organising society-has therefore been the underlying ambition of this article. this is a point that brings us to begin by reflecting on the scale of the challenge; not in relation to defending democracy but more specifically in relation to the challenges posed by coronavirus. this is a new virus, it can be highly aggressive and it is easily transmitted. with this in mind, it is possible to move across the three levels from the individual, to the system, to the basic notion of democracy. any defence of democratic politics must to some extent seek to defend politicians. although frequently demonised, derided and dismissed as self-serving and self-interested characters, the simple fact is that politicians are at the -end-of-theday humans, as the manner in which several leading politicians have succumbed to coronavirus reflects. notwithstanding clear concerns about patterns of political recruitment and the degree to which the political class reflect the diversity to be found within society, this does not alter the basic point that promotes some understanding of the practical and day-to-day pressures under which politicians generally operate. put slightly differently, 'governing under pressure' is incredibly demanding and an evidence-based debate about the mental health and well-being of politicians was already emerging before the coronavirus crisis emerged (for a review, see flinders et al., ) . these pressures increase as individuals assume the responsibilities of ministerial office and are particularly pronounced in times of crisis, especially when the source of the crisis is new and therefore no clear knowledge of 'what works' is available. crisis situations by their very nature demand that someone ultimately has to assume control and make decisions under extreme pressure, on the basis of imperfect information and in the full knowledge that they are dealing with matters of 'life and death' for which they will at some point be held to account. in a democracy, it is elected politicians to whom these decisions and situations fall. the public demands clarity ('when will lock-down end?', 'when will a vaccine be found?', 'what is going to happen next?') when politicians are themselves charged with grappling with uncertainty and cannot produce simple answers to complex questions. this may explain their strategy of 'hugging the experts' but as expert opinion itself divides and becomes more contested then so the ability of politicians to look to science for answers, at least in the short-term begins to wane. the micro-level argument is therefore simply one that promotes some understanding of the professional challenges and personal pressures that those who have at least dared to step into the arena and assume the burdens of office are attempting to manage. it would at this point be possible to explore the contemporary relevance of theodore roosevelt's 'it's not the critic who counts' speech of april but such temptations must be resisted in order to move to a second mid-level focus on understanding institutional change. the simple argument here is that although, as the second section (above) suggested, the response of democratic governments around the world is likely to be seen through interpretations of 'policy failure'-and some mistakes and failures will undoubtedly have occurred-it is also important to understand the scale of what has actually been achieved. in the uk, the whitehall machine and wider-state structures have demonstrated an ambition and agility that although not perfect cannot be denied. the scale of the achievements is worthy of reflection, irrespective of whether it relates to building new hospitals, launching new policies, negotiating new powers, liaising with other governments, co-ordinating a vast network of organisations and suppliers, calming and informing the public, reshaping the economy or building new financial safety nets. interestingly, it is possible to identify a strong 'negativity bias' within academe as well as within society more broadly. to enter the fields of public administration and public policy is generally a fairly depressing experience due to the almost obsessional focus of these fields on failures, catastrophes and disasters. the publication in april manifesto 'towards positive public administration' by scott douglas, paul t'hart and a large group of leading scholars was an explicit attempt to rebalance the analytical scales and promote an understanding of structural successes, policy achievements and democratic innovations. the mid-level argument is therefore one that seeks to promote some understanding of the structural and institutional accomplishments that have been achieved in the content of a truly exceptional and potentially transformative crisis. democratic politics has not been able to 'make all sad hearts glad' as crick admitted it never could in his defence over half a century ago and to some extent the covid-crisis has shown this, but at the same time its achievements in response to the public health pandemic should not be too easily dismissed. this argument matters because it underpins a far broader macro-political dispute about the global state of democracy and how the coronavirus is already reshaping the debate about regime legitimacy and state capacity. the danger of the 'credit-claiming' behaviour of china in containing the crisis through technologically powered surveillance is that it may engender an 'authoritarian appeal' or 'strong leader' effect that was to some extent already evident in many countries through the drift towards populism (see table , above). 'the new coronavirus pandemic is not only wreaking destruction on public health and the global economy but disrupting democracy and governance worldwide' frances brown et al. ( ) have argued 'it has hit at a time when democracy was already under threat in many places, and it risks exacerbating democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation'. the geopolitical consequences of this can already be seen in the 'power grab' behaviour of some national leaders and also in the attempts by international actors to defend democracy. the existence of what dan kelemen ( ) has labelled an 'authoritarian equilibrium' within the european union has raised particular concerns. the decision of the secretary general of the council of europe to publish an open letter to the hungarian prime minister, viktor orbán, on the march regarding the use of covid-emergency measures, plus the decision to launch a new eu action plan on human rights and democracy the very next day that is explicitly designed 'to defend human rights and democracy all over the world by using all our resources faster and more effectively', captures the sense that a new phase in the long-running tension between authoritarian and democratic regimes may well have started. understanding the dynamic and dialectical relationship between concerns regarding the crisis of democracy and the unfolding coronavirus pandemic is necessary in order to prevent a form of socio-political cross-contamination, whereby the cynicism, negativity and frustration concerning politicians, political processes and political institutions that existed before the coronavirus outbreak is allowed to direct, define and automatically devalue how democratic structures are subsequently judged in terms of how they responded to the challenge. without appreciating (i) the fragility and significance of public trust, (ii) the potentially pathological impacts of blame-games or (iii) understanding the achievements of individuals and institutions working together to address a collective threat, there is a very real risk that the coronavirus crisis will fuel a broader crisis of democracy. the avian influenza pandemic how to win 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coronavirus: why boris johnson and other world leaders have become more popular during outbreak what went wrong? the world health organization from swine flu to ebola the new despotism the european union's authoritarian equilibrium do authoritarian or democratic countries handle pandemics the best pathologies of accountability social and political determinants of vaccine hesitancy presidential popularity from truman to johnson crying wolf? biosecurity and metacommunication in the context of the swine flu pandemic opinium ( ) opinium 'public opinion on coronavirus - st april towards positive public administration: a manifesto teflon immorality" and the perversity of life us military may have brought coronavirus to wuhan, says china in war of words with us democracy report : autocratization surges -resistance grows the politics of blame avoidance boris johnson approval rating tracker none. none. none. key: cord- - aa cut authors: clavijo, nathalie title: reflecting upon vulnerable and dependent bodies during the covid‐ crisis date: - - journal: gend work organ doi: . /gwao. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: aa cut this paper is a short narrative on how feminism helped me find a balance in my life and how this balance has been disrupted with the covid‐ crisis. i reflect on how this crisis is showing our vulnerabilities as human beings. this crisis reflects how our bodies depend on each other, moving away from the dominant patriarchal ontology that perceives bodies as being independent (butler, ). i reflect on how this crisis is letting the most vulnerable in situations of survival because the infrastructures (butler, ) that support our bodies are not functioning. at the same time, this crisis is providing visibility to certain occupations that are dominated by issues of race, class and gender. these occupations are being at least temporarily rehabilitated to their central position in society. we are living a time where we could show, through our teaching, possible resistance to the neoliberal ontology that captured humanity. we are living a time where we could show, through our teaching, possible resistance to the neoliberal ontology that captured humanity. keywords: vulnerability; gender; covid- ; dominated occupations before embracing an academic career, i worked for several years in a company where i was a management accountant. at the age of thirty, i ticked all the boxes that helped maintain masculine domination in my professional and worse, deep in my personal life. i had to small sons, had taken the decision to change my contract on a part-time basis and was married to a man who always believed his work was more important than mine. i was in charge of taking my sons to day-care and school in the morning and in the evening. whenever there was a problem at school or at day-care, i was the one receiving the calls and running to find a solution. when i would have to go for business travel, i would leave my sons to the nanny, take the plane at am in the morning and come back running at pm to pick them up. i remember crying a lot, filling so much guilt and so much anger. if my sons' father did not do his part of parental work, it was simply because he was too tired and had to concentrate on his career. i felt so much pain at the time; so much guilt; so much oppression. in , my manager told me at an annual evaluation: "nathalie, you are a confirmed management accountant but you will not go up the latter because you have children. but you know it's normal, my wife is living the same situation". stronger and more beautiful than i had ever been. most of all, i felt free and had liberated myself from the guilt that comes with the different identities one can embody as a mother, a partner, a researcher, a professor… of course, nothing is easy. of course, i am still vulnerable to gendered norms but at least feminist theories have helped me construct strategies to resist to these norms (butler, ) . the problem is that my partner and the people who know me see me as someone extremely strong, who can cope with anything and always stays up at times when many would fall down. whenever i am facing an issue, my partner and parents just say: "don't worry, you'll find a way out". that is about the only thing they will say. they do not believe me when i tell them that i am weaker than they think and sometimes i would need more support that they can imagine. yes, i am still seen like a sponge ready to absorb the family, economic and social this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. everything collapsed around me. everything i had taken so many years to build, to find the right personal balance, went to dust. many parents are experiencing right now the same difficult days i am going through: organizing my work, working sometimes at am because i really cannot think of any other timeslot for work, my zoom conferences while my sons are playing in the room next door, homeschooling a -year-old boy, a -year-old boy and a year-old boy at the same time, thinking about meals, laundry, calling family to make sure everyone is fine etc. when my mother asks me how i am doing, i tell her it is really difficult to handle everything. she simply answers: "you'll be fine, you're used to multi-tasking". you know what came back to my face like a boomerang during this crisis? guilt, that horrible guilt. although i am with my boys all day, i do not feel like i am appreciating that time with them because my mind is thinking of all the work i have to cover. i also feel guilty because i feel useless being home during the crisis we are living. i feel that i am taking dirty care upon myself again. two weeks ago, my -year-old hurt himself while playing with his older brother. when it happened, i was heading a zoom conference. my boy came into my office screaming. i was so angry at him because he was disturbing the conference and he "knew the rules". i muted my this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. microphone, asked him to "shut up" because i still had one hour of zoom. when i ended my conference, i went to see him. he was still crying. his wrist was hurting. i told him he would be fine. deep inside of me, i hoped he was ok because i needed to work for at least half a day the next day and i did not want to spend time going to see a doctor or going to the hospital's emergency unit, especially during pandemic times: i had to work. well, the next day, i went with him to the emergencies. he had cried all night; i was told his wrist was broken. guilt. i had put my work before my son's well-being. guilt. he must have been in so much pain during the last hours. when we were at the hospital, a nurse was taking care of him when my year-old asked her: "have you seen your children? are they ok?" the nurse looked at me. i saw the pain in her eyes. she smiled at my son and said she would see her little girl tonight. i think i will never forget that nurse's pain in her eyes. her eyes were clearly saying: "no, i have not seen my children". i had been telling my sons how much sacrifice care workers are making for the common good. i had told them care workers are working at least hours a day and many of them were not seeing their children very often. it is one thing to be conscious about such situation and telling your children about it because you want them to understand others' sacrifices for the common good. it is a completely different thing to see the pain in a nurse's eyes. when we left the hospital, my son said: "i don't think her daughter is going to see her". my family and i have been all together at home for weeks now. i still feel frustration and guilt but i have also tried to look at what this crisis is showing us. if many of us have felt that this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. our lives have collapsed, part of the reason is because some of the infrastructures (associations, schools, day care, stores, offices…) that support our bodies (butler, ) are not functioning during this crisis. we are living a situation where bodies need each other, where we depend on each other, but the access to infrastructure is reduced or impossible. this situation is a real-life case where we, as scholars, will be able to show our different audiences that the dominant patriarchal ontology that thinks the body as independent is over. during this crisis, i have thought of feminism as the act of putting myself aside for a while because bodies that are in a much more dominated position than i am are in real pain. women and men with violent partners are stuck home with very little ways to escape. children with a violent parent are left on their own. the government has offered alternatives in these difficult times to help those who suffer. for example, the government has declared in the media that because it is difficult for women to call the police when they are home with their aggressor, women can now seek help when they go to a pharmacy. it strikes me how the government keeps conceiving violence within a heterosexual matrix where it is systematically a woman who suffers from the violence of a man. this type of discourse might be blocking persons who are in a non-heterosexual relationship from seeking help. all of us are over-consuming media networks; therefore, violent partners know that pharmacies have become an alternative to calling the police. what about children? social workers are still working but are not allowed to go to people's homes. at a time where the vulnerable would need the support of the infrastructure even more, they are left on their own. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. this crisis has also brought to the front the tremendous inequalities that exist in terms of education. according to the government, schools have completely lost contact with about % of children; the most vulnerable ones. what do you need to be able to do homeschooling? a computer, a phone, the internet, a printer and paper. some of us my take this equipment for granted but the problem is that not all families possess this equipment. what else do you need? at least one parent who will be able to help children in organizing their work and help them understand lessons. what about those parents who left school too early to be able to accomplish these tasks? what about those parents who simply do not know how to teach (and there are many!)? in normal times, the poorest children in france can eat at their school canteen for euro per meal. french school canteens offer healthy meals with a starting course, main course, cheese, bread and a desert. for these children it is sometimes the only proper meal they are able to eat during the day. what meals are they having during this crisis? the infrastructures supporting our bodies are not functioning. vulnerable bodies are trying to literally survive through the crisis. i have also been thinking about bodies who are fighting for the common good. i am thinking of dominated occupations where race, class and gender play a significant role in rendering them invisible in normal times. just like the nurse i was mentioning earlier, care workers are not home like i am; they are not even able to see their children as much as i am. in fact, in france, their children are being taken care of by other women who are working in day care and schools that remain open for the needs of what the government has called "essential" occupations. most of all, these occupations are exposing themselves to unimaginable risk for the common good. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. for the time being, these occupations are more vulnerable than i am; therefore, it is fine for me to put myself aside for a little while and reflect on what is happening. at pm at night, i go to my balcony with my sons and applaud for a minute all these occupations that were invisible before the crisis. i have mentioned care workers but we also applaud cashiers, garbage collectors, truck drivers, teachers… at pm at night, my neighbors and i also hit our saucepans with a spoon to protest against the last years of neoliberal decisions that have weaken our health system. society should not be paying for the decisions of a so-called elite. at the same time, society is learning what « essential » occupations are. for feminist researchers, the essential role of these occupations seems obvious, but for french society, it is not always the case. before the covid- crisis, these occupations were considered as peripheral; now they seem to have become central. society is temporarily providing recognition to these workers but i surely hope this recognition will be more than symbolic in the future. a debate is rising in france regarding the low levels of remuneration that these "essential" occupations have accepted for so many years. society seems to be struck by the strong decorrelation that exists between an occupation's salary and its central role for the common good. on april th , president macron's speech on television mentioned the following: "we will also have to remember that our country, today, stands entirely on women and men whom our economies recognize and pay so poorly. "social distinctions can only be based on common utility. the french wrote these words more than years ago. today, we must take up the torch and give full force to this principle" https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/ / / /adresse-aux-francais- -avril- this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. i did not know if i had to laugh or cry at this comment. i find so much hypocrisy in such words because it is the neoliberal system that president macron supports which has worsen such misrecognition. at least, french society might remember president macron's words to act in the future. feminist research has been debating this crucial point for so many years and has a lot to offer in these debates to understand the structural norms that have led to such misrecognition. feminist research can also contribute in finding ways of reconciling these occupations with their own power to act. if we want recognition to run in the long term, for those of us who teach, one possible way to start is by educating our audiences, starting with our students. i personally teach accounting in a business school, providing knowledge to future managers in big corporations. this audience has been educated in a context where they have been taught to become entrepreneurs of the self and to constantly maximize their individual performances (brown, ; cooper, ) . this crisis illustrates how vulnerable we are; how taking care of the other is central. an entrepreneur of the self cannot survive without support, without infrastructure (butler, ). an entrepreneur of the self fully depends on others. how many entrepreneurs have had to stop their activity? how many are struggling to pay their bills, to survive? before teaching what financial performance is, we should start teaching what social justice is. my colleagues and i are building up a course called "accounting for the common good" that will start during the fall semester. we are mobilizing feminist theories to educate future managers. these difficult times act as a reflection of what feminist research has been exposing for so many years. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. our goal is to put social justice at the heart of accounting. our goal is to teach our future managers what this crisis has taught us. this is a difficult time where we might feel scared and lost. it is also a time of hope. a time where we can show resistance to the neoliberal ontology that has captured humanity. many of our countries are paying the consequences of neoliberalism during this crisis because finance was at the heart of it all. we are vulnerable and dependent human beings. without social good, everything will collapse again and again. bibliography: neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy rethinking vulnerability in resistance entrepreneurs of the self: the development of management control since . accounting se défendre: une philosophie de la violence: zones key: cord- - fimkpd authors: kejriwal, mayank; zhou, peilin title: on detecting urgency in short crisis messages using minimal supervision and transfer learning date: - - journal: soc netw anal min doi: . /s - - - sha: doc_id: cord_uid: fimkpd humanitarian disasters have been on the rise in recent years due to the effects of climate change and socio-political situations such as the refugee crisis. technology can be used to best mobilize resources such as food and water in the event of a natural disaster, by semi-automatically flagging tweets and short messages as indicating an urgent need. the problem is challenging not just because of the sparseness of data in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but because of the varying characteristics of disasters in developing countries (making it difficult to train just one system) and the noise and quirks in social media. in this paper, we present a robust, low-supervision social media urgency system that adapts to arbitrary crises by leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data in an ensemble setting. the system is also able to adapt to new crises where an unlabeled background corpus may not be available yet by utilizing a simple and effective transfer learning methodology. experimentally, our transfer learning and low-supervision approaches are found to outperform viable baselines with high significance on myriad disaster datasets. the united nations office for the coordination of human affairs (ocha) reported that in , more than million people were in need of humanitarian assistance, with over billion dollars of unmet requirements. using technology to address this shortfall by assisting aid agencies and first responders to mobilize and send resources where they are needed the most is an important problem with the potential for widespread long-lasting social impact (palen and anderson ; sakaki et al. ) . to achieve this goal, the problem of semi-automatic urgency detection needs to be solved, especially on short message streams like social media that support real-time news feeds and micro-updates from citizens on the ground. we define an urgent message in the crisis context as one that expresses an actionable need that needs to be resolved in a short time frame. urgency detection is related to the problem of detecting relevant or informative tweets from a stream of tweets, not all of which are pertinent to the crisis at hand. urgency detection may be understood to be a very specific version of the relevance detection problem. similar to the latter, urgency detection also falls in a class of information retrieval (ir) problems, which attempt to detect and rank relevant messages and documents. however, there is an added dimension to urgency detection, since (as defined above) an actionable need, possibly implied, must be expressed in the tweet that could potentially be resolved if dealt with in a time-sensitive manner. for example, a message such as 'roof collapse in building on main street; multiple people trapped inside' may be deemed to be urgent; however, messages such as 'roof collapse due to storm at midnight; all people successfully evacuated' and 'avalanche in nepal caused four deaths' are relevant and may assist in studying the disaster further (or even mobilizing long-term response) but are not particularly urgent, either because it does not require immediate action or because the damage has already occurred. informativeness as a broad problem has undergone some study (olteanu et al. ) (see also sect. ), but to our knowledge, urgency as a specific ir area has not received the same kind of special attention despite its utility to first responders in times of crisis. put intuitively, solutions to the urgency detection problem can be framed in terms of probabilistic binary classification, a common machine learning paradigm involving other related tasks like sentiment analysis (pang et al. ) . although urgency detection has some similarity with sentiment analysis (both are subjective to a degree, since annotators can, and do, sometimes disagree), the core problem is different, since the goal is to flag messages that express urgency, which is almost always a negative or panic-ridden emotion. however, it can be difficult to distinguish urgencyrelated tweets from just negative tweets. we provide an illustrative set of real-world examples in table . in this paper, we present practical approaches for crisisspecific minimally supervised urgency detection on short message streams such as twitter. the presented approaches cover two scenarios that often emerge in the real world. in the first scenario, a small amount (a few hundred messages) of training data labeled as urgent or non-urgent is available, along with a copious 'unlabeled' background corpus. in the second scenario, similar data are available for a 'source' domain but not for the target domain (expressing a 'new crisis') for which the urgency detection needs to be deployed. in other words, as messages are streaming in for this new domain, investigators label a few samples, but cannot rely on the availability of a background corpus since urgency needs to be tagged in real time before the crisis has fully subsided. to accomplish this challenging goal, our approach relies on a simple and robust transfer learning methodology (pan and yang ) . experimental results on three real-world datasets and several performance metrics validate our methods. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first such paper investigating the problem of urgency detection in social media, both algorithmically and empirically, for arbitrary disasters in low-supervision and transfer learning settings. the rest of this paper is structured as follows. section describes some related work, sect. specifies our two research questions, and sect. describes our approaches in support of answering those questions. section covers the experiments, and sect. concludes the paper. crisis informatics is emerging as an important field for both data scientists and policy analysts. a good introduction to the field was provided in a recent science policy forum article (palen and anderson ) . the field draws on interdisciplinary strands of research, especially with respect to collecting, processing and analyzing real-world data. particularly, social media platforms like twitter have emerged as important channels ('social sensors ' sakaki et al. ) for situational awareness in support of crisis informatics. although situational awareness is a broad notion extending beyond crisis informatics (e.g., military situational awareness), urgency detection is a special kind of situational awareness that tends to arise mainly in the crisis domain. a direct application is to help first responders and aid agencies assess needs in crisis-stricken areas and mobilize resources effectively (i.e., where needs are most urgent). while the initial primary focus of situational awareness and sensing systems was on earthquakes (avvenuti et al. ; crooks et al. ) , the focus has diversified in recent years to disasters as diverse as floods, fire, and hurricanes (arthur et al. ; vieweg et al. ) . we note that twitter is by far the most monitored social media platform during crises (simon et al. ) due to the availability of the published data and its real-time nature. increasingly sophisticated approaches have been presented for data collection, including dynamic lexicons (olteanu et al. ) and analysis tools like tweettracker (kumar et al. ) . in the last few years, and even just the last few weeks (in the wake of the covid- ) crisis, a number of important works in network science have addressed crises. we only cite a few recent papers by way of reference. recently, (purohit et al. ) have described a method to rank and group social media requests for emergency services, a work that is particularly relevant since the outbreak of covid- . recent work in opinion mining (e.g., see keyvanpour et al. ) , especially using lexicons and machine learning in social media, is also relevant to our work. another extremely relevant work is a recent article that described a lightweight and multilingual framework for crisis information extraction from twitter data (interdonato et al. ). the research presented in that paper, though not resolving the problem of detecting urgent tweets, is compatible with our own work since it presents a relatively unsupervised and lightweight paradigm, and uses similar metrics. other papers have tried to look at specific crises, e.g., the work by (ladner et al. ) in analyzing tweets to determine the activeness of the syrian refugee crisis. another article has tried to do disaster damage assessment from twitter data using statistical features and 'informative words,' not dissimilar to our own lexicon-based approach (madichetty and sridevi ) . a last example is the work in (klein et al. ) , which describes a project called sabess that uses social network analysis for identifying reliable tweets and apply content analysis in order to summarize important 'emergency facts.' these six examples are among a sample of several pieces of work that have tried to use social media productively in helping to analyze or provide actionable intelligence during a crisis situation attesting to the ongoing importance of the problem. nlp methods have been widely used in extracting situational awareness from twitter, e.g., see the work by (verma et al. ) . another important line of work is in analyzing events other than natural disasters (such as mass convergence and disruption events), but still relevant to crisis informatics. for example, stabird et al. presented a collaborative filtering system for identifying on-the-ground 'twitterers' during mass disruptions (starbird et al. ) . similar techniques could be employed to supplement the work in this paper. in a similar vein, the crisistracker system (rogstadius et al. ) is another example of a system that uses crowdsourced social media curation for disaster awareness. the system does not specifically address the urgency detection problem, however. aidr is a system that is more closely aligned with the goal of using ai for better disaster response (imran et al. ) , but its goal is to classify messages into a set of user-defined categories of information such as 'needs' and 'damages.' in contrast, we consider needs at a higher-level of classification; namely, is it urgent or nonurgent? the outputs of aidr are compatible with our own since both systems provide actionable information to first responders. another important crowdsourcing tool that has been especially useful in working with sms messages is ushahidi, a project that was a grassroots effort that started in kenya and that was used initially to encourage kenyans to report incidents (especially, acts of violence) that they have witnessed. the website was very successful, and the model has since been replicated in other countries. just like the other systems considered in this section, we believe ushahidi's goals and technology are compatible with the capabilities presented herein. more generally, projects like crisislex, crisis computing and epic (empowering the public with information in crisis) have emerged as major efforts in the crisis informatics space due to two reasons: first, the abundance and fine granularity of social media data implies that mining such data during crises can lead to robust, real-time responses; second, the recognition that any technology that is thus developed must also address the inherent challenges (including problems of noise, scale and irrelevance) in working with such datasets. crisislex provides a repository of crisisrelated social media data and tools, including collections of crisis data and lexicons of crisis terms (olteanu et al. ) . it also includes tools to help users create their own collections and lexicons. in contrast, project epic, launched in and supported by a us national science foundation grant, is a multi-disciplinary effort involving several universities and languages with the goal of utilizing behavioral and technical knowledge of computer-mediated communication for better crisis study and emergency response. since its founding, project epic has led to several advances in the crisis informatics space; see, for example, palen et al. ; kogan et al. ; anderson et al. ; soden et al. ) . the work presented in this article is intended to be compatible with these efforts, although we are addressing a specific problem that was not addressed by any of the works cited above. we have released our model openly, and potentially, this released model could be integrated into some of the platforms described above. crowdsourcing could be used in lieu of (or even in addition to) the active learning framework presented as one of the solutions to the low supervision challenge described later in this article. it could also be used to provide more confidence in the annotations, since there is an inherent element of subjectivity when one is labeling a tweet as 'urgent.' note that most labeling problems in machine learning involve some subjectivity, and inter-annotation agreement has been found to be a concern in some cases. whether such concerns arise in the case of urgency detection is an unknown issue that does not fall within the scope of the presented work, but could be a valuable issue to address in future research. other lines of work relevant to this paper involve minimally supervised machine learning, representation learning and transfer learning. concerning minimally supervised machine learning (ml), in general, ml techniques where there are few, and in the case of zero-shot learning (palatucci et al. ; romera-paredes and torr ) , no observed instances for a label has been a popular research agenda for many years (uszkoreit et al. ; aggarwal and zhai ) . in addition to weak supervision approaches aggarwal and zhai ( ) , both semi-supervised and active learning have also been studied in great depth, with surveys provided by (zhu ; settles ). however, to the best of our knowledge, a successful systems-level conjunction of various minimally supervised ml techniques has not been achieved for the task of short-text urgency detection. such as empirical assessment is an important goal of this paper. due to the current renaissance of neural networks (sahlgren ), embedding and representation learning methods have become more popular due to the advent of fast and effective models like skip-gram. recent work has used such embeddings in numerous nlp and graph-theoretic applications (collobert et al. ) , including information extraction (kejriwal and szekely ) , named entity recognition (nadeau and sekine ) and entity linking (moro et al. ). the most well-known example is word vec (for words) (mikolov et al. ) , followed by similar models like paragraph vec (for multi-word text) and fasttext (dai et al. ; joulin et al. ) , the last two being most relevant for the work in this paper. for a recent evaluation study on representation learning for text, including potential problems, we refer the reader to (faruqui et al. ) . finally, transfer learning is a central agenda in this paper; an excellent survey of dominant techniques may be found in (pan and yang ) . more recent work on domain adaptation may be found in , with the work in (pedrood and purohit ) applied specifically to the disaster response problem. pedrood and purohit ( ) also applied transfer learning to the problem of mining help intent on twitter. other relevant work in crisis informatics, both in terms of defining 'actionable information' problems like urgency and need mining, and providing multimodal twitter datasets from natural disasters, may be found in (he et al. ; purohit et al. ) and . caragea et al., for example, present an approach to identifying informative messages in crises by using cnns (caragea et al. ) . other similar works include burel et al. ( ) burel and alani ( ), nguyen et al. ( ) , ( ) and ). an important difference between the class of papers cited and our own work is that we are not seeking to detect events in crisis situations, but are instead trying to assign urgency scores to sub-events that are happening in the aftermath of a disaster. the two problems are related in that better accuracy on event detection (for which these deep learning systems could be used to great effect) would lead to better identification of urgent events. however, urgency detection is a difficult problem in and of itself, beyond the broader problem of isolating informative events related to the disaster from an incoming stream of messages. some of the work above is multimodal (e.g., the paper by nguyen et al. ( ) ), which would be an interesting direction for future research for urgency detection (from images and videos, rather than just text). an alternate way of looking at the problem is as an 'event detection' problem, e.g., in (zheng et al. ) zheng et al. study semi-supervised event-related tweet identification which also tries to identify the urgent tweets related to earthquakes and floods. these works are complementary to the minimally supervised, low-resource setting in this paper. finally, we note that there has been some very recent work in few-shot models that use little to no training data and are similar to this paper in that regard , kruspe et al. ( ) . however, there are significant differences from our own work. for example, while consider a specific disaster situation (flood risk assessment in a particular city in india), kruspe et al. ( ) considers the earlier problem of detecting tweets that are relevant to the crisis itself, rather than the problem of assigning an urgency score to events that are detected. in general, we are not aware of a few-shot or minimally supervised technique that tackles urgency detection for the purposes of triage. page of we briefly enumerate below the research questions under consideration in this paper. while the first question captures the classical low-supervision setting, the second question introduces an element of transfer learning. how do we build an urgency detection system for a specific crisis when given as training input both a small number of manually labeled tweets and a large number of unlabeled tweets (background corpus) for that crisis? . low-supervision transfer learning for urgency detection: how do we build an urgency detection system for a specific crisis when given as training input a small number of manually labeled tweets for that crisis, as well as 'auxiliary' training input of (a small number of) manually labeled tweets and unlabeled background tweets from a different crisis? unlike the first scenario, the second scenario applies to a very short period (hours, or even minutes) after the crisis has struck; this is why a background corpus is not available (yet) for that crisis. instead, only a few manually labeled messages that have been acquired till that point are available. the approach for addressing the first research question is schematized in fig. . the first step in the workflow involves data preprocessing of the corpus. we follow a standard set fig. training workflow for urgency detection of preprocessing steps. first, we apply a tokenizer to split the sentences into lists of words and delete words with special prefixes (including @ and rt, which are particularly prevalent in twitter) and special suffixes. we also remove non-alphanumeric characters and convert the entire sentence to lowercase. next, similar to traditional machine learning pipelines, we extract a set of manual features for expressing prior human knowledge about urgency detection. our manual features are thus called because they are primarily keyword-based and binary, with keywords selected based on data exploration and domain knowledge. we consider ten such keywords, namely hit, help, kill, injure, strand, miss, urgent, die, need, food. if any of these keywords are present , the corresponding feature is set to . note that these keywords are associated with situations that are generally urgent, like people who have been attacked or affected by a crisis and need urgent help, but some are noisier than others . additionally, we also utilize an eleventh feature that checks to see if any numeric digits are present in the dataset. the rationale behind this feature is that, in more urgent tweets, numbers are often present, e.g., ' climbers are currently trapped on everest due to the avalanche.' in the experiments section, we show that the manual features are not adequate for addressing low-supervision urgency detection. besides, it is prudent to utilize the large number of unlabeled tweets (background corpus) if it serves a useful purpose in improving performance. to that end, we train a skip-gram based word embedding model based on the 'bag of tricks' model released by researchers from facebook in a package called fasttextjoulin et al. ( ) . the reason behind using fasttext, as opposed to alternate word embedding models like glove and word vec mikolov et al. ( ) , is several-fold. first, fasttext is very fast and easy to execute and is well maintained. second, preliminary analyses showed that it does quite well on social media tasks and because of the bag of tricks methodology (that uses character and sub-word embeddings to gracefully deal with oovs and misspellings), it is able to generalize much better. finally, fasttext's apis include a way to get sentence embeddings directly after training the word embedding model. by training fasttext on the background corpus, we are able to train a robust embedding model. in both the training and test phases, we use this model to get feature vectors for our messages besides the -dimensional manual feature vector described earlier. however, given that the background corpus might not be as extensive or representative as a 'general' corpus like wikipedia, we try to smooth the feature space by also using a pre-trained embedding model trained over the english wikipedia corpus and publicly available . the vectors obtained from this model have dimensions and were trained using skip gram with default parameters. as fig. illustrates, we use all of these feature sets to build an ensemble by combining local embedding features, manual features and wikipedia pre-trained word embedding features. the final score of the ensemble model is achieved by weighting the scores of the three linear regression models (one for each feature set), with weights adding to . the weights are set using a held-out validation set. when the urgency of a new 'test' message needs to be determined, we preprocess the message, extract all three feature sets and get the weighted score from the three regression models. if the score falls above a pre-determined threshold (again, determined through validation), then the message is flagged as urgent; otherwise, it is not. in this section, we describe our approach for 'urgency detection transfer' whereby a source dataset is given (similar to rq , where both an unlabeled background corpus and a small manually labeled training set are available) along with a target dataset (only a small manually labeled training set and no background corpus), representing the crisis under investigation. our approach for urgency transfer is captured in algorithm . many of the steps are similar to those for rq , including preprocessing, but there are some important differences; hence, we use pseudocode to express the workflow more precisely. for example, while the wiki embedding model remains the same as earlier, the manual features are obviously extracted over the target domain (since they do not require a background corpus) and importantly, the 'local' embedding model is now trained over the source domain corpus, since there is no target domain unlabeled background corpus available. to 'sync' the source and target domains, we consider a simple, but empirically effective, approach. rather than use just the labeled target domain data for training the three linear regression models, we combine the labeled training data from both the source and target domains, but the target training data are up-sampled to allow its properties to emerge more concretely in the training. the up-sampling margin is a parameter in algorithm ; in practice, a factor of (meaning the target labeled dataset is up-sampled by x) has been found to work well. to maximize training dataset utility, we do not use a validation set for classifier weight optimization, but consider the average of all three classifiers as the final score. comprises a collection of tweets collected in the aftermath of the nepal earthquake (also called the gorkha earthquake), while macedonia was not an actual disaster but a realistic live-action simulation (of a disaster) conduced in . train word embedding w s on text in d su ∪ d sl ; . up-sample d t by factor u and 'mix' with d sl to get expanded training set, d train : d tu ∪ d s l . extract manual feature set f m , source embedding feature set f s (using w s ), and wiki feature set f w (using w w ) from each message in d train ; . train linear regression models c s , c m and c w on f s , f m and f w resp. to get classifier; . return final classifier model c : avg score(c s , c m , c w ); for evaluating the approaches laid out in sect. , we consider three real-world datasets described in table . two of the datasets (nepal and macedonia) were made available to us through the darpa lorelei program , under which this project is funded. the nepal dataset macedonia toward the end of . macedonia does not have much noise and is 'information-dense,' but small. as such, it provides a good test of the transfer learning abilities of the approach presented. kerala describes tweets in the aftermath of the kerala floods in south india in and is the largest dataset, with many relevant and irrelevant tweets. we note that these datasets were collected independently by an external participant in the program and made available to all performers in the program for research. originally, all the raw messages for the datasets described in table were unlabeled, in that their urgency status was unknown. since the macedonia dataset only contains messages and is a small but information-dense dataset, we labeled all messages in macedonia as urgent or non-urgent (hence, there are no unlabeled messages in macedonia as given in table ). for the two other twitter-based datasets, we used active learning to compose a labeled set that would contain challenging examples. the basic process was to do data preprocessing as described in sect. , followed by training the local fasttext-based word embedding model on all messages in the corpus. next, we randomly labeled urgent and non-urgent tweets and fed them into a classifier. the classifier was applied on the rest of the unlabeled data to obtain 'ambiguous' examples (where the classifier's probability of the positive label was closest to %). we labeled another samples this way and continued to re-train and apply the classifier for two more iterations till we obtained a total of labeled points . note that the final labeled dataset may not be balanced in terms of urgent and non-urgent messages. table shows that nepal is roughly balanced, while kerala is imbalanced. we used stratified sampling therefore to split the labeled pool into training and testing datasets for evaluating the two research questions. we used % for training and % for testing. while the data cannot be made publicly available due to privacy concerns, we have released both the trained models and instructions for how to re-train the model on novel datasets as a docker container . we consider four standard metrics, namely accuracy, precision, recall and f-measure. accuracy is simply the ratio of correctly labeled messages to the size of test set, precision is the ratio of the true positives to the sum of true positives and false positives, recall is the ratio of true positives to the sum of true positives and false negatives, and finally, f-measure is the harmonic mean of precision and recall and captures their trade-off. datasets for investigating rq include nepal and kerala since macedonia does not have a large unlabeled corpus available, which is an assumption made per rq . recall that we used stratified random sampling to split the labeled data for each dataset into training ( %) and test ( %) sets. of the % training set, a further split was done, with % kept for 'training' and % for setting optimal weights for the linear classifiers trained in section iv. to account for the effects of randomness, each experiment was conducted across ten trials, with averages reported on all four metrics described previously for all baselines described below and our approach. among the different machine learning classifiers in the sklearn package tested, the linear regression was found to work well and used as the classifier of choice where applicable. we use six baselines to evaluate the approach for rq described in sect. . note that statistical significance is tested using the one-sided student's paired t-test by comparing the best system (on each metric) against the local baseline, which is a reasonable choice since in a high-supervision (or even normal-supervision) setting, this baseline has been found to perform quite well. significance at the % level is indicated with a *, at the % level with a ** and at the % level with a *** (table ) . the protocol for investigating rq is similar to the one for rq . we consider three baselines besides our own approach: target-only local (target local): this baseline is essentially the wiki-manual baseline described in the previous section and trained on the target dataset (i.e., no transfer learning is used, and no source is assumed). this baseline is used to illustrate the benefits of transfer learning, since this baseline sets the minimum benchmark that has to be bested by a transfer learning baseline. locally supervised with source embedding (embedding transform): similar to our approach on rq , manual features, source embeddings and pre-trained wikipedia embeddings are used to train three classifiers (but on the labeled target domain) and average their probabilities as the final result. while the local embeddings are trained on the source domain (since unlabeled data are not available for the target domain), all classifier training is always done on the target. locally supervised with up-sampling and source embedding (upsample): this baseline is the same as embedding transform, except to boost the power of the baseline, we upsample the labeled data (in the target dataset) by x. thus, this baseline tries to mitigate source bias and concept drift by giving more importance to the transfer domain. this baseline is also more appropriate for the case where the target training data are extremely limited. table illustrates the result for rq on the nepal and kerala datasets. the results illustrate the viability of urgency detection in low-supervision settings (with our approach yielding . % f-measure on nepal, at % significance compared to the local baseline), with different feature sets contributing differently to the four metrics. while the local embedding model can reduce precision, for example, it can help the system to improve and accuracy and recall. similarly, manual features reduce recall, but help the system to improve accuracy and precision (sometimes considerably). to truly address the urgency problem, therefore, a multipronged ensemble approach is justified, as also argued intuitively in section iv. we also note that the pre-trained wikipedia embedding model proved to be an important tool in improving the generalization ability of the model and not requiring any labeled or unlabeled data; in essence, serving as a free resource that could be helped to regularize and stabilize models that would otherwise be uncertain in lowsupervision settings. concerning transfer learning experiments (rq ), we note that source domain embedding model can improve the performance for target model, and upsampling has a generally positive effect (tables , , , ) . as expected, transfer learning performance (rq ) is generally lower compared to the low-supervision urgency detection on a single dataset (rq ). note that at least one of the transfer learning methods always bests the local baseline on all metrics (except precision in table , a result not found to be significant even at the % level). our approach shows a slight improvement over the upsampling baseline on two of the four scenarios (tables , ) by - . % on the f-measure metric, which shows the diminishing returns from mixing source and target labeled training data. further improving performance by high margins will require a radically new approach left for future work. this paper presented minimally supervised urgency detection approaches for short texts (such as tweets) in the aftermath of an arbitrary humanitarian crisis such as the nepal earthquake. the presented systems covered two scenarios that often emerge in the real world. in the first scenario, a small amount (a few hundred messages) of training data labeled as urgent or non-urgent is available, along with a copious background corpus. in the second scenario, similar data are available for a 'source' domain but not for the target domain (expressing a 'new crisis') for which the urgency detection needs to be deployed. as messages are streaming in for this new domain, investigators label a few samples, but cannot rely on the availability of a background corpus since urgency needs to be tagged in real time before the crisis has fully subsided. to accomplish this challenging goal, our approach relies on a simple but robust transfer learning methodology. experimental results on three real-world datasets validate our methods. some of the obvious avenues for future work are to improve the existing approach incrementally by (for example) adding more manual features and using more sophisticated local embedding model, possibly with more advanced tuning of hyperparameters like the learning rate and vector dimensionality. for improving transfer learning, we are considering using a deep learning model with priors to truly leverage the presence of a source, albeit one covering a domain that is different from the target. deep learning for transfer learning is still in its infancy in the machine learning community, e.g., a recent survey on deep transfer learning (tan et al. ) shows that most current research 'focuses on supervised learning, how to transfer knowledge in unsupervised or semi-supervised learning by deep neural network may attract more and more attention in the future'. in looking at the references they cite, the effectiveness of deep transfer learning does not seem to have been demonstrated thus far for difficult and irregular social media datasets however, we believe that this presents an opportunity for further study, especially as new and different crises like covid- continue to threaten our way of life at a global scale. flood risk assessment of srinagar city in jammu and kashmir, india domain adaptation with adversarial training and graph embeddings crisismmd: multimodal twitter datasets from natural disasters architectural implications of social media analytics in support of crisis informatics research social sensing of floods in the uk getting the query right: user interface design of analysis platforms for crisis research on semantics and deep learning for event detection in crisis situations crisis event extraction service (crees)-automatic detection and classification of crisis-related content on social media identifying informative messages in disaster events using convolutional neural networks natural language processing (almost) from scratch # earthquake: twitter as a distributed sensor system document embedding with paragraph vectors problems with evaluation of word embeddings using word similarity tasks the signals and noise: actionable information in improvised social media channels during a disaster a lightweight and multilingual framework for crisis information extraction from twitter data bag of tricks for efficient text classification information extraction in illicit web domains robust filtering of crisis-related tweets omlml: a helpful opinion mining method based on lexicon and machine learning in social networks detection and extracting of emergency knowledge from twitter streams think local, retweet global: retweeting by the geographically-vulnerable during hurricane sandy detecting event-related tweets by example using few-shot models tweettracker: an analysis tool for humanitarian and disaster relief activeness of syrian refugee crisis: an analysis of tweets disaster damage assessment from the tweets using the combination of statistical features and informative words distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality entity linking meets word 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for disaster awareness an embarrassingly simple approach to zero-shot learning earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors active learning literature survey socializing in emergencies?a review of the use of social media in emergency situations resilience-building and the crisis informatics agenda: lessons learned from open cities kathmandu learning from the crowd: collaborative filtering techniques for identifying on-the-ground twitterers during mass disruptions analysis and improvement of minimally supervised machine learning for relation extraction natural language processing to the rescue? extracting" situational awareness" tweets during mass emergency microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness semi-supervised event-related tweet identification with dynamic keyword generation the authors gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support and funding of the darpa lorelei program and our partner collaborators in providing detailed analysis. the views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of darpa, afrl, or the us government. conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. key: cord- -l p sxqu authors: branicki, layla j. title: covid‐ , ethics of care, and feminist crisis management date: - - journal: gend work organ doi: . /gwao. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: l p sxqu the covid‐ pandemic threatens both lives and livelihoods. to reduce the spread of the virus, governments have introduced crisis management interventions that include border closures, quarantines, strict social distancing, marshaling of essential workers and enforced homeworking. covid‐ measures are necessary to save the lives of some of the most vulnerable people within society, and yet in parallel they create a range of negative everyday effects for already marginalized people. likely unintended consequences of the management of the covid‐ crisis include elevated risk for workers in low‐paid, precarious, and care‐based employment, over‐representation of minority ethnic groups in case numbers and fatalities, and gendered barriers to work. drawing upon feminist ethics of care, i theorize a radical alternative to the normative assumptions of rationalist crisis management. rationalist approaches to crisis management are typified by utilitarian logics, masculine and militaristic language, and the belief that crises follow linear processes of signal detection, preparation/prevention, containment, recovery, and learning. by privileging the quantifiable ‐ resources and measurable outcomes ‐ such approaches tend to omit considerations of pre‐existing structural disadvantage. this paper contributes a new theorization of crisis management that is grounded in feminist ethics to provide a care‐based concern for all crisis affected people. how anthropogenic (human-made) crises can be transformed by feminism towards a sustainable future (e.g., see biesecker & von winterfeld, ) . in contrast, i focus on how institutions and organizations manage high impact, low probability exogenous crisis events (pearson & clair, ) . this paper responds to calls for organizational concepts of care to be "grounded in philosophies of care rather than business theories" (elley-brown & pringle, , p. ). by drawing on the ethics of care approach brought to prominence by carol gilligan ( ) , i propose that crisis management ought to be considered "…not as a math problem with humans but a narrative of relationships that extend over time…" (gilligan, , p. ) . gilligan ( , p. ) suggests that, "the ideal of care is thus an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone." this conceptualization emphasizes the importance of ongoing, interdependent relationships as sites of care (lawrence & maitlis, ; sevenhiujsen, ) and in so doing brings discourses of care from the background of crisis management to its foreground. held ( ) contends that recognizing the ethical centrality of care is transformative, because it shifts the normative focus towards issues that are often marginalized, makes these issues visible, and in so doing improves lives. i begin by reflecting on the complications and concerns that arise from the approaches adopted to managing the covid- pandemic, before unpacking the assumptions and dimensions of rationalist crisis management in more detail. next, drawing upon an ethics of care perspective i present a feminist alternative to rational crisis management, entailing a heightened appreciation of reciprocal care and relational needs and capacities within a feminist crisis management. finally, i outline the social change that could be provoked by a care-based approach to crisis management. as i write this paper, on the th of may , the novel influenza virus has infected , , people and caused , deaths (john hopkins, ) . troubling images of the effects of the virusbody bags, overwhelmed medical facilities and hazmat suits -have become "matter out of place" (douglas, ) . in italy, the us and the uk, the number of severe covid- cases (i.e. those requiring hospitalization) has exceeded the capacity of hospitals, medical personnel, and healthcare supply chains to respond. the threat posed by a novel influenza outbreak was well known. in the years prior to , there had been four major influenza outbreaks: "spanish influenza" in / , severe acute respiratory syndrome (sars) in , "swine influenza" (h n ) in , and middle east respiratory syndrome (mers) since (cdc, a (cdc, , b . "spanish flu" is estimated to have caused between - million deaths worldwide (cdc, ), casting a long institutional shadow and becoming totemic of the risks posed by a runaway novel influenza outbreak. references to the outbreak still appear in national risk registers globally (e.g. uk national risk register, ). more recently, sars and mers were largely contained through traditional public health interventions, such as, quarantine and contact checking (bell, ) , and h n spread to a large population but produced only moderately severe illness (who, ) . despite prior knowledge about the threat posed by a novel influenza outbreak the people, health systems, businesses and legislative authorities of many countries were insufficiently prepared for covid- . the management of the covid- crisis has led to unprecedented impacts. in a first wave of crisis measures, the virus was constructed as a threat from the outside. countries such as australia closed their borders to visitors and introduced enforced quarantines for returning citizens and residents. as evidence of community transmission emerged, a second wave of crisis measures were introduced. many countries issued social distancing guidance that recommended staying six feet from other people (cdc, april , ) and/ or introduced "shelter-in-place" orders that required residents to only leave their homes for "essential activities" (city and county of san francisco, ) . together, these measures transformed daily life. covid- policies originated from government but were translated into action by organizations. employers made decisions about whether, when, and how to move to remote working. although some of us were required to stay at home, essential workerssuch as cleaners, doctors, nurses, porters, supermarket cashiers, and delivery drivers -were asked to stay at work. as more people self-isolated, businesses struggled to remain financially viable and millions of employees were furloughed or lost their jobs. globally, it is estimated that covid- will lead to the loss of up to million full-time jobs (international labor organization, ) . the world was waking up to a new reality triggered by a large-scale public health crisis and worsened by the threat posed to the economic system. how a crisis is managed can result in unintended consequences (grabowski and roberts, ) . evidence began to emerge that people from already structurally disadvantaged groups were being disproportionately impacted by both covid- and the measures put in place to control its spread. an american study found that structural factorshealthcare access, density of household, and unemploymenthad contributed to counties with a higher composition of african americans experiencing greater rates of both covid- infection and death (barron-lopez, ). in england, people are more likely to die from covid- if they live in a socio-economically deprived area (pidd, barr & mohdin, ) . those in low-paid care-based employment, disproportionately women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds, also face disproportionate risks as the essentialness of their roles and precarity of their employment reduces their ability to stay at home. a recent united nations report ( , p. ) highlights that "the impacts of covid- are exacerbated for women and girls simply by virtue of their sex." the report goes on to say that due to covid- women are facing compounded economic impacts due to the disproportionately precarious nature of their work, adverse health effects due to the redirection of resources, greater levels of unpaid work, and increased exposure to gender-based violence. covid- is likely to have long-run impacts on workplace equality, as women are potentially excluded from a shrinking job market and/ or experience stalled career progression. alessandra minello ( , paragraph ), speaking about academia in an article in nature, argued "in the long run, these changes in productivity will affect careers. those with fewer care duties are aiming for the stars." crises, and crisis management, have become the subject of a growing and increasingly prominent strand of management research and practice (see bundy et al., ; williams et al., for reviews), with major strands of research oriented to organizational preparation for, mitigation of, and learning from crisis events (what bundy et al., call the "internal" approach), and communication with, and management of, stakeholders affected by crisis events (referred to as the "external" approach by bundy et al., ) . in order to critically reflect on and surface the often implicit ethical assumptions inherent in mainstream crisis management research and practice, i focus on the classic and highly cited contributions of mitroff and colleagues (mitroff, ; mitroff, shrivastava, & udwadia, ; pearson & mitroff, ) because they continue to exert considerable influence on crisis management research and practice, and exemplify the rational crisis management paradigm. the principal ethical orientation of classical crisis management is ego-istic, calculative, and broadly utilitarian. mitroff ( ) characterizes the central purpose of crisis management as addressing the following question: "is there a rational way to select which potential crises an organization should prepare for, and which can be 'safely' ignored?" (mitroff, , p. ), noting that "the trick is to think about potential crises as logically as you think about other business issues" (op. cit. p. ). the objective of crisis management is principally to protect and sustain the organization, and only secondarily to protect and advance the interests of other stakeholders. crises are conceived of as "disasters precipitated by people, organizational structures, economics, and/or technology that cause extensive damage to human life and natural and social environments. they inevitably debilitate both the financial structure and the reputation of a large organization" (mitroff et al., , p. ) . the discourse of crisis management emphasizes the calculation of impacts in financial, legal or human terms, and implicit in classic crisis management is a boundedly rational calculus, in which a focal organization is seen as weighing the costs and benefits associated with planning for and mitigating specific crisis events. for example, mitroff et al. ( , p. ) cite the following motivating insight regarding the incidence and impacts of crises, "the number of product-injury lawsuits terminating in million-dollar awards has increased dramatically in the past decade: in fewer than , product injury lawsuits were filed in u.s. courts; by , the number had jumped to , ". central to most models of crisis management (for classic conceptualization see pearson and mitroff, ) are the assumptions of linear multi-stage crisis processes, and clearly delineated, bounded, and relatively brief, crisis events. crisis management encompasses: (i) the pre-crisis phase which focuses on detecting/ identifying/ anticipating and preparing for crises, to reduce the likelihood of a crisis emerging, and to ensure that the organization is as prepared as it can be; (ii) the during crisis phase, where the organization is concerned to manage/respond to the crisis and to mitigate its effects; and (iii) the post-crisis phase, emphasizing recovery and repair, in which the organization takes measures to return to "normal" and to learn from a given event in the hope that it isn't repeated in future. together, the stages of crisis management emphasize the agency of firms at various points in the crisis management process, and the capacity of firms to avoid, mitigate, and learn from crises. inherent to crisis management is a philosophy of crises being "manageable", even to the point that "organizations do create the crises they face in the special sense that the kinds of early warning, prevention, damage limitation, learning and recovery mechanisms they institute are one of the most important factors affecting what kinds of crises occur" (mitroff, , p. ) . this extends to deploying discourse that characterizes adverse events that affect an organization as being the result of various "failures", "faults", "deficiencies" or as a reflection of "poor company culture" (mitroff et al., , p. ) . regarding how rational crisis management conceives of the management of crises, the emphasis lies with the need to develop a specialist organizational function charged with managing crises. as pearson and mitroff ( ) put it, crisis management requires that, an appropriate infrastructure must be in place…permanent crisis management teams must be established…membership on such teams includes all functions and specialities required to deal with crises, such as the ceo and top executives from operations, legal, human resources, management information systems, security and safety, environmental health, public affairs, and finance ( , p. ). thus, the emphasis is on coordination via a specialist managerial function which leverages the full authority and hierarchical power of the organization's senior management. before embarking on a discussion of ethics of care and how it might inform the theory and practice of crisis management, it is important to recognize that conceptualizations of crisis appear frequently in feminist works and to distinguish crisis as understood in feminist writing from crisis management as a specific activity undertaken within institutions and organizations in society. feminist writing in sociology and political science has problematized a focus on specific crises, in favor of provoking a broader recognition of the endemic presence and wider societal significance of notions of crisis. for example, otto ( ) highlights that "crises have become an everyday technique of global governance, authorizing the operation of a more hegemonic legal order and reducing (though not eliminating) the space for political contestation and critique" (otto, , p. ) . similarly, griffin ( ) critiques "neo-liberalism's gendered techniques of crisis governance, facilitating 'effective' crisis management while censoring challenges to the hierarchies, shock tactics and austerity measures on which crisis governance depends for its smooth operation" (griffin, , p. ) . these accounts analyze crisis management at a societal level of analysis, placing an emphasis on how crises are leveraged to reinforce existing hegemonies. a smaller body of work addresses how individuals (primarily women) draw upon care to overcome the challenges of large-scale crisis. for example, meliou's ( ) qualitative study examines how female entrepreneurs in greece drew upon familial resources of care during periods of financial crisis and austerity. in contrast, my concern in this paper is to explore the value of directing a feminist lens, in the specific form of ethics of care, to the management of specific crises at individual, organizational, and societal levels. thus, notwithstanding the broader role of crisis in societal governance, my concern lies with feminizing the practices of crisis management at multiple levels of analysis. in a conversation between inbar livnat and paula-irene villa braslavsky ( ) that appeared in gender, work & organization's feminist frontiers a theme emerged regarding who or what "takes care of care" (p. ). the conversation progressed to consider the "crisis of care" in capitalist economic settings, and the ways in which "everyday caring have to be taken care of by somebody, somehow; an arrangement, an organization, by other people." (livnat & braslavsky, , p. ) . these notions of care as solution, and care as liability, resonate with how the covid crisis has been managed. notions of care are frequently invoked in relation to the management of the covid- crisis. we are asked to take care for ourselves and each other by socially isolating. if we are parents, we are asked to care for children and their education as schools close. if we have been lucky enough to keep our jobs, we are expected to continue to care about our work and our productivity. we are even asked to care for the economy, by getting back to working and spending as normal. the management of covid- has led to unbalanced expectations about who is doing caring (minello, ) , masculinized ideals of competitive performance (ivancheva, & keating, ) , and for some a loss of access to care as resources are diverted towards the covid crisis. these care-based discourses are problematic because they lack both (a) an intimate understanding of what it means to take, give, and receive care (sevenhuijsen, ) , and (b) reflexivity regarding the likely gendered and other inequitable consequences of mobilizing care instrumentally towards managing the covid crisis. carol gilligan's ( ) [first published in , edition referred to throughout] conceptualization of "ethic of care" provides a basis to illuminate the normative dimensions of crisis management and to feminize its focal concerns and praxis. gilligan recasts moral problems as "problems of human relations" ( , p. xix) and the approach to moral reasoning and action is therefore notably experiential. the ethic of care emerges from gilligan's ( , p. ) search "…to identify in the feminine experience and construction of social reality a distinctive voice, recognizable in the different perspective it brings to bear on the construction and resolution of moral problems." drawing on psychological interviewing techniques gilligan was able to demonstrate that girls and women tended to speak differently about morality when compared to boys and men. jake's judgments reflect the logic of the justice approach. her incipient awareness of the "method of truth," the central tenet of nonviolent conflict resolution, and her belief in the restorative activity of care, lead her to see the actors in the dilemma arrayed not as opponents in a contest of rights but as members of a network of relationships whose continuation they all depend upon. (gilligan, , p. ). gilligan ( ) therefore came to identify a paradox in that "…the very traits that traditionally have defined the "goodness" of women, their care for and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral development" ( , p. ). gilligan's research ( gilligan's research ( , subsequently challenged kohlberg's "so-called objective" ( , p. xviii) position on the stages of moral judgment development ( , p. ) , reflecting that rather than being "…seen as a developmental deficiency, this bias appears to reflect a different social and moral understanding" ( , p. ). gilligan went on to suggest, ( , p. ). in the two excerpts above, gilligan introduces four central tenants of her theory: non-violent conflict resolution, contextual and narrative understanding, the activity of care, and networks of relationships and responsibilities. nonviolence is central in gilligan's writing, because "the injunction against hurting" enables a conceptualization of care that asserts "moral equality between the self and other and to include both in the compass of care" ( , p. ) . moral equivalence between care for others and care for oneself is important because care is 'easy to sentimentalize and privatize' (tronto, , p. ) . held ( , p. ) clarifies that "neither is it satisfactory to think of caring relationships as merely what rational individuals may choose to care about as long as they give priority to universal, impartial, moral principles." care in this sense is not a virtuous disposition (i.e. women behaving selflessly), but rather both a value and a practice (held, ; tronto, ) that is pursued relationally and results in enhancing the other's well-being (noddings, ) . care is also dependent upon context because it "is distorted if abstracted from particular contexts and specific relations" (fitzgerald, , p. ). relationships, with others and larger society, are important in gilligan's ( ) work because they are "sites of care" (lawrence & maitlis, , p. ) . our individual lives are only possible because of our caring relationships with other people (sevenhuijsen, ) . critical to gilligan's ( , p. ) theory is the "rediscovery of connection, in the realization that self and other are interdependent and that life, however valuable in itself, can only be sustained by care in relationships." at the same time, ethics of care also reflect "the tie between relationship and responsibility" (gilligan, , p. ) and therefore "concern about how to fulfill conflicting responsibilities to different people." in gilligan's ( ) approach, human relationships are not only socially but politically situated. as held ( , p. ) explains, "turning everyone into a liberal individual leaves no one adequately attentive to relationships between persons, whether they be caring relations within the family or social relations holding communities together." ethics of care challenge notions of neo-liberal individualism and resist the centrality of justice ethics and the primacy of rationality (gilligan, ) . ethics of care and justice are often presented as alternative moral positions (gilligan, ; lawrence & maitlis, ) , however care can be understood as "the wider moral framework into which justice should be fitted" (held, , p. ). the ethic of care perspective therefore critiques the norm of independent citizenship that is common to neo-liberal modes of governing and organizing and the centrality of individualism in many moral theories (sevenhuijsen, ) . ethics of care have been applied in a wide range of management research settings. for example, nicholson and kurucz ( ) examine the potential for ethics of care to illuminate the ethical dimensions of relational leadership for sustainability. they conceptualized an ethical framework for relational leadership for sustainability that distinguishes between "what we do" ("caring for" and "caring about") and "who we are" (i.e. primacy of relationships, complexity in context, mutual wellbeing focus, engaging whole person) (nicholson & kurucz, , p. ) . lawrence and maitlis's ( ) conceptualize "how an ethic of care might be enacted inside organizations among their members" (p. ) to understand organizations as potential "sites of care and compassion" (p. ). they propose that the care enacted through discursive practices and everyday working relationships increases organizational members' feelings of support and connection. carmeli, brammer, gomes, and tarba ( , p. ) also apply gilligan's work at the organizational level of analysis to empirically examine "why and how an organizational eoc fosters employee involvement in sustainability-related behaviors at work." they found that organizations that exhibited care towards their employees foster higher levels of employee satisfaction and involvement in sustainability-related activities. the ethics of care perspective therefore enabled carmeli et al. ( ) to provide a micro-foundational understanding of organizational sustainability. a further relevant literature develops ethics of care in the context of public policy. stensöta ( , p. ) suggests that while ethics of care were traditionally applied in carebased settings (e.g. nursing) that they are now being used "to dissect the current arrangement of care provision (or rather non-care provision) in policies and administrative procedures." a new strand of literature has thus developed on normative public policy. for example, fitzgerald ( ) seeks to reimagine government through an application of ethics of care (understood as critical political theory), by creating a thought experiment about the creation of a "department of care" which provokes reconsideration of "the norms underpinning governments and institutions more broadly" (p. ). building on the work of tronto ( ) , sevenhuijsen's ( ) application of ethics of care to dutch social policy provokes discussion of four key dimensions of care. caring about stands for the recognition that there is a need for care. the corresponding value is attentiveness. essential to good care is the ability and willingness to put ourselves in a situation where we understand the needs and the perspectives of others. taking care of consists of taking the necessary steps in the care situation in question. 'taking care of' is based on the willingness and capacity to take responsibility that 'something' is done to provide for the need in question. caregiving, the third dimension, consists of carrying out actual caring activities that ensure that the caring needs are met. this supposes that people have the competence and the resources for care-giving in accordance with what is needed in the situation concerned. care receiving refers to the interaction between the care-giver and care recipient: for the caring process to succeed it is important that there is room for responsiveness in order to assure that the care receiver responds well to the care received. (sevenhuijsen, , p. ) . these granular notions of types of care are important because they enable a conceptual distinction to between the carrying out care (caregiving) which is often associated with carebased contexts, with recognition of the need for care (caring about), taking responsibility for care (taking care), and the connection between the care giver and care recipient (care receiving). a multifaceted consideration of care highlights two complications. first, as sevenhuijsen ( ) notes, ethics of care requires consideration of trust in the context of care-based relations. sevenhuijsen ( , p. ) observes that if the care given and received becomes one-sided it exhibits an "asymmetrical reciprocity" which can lead to adverse effects such as paternalism, social divisions, or unhelpful role signification (e.g. "rescuer and victim"). second, jordan ( , p. ) , writing about "caring masculinity/ies" in the context of fathers' rights groups, raises a parallel point about the mobilization of care towards the notions or protection / protector. jordan's ( ) work therefore highlights the importance of context within which narrative of care emerge and the complexities they provoke. phillips and willatt ( , p. ) also recognize the possibility for "regressive and paternalistic care practices to emerge in relation to the raced, classed and gendered structures." trust therefore matters to care, because without openness about vulnerability and an empathetic quality of understanding towards others, connection is eroded (sevenhuijsen, ) . having considered the basic tenets of ethics of care, i now return to crisis management, and to more formally comparing rational crisis management literature with an alternative feminist crisis management informed by an ethic of care. writing at the individual level of analysis, gilligan ( ) makes two key observations about personal crisis: (a) that crisis reveals the "predicament of human relationships" (p. ), and (b) that crisis can create "a return to a missed opportunity for growth" ( , p. ) . the link between crisis, caring (including self-care), social relationships and responsibility is also applicable to crisis at other levels of analysis. prior work by simola ( ) considers ethics of justice and care in the context of corporate crisis management. simola's ( ) research is therefore primarily concerned with corporate responses to organizational crises, rather than a feminist perspective on crisis management. this is demonstrated in the article's conclusion, where simola ( , p. ) suggests that, first, further consideration should be given to the circumstances under which one approach might be more appropriate than the other approach. is there a particular set of circumstances under which corporate leaders might be well advised to use either an ethic of justice or an ethic of care? choosing between ethical framings depending upon their utility seems somewhat problematic in relation to how both ethics of care and justice are theorized (e.g., see held, ) . i present my comparison of the rational approach to crisis management and feminist crisis management in table one, below. table one contrasts the two alternative approaches to crisis management along several dimensions that relate to the underlying assumptions and understanding of crisis that each approach embodies. table one encapsulates the key dimensions on which the alternative approaches differ. regarding the underlying assumptions of crisis management, perhaps the principal points of divergence between the two approaches relate to their underlying logicsrespectively calculative and relationaland their assumptions regarding the objectives of crisis managementrespectively, a return to "normal" versus individual and social transformation. rational crisis management emphasizes a weighing of costs and benefits and implementing practices that return a society or organization to its original state following a crisis. in contrast, a feminist crisis management might emphasize a relational logic grounded in preserving and extending relationships through a crisis through caring and seeing opportunities for a crisis to lead to a social transformation. perhaps the most significant points of difference in the two approaches' understandings of crises relate to assumptions about temporality and boundedness. rational crisis management tends to see crises as episodes in isolationboth in the sense of isolation from broader contexts in which they arise, and in the sense of separation from other, related, crises that co-occur. in this view, crises are temporally and socially specific. in contrast, feminist crisis management would see crises as multiple and contextualized, as enduring and overlapping phenomena that are enmeshed and embedded within each other to a significant extent. crises compound and confound each other within webs of relationships informed by care. covid- has shown the limitations of rational crisis management, and the need for an alternative approach grounded in different assumptions and oriented to distinct outcomes. lawrence and maitlis ( ) propose that ethic of care scholarship tends to focus more on theory than action, and in this paper i highlight the practical advantages that could flow from thinking and acting differently about crisis, especially socially disruptive extreme crises like covid- that have multiple effects on societies globally. my analysis of crisis management is explicitly feminist in orientation and transformational in objective. i draw upon gilligan's ethic of care as a theoretical viewpoint to "provide a language" for crisis management which could "…transform the social norms that impact on individual behavior and effect institutional and organizational arrangements" (pullen, lewis, & ozkazanc-pan, , p. ) . to do this, i contrast rational crisis management and an alternative perspective that is concerned with caring about, taking care, care giving and care receiving (sevenhuijsen, ) in the context of large-scale crisis events like covid- . i have proposed that feminist crisis management rests on fundamentally different foundations, embodies distinct behaviors, policies, and perspectives, seeks alternative ends, and follows alternative processes. coronavirus: prime minister jacinda ardern's full covid- speech a new study shows just how badly black americans have been hit by covid- public health interventions and sars spread dangerous knowledge: the political, personal, and epistemological promise of feminist research in management and organization studies notion of multiple crisis and feminist perspectives on social contract why resilience managers aren't resilient, and what human resource management can do about it this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved crises and crisis management: integration, interpretation, and research development an organizational ethic of care and employee involvement in sustainability-related behaviors: a social identity perspective history of flu pandemic h n pandemic (h n pdm virus) middle east respiratory syndrome (mers) social distancing, quarantine, and isolation city and county of san francisco, department of public health johnson says this is war stop calling coronavirus pandemic a 'war'. the conversation purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo sorge, heideggerian ethic of care: creating more caring organizations reimagining government with the ethics of care: a department of care in a different voice: women's conceptions of self and of morality in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development joining the resistance risk mitigation in large-scale systems: lessons from high reliability organizations crisis, austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective oxford: oup. international labor organization ( ) ilo: covid- causes devastating losses in working hours and employment precarity, gender and care in the neoliberal academy covid- dashboard by the center for systems science and engineering masculinizing care? gender, ethics of care, and fathers' rights groups care and possibility: enacting an ethic of care through narrative practice who takes care of 'care'? gender family as a eudaimonic bubble: women entrepreneurs mobilizing resources of care during persistent financial crisis and austerity. gender, work & organization the pandemic and the female academic crisis management: cutting through the confusion effective crisis management national risk register of civil emergencies - edition relational leadership for sustainability: building an ethical framework from the moral theory of 'ethics of care' this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education remapping crisis through a feminist lens reframing crisis management from crisis prone to crisis prepared: a framework for crisis management embodiment, care and practice in a community kitchen calls for health funding to be prioritised as poor bear brunt of covid- a critical moment: years of gender public ethics of care: a general public ethics the case against waging 'war' on the coronavirus the place of care: the relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social policy ethics of justice and care in corporate crisis management this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care policy brief: the impact of covid- on women organizational response to adversity: fusing crisis management and resilience research streams extreme events, organizations and the politics of strategic decision making statement to the press by who director-general dr margaret chan who director-general's opening remarks at the media briefing on covid- - this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved key: cord- -kirtoaf authors: misztal-okońska, patrycja; goniewicz, krzysztof; hertelendy, attila j.; khorram-manesh, amir; al-wathinani, ahmed; alhazmi, riyadh a.; goniewicz, mariusz title: how medical studies in poland prepare future healthcare managers for crises and disasters: results of a pilot study date: - - journal: healthcare (basel) doi: . /healthcare sha: doc_id: cord_uid: kirtoaf in the event of a crisis, rapid and effective assistance for victims is essential, and in many cases, medical assistance is required. to manage the situation efficiently, it is necessary to have a proactive management system in place that ensures professional assistance to victims and the safety of medical personnel. we evaluated the perceptions of students and graduates in public health studies at the medical university of lublin, poland, concerning their preparation and management skills for crises such as the covid- pandemic. this pilot study was conducted in march ; we employed an online survey with an anonymous questionnaire that was addressed to students and graduates with an educational focus in healthcare organization and management. the study involved people, including men and women. among the respondents, . % currently worked in a healthcare facility and only . % of them had participated in training related to preparation for emergencies and disasters in their current workplace. the respondents rated their workplaces’ preparedness for the covid- pandemic at four points. a significant number of respondents stated that if they had to manage a public health emergency, they would not be able to manage the situation correctly and not be able to predict its development. managers of healthcare organizations should have the knowledge and skills to manage crises. it would be advisable for them to have been formally educated in public health or healthcare administration. in every healthcare facility, it is essential that training and practice of performing medical procedures in full personal protective equipment (ppe) be provided. healthcare facilities must implement regular training combined with practical live scenario exercises to prepare for future crises. rapid economic development combined with urbanization has led to significant human encroachment on the natural environment; this has exacerbated climate change, increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events that often result in morbidity and mortality [ , ] . the covid- pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in healthcare systems globally. it is imperative to review what healthcare managers are currently being taught to determine gaps in the curriculum to better prepare healthcare leaders for future disasters and pandemics. when crises occur, rapid and effective assistance to victims is essential. medical assistance is often necessary, and a significant number of victims require coordinated treatment and transport to healthcare facilities. the work of medical facilities cannot be carried out without an appropriate management system. therefore, managers of healthcare facilities must have the knowledge and skills needed to manage crises effectively [ ] . in poland, public health is the only field of study that prepares potential healthcare managers. in recent years, this field of study has not attracted much interest as it does not have a standardized accredited curriculum or a defined set of competencies for healthcare administrators. in many high-, middle-, and low-income countries, schools of public health have developed competency-based curriculums focused on healthcare administration [ ] [ ] [ ] . the healthcare institutions law states that a healthcare facility manager is a person who possesses higher education and has proper knowledge and experience to perform managerial duties [ ] . the presented requirements indicate that the function of a manager in a healthcare facility can be performed by a person who does not necessarily have prior medical or managerial education specific to healthcare. management of healthcare organizations is complex. unlike most industries, unfamiliarity with healthcare operations may result in the director of a healthcare facility being unable to assess the risk of an epidemic or a disaster objectively. in turn, this may result in inadequate management and, consequently, may contribute to negative consequences for patients and staff of the medical facility. the aim of this study was to evaluate the perceptions of students and graduates in public health studies at the medical university of lublin, poland, concerning their preparation and management skills for crises such as the covid- pandemic. the standard of the polish medical training in may raise some concerns about the preparation of future medical staff in management of mass casualties resulting from major incidents and disasters, as well as an overwhelming amount of sick patients that can stress a healthcare system due to a pandemic. for example, the subject of disaster medicine is only included in the medical rescue course. the preparation of medical students for crises and infectious diseases at the medical university of lublin's department of public health is presented in table . public health studies are not regulated in poland and therefore do not have a specific standard of education. it is the only field of study in poland that prepares potential healthcare managers. graduates from the medical university of lublin's department of public health curriculum are taught epidemiology, infectious diseases, and crisis management. during the students' first level of study (undergraduate studies), they are taught the following subjects: basics of epidemiology, virology, basics of sanitary-epidemiological monitoring, epidemiology, environmental epidemiology, basics of nosocomial infections, and crisis management. at the second level of studies (postgraduate studies), the subjects are disaster medicine, general epidemiology, nosocomial infections, and other threats. the current covid- pandemic necessitated revisiting the current preparedness in the polish medical facilities and among medical professionals for the next event. thus, we aimed to investigate the readiness level among trained professionals in public health with organizational knowledge in management of healthcare services. we conducted an extensive analysis of the literature. the findings were analyzed using the nominal group technique (ngt) and the acquired knowledge was sorted using categorization and knowledge mapping to develop a questionnaire. using instant messaging, the respondents had the opportunity to contact and ask questions if necessary. people working in healthcare facilities used this option to clarify the problems they encounter at work connected with the pandemic. an extensive analysis of literature and then the arrangement of the acquired knowledge through categorization and knowledge mapping led to the development of a research tool in the form of a questionnaire. a qualitative method was used to verify the research tool, and the questionnaire was tested on a sample of students to check whether the respondents understood the questions it contained. this group was then excluded from the pilot study and their answers were not included in the final analysis. in the pilot study, an original questionnaire was available in online versions, which contained closed questions and questions that were open and allowed the respondents to express their opinions freely. statistical and frequency analyses, and review of basic descriptive statistics were conducted using ibm spss statistics version . the study was not a medical experiment and legally did not require the approval of the bioethics committee. the study involved students and graduates, including . % ( subjects) men and . % ( subjects) women. among the respondents, . % ( subjects) currently worked in a healthcare facility and . % (students) did not. among people working in healthcare facilities, only . % ( subjects) in the present workplace had participated in preparation training related for mass-casualty incidents and disasters (e.g., epidemics). in comparison, . % ( subjects) had not undergone such training. the respondents evaluated their workplaces' preparedness for pandemics on a likert scale from to . table presents the subjective evaluations of the respondents. most respondents rated the preparedness of their workplaces at three points ( %) and five points ( %), followed by % for six points, and % for zero points or one point. no one rated the preparedness of their workplace at the maximum of points. the highest rating was seven points. however, some of the respondents worked in hospitals. in contrast, others worked in healthcare facilities such as outpatient clinics or primary care practices. in these workplaces, the risk is lower and advanced life-saving equipment, such as respirators, is not required in the workplace. as many as . % ( subjects) of the respondents acknowledged that healthcare managers should receive education and training concerning the management of healthcare facilities during emergencies and disasters, only . % (two subjects) were of the opposite opinion. respondents were asked what kind of training should be included in the curriculum to develop competences and skills in crisis and disaster management. similar responses were grouped thematically. most often, respondents reported the need for practical classes and simulation of crisis events ( . %), and some reported that these should be theoretical classes ( . %). they proposed classes on the organization of the work of personnel and human resources management during crisis events ( . %). they indicated that there should be more classes on the subject of crisis management ( . %). furthermore, . % of respondents reported the need for ppe training (learning to put on and take off suits, goggles, visors, and protective masks). the respondents reported that they never had the chance to put on or see others put on ppe during their studies, so they did not know how to use it properly and safely at work. they reported significant difficulties in performing patient care and the need to practice procedures in full ppe beforehand, as the range of movement in such situations is limited. only two of the respondents expressed that they did not feel the need for any additional training. respondent answers are presented in table . the majority of the respondents ( subjects) responded that healthcare management students should educate themselves about climate change and its impact on health. in the second question, where respondents were free to express their opinion by submitting an answer, they were asked to state their concerns if they did not have sufficient skills or competencies to manage crises as a current/future healthcare facility manager. the respondents ( %) were most often afraid that they would not be able to cope with the situation and that they would not be able to predict the development of the situation and make the right decisions. nearly % of the respondents were worried about the lack of experience in such situations, and % were afraid that the competencies they had would not be sufficient to manage a crisis. all of the respondents' answers are presented in table . table . concerns the respondents felt about their ability to manage a crisis independently. answers % concerns about the proper functioning of the facility . % ability to allocate responsibilities well among employees . % the stress of endangering the life and health of a large group of patients and staff . % fears that their competencies are not insufficient . % fear that i will not be able to cope, that i will not anticipate the development of the situation, and the fear of chaos . % concerns about the lack of experience in such situations . % concern about the lack of specific procedures . % fear of responsibility and fear that i will make a mistake . % the fear that i will become infected with an infectious disease our findings suggested that among the respondents who worked in healthcare facilities, as many as . % had not received any training related to preparation for crises and disaster. similar research was conducted in yemen in , where healthcare workers were surveyed using a questionnaire. the analysis showed that the general state of knowledge of yemeni healthcare workers was insufficient in relation to crisis and disaster preparedness. a total of % of all respondents had not participated in any disaster preparedness courses, and . % of respondents had not participated in any practical exercises on crisis and disaster preparedness. additionally, managers seemed insufficiently qualified in emergency planning and crisis management, as their level of knowledge was lower than that of the medical personnel [ ] . in poland, the first diagnosed covid- patient (patient zero) was recorded on march, [ ] , whereas in china, according to official sources, the first patient was diagnosed on december, [ ] . in poland, during those three months before the coronavirus was diagnosed and reported, people had started to buy mainly protective masks and thermometers. large quantities of ppe (e.g., protective masks, gloves, thermometers) were exported to china, as there was a huge demand in this region. due to this, a few weeks before the coronavirus's appearance in poland, the amount of available ppe was insufficient. the biggest problem turned out to be the lack of ppe for medical personnel. until then, hospitals that rarely had to deal with highly infectious diseases did not have a sufficient quantity of protective clothing, visors, or appropriate protective facemasks at their disposal. managers of healthcare facilities had not anticipated such a problem, most of them had no supplies, and the situation was a complete surprise to them. respondents working in the hospitals reported that visitors of hospitalized persons were taking protective gloves and disinfectant supplies out of the wards. a mandatory total ban on visits was introduced shortly after the first covid- patient's appearance, which brought an end to this practice. donors and community members came to the rescue, sewing masks and making homemade visors in a spontaneous gesture of help. an important problem, which the respondents pointed out, was the training on ppe use. wax and christian outlined the correct use of ppe for medical personnel, including guidelines on how to safely remove their protective clothing to not expose themselves to secondary contamination. the researchers stressed the need to define clear protocols for cleaning ppe for subsequent use [ ] . according to the united states occupational safety and health administration (osha), it is essential for medical personnel to know the requirements for a given emergency [ ] . these guidelines should serve as a basis for national protocol development in the standardized use and training of ppe in medical facilities. most respondents, when asked to express their concerns about being able to manage a healthcare facility in a crisis situation independently, indicated a lack of experience in such circumstances, a fear that their competencies would prove insufficient, and an inability to predict the development of the situation and to manage it properly. management in crises is difficult, stressful, and raises several concerns. unfortunately, a review of polish and foreign literature on the management of healthcare facilities in crises has shown that there is a paucity of published research in this area [ , ] . a significant problem reported by the respondents is the need for training in operations management and human resource management. nowadays, in a healthcare organization's preparation for crises and disaster, the human factor plays a vital role. a shortage of medical personnel, high workloads, an increasing amount of documentation, and the fulfillment of several necessary formalities make medical practitioners reluctant to participate in training [ ] . complacency also plays a contributing factor during a prolonged period of relative calm when no unexpected events occur. in this case, it can be difficult to expect staff to familiarize themselves with the documentation, standard procedures, and plans of mass-casualty incidents and disasters. in most cases, it consists of a quick, cursory review. in times of prolonged periods of security, people do not feel an imminent threat and, therefore, do not have the strong motivation to prepare for a crisis. the situation related to the spread of covid- is unprecedented and difficult for all managers [ ] . the creation of hospital crisis management plans, evacuation plans, or handling of mass-casualty incidents, and the obligation for staff to become familiar with them, is an important step toward preparedness for these events. however, the lack of such plans can lead to chaos and complete disorientation. the effects of disasters can be mitigated by adopting risk management measures and appropriate planning, education, and training measures [ ] . the most frequently mentioned need identified by students and graduates in public health was additional training ( . %), which was based on practical exercises and simulations of real crises. the foundation for effective healthcare operations management should consist of regularly scheduled exercises and training in the procedures related to crises. skills rehearsed in practice improve preparedness and confidence, allowing one to verify knowledge and analyze the effectiveness of their actions, all of which cannot be achieved using only theoretical training or assumptions [ , ] . a significant number of respondents, . % ( persons), felt that healthcare management students should receive education about climate change and its impact on health. many threats result from global climate change. these threats are caused mainly by rapidly developing industries and excessive human expansion into nature, raising the probability of various types of types of extreme weather events and new diseases, including infectious diseases and cancers, and their occurrence is increasing. the world health organization (who) identified climate change impacts on health and epidemics as the most urgent health challenges in the next decade [ ] . medical and management personnel should be prepared for the possibility of an event that will exceed the local response capacity and lead to excessive morbidity and mortality [ ] [ ] [ ] . the approach to crisis management issues adopted by the manager of a healthcare facility is an essential and decisive aspect. if a healthcare facility's management approaches the problem of preparedness for crisis incidents seriously, it can force the employees to read the documentation and participate in practical exercises [ ] . this can be achieved by organizing several rounds of practical exercises so that all employees can participate. in addition, management should carry out tests to check employees' knowledge of plans and procedures for dealing with mass-casualty incidents and disasters, evacuation of buildings, and dealing with infectious diseases. if the head of the healthcare facility treats these issues as important, hospital staff will address them in the same manner [ ] . healthcare organizations are challenging to manage on a day to day basis. a crisis event creates additional operational issues that require specialized knowledge and skillsets to manage effectively and safely. poland should consider increasing healthcare threats to its citizens as a catalyst to introduce new a curriculum in healthcare administration. at the undergraduate and graduate levels, programs can be created that develop competencies in disaster management and crisis leadership to prepare the workforce to manage future healthcare emergencies resulting from epidemics, natural disasters, or man-made events such as terrorism [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] . the main limitation of this study was that only one university was surveyed. however, it was a pilot study that revealed gaps in training and education related to crisis and disaster management in the public health studies curriculum, one that is preparing students to manage and lead healthcare organizations. to date, no similar research has been conducted in poland. this research forms the basis for planned future studies with more respondents and a more comprehensive approach aimed to determine the preparedness and training of healthcare administrators currently managing healthcare facilities in poland. another limitation is the low number of respondents in total. however, as a pilot mixed methods study, the outcome indicates a need for further studies with a larger population. managers of healthcare facilities should have the knowledge and skills to manage crises. they should have an education in public health with core courses in healthcare management. the public health curriculum should also develop competency-based programs that build knowledge and skillsets for managers to deal with emergencies and disasters effectively. training in ppe use and exercises in performing medical procedures in full protective clothing should be mandatory in all medical facilities. in poland, regular tabletop and live scenario exercises must be an integral operational consideration for all healthcare facilities to remain prepared for future crisis management of major incidents, disasters, and public health emergencies is complex and requires a multidisciplinary approach. future managers of healthcare facilities should be taught public health and medical knowledge but also be trained to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate effectively during a crisis. developing a competency-based healthcare management program together with regular tabletops and scenario-based simulation training should be considered to facilitate and improve the future polish preparedness for disasters and pandemics. natural 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cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia in wuhan, china: a descriptive study neurosurgery in an infant with covid- coronavirus and the eyes. the possibilities of infection transmission, clinical symptoms and prophylaxis in the ophthalmic office impact of the doctor deficit on hospital management in poland: a mixed-method study current response and management decisions of the european union to the covid- outbreak: a review postgraduate education in disaster health and medicine. front evacuation from healthcare facilities in poland: legal preparedness and preparation validated ways of improving the ability of decision-making in emergencies; results from a literature review population health adaptation approaches to the increasing severity and frequency of weather-related disasters resulting from our changing climate: a literature review and application to charleston, south carolina air pollution, climate change, and health disaster early warning systems: the potential role and limitations of emerging text and data messaging mitigation capabilities tools and checklists used for the evaluation of hospital disaster preparedness: a systematic review cognizant healthcare logistics management: ensuring resilience during crisis covid- epidemic in the middle province of northern italy: impact, logistics, and strategy in the first line hospital how should u.s. hospitals prepare for coronavirus disease (covid- )? disaster preparedness and professional competence among healthcare providers: pilot study results bioterrorism preparedness and response in poland: prevention, surveillance, and mitigation planning the authors declare no conflict of interest. key: cord- -sbyu yuc authors: farrokhi, aydin; shirazi, farid; hajli, nick; tajvidi, mina title: using artificial intelligence to detect crisis related to events: decision making in b b by artificial intelligence date: - - journal: industrial marketing management doi: . /j.indmarman. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: sbyu yuc artificial intelligence (ai) could be an important foundation of competitive advantage in the market for firms. as such, firms use ai to achieve deep market engagement when the firm's data are employed to make informed decisions. this study examines the role of computer-mediated ai agents in detecting crises related to events in a firm. a crisis threatens organizational performance; therefore, a data-driven strategy will result in an efficient and timely reflection, which increases the success of crisis management. the study extends the situational crisis communication theory (scct) and attribution theory frameworks built on big data and machine learning capabilities for early detection of crises in the market. this research proposes a structural model composed of a statistical and sentimental big data analytics approach. the findings of our empirical research suggest that knowledge extracted from day-to-day data communications such as email communications of a firm can lead to the sensing of critical events related to business activities. to test our model, we use a publicly available dataset containing , items belonging to users, mostly senior managers of enron during through the crisis. the findings suggest that the model is plausible in the early detection of enron's critical events, which can support decision making in the market. audiences based on their past crises and particularly crises that their audiences are aware of. scct suggests and emphasizes the usage of communication to maintain and withhold the reputation of an organization (coombs, . the effectiveness of actions taken in a recovery process is directly related to the quality of meaningful insights extracted from collected data. in many cases, there are stakeholders other than managers who can benefit from the knowledge obtained from a situational assessment. for example, stakeholders have a vested interest in understanding the impact of strategies implemented (ki & nekmat, ) . by using real-time data, management can keep the situation under control from becoming a full-fledged, blown up crisis. this is important for two reasons. firstly, sensing a crisis in its early stages will help the management team to improve an organization's preparedness of a crisis. secondly, during a crisis, it is crucial to have effective and productive communication. comprehensive knowledge and a good understanding of the nature of a crisis will help in planning, controlling, and leading the situation. this pioneering study is among the first studies that endeavour to use email data and sentiment analysis for extracting meaningful information that helps early detection of a crisis in an organization. our framework is designed based on cognitive architecture through the implementation of artificial agents. we developed a critical event detection analysis model (ceda) that extends scct and attribution theories based on ai and big data analytics. to expand on the proposed methodology, the next section of this paper is an overview of the current literature for existing methods developed on popular networks. facebook, twitter, rrs feeds, email, and others might have very different functionalities; however, knowledge built on one is fairly applicable to all, particularly in textual analysis. sections and of this study describe our methodology for discovering the change in trends in enron emails and provides an overview of its results. section focuses on big data and data mining, while section presents our approach to language-based sentiment analysis. in section , we discuss textual and sentimental analyses, whereas section underlines the theory of artificial intelligence rational agents. in section , we discuss the hypotheses and methodology used in this study, while section examines the combined effect of frequency analysis and sentiment analysis in detecting enron's crises. section concludes this study. faulkner ( ) defines crisis or disaster as "a triggering event, which is so significant that it challenges the existing structure, routine operation, or survival of the organization" (p. ). in this context, an organizational crisis, according to , is defined as the perception of an unpredictable event that threatens important expectancies of stakeholders that can severely impact an organization's performance and generate adverse outcomes. such outcomes, according to faulkner ( ) , can be considered as a shock at both the individual and collective levels, where the severity of the unexpected nature of the event may cause not only stress in the community but also a sense of helplessness and disorientation among others (faulkner, ) . our emotional response and confidence may affect our behaviour in assisting and aiding others (willner & smith, ) . willner and smith ( ) claim that weiner's attribution theory weiner ( weiner ( , indicates that our emotional response to any behaviour is directly related to our attributions to the source of the individual's behaviour and our confidence in whether the behaviour can be changed. jeong ( ) claims that, according to the weiner's attribution-action model, the tendency of the actor being punished by others increases if the actor who caused the problem was perceived to hold a responsibility to a dilemma (higher internal and lower external attributions), as opposed to when the higher external and lower internal attributions are made. scct, along with the attribution theory, offer guidelines to assess the reputational threat based on different crisis clusters and stakeholders' perceptions. thus, they provide frameworks for crisis communication while taking into account the organization's situation and the publics' emotions (ott & theunissen, ) . scct specifies ten crisis types or frames namely: natural disaster, rumour, product tampering, workplace violence, challenges, technical error product recall, technical-error accident, human-error product recall, human error accident, and organizational misdeed, while the attributions of crisis responsibility have been used to group the various crisis types into three main clusters of (a) victim, (b) accidental, and (c) intentional . the victim cluster, for example, contains crisis types that produce very low attributions of crisis responsibility (e.g. natural disasters) and represents a mild reputational threat, while the intentional cluster yields to strong attributions of crisis responsibility and represents a severe reputational threat . anderson and schram ( ) describe "crisis informatics" and "disaster informatics" as a field of research that focuses on the use of information and communication technologies during emergencies. the adoption and application of data science to address the managerial issues of business are still developing, yet the results have already been seen to be transformative for the organizations that have adopted it. in corporate finance, data science is widely used to help management handle tasks such as fraud detection and credit risk assessment (wu, chen, & olson, ) . inputs from internal and external events increase a firm's agility and help top management to make more informed decisions and mitigate risks involved (vosoughi, roy, & aral, ) . big data and the capability of its analytics in interpreting real-time events benefit management (baesens, bapna, marsden, vanthienen, & zhao, ) . as an example, the report released by towers watson in reveals the importance of extracted knowledge in the supervision of the energy and enablement of employees for effective management (global workforce study, ) . situational awareness is the knowledge that can be integrated from accessible data and used to assess a situation to manage it (sarter & woods, ) . in fast-paced business environments, improving situational awareness helps both managers and other stakeholders to improve performance through their early engagement (nofi, ) . regarding crises, the content created and shared on an organization's data network, either authored by the organization's actors or external participants, becomes crucial. the first step to analyze the situation is to collect the organization's network data. for large organizations, the main concerns with the data are scale (volume), streaming (velocity), forms (variety), and uncertainty (veracity). for example, in social media, users share information to establish connections with others (treem & leonardi, ) . content generated by users in social media has surpassed zeta bytes of data (reinsel, gantz, & rydning, ) . social media, web analytics, and media semantics have been effective marketing tools to increase brand awareness, loyalty, engagement, sales, influencing customer satisfaction, and conversation related to business-to-business (b b) and business-to-customer (b c) interactions (agnihotri, dingus, hu, & krush, ; järvinen & taiminen, ; mehmet & clarke, ; siamagka, christodoulides, michaelidou, & valvi, ; swani, brownb, & milne, ) . even though using social media to increase situational awareness is not new (watson & rodrigues, ), yet, organizational and technical changes must happen before social media can be fully embraced (plotnick & hiltz, ) . data are essential inputs to make better and informed decisions (waller & fawcett, ) . data mining is the process of finding a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - meaningful patterns in data to extract valuable knowledge that leads to making informed decisions (witten, frank, hall, & pal, ) . during the development of a crisis, data stored in structured and unstructured datasets in conjunction with various real-time data streams (feeds from social media or sensors) can empower management and stakeholders to understand its severity and intensity. some of these data are streaming data, and analyzing them requires processing a sheer volume of data. storing massive data is costly, and, in many cases, the data itself may not have the same value in the future. for example, the processing of detected earthquake signals at a later point in time might not be useful for detecting an earthquake. in the past, an organization's primary data were captured through business transactions and processes. resources such as enterprise resource planning (erp), human resource, financial and audit reporting, performance monitoring, customer relationship management (crm), and supply chain management (scm) commonly used for sourcing internal data. recently, data from social networks and other external sources are considered new sources of data. data from external sources can be categorized into two groups. the first category includes data that is directly related to companies, such as online social media content and mobile devices. the volume of capturing business and personal interaction data (such as social media and mobile data) is increasing tremendously. the second category includes data that may not be directly related to an organization; however, it can affect the organization's performance. for example, collecting socio-cultural data can help to improve business processes by making decisions more aligned with the current cultural changes. also, knowledge derived from arbitrary data resources can be equally valuable to organizations. for instance, internet-connected devices form a massively connected network of things called the "internet-of-things" (iot), which produces tremendous amounts of data that are used for planning and managing smart cities. likewise, public data from data lakes or governments can be harvested (baesens et al., ) and used for data aggregation. big data refers to datasets with colossal volume, variety, and velocity (witten et al., ) . big data has been around since early and has become a powerful resource for many businesses (white, ) . business analytical tools are evolving, and they can now produce real business value (jans, lybaert, & vanhoof, ) . decision-making and forecasting models are the main areas of any business analytics (candi et al., ; wu et al., ) . data harvested from multiple sources are fed into sophisticated algorithms equipped with advanced statistics, econometrics, and machine learning sciences (hiebert, ) . these data will be used to uncover useful hidden patterns and relations that would help to make informed decisions (dubey, gunasekaran, childe, blome, & papadopoulos, ; holton, ). in the event of a crisis, bad decisions are often costly and result in the misappropriation of resources, which hurts both organizations and society. a scientific analysis of the crisis based on the knowledge obtained from the event helps to carefully craft a strategy to manage the situation (baesens et al., ) . in business settings, email can be a very important source of data for crisis management. over and above recorded messages, it exceptionally contains rich data such as timestamps, details of the sequence of interactions, and users' intention that emerge in the organizational context (bülow, lee, & panteli, ) . closely related to email source, rss feeds are the next source of data for crisis management. thelwall and stuart ( ) collected web feeds from rss databases, and google searches to build a database of daily lists of postings. then they generated a time-series graph of frequently used words that show a significant increase in usage during the monitoring period. for example, rss web feeds are effective in extracting words with a sudden increase in usage in posts relevant to crises. facebook is another effective communication platform, with more than one billion active users. a positive or negative message about an organization can spread in a matter of a minute. the observation showed that all social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, and others) influence individual perceptions of an organization more than the transported messages. in other words, the medium is more important than the message itself (ki & nekmat, ) . regarding the effectiveness of collecting real-time data, baesens et al. ( ) , points out a well-known japanese barbershop chain that has sensors in all its stores' chairs. sensors detect available seats for a haircut, duration of each haircut, and its total processing time. the collected information is used for the firm's online appointment system, performance analyses, and resource allocations. another prominent source of online network data is blogs, which a verity of topics including social, technical, political, and so forth are covered from the bloggers' perspectives. generally, blogs are entirely personal and typically reflect bloggers' perceptions of the conversed topic (thelwall & stuart, ) . blogs can be influential based on what has been reported, the way it has been reported, the source that reports it, and the politics of the event. table shows a summary of the data sources described above and the related studies. digital media, such as social media networks, websites, and blogs, are used as one of the popular platforms for managing crises in organizations. the social network facilitates real-time communication between individuals and groups, and they become a common platform for engaging stakeholders in communication discourse . despite the availability of cloud collaboration platforms and increased popularity of social media, by far, email remains the most common medium used for communication in work settings (bülow et al., ; jung & lyytinen, ) . one of the drawbacks of social media data analysis is that a large number of messages must be monitored from the social network to find quantitative evidence during a crisis (thelwall & stuart, ) . extracting accurate data from the mining of unstructured data is not feasible; however, one of the important features in big data, triangulation, allows validating data. as such, the majority of human interaction data offers an opportunity to generate new insights (baesens et al., ) . investing in data quality at first may be considered difficult and expensive, yet the economic return of high-quality data is substantial. according to baesens et al. ( ) , even small gains in data quality improve analytical performance. during the crisis, big data can be used by organizations to create a favourable impression or to lead a selected group or audience towards a corrective action (hiebert, ) . thelwall and stuart ( ) shows rss web feeds are effective in extracting words with a sudden increase in usage in posts relevant to crises. facebook ki and nekmat ( ) the medium is more important than the message itself, in influencing an individual's perceptions of an organization. blogs thelwall and stuart ( ) covers verity of topics including social, technical, and political perspectives from the bloggers a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - obtaining relevant data is an integral part of predictive analysis modelling, which requires extra attention. therefore, it becomes a challenging process. one way to target the relevant data is through the detection of frequently occurring items shared in the communication network (baesens et al., ) . kavanaugh et al. ( ) grouped posted messages in three categories. the first group consists of people who appear to be complaining at first; however, they represent opportunities for organizations. these messages that are mostly posted directly on an organization's facebook or twitter pages ask for improvement in a product or service. also, in this group, positive messages can be spread through online media channels to praise how well the organization resolved the problem. the second group is commentators. they are not asking for resolution; instead, they are venting to spread negative words on an organization's online media channels. they might go even further by posting complaint messages on other organization's blogs or newsletters. the third group is the ugly one. this group intends to harm the organization's reputation by spreading harmful content. the goal is to spread negative word-of-mouth. competitors can further harm an organization's reputation by taking advantage of these negative contents by greatly exaggerating the flaws (kavanaugh et al., ) . in , british airways' customer paid for a promoted tweet to maximize spreading his complaint about his lost luggage. his tweet got over , impressions in the first six hours of its posting (grégoire, salle, & tripp, ) . in online networks, comments charged by anger spread out quickly (fan, zhao, chen, & xu, ) . in "spite-driven" comments, in which a customer may go beyond negating the organization's reputation, going viral is more likely. (grégoire et al., ) . novelty encourages information sharing. since novelty provides more information to understand events better, it becomes more valuable to have and to share. therefore, novel news tends to be shared more often (vosoughi et al., ) . however, there are differences in why and how widely the true or false news spreads. true stories stimulate feelings of joy or sadness and are more likely to be anticipated. false stories, on the other hand, cause fear, disgust, and stronger emotional feelings. the empirical study of vosoughi et al. ( ) shows that people tend to react and reflect on false stories with higher rates. a list of , twitter hashtags' emotion weighted and classified into eight distinctive groups. the original classification of emotions to anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust is plutchik's ( ) work, and it is based on the national research council canada (nrc) lexicon, which contains approximately , english words. there are differences between news and rumours. news is an asserted claim, and rumours are shared claims among people. on platforms such as twitter, a rumour can easily be started by a topic being shared, and since it triggers emotions (fear or disgust), it might be retweeted many times. fake news also falls in this category. it is defined as a willful distortion of the truth. a study by vosoughi et al. ( ) showed that even though people who had spread false news had fewer followers and spent less time on twitter, their false news spread farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the active users who share the truth. in this regard, false news and rumours are overwhelmingly more novel than real news. to measure the novelty degree of true and false tweets, they compared the distributions of the experimental guided tweets for days. false news can create many disadvantages for businesses, including misallocation of resources, misalignment of business strategies, and even loss of reputation (vosoughi et al., ) . each developing crisis scenario is unique; however, high profile crises usually get more attention and are contingent. this is due to users' comments and replies that facilitate and accelerate the news to go viral (ki & nekmat, ) . the contingency starts when participants start responding to one another's replies. for a message to be contingent, the role of participants needs to be interchangeable (sundar, kalyanaraman, & brown, ) . contributors' perception of closeness to the subject heightens their engagement during crisis communication (ki & nekmat, ) . another reason for people's participation in conversations is their desire to connect to a community that shares similar opinions. this provides them with the opportunity to express their views about a crisis. it has been consistently seen that people would rather re-publish another user's message than start a new, standalone message. for example, in retweeting, users build upon another's commentary and opinion to develop their credibility on communicating their insights on a subject. ki and nekmat's ( ) research indicated that the majority of messages posted on an organization's facebook wall during crises consisted of individual responses built upon the messages of others. the impact of the internet in delivering news of crisis events is significant (bucher, ) . for example, in january , a group of young people in france used a youtube channel to express their reason for switching from the orange cell provider to free. the video went viral, and it was viewed more than . million times, almost overnight. in another case, fedex suffered from negative publicity from someone posting a youtube video showing a fedex driver throwing a package containing a fragile item. this video was viewed over half a million times by the time fedex had responded on the third day of its posting. still, three years after its posting, the video was viewed over nine million times (grégoire et al., ) . in another example, grégoire et al. ( ) reported on a young girl who was offended when she received a t-shirt as a gift in , and she decided to share her opinion on the company's facebook page. the page at the time had . million followers. her comment received hundreds of responses and then hit twitter. one of the goals of managing a crisis event is to communicate information effectively to the relevant audience in time. this helps to lessen the adversarial impact on business performance and hopefully promote a positive image. some social media channels, such as instagram, pinterest, and flickr, might be more effective in spreading word-of-mouth than traditional communication channels. in many instances, it is more convenient for customers to reach directly into organizations through online media channels (tweeting or sending an email) as opposed to buying a newspaper to read an article about the company or sending paper mails (grégoire et al., ) . it is not always easy to understand the intention behind the communicated messages since the people on the other side of the crisis communication may have a different agenda (thelwall & stuart, ) . statistical methods have been used and are still being used for identifying and classifying text. antweiler and frank ( ) used statistical algorithms to code the messages collected through yahoo finance as bullish, bearish, or neither (antweiler & frank, ) ; however, language-based analysis has recently become more predominant to use (li, ) . araque, corcuera-platas, sánchez-rada, and iglesias ( ) argue that with the increasing power of social networks, many natural language processing (nlp) tasks and applications are being used in order to analyze this massive information processing. one of the domains in which language-based analysis has been employed is in examining the content of corporate financial reports and executive conference calls (larcker & zakolyukina, ) . fraud-monitoring software sifts through employees' emails or documents to detect a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - corporate misconduct (purda & skillicorn, ) . the text analytics-based sentiment analysis involves a very largescale data collection, filtering, classification, and clustering aspects of data mining technologies that handle the application of text analytics (sharda, delan, & turban, ) . by tapping into data sources, such as tweets, facebook posts, online communities, emails, weblogs, chat rooms, and other search engines, sentiment analytics offers marketers, decision-makers, and other stakeholders, insights about the opinions in the text collection (sharda et al., ) . essentially, the language-based analysis approach is based on earlier psychology and linguistic work. this approach has resulted in building lists of words ("bags of words") in which each group of words is associated with a particular sentiment. for example, it can examine a text for an indication of anger, anxiety, and negation (larcker & zakolyukina, ) or negativity, optimism, and deceptiveness (li, ) . the sender's psychological state of mind is affected by the individual's assessment of the surroundings. the individuals' reflection of their surroundings can be seen in their writings and shared information patterns (yates & paquette, ) . sentiment analysis is the process of classifying texts (araque et al., ) into positive, negative, or neutral. the process is designed to detect the underlying hidden expression in the text. in business, sentiment analysis is used in various domains, including customer need to change analysis, marketing, and performance enhancement (ragini, rubesh, & bhaskar, ) . in this context, sentiment analysis is used to determine a text's subjectivity and its polarity (ragini et al., ) . various studies have used language-based analysis to assess situations during times of disasters; however, this study found it more useful when the language-based analysis was combined with statistical analysis. privacy is a major for the current digital age (hajli, shirazi, tajvidi, & huda, ) . individuals' social background, cultural expectations, and norms shape their privacy expectations (nissenbaum, ). xu, jiang, wang, yuan, and ren ( ) argue that although the information discovered by data mining can be precious to many applications, there is an increasing concern about the other side of the coin, namely the privacy threats posed by data mining. previous research argues social media platforms, such as facebook, twitter, and apps location services to track their users, may pose major privacy concerns (nadeem, juntunen, shirazi, & hajli, ; wang, tajvidi, lin, & hajli, ) . another example is related to mobile devices in which some systems allow the installed apps to track and use the contextual information of users in order to adapt to the new conditions in an automated fashion. privacy protection in contextually aware processes relies on procedures that address the anonymity and confidentiality of personal information (shirazi & iqbal, ) . shirazi and iqbal ( ) studied privacy concerns with communicated messages in the context of both internal and external organizational networks. shin and choi ( ) argue that despite the fact that big data technology has the potential to provide powerful competitive advantages, private and public organizations are struggling to establish effective governance and privacy in connection with big data initiatives. in the distributed privacy preservation model, as noted by aggarwal and yu ( ) , a new aggregated dataset that does not include any personally identifiable information can be obtained from the source records. aggregating extracted anonymous data from organizations' employees' emails, for example, provides the required personal information privacy protection for all parties. in one behavioral aspect of organizational data usage, the management and employees tend to change their attitudes towards using an organization's data when they understand what data are accessed during the data collection process and what it has been used for (díaz, rowshankish, & saleh, ) . díaz et al. ( ) argue that building a data-driven culture in organizations will ease and enhance the actual data analytical efforts. building awareness among the employees has to be a part of an organization's data privacy strategy while holding them accountable and responsible for protecting all organizational data, especially private personal information. as such, before we generated a table of text extracted from emails, the dataset was anonymized in such a way that identifiers (e.g., name, employee id, and phone number), quasi-identifiers (attributes that can be linked to external data), and other sensitive attributes were removed from the dataset (ghinita, tao, & kalnis, ; mamede, baptista, & dias, ) . roux-dufort ( ) argues that the traditional perception of crises used to narrow down and only include exceptional circumstances. the scandal of financial domains (enron, worldcom), significant terrorist attacks ( / ), supernatural events, such as hurricanes and so forth are only a handful of examples of those events. as such, research and studies in the field of crisis management gain their legitimacy through the process of investigation and from the potency of the investigated incidents. therefore, the more important the incident, the more licit the investigation will be because the ambiguity of the content urges the need to obtain knowledge (roux-dufort, ) . this study aims to develop a big data analytics framework by deploying artificial intelligence rational agents generated by r/python programming language capable of collecting data from different sources, such as emails, tweets, facebook, weblogs, online communities, databases, and documents, among others (structured, semistructured, and unstructured data). r/python programming with their extensive libraries, frameworks and extensions offers excellent tools and capabilities for solving complex projects involving artificial intelligence and big data. these capabilities include but are not limited to artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, natural language processing and object detection and tracking (joshi, ) . to test our model, we focused on existing emails extracted during the enron crisis. as a consequence, this pioneering project is, in fact, among the first studies that endeavour to use sentiment analysis for extracting meaningful information that helps early detection of a crisis in an organization. our framework is designed based on cognitive architecture through the implementation of artificial agents. research on artificial intelligence (ai) agents has long focused on developing mechanisms to enhance how agents sense, keep a record of and interact with their environment (castelfranchi, ; elliott & brzezinski, ; rousseau & hayes-roth, ) , the so-called "intelligent systems" (russell, ) . recent studies of cognitive architectures indicate both abstract models of cognition, in natural and artificial agents, and the software-based models (lieto, bhatt, oltramari, & vernon, ) for designing systems that do the right things intelligently (russell, ) . this approach encompasses considering the intelligent entity as an agent, that is to say, a system that senses its environment and acts upon it. in this context, an agent is defined by the mapping from percept sequences to actions that the agent instantiates. we define rational agents as agents whose actions make sense for the information possessed by the agent and its goals. kreiner ( a, b) argue that rationality refers to the purposefulness and forward-looking character of an agent. the theoretical foundation of perfect rationality within ai is well defined by newell's paper on "knowledge level" (newell, ) . knowledge-level analysis of ai systems relies on an assumption of perfect rationality. it can be used to establish an upper bound on the performance of any possible system by establishing what a perfectly rational agent would do given the same knowledge (russell, ) . within the context of ai, russell ( ) argues that intelligence is strongly related to the capacity for successful behaviour-the so-called "agent-based" view of ai. the candidates for formal definitions of intelligence (dean, aloimonos, & allen, ; russell, ; russell & a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - norvig, simon, ; wellman, ) of a system s are perfect rationality (the capacity to generate maximally successful behaviour); calculative rationality (the capacity to compute the perfectly rational decision); metalevel rationality (the capacity to select the optimal combination of computation sequence-plus-action); and bounded optimality (the capacity to generate maximally successful behaviour given the available information and resources). the metalevel rationality applied in this study is, in fact, a knowledge-level analysis or perfect rationality associated with computing action. in other words, while perfect rationality is difficult to achieve, considering the limitation of computing settings, the metalevel rationality of ai has been deployed in this study (see fig. ). russell ( ) is the capacity to select the optimal combination of computation sequence-plus-action under the constraint that the computation must select the action. metalevel architecture splits the agent into two (or more) notional parts. the object-level carries out computations concerned with the application domain, such as projecting the results of physical actions, computing the utility of certain security states, and so on. the metalevel is a type of decision-making process whose application domain consists of the object-level computations themselves, the computational objects, and the states that they affect. the sheer volume of corporate archival and real-time data requires a change in traditional crisis analysis approaches that use static, archival data and manual analysis. as mentioned by vera-baquero, colomo-palacios, and molloy ( ), real-time access to business performance information is critical for corporations to run a competitive business and respond to the ever-changing business environment. with machine learning, ai automation and big data analysis, as deployed in our critical event detection analysis (ceda) method depicted in fig. , can build patterns of positive and negative (abnormal) words to monitor emerging trends proactively before a potential crisis occurs. in this context, the machine learning algorithms help us anticipate when employees (or stakeholders) are experiencing issues, and allow crisis managers to potentially address the problem and control how incidents are communicated and presented to the world . previous studies have considered the use of network data for situational awareness; however, to the authors' knowledge, none have specifically investigated or analyzed the use of email communication by major organizations for situational assessment of a developing crisis. in our method, we used email data to detect critical events. email usage is fairly well distributed across all types of organizations in developed nations. in a conducted survey, it has been shown that the two most used channels for communication in organizations are an intranet ( %) and email ( %). by and large, email is the most common channel for communication in organizations (moynihan & hathi, ) . this study further examines trends in email communication displayed by the organizations' email users to provide a more comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of email meta-data for organizational crisis detection by asking the following question: : what are the impacts of the sudden change in email communication trends and sentiment of the day on identifying a developing crisis in an organization? rq . : how an artificial agent's meta rationality can identify a sudden change in the email communication trend? (capacity to select the optimal combination of computation sequence-plus-action under the constraint that the computation must select the action). our approach seeks to improve detecting a crisis in organizations in its early stages. emails, when analyzed effectively, can allow management to make informed decisions to avoid a potential crisis. as argued by (ulmer et al., ) , crisis communication is growing as a field of study. the unpredictable events or crises can disrupt an organization's operations, threaten to damage organizational reputations (coombs & holladay, ) . in particular, we are interested in the analysis of text and its relationship with the contexts in which it was used. in this context, early detection of crisis through analysis of patterns of communication context is particularly an important step in tackling crises in its early stage. if critical events are not detected in the early stages, they may develop to potentially unmanageable crises. building on our discussion covered in sections , . , . , , . , and . , we propose: h . : a sudden increase in the frequency of communicated emails positively correlates with a developing situation in an organization. people's behaviour is shaped by the response to factors such as feelings, attitudes, beliefs, abilities, consequences of action, and accepted social norms. human responses to internal or external stimuli are also evident in online communication channels. for example, the swearing-in social network promotes retaliatory responses (turel & qahri-saremi, ) . linguistic analysis can effectively be used in detecting financial frauds. purda and skillicorn ( ) showed when a company is committing fraud, the employed writing style and presentation style in communicating financial information changes. studying organizations' management's discussion and analysis (md&a) report showed that the companies who have been associated with fraudulent activity in the past, have pushed to write an md&a section in the -k report without referring to words relating to merger activity or potential legal problems (words such as settlement, legal, and judgments). combining the above discussion and our argument from section , we propose: situational crisis communication theory a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - negative, correlates with a developing crisis in an organization. fig. shows the relationships among the indicators in our proposed integrated model. we suggest a sudden change in email communication trends, sudden increases in the frequency of communicated emails taken together with the day's overall sentiment, and predicts public behavioral intention. to capture the information, we developed a methodology that captures the sudden change in email communication patterns in an organization. for our study, we worked on publicly available enron email dataset. this dataset was initially collected and prepared for the calo project. it contains , items belonging to users, mostly senior management of enron. the email data are organized in the form of files and folders. originally, the email dataset was made public by the federal energy regulatory commission during its investigation. it turned out to have many integrity problems, and later on, melinda gervasio, at sri, corrected the problems. to our knowledge, this is the best available substantial dataset that relates to an organizational crisis and concerns the public interest. fig. illustrates our critical event detection analysis method (ceda), which consists of four stages. in the first stage, data preparation, we developed a python script that crawls in the dataset's folders and builds a corpus of data, including some initial statistical data relevant to each item set, and distinguishes sent emails, received the email, or non-email items. in total, we recognized , sent emails and , received emails. the numbers have factored in the ccs and bccs. we developed an automatic method in order to extend and examine other email datasets if they become available. the advantage of an automatic method is that it can provide convenient and standardized access to extract relevant information and is not intrusive. each item in the enron mail directory list contains the header of the email, the subject, the date, the correspondence to the sender and receiver, and the email body sections. to work with data, we built a new corpus of data where each line became our new line for the data frame in r. in the second stage, we identified and compared communications from different periods of the last three years of enron before its bankruptcy. in ceda, situational events are detected by inferring from trend changes in communication patterns in the existing dataset. in near realtime processing, continuous massive streaming of content is processed in a single instant since the streaming data may not be available for reprocessing again, or it does not have the same value at a later time. to process and analyze semi-structured data, we first studied some available tools that could perform pattern discovery on text files. as an aggregation tool for semi-structured data, we deployed nvivo software version . nvivo allows importing, managing, and analyzing text and has advanced visualization tools. a common issue with using the existing analytical tools is that most of them are designed to perform predefined tasks. after some preliminary assessment, we found them to be very limited for this study. our input data was scattered widely in irregular patterns under several folders and subfolders. also, the volume and number of records in our dataset were beyond the practical functionality of these tools. initially, it was difficult to infer from the email counts whether they were crisis-related. for instance, sent/received email frequency on its own would not be conclusive enough to indicate an emerging crisis. however, including other external environmental factors, such as historical news events from reputable news outlets and market reflection on enron's stock price, increased our method's predictive capability. fig. illustrates the summary count of the resulting calculation of sent and received emails using our method of inspecting the enron dataset. for example, to calculate the number of sent emails, we included all the recipient addresses that were in the to:, cc:, and bcc: sections of the header of that email as with. we calculated the number of received emails by counting how many other people received the same email by looking at the detailed information available in the metadata of each email. we also detected mailing lists and tagged them separately. our preliminary examination of enron's email suggested that the frequency change in sent and received emails could provide valuable information. to detect ongoing crisis events at enron, we defined a statistical model that raises red flags for suspicious instances. to explain our statistical model, suppose we knew event (e ) was occurring on may , (fig. ) . let us consider the line l avr represents the average number of emails received per day from may through may . in the same way, let us consider l ϭ and l ϭ to represent one standard deviation and two standard deviations, respectively, of the number of emails received per day for the same period. the threshold in our model is defined as any day in which the total number of emails received falls out of . standard deviations of the mean of its previous days' number of emails received. this may indicate that an important message has a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - triggered a sudden increase in the number of emails received for that day. in other words, the message has gone viral. in fig. , the regular repeating low points in the sent or received curves are weekends. including them unnecessarily widens the standard deviations of the past days (the days before the event day), and this would negatively impact our model's detection assessment. the model detects e event the same way as e , except the reference point for calculating the average line, l' avr starts from the event e . we are expecting some residual effect from the previous events, including e , which may impact the number of received emails in the days coming after e . since we set a new start point for calculating event e , the model implicitly includes the residual effects of all the previous events, but more so of the last event since some of the old events' effects may have already tapered off. therefore, we always calculated the most recent effects to add to the accuracy of our method. this way, we detected all the days where the total number of emails received was significantly higher than the mean of the total number of emails received for the period they accounted for. this covered . % of the population of all past days where the total number of received emails varies to be less than . σ deviation from the period's average. we added sentiment analysis to our study to measure whether the sudden surges in the total number of received emails were due to a positive or negative sentiment fact of the day. it is essential to analyze the organization's emotional load of the day to understand the true meaning of the surges in the number of emails. our sentiment analysis consists of two stages, namely, individual email-based polarity analysis and day-based polarity analysis. each email has information about its sentiment. to avoid a washout effect, we avoided working with combined emails' text. in order to categorize the emails, we customized publicly available tools to score the sentiment of each email based on the bing liu lexicon. the lexicons are a dictionary of words that are used for calculating the polarity of the text. bing liu's opinion-mining lexicon contains positive words and negative words that include misspelled and slang terms of words as well (liu, ) . opinion words or phrases in a text play a key role in carrying the sentiment of the text as a whole (ragini et al., ) . fig. shows the output of ceda's sentiment analysis of enron's received emails (see also figs. and in appendix b). we used mixed market responses and media responses as a proxy to indicate the firm's real crisis events. the average daily percent movement of the stock market is used as a basis to detect crises in enron's financials. looking at the s&p stock market over the last ten years, the average daily move in the stock price is between − % and + % (financial, ) . therefore, for our study, any change beyond % is considered as an important market reaction event. ceda compares enron's every day's closing price to up to five past consecutive closing prices. if the stock price for the day is less than the n days ago stock price minus % accumulated loss for the past n days, that is considered as a market's negative reaction to a possible crisis event. we searched the public news outlet and academic sources to retrieve the list of important events that hit enron during the sample period. the events are taken from the new york times, washington posts dailies and agsm (australian graduate school of management) unsw sydney. table shows a partial news events timeline taken from data collected by the university of new south wales-sydney (unsw business school). the table represents examples of how the news was coded. the variable is set to if an event translated to a crisis event, otherwise. a complete list of all chronological news events is presented in appendix a. hypothesis examines the correlations between sudden increases in daily communicated email trends and developing situations in an organization. hypothesis examines the correlations between the overall sentiment of the days and developing situations in an organization. we used logistic regression analysis as an appropriate inferential statistic for three reasons. first, our research questions are relational questions seeking information about the relationships between detected events by ceda and crisis events; we are interested in determining whether there is an association among these variables. second, we considered the level of measurements; all four variables in this study are dichotomous: sudden change in email communication trends detected (yes/no), the overall sentiment of the day (negative/positive), the sudden drop in the firm's stock price (yes/no), and bad news in media (yes/no). third, logistic regression allows testing the probability of falling a given case into one of two categories on the dependent variable. a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - . experimental results and statistical analysis weiner's ( weiner's ( , ) attribution theory has three main parts that are "locus-focuses on whether the source of cause is internal/external", "controllability-whether the person has a sufficient degree of control over his/her behaviour" and "stability-whether the cause of the behaviour is permanent or temporary" (willner & smith, ) . the sentiment analysis deployed in this study searches for additional cues in building meaningful information (negative or positive) that helps in the early detection of a crisis in an organization. as part of the proposed method, we built a method in which critical events are detected by segregating the days based on becoming an outlier compared to their previous days' average number of emails received. in the second part, we used lexicon-based sentiment analysis in order to compute the sentiment score of each day. for correctly detected critical days in which there was not a corresponding external news event to support them, our comparison cloud analysis suggested an excellent insight of ongoing issues for the day in question (fig. ) . table represents a sample output from dataset preparation of our proposed critical event detection analysis model (fig. ceda, apply filtering base on item types and apply email counting rules). at this stage, the unstructured enron dataset's email data, which were in the form of files and folders, categorized and filtered based on item types (sent, received, calendar, contact, note) and transformed into our numerical version of enron's corpus data. each row in our dataset represents statistics wherein "date" represents the day in which the data extraction and calculations were made for, "email counts" accounts for the total number of emails that have been sent and received in that day, "total word count" is the total word count for all emails all together for that day, "to" represent the total number of email addresses where the emails were sent to using "to" box, "ext email address/to count" represents the number of email addresses that were external users (non-enron email addresses) using "to" box, same explanation of "to" applies to "cc" and "bcc", "reply chain" represents the total number of times that the emails were forwarded, "all to" represents the total number of email addresses that emails have been sent to all together (to + cc + bcc). a similar definition of "ext email address" goes for "all ext to addresses". tables and show examples of resulting output from assessing the sentiments of the day extracted from the enron emails. the texts from the body and subject lines of all received emails for each day were analyzed using publicly available sentiment-based lexicons. we calculated the sentiment of email data, bing liu, affin, loughran, and nrc lexicons to increase the reliability of our findings. enron's news events (appendix a, table ) were manually collected and classified. in order to have a better classification of the crisis news, the table was presented to six mba students, three ph.d. students, and two information system professors and asked them to rate the news based on whether the news relates to a crisis event or not. table in appendix a is the outcome of consensually agreed results. the variable is set to if a news event translated to a crisis event, otherwise. in table , the critical event information is reflected in the fourth column. the second and third columns in table is the output of our ceda model. similarly, when there was a surge in the number of received emails detected or the sentiment of the day was negative, the variable is set to . we ran a series of logistic regression analyses to test the relation between hypothesized constructs. the binary logistic regression analysis result showed that our model is a good fit (− *log likelihood = . ) (appendix b, table ). referred to as model deviance, − *log likelihood is the most useful test to compare competing models in binary logistic regression analysis (stevens & pituch, ) . the omnibus tests of model coefficients test results also confirm that our model includes the set of predictors that fits the data significantly better than a null model (� ( ) = . , p < . ) (appendix b, table ). in table , each predictor's regression slope (b) represents the change in the log odds of falling detected crisis events by ceda (eev-within days) into the market and media reactions to real crisis events (news&nse). the model's positive regression (b = . ) indicates the detected event by our predictor variable (detected events within three days) has a high probability of falling into the target group (news& nse). in this test, it is important that odds ratio (exp(b)) does not include . (not zero) between the lower and upper confidence bound for a % confidence interval. table provides the accuracy of the model. the overall classification accuracy based on the model is . %. our method for detecting the sudden change in the number of received emails trend combined with the sentiment of the day is conclusive and predicted % (table ) of the news event published in major news outlets and market response when a crisis event hit enron for the period of our study. the results support our hypotheses. detection of critical events by finding the change in the pattern of the number of received emails in combination with the use of the sentiment analysis method is statistically significant. new technological advancements such as artificial intelligence have become an important foundation of competitive advantage in the market for firms. therefore, in this research, we examine the role of a. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - computer-mediated artificial intelligence agents in detecting crisis related to events in a firm. the findings of our empirical research suggest that knowledge extracted from day-to-day data communications such as email communications of a firm can lead to the sensing of critical events related to business activities. critical events, in general, if not detected in the early stages, are a threat to an organization, and can become unmanageable crises. the past crises or history of crises in an organization could help crisis managers evaluate whether a recent crisis is an exceptional event (unstable), or is part of a pattern of events (stable). as claims, reoccurrence of an event, or continuation of more than one event, may indicate that the recent event is not an exceptional incident. as such, it is crucial for organizations to have the ability to access real-time crisis information to be able to assess the situation. technology provides a platform in which crisis-related information is acquired in the fastest and most direct manner. computermediated communication platforms, such as an organization's internal communication channels and external social media channels, facilitate real-time dialogue between intended stakeholders and, therefore, become strategically important. we performed analyses of the enron email dataset to identify changes in patterns of emailing frequencies and used that information to detect critical events. we developed a big data tool to perform an initial email count and to calculate the number of "emails sent" and "emails received" for the last three years of enron before its bankruptcy. then, we used advanced analytical tools to visualize and represent the result of the email counts to make a greater sense of a large amount of data more quickly and easily. pattern changes in the emails' metadata showed greater importance in detecting and assessing situational events. despite the simple psychological fact behind the change in the number of emails sent and received during crisis periods, the use of email metadata is a relatively underexplored area. this study analyzed enron users' email communication effectiveness in detecting critical events. through the mining of the organization's semi-structured email data and using more in-depth content analysis, we developed a model called critical event detection analysis model (ceda) for detecting critical events. the model analyzes the connection between the frequency change in the number of emails received and an ongoing situation communicated through an interactive, computermediated communication channel. to obtain a better result in the detection process, the model factors in the textual character of communicated messages (e.g., polarity, emotions). our managerial contribution is to provide a tool to enhance decision-making in organizations by detecting crisis in its early stages. our theoretical contribution is to build a framework to detect triggering events in an organization using email metadata. this can serve as a foundation for other researchers to explore other social network data or metadata for assessing and predicting emerging critical events in organizations. our main practical implication is that we develop and introduce a critical event detection analysis model (ceda) for detecting critical events in this empirical study. we analyze enron users' email communication effectiveness in detecting critical events. our analysis helps us develop the model to a big data tool to perform an initial email count. the model helps the firms to calculate the number of "emails sent" and "emails received" for the last three years of enron before its bankruptcy. we argue that critical events are a threat to an organization. organizations can learn from past crises to empower crisis managers to evaluate whether a recent crisis is unstable or stable. our findings provide the ability to access real-time crisis information to be able to assess the situation. this helps organizations to have better forecasting for the market, for example. our research suggests to the managers that computer-mediated communication platforms, such as an organization's internal communication channels and external social media channels, are essential tools to enable real-time dialogue between intended stakeholders. farrokhi, et al. industrial marketing management ( ) - this study was limited to an organizational crisis and as such it did not cover the external crisis such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome pandemic, and the swine flu epidemic (pan, pan, & leidner, ) and large scale supernatural disasters (e.g., hurricane katrina, asian tsunami) and/or significant events, such as the / terrorist attacks. another limitation of this study is associated with sentiment analysis of english text; thus, languages other than english need to be explored. a possible extension to the methodology would allow researchers to explore the domain to multinational corporations (mnc). authors are grateful 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security in big data: privacy and data mining emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: a case study of the haitian earthquake social media and culture in crisis communication: mcdonald's and kfc crises management in china key: cord- -smkglves authors: al eid, nawal a.; arnout, boshra a. title: crisis and disaster management in the light of the islamic approach: covid‐ pandemic crisis as a model (a qualitative study using the grounded theory) date: - - journal: j public aff doi: . /pa. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: smkglves the current study sought to generate a theory from the data on crisis management in islam, and also aimed to identify the strategies used by leaders in the crisis management process. the grounded theory approach was applied, which is one of the qualitative designs. the content of the verses of the noble qur'an and the hadiths of the prophet muhammad that dealt with the issue of crises were analyzed. the results of the qualitative analysis of the verses of the qur'an and the hadiths of the prophet's noble sunnah have resulted in four concepts that constitute a broad conceptual theory of crisis management according to the islamic approach. these concepts are: crisis management strategies in islam, the stages of crisis management, the characteristics of a leader who manages crises, and the roles of a leader during the crisis management process. a number of assumptions have been made of this generated theory about islamic crisis management model. in light of the results of this study, recommendations were formulated that indicate the necessity of training leaders in the islamic approach to crisis management, its strategies and its scientific steps in crisis management. these results have wide applications in the field of training leaders, and also recommend future studies to verify the assumptions of the theory that emerged from the data in this study on crisis management in islam (covid‐ pandemic crisis as a model). pandemic. that has killed hundreds of thousands of individuals around the world, and caused huge economic losses. and it negatively affected the education sector and others, which called upon countries to develop plans to address these losses in all sectors. arnout et al. (arnout et al., , p. ) mentioned "among the events witnessed in is the spread of the corona virus (covid- ) by its rapid spread and the increase in the number of infections and the number of deaths in all countries of the world. as a result, the director-general of the world health organization announced on the eleventh of march that covid- represents pandemic. given the seriousness of the results of the corona pandemic , countries had to intensify their efforts to confront this pandemic, and put plans to manage this crisis to face its severe economic, health, educational, and social consequences. that is why state institutions are keen to use various strategies that emphasize participation among workers in these institutions and all members of society, and collective leadership in thinking and implementation, then follow-up and evaluation. and activating these strategies through forming committees, work teams, organizing data on crises, preparing and training individuals to face this pandemic and reducing its destructive effects." al eid, alqahtani, et al. (al eid et al., , p. ) reported that the holy quran and the sunnah provide the framework for islamic law (shareaa), which governs all aspects of life of every muslim. the holy quran is observed as the authority of how to surrender to allah's will in various circumstances in life. the sunnah considers to be complemented to the holy quran; it could be defined as the teachings and sayings of the prophet muhammad. recent evidence suggests that the modern crisis management theories have focused on models that include steps for crisis management, including identifying crises and collecting data on them, setting alternatives and choosing from them, then implementing solutions and evaluating their results. thus, we note that such administrative models ignore some aspects of crisis management in islam. that is why this study came to generate a broad conceptual theory clarifying crisis management, according to the islamic model for establishing islamic crisis management from the noble qur'an and the noble sunnah. this is to take advantage of previous experiences to read and anticipate the future by knowing the past, and on the other hand, highlighting the islamic model, which was characterized by skill, patience, and faith in crisis management. the issue of crisis has received considerable critical attention. bieber ( ) showed that the crisis as a turning point from unstable situations, and could lead to undesirable outcomes, if the parties concerned are unwilling or unable to contain them and ward off their dangers. mustafa ( ) pointed crisis management is the continuous management process that is concerned with forecasting potential crises by sensing, monitoring internal and external environmental variables generating the crisis, and mobilizing the resource and available capabilities to prevent the crisis or deal with it with the most efficiency and effectiveness, and to achieve the least amount of damage. however, farid and ajwa ( ) added that crisis management is a strategic planning process that requires the institution to take a set of decisions in circumstances of tension and uncertainty, at a specific time aimed at the proper response to the events of the crisis and preventing its escalation, and minimizing its negative results to the least possible extent and removing risks in the direction of restore their natural conditions. in this article, we argue that the crisis is an emergency that damages society and may lead to its collapse, and it may be economic and may be social. strategies as viewed by the scientists of organization and administration in islam mean the future vision for any action, task or matter in the future, so that the decision-maker will have a vision of his command when achieving the destination. a number of researchers have reported the features of crisis. barton ( ) determined six features of the crisis, as follows: . surprise: it means that crises occur without warning, or ring bells, but rather suddenly. this means the lack of information on the cause of this crisis, and the reason is due to the lack of information, especially if it occurs for the first time. . escalation of events: when crises occur, juveniles follow to tighten the noose on decision-makers. . loss of control: all events of the crisis fall outside the ability and expectations of the decision-makers, so they lose control and control. . panic: the crisis causes a state of panic, so the decision-maker will dismiss all those involved in the occurrence of the crisis, or resort to quarrels with his aides. . the absence of a rapid, fundamental solution: crises do not give the decision-maker a time or opportunity to reach a careful solution, but rather it is necessary to choose between a limited number of solutions and choose the least harmful. and through the above, crisis management is a modern concept in the science of management, but crises and dealing with them are as old as man himself, and islam is the first to start laying the scientific and practical foundations for crisis management, and this was evident through the directives of the holy qur'an and honorable hadiths, such as preparing for crises before they occurred, and verification of the validity of information, and strength in facing crises, strategic planning for crises, working in teams to face crises, and strategies to face crises. the world on the planet faces risks from time to time, and the way out is always through science, where technology plays a very important role. advanced nations seek to confront risks through scientific means and studies, but this time the matter was more dangerous and faster than some people think. it is the new corona virus, which caused panic among the population of the earth. no country in the world has been spared the covid- . this new covid- has left its effects in all aspects of life; entire states are paralyzed, closed borders, global economies have slowed down, and schools closed. students in their homes study, employees in their homes work and so on. the spread of epidemics is always a challenge for human societies, such as the new covid- in , the spanish flu in and the black plague in the th century over societies. although europe in the middle ages, after its exit from the first world war, differs greatly from today's world and society in light of the means of communication, the internet, and globalization, the spread of a pandemic is always a test for society and an era. however, the current crisis of the spread of the covid- pandemic has swept the world, leaving infections in large numbers, and global health systems have collapsed with them. the epidemic threatens social relationships, and caused a change in health systems and produced the concept of quarantine and the creation of methods for sterilization, and all this is undoubtedly the health system, social, educational, family, economic, and leisure are collapsed. the result is the emergence of a new face of this world. what is clear to everyone now is that a virus that does not see with the naked eye was able to create chaos in this world, and compel everyone to rearrange the vocabulary of his life in proportion to preventive procedures. this pandemic virus, which reached the level of the epidemic, has sounded alarm bells to pay attention to many things, the most important of which is maintaining personal hygiene and adopting a balanced healthy, nutritional, and athletic style. but the inevitable and cruel matter is stopping life, which has its manifestations (closing schools, filling hospitals and clinics, closing clubs and public places, closing some government interests-closing houses of worship), and this virus has turned into an international trend that is spoken by young, old, sick, and health people, and this is indicates the seriousness and ambiguity of the situation, and a description of the state of panic among everyone. from all this, we must manage the covid- crisis with efficiency and wisdom to reduce the negative effects on the individual and society. there is a consensus among researchers (abu farah, ; abu khalil, ; al-khudairi ( ) ; al-momani, ; al-sheikh, ; fathi, ; maher, ; mustafa, ) that crisis management focuses on the use of the scientific method in confronting crises, working to prevent the occurrence of the crisis as possible, and facing the crisis effectively to mitigate its negative effects, loss of lives, and reduce health threats. al-sheikh ( ) and al-yehoy ( ) mentioned that crisis management is important because of it is providing the scientific ability to extrapolate and predict current and potential threat sources, and optimizing the resources and capabilities available to reduce the effects of a crisis. as well as providing practical capabilities and material capabilities to prepare and confront, and work to return to normalcy through a set of steps and procedures for restoration. izz al- din ( ) and maher ( ) determined that there are three phases of crisis management: . pre-crisis phase: it includes all preventive procedures that avoid the occurrence of the crisis. . the stage of dealing with the crisis: it includes all procedures to achieve the maximum possible results. . post-crisis phase: it includes all the procedures necessary to readapt to the outcome of the crisis, and this adjustment must be achieved in the behavioral, psychological, organizational, and financial aspects. while al-tayeb ( ) and bin abdullah ( ), the crisis management has four stages: . the stage of mitigating the crisis, in which the quality of the risks and the surrounding circumstances and the prediction of the surrounding hazards are determined. . the stage of preparation and preparation and drawing up a complete plan to face the crisis. . the stage of confrontation: it is a decisive stage in managing the crisis, on which the size of the losses depends. . the rebalancing stage: in which a relatively long-term plan is drawn up according to the effects of the crisis. thus, the leaders and officials must be aware of these stages to manage the crisis, because it is considered a type of diagnosis, and accordingly, the necessary treatment is determined for these crises. for this, there must be adequate preparations and methods to prevent crises by discovering early warning signals, identifying areas of weakness and addressing them so that they do not turn into a crisis (ahmed, ; al-momani, ; el-hamlawy, ; maher, ; mustafa, ) . by presenting this theoretical framework for crisis management, it is clear that although some research has been carried out on crisis management models, there has been little quantitative analysis of the islamic approach of crisis management. a search of the literature revealed few studies which attempted to investigate the islamic crisis management model, thus this study highlight the importance of this object. the specific objective of this study was to generate a theory on crisis management according to the islamic model, as well as formulate their assumptions and to identify the strategies used by leaders in crisis management. and also, to determine the characteristics of the leader during the crisis management process, and the roles assigned to him in this process of crisis management. the researchers started from the premise of the explanatory model, as the methodology of the grounded theory that belongs to qualitative research was applied to generate a broad conceptual theory that explains the practical practice of managing crises and disasters according to the islamic approach. and that is through analyzing the documents of the noble qur'an, the noble sunnah, and by extrapolating the stories of the prophets. as there is a gap between empirical and descriptive studies that dealt with crisis management, clarifying the islamic model in crisis and disaster management and developing an integrated approach that benefits decision-makers and reduces the size of heavy losses on the other hand. that is why the current study came to bridge this gap using the grounded theory approach, which, as glaser and strauss ( ) pointed out that the aims of the grounded theory method to reach a theory emerged from the data collected in an inductive way. according to glaser and strauss ( ) , the theoretical samples in this study were taken during the data collection process from the texts of the noble qur'an, hadiths from the prophet's sunnah, and the stories of the prophets, in order to generate the theory, by collecting, compiling, and analyzing data at the same time, to gradually crystallize the theory. the study applying the content analysis of the texts of the noble qur'an, the hadiths of the prophet's sunnah, and extrapolating how crises were managed according to the islamic approach, and the steps that were followed in managing these crises, in order to develop a theory clarifying crisis management in islam. the texts of the qur'an and hadiths were collected from the sunnah of the prophet, then they were organized and categorized, and a qualita- the researchers in this study followed the approach of the grounded theory, and according to this methodology, data was collected and analyzed together at the same time, and the data analysis in this study included organizing, classifying, interpreting, understanding their data, noting the patterns, topics, categories, and axes that appear during the analysis. the data were organized by creating three volumes, the first contains files of quranic texts and hadiths of the prophet's sunnah that dealt with crisis management. the second volume contains the analytical cues, for each quranic or hadith of the sunnah in a special file and coded by printing them and then shading the symbols in different colors, as the notes were coded, and the notes are utilized by their repeated reading, and extracting meanings from them to support the process of interpreting the data and writing the results of the study. while analyzing the data, the researchers continuously compared coding and categories to discover similarities and differences, so that similar categories are grouped together under a concept or a higher category according to the glaser and strauss ( ) . the coding and comparison process took place after an analysis of every quranic and hadith of the prophet's sunnah, so that these symbols are essential and guided when analyzing the rest of the qur'anic texts and hadiths of the prophet's sunnah, and this procedure is known as the theoretical samples which, as charmaz ( a) indicated, is a feature of the grounded theory methodology as it helps in building categories and themes that refine the theory emerging from the data. the researchers in this study continued in this way until reaching the stage of theoretical saturation, which means not only the absence of new information in the data, but also the confirmation of concepts that were clearly and accurately identified to construct the theory according to corbin and strauss ( ) . in this study, the researchers employed corbin and strauss ( ) strategy in data analysis and coding, which includes three coding stages: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. the open coding resulted in ( ) an initial symbol, then it was reduced to the axial coding, its intensification and its aggregation in higher categories through continuous comparison, and establishing links between the groups that emerged from the open coding. in this axial coding, attention is paid to symbols that have a greater analytical value and are repeated and are closely related to research questions. also, symbols that were not repeated during the analysis process and have nothing to do with research questions were excluded. from the axial coding, basic concepts were identified. after the features of theory began to emerge, which represent the climax of axial coding, the beginning of selective coding, and classification under a basic category (corbin & strauss, ) . in selective coding, the basic concept of the theory is generated and linked in a theory that may help, according to glaser ( ) , in the conceptual integration of crisis management theory in islam. figure illustrates the selective coding of axial groups. the process of analyzing and coding data revealed four main axes that constitute the theory of crisis management in islam: stages of crisis management, crisis management strategies, characteristics of a leader in crisis management, tasks in crisis management. each of these axes contains a number of categories. figure illustrates the findings of the data analysis and coding process and the resulting theory. f i g u r e islam crisis theory, emerging from data through the analysis of the qur'anic texts and prophetic hadiths, it becomes clear to us that the crisis is an emergency situation that harms society and may lead to its collapse, and it is based on economic and social types. islam has developed an approach for coping crises characterized by wisdom and positivity, and therefore the nation has not weakened or collapsed. this islamic approach is to manage crises in several steps that are: defining the crisis and determining its causes, then defining its manifestations, then adopting methods to deal with it and planning to solve this crisis. in the story of the prophet noah-peace be upon him-there was a crisis, which was the lack of obedience of his people to him, and the nonentry of new believers in the islamic religion. the manifestations of this crisis were the severe mockery of the believing group, stubbornness and refusal to hear from the prophet, no matter how he was exposed in the morning or evening, and insisted on stubbornness and arrogance, so that they would be sedition and delusion for those who actually believed. as for the method of the prophet noah's management of this crisis, he began with warning, advice, awareness, reminders, education, and alerting, despite the length of time that noah broadcast-peace be upon him-calling on his people, but he did not despair, did not retreat, and did not lazily report his call to god by all possible means, to the extent that they put their fingers in their ears, so that they would not hear it, and sought their clothes in order not to see it, so god almighty told him that he would not believe from them except those who believed, he called on them not to be a temptation for the weak believers, so god's punishment for facing the believers was a major crisis, which is the lord's punishment that will flood the earth with those on it. in the story of the prophet noah with his people, when they did not obey him to enter islam, the reaction of the prophet noah was patient, did not give up, did not lazy, or retracted his goal in communicating the call of his lord, and he remained for many years calling them and he only believed with him very little. the islamic nation went through many crises and disasters, among these crises the flood of prophet noah who drowned the land, in surah al-ankabut-verse- god said "and we certainly sent noah to his people, and he remained among them a thousand years minus fifty years, and the flood seized them while they were wrongdoers" (the noble qur'an). the crisis also including the stormy food crisis that toppled the arabian peninsula and the region for seven full years, including the crisis of muslims during the era of the prophet muhammad when they lost safety of themselves and their families, so permission to emigrate, and then the siege crisis unfairness of the faithful in the city from all of the arabian peninsula also almost claimed the islamic nation. in surah at-tawbah-verse- god "said if you do not aid the prophet-allah has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out [of makkah] as one of two, when they were in the cave and he said to his companion,"do not grieve; indeed allah is with us. "and allah sent down his tranquillity upon him and supported him with angels you did not see and made the word of those who disbelieved the lowest, while the word of allah-that is the highest. and allah is exalted in might and wise" (the noble qur'an). and also, by analyzing of the holy qur'an verses and the sunnah of the prophet muhammad we found that crises are multiple and varied, and we can divide the crises from an islamic perspective, as follows: . economic crises: such as poverty, unemployment, loans, etc. . social crises: including the marriage crisis, divorce, marital infidelity, the housing crisis … and others. . political military crises: such as the battle of al'ahzab, talot and goliath. . health crises: such as disease, epidemics, and plague. each category of these crises requires different strategies to confront and overcome them. in the story of the prophet joseph with his people, a crisis occurred and he expected the scarcity of water after years, the nile's level decreased for seven whole years, and because the people believed, and the honest and ruled scientist in them, and because they acquiesced to his interpretation and were instructed to set a logical solution, the crisis went well despite the distress. in surah yusuf-verse- god said "you will plant for seven years consecutively; and what you harvest leave in its spikes, except a little from which you will eat." and also in yusuf-verse- "then will come after that seven difficult [years] which will consume what you saved for them, except a little from which you will store" (the noble qur'an). as well as, among the crises faced by the prophet mohammad at the beginning of the message and the call of the people to the islamic religion, when the few believers threatened to perish and then destroy the invitation or repel those who fear it, so the solutions were limited to leaving the place of infidelity and fleeing to a better country that this group can save itself in order to preserve the debt it holds. in surah al-tawbah-verse- god said "if you do not aid the prophet-allah has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out [of makkah] as one of two, when they were in the cave and he said to his companion,"do not grieve; indeed allah is with us. "and allah sent down his tranquillity upon him and supported him with angels you did not see and made the word of those who disbelieved the lowest, while the word of allah-that is the highest. and allah is exalted in might and wise" (the noble qur'an). the decision to emigrate was not easy for the people of mecca, who settled in cities and countries other than the nomadic arabs who used to move from place to place. beginning from the first day of the prophet muhammad's migration to medina and crises followed over the nascent society, the first crisis was to provide a place for housing, food and drink for the people of mecca, migrants leaving behind their homes, money, family and trade, so he took my brother among the migrants and supporters after the souls were prepared to compete for giving and giving at the same time that in it, immigrants refrained from accepting money for free from work and making an effort. in surah an-nisa-verse- god said "and whoever emigrates for the cause of allah will find on the earth many [alternative] locations and abundance. and whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to allah and his messenger and then death overtakes him-his reward has already become incumbent upon allah. and allah is ever forgiving and merciful" (the noble qur'an). the crisis management strategies of the prophet muhammad did not differ completely from the islamic method in crisis management. one of the basic solutions to confront poverty and the deteriorating economic conditions is to enable those able to work by providing them with job opportunities. like what happened in the migration crisis, as it was necessary to find a suitable place in the prevailing work of immigrants, which is trading at that time, and to provide a market in which muslim merchants and workers are active, and islam has been keen since its foundations in medina focused on this, in surah an-nisa-verse- "and whoever emigrates for the cause of allah will find on the earth many [alternative] locations and abundance. and whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to allah and his messenger and then death overtakes him-his reward has already become incumbent upon allah. and allah is ever forgiving and merciful" (the noble qur'an). we conclude from this that the prophet mohammad's wise approach to crisis management was to focus on the main goal, and not to get involved in side events, in surah al-ahzab-verse- god said "there has certainly been for you in the messenger of allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in allah and the last day and [who] remembers allah often" (the noble qur'an). in order to ensure crisis management in the prophet's approach, it is necessary to define the rules and procedures that should be dealt with. consequently, the elements for the crisis-resolution strategy were realized, which is to provide the necessary information on the foundations of dealing with the crisis, its care and its compassion to the parties to the crisis. it is also noted that his superiority, may god bless him and grant him peace, in solving the crisis through methods that the science of management did not know, except in our time, by emptying the crisis from its content, since a crisis cannot be the psychological factor is the most dangerous when confronting crises and disasters, so the holy qur'an was keen to address souls and prove them in times of adversity and afflictions, and to train them that these crises will inevitably end, and therefore we must commit to patience with these disturbances, as feelings of trust, faith, fantasies, and suspicions are controlled. without this patience and confidence in god's ability, in surah al-hadid-verse- , god said "no disaster strikes upon the earth or among yourselves except that it is in a register before we bring it into being-indeed that, for allah, is easy" (the noble qur'an). when we trust in god and his ability, we will have the courage to face crises, and therefore crises cannot be overcome, as in the verse in surah all 'imran that god said "o you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed and fear allah that you may be successful." and also, in al-baqarah-verse- -god said "and we will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient" (the noble qur'an). the prophet muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, had from the analysis of the holy qur'an we noticed that the islam urged to cooperate among individuals to work to solve the problems and crises that societies can face. in surah al-ma'idah-verse- god said the idea of forming teams and using them to solve organizational problems and reach results are one of the smartest ideas and trends that smart leaders can use in the best and lasting achievements, in surah al-kahf-verse- god said "he said,that in which my lord has established me is better [than what you offer], but assist me with strength; i will make between you and them a dam'" (the noble qur'an). in surah al-kahf, he directed the king of zulqarnain when he made the people of the village feel that this is their village and that they were the first to preserve it and repel any attack and from any party whatsoever. this dam, even if they leave, has given them the reasons for strength, which is how to form work teams, and once again give them the reasons for strength, which is building the dam and their ability to maintain their village, and therefore they can stay and continue. abu farah ( ) mentioned that to prepare for any crisis, a crisis management team is required to be formed to face any crisis of any kind and it is called the work team, the investigation committee, the expert group, the problem-solving committee or the special committee, and in the political and military field it is called like the special operations forces or the rapid deployment forces." the goal of the team is to work to address the crisis, reduce its seriousness and negative effects, in addition to the presence of the leadership of the crisis, that is, advance planning and develop future scenarios to predict any crisis that could arise through the presence of indications of its occurrence. this crisis management team must be distinguished by the ability to successfully intervene in crisis management, whether it is physical, mental, or practical abilities. this is in addition to composing, commitment to orders and instructions, whatever the risks involved in the crisis, extreme attention when carrying out a task, as well as preparing to sacrifice, loyalty and full membership in the administrative entity (fathi, ) . migration and transmit from one place to another at the time of crises and disasters that threaten people's lives is a strategy to cope these crises. immigration was a strategic solution for muslims in the century of prophet muhammad to rid themselves of persecution and genocide, after god had asked the prophet muhammad to migrate from mecca to medina. in surah an-nisa-verse- god said "indeed, those whom the angels take [in death] while wronging themselves-[the angels] will say,"in what [condition] were you? they will say,"we were oppressed in the land. "the angels will say,"was not the earth of allah spacious [enough] for you to emigrate therein? "for those, their refuge is hell-and evil it is as a destination." as well as, it was narrated from kathir bin immigration means moving from one place to another, temporarily or permanently, in residency, whether the migration took place by one person or by a group of people. migration may be as follows: migration between continents, or migration between countries within a specific continent, or regional migration (within the country itself), and the most important forms of migration are migration from the countryside to cities in search of better life opportunities, and the search for work, and affect human migration on population, social, cultural and economic patterns and characteristics in the new country. managing the crisis by transforming risks, misfortune and threats into opportunities that can be used to maximize the value of the organization. the state's success in managing the crisis requires not allowing this crisis to interfere with the state's regular business, and not allowing these regular actions to interfere with the proposed solutions to the crisis. at this stage, the plan should be put into practice, and the crisis management team should be given the full powers necessary to deal with this crisis. the crisis management team should confront the crisis by try more than one method in the event that a method fails and the method depends on solid analytical foundations rather than random methods prophet joseph faced the economic crisis by putting the scientific plan out of it by paying attention to agriculture, increasing productivity, reducing losses and storage safety, and rationalizing consumption and surplus. in surah yusuf-verse- god said "then will come after that seven difficult [years] which will consume what you saved for them, except a little from which you will store" (the noble qur'an). it refers to the leadership of the crisis and putting it under control, it also means the direct exit from the problem circle in the solution circle. also, it means resolving the crises that people or organizations face, which are always ready to deal and predict what happens, and put in their calculations what is not expected to happen through readiness and preparedness, coming out with the least losses and turning the crisis into an opportunity of success in the sense of turning pain into hope, and it needs to exist basic features, skills, and capabilities of the leader of the crisis that distinguishes him from others, including early detection, the prediction of something that turns into a crisis, and also needs self-confidence and highlighting aspects of strength, validation, and not rushing to judgment and positivity, and optimism, since the presence of crisis leadership prevents the existence and spread of the crisis from during early forecasting and the presence of precursors warning of the crisis, such as, in surah yusuf-verse- god said "then will come after that a year in which the people will be given rain and in which they will press [olives and grapes]" (the noble qur'an). said, "this is parting between me and you. i will inform you of the interpretation of that about which you could not have patience" (the noble qur'an). from these results, we can conclude that during crisis management, leaders must avoid indiscriminate confrontation with crises, and they must follow the scientific method, use the initiative management method, pre-planning to confront them, and define the roles of workers, to reduce the negative effects of the crisis, and benefit from the results of the current crisis for future preventive planning. adopting preventive forecasting as a prerequisite in the process of managing crises through proactive management, which is a department based on warning predictive thought to avoid a crisis early by formulating an acceptable preventive system that relies on initiative and innovation and training workers on it. this hypothesis validates that the nature and levels of preparedness in an state vis-à-vis crises are directly proportional to the reality of preventive or curative trends among workers in that state. where the proportional proportionality between the preventive solution to crises and the ability to face crises has been developed at a high level of preparedness. the need to develop and implement preventive and curative awareness programs and training for workers in the field of crisis management on these programs. for example, the locust problem and its destructive effect, which could turn into a seasonal crisis, as in the yusuf-verse- [joseph] said, "you will plant for seven years consecutively; and what you harvest leave in its spikes, except a little from which you will eat" (the noble qur'an). and also, when al-khidr, peace be upon him, were accompanied by moses, peace be upon him, on their journey, they came on the seashore to cross it, and they found a ship that transported people owned by the poor and orphans they used to feed from. and for free. on their way, they were marching in the sea, an unjust tyrant king, who seized every good ship and included it to his navy fleet, so his work was exactly like a sea pirate. thus, information was available on the past and present of our master, al-khidr, peace be upon him, so we note from the analysis of the texts of the qur'an that islam as an intermediate religion and belief was able to deal with crises and disasters in an intermediate way as well, as it focused on purely material aspects such as preparation, planning, preparation of materials and work teams and all of these matters that cannot solve the crisis or disaster from others, and besides that parallel to this material aspect, seeking asylum to god. islam urged for planning in times of crises and disasters, as in al-anfal-verse- god say "and prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom allah knows. and whatever you spend in the cause of allah will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged" (the noble qur'an). islamic thought preceded modern administrative thought in many steps and rules that were established to deal with crises and disasters. these steps are illustrated by evidence of the legitimacy of preventive planning. islam focused on proactive planning, in the sense that we plan and put forward proactive plans in a phase known as no disaster or no crisis, so it is always better to imagine-as an individual or as a country-that each crisis-any kind of crisis or disaster-can happen and draw the necessary scenarios that you think will contribute in one way or another to dealing with this crisis if they occur, and can put more than one scenario, if this does not work then it can work the other scenario (abu khalil, ; hilal, ) . planning is an important prerequisite in the crisis management process, as our actions are nothing but a reaction and a variation between the random reaction and the planned reaction. most crises are aggravated because they are human and administrative errors that occurred due to the absence of the organizational base for planning. if we do not have plans to face crises, crises will end itself the way you want it to be, not the way we want it. through the foregoing, it becomes clear to us that training in crisis planning is one of the basic axioms in successful organizations, as it contributes to preventing the occurrence of the crisis or mitigating its effects and avoiding the element of surprises accompanying it. also it becomes clear to us that planning gives the crisis management team the ability to conduct an organized and effective response to a crisis with high efficiency, ready to face the unplanned emergency situations that may accompany the crisis. the biography of our prophet muhammad is full of attitudes indicating good planning and management, disguising from the enemy, the ability to overcome all difficulties, reaching the goal, the wise mind, and a correct opinion. and all of these attributes were combined in the greatest migration that history has ever known, the migration of the prophet muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, from makkah al-mukarramah to medina, which the prophet muhammad had planned well. in the end, from these findings we can say the crisis management is refer to setting effective plans to manage the crisis, and these plans are important for the organization's success in dealing with this crisis and getting out of it with the least possible negative effects. where the prophet guides us to plan for the future, so that prosperity flies over future generations, and that our children and grandchildren live with prosperity, even if it is simple, in order not to be dependent on people, and they ask people other than them. among those hadiths is the planning dialogue that optimism has taken a method for it. in the darkest of circumstances and the most severe crises, but it is positive optimism, optimism that leads to work and not to lethargy and laziness, so his optimism teaches us that mere wishes are not enough to be warranted and lulled to reckoning and backwardness, and that impotence and weakness were never a pretext for lethargy and inaction, it was pure his prophet muhammad wondrous is accompanied by strong certainty, firm and sincere determination, his optimism deepens self-confidence, cultivates hope for a bright future, and calls for hard work, diligence, patience, and perseverance, his optimism stimulates vigor and activity. optimism accompanied by firmness and certainty, confidence and good belief in the lord. in surah yusuf-verse- god qur'an). as well as, narrated abu huraira: the prophet muhammad said, there is no disease that allah has created, except that he also has created its treatment" (al-bukhari, ) . ( ) and al-khudairi ( ) indicated that efficient crisis management requires strategic planning, prediction and the creation of a trained team for crisis management and teamwork, providing a good information base and system for communications, analyzing past crises to benefit from them as a previous experience, and setting scenarios for facing crises. the results of analyzing the contents of the verses of the noble qur'an, and the hadiths of the prophet muhammad, showed that the leader who manages the crisis must have several characteristics, we divided these characteristics, as follows: ses, the extent of which varies between those that occur at the individual level, and those that affect groups of different organizations, whether at the local or global level. and given that the circumstances surrounding us are unstable and successive changes, this has led to the complexity of the crises and their multiple dimensions. therefore, these crises must be confronted and managed wisely, because their persistence leads to enormous human and economic losses. this crisis management needs distinct and creative leadership, which has personal, mental, and social characteristics and characteristics that enable it to effectively confront these crises. al eid, arnout, and almoied, , p. ) found that the leader must possess the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination and see things as they are without distortion, the ability to excel and transcendence, the ability to engage in deep spiritual states of thinking such as meditation, reverence, intuition, the ability to transcendence above materialism, maximize the experiences of daily work life which enables the leader to understanding his relationships with all beings. there is no doubt that these characteristics are essential components of crisis management, enabling the leader during crisis management to assess the crisis situation, and analyze the elements of this situation, scientific planning for intervention to the crisis, and also makes him able to intervene to management the crisis. the results of analyzing the contents of the verses of the noble qur'an and the hadiths of the prophet muhammad showed that the leader has roles that he must perform in times of crises and disasters, in order for him to overcome these crises, and the following are the results of devising these roles: you can make decisions about isolation, media awareness, or home campaigns. or by preventing flight, to provide financial assistance to groups of the poor countries. in surah al-kahf-verse- [al-khidhr] said, "this is parting between me and you. i will inform you of the interpretation of that about which you could not have patience" (the noble qur'an). . shura: the decision-maker who is influenced by the decision may succeed for some time, but at the time of setback he bore the results alone. therefore the decision-maker must take the decision by raises the matter to the shura, puts everyone in the face of responsibility and chooses the best opinions and does not offend the opinions of his employees (al-momani, ; maher, ) . in the battle of the "alkhandaq," the role of the leader of the prophet muhammad in consulting his soldiers is evident in every small and large as long as there is no quranic text to do so. before the army of infidels arrived to return without a fight after a period of severe siege. in surah ash-shurra-verse- god said "and those who have responded to their lord and established prayer and whose affair is [determined by] consultation among themselves, and from what we have provided them, they spend" . follow-up to the crisis management team: this is the role of the leader who assigned the roles but does not leave them to circumstances, but rather adopts the principle of accurate follow-up by setting interim goals. the determinant, and finishes one quarter of it in the first days of the week, and so on. he set interim goals for accurate follow-up that would facilitate reaching the final results on time, or at least a large percentage of them. in surah at-tawbah-verse- god said "and say,do [as you will], for allah will see your deeds, and [so, will] his messenger and the believers. and you will be returned to the knower of the unseen and the witnessed, and he will inform you of what you used to do'" (the noble qur'an). from this we can say that an effective leader in the times of crisis and disasters is one who gives the opportunity to others fully to express their opinions, listen to them well, and does not boast of his incredible mental capabilities, in order to achieve collective interests in overcoming these crises. from these findings, the theory that was generated from the data collected, about the islamic crisis management model (see figure ), we can formulate these assumptions: . traditional and indiscriminate methods in crisis management do not fit with the nature and complexity of contemporary crises, and therefore it is necessary to follow a scientific method in crisis management that is characterized by complementary, cunning and organization, which is the approach developed by islam since more than centuries ago. . success in crisis management needs the leader to acknowledge its existence and not to deny it, because this increases the losses incurred by it, and makes it more difficult to face them. . the crises differ in their type, severity, and causes, and for this, the strategies for management with them differ. . the aims of crisis management are to stop losses and consequential damage, control the movement and eliminate it, take preventive procedures to prevent its recurrence in the future, and forecast future crises. . the strategy used for crisis management varies with the crisis stage. . effective crisis management has requirements, including the personal, mental, and social characteristics of the leader who manages these crises. . during a crisis management leader, there are roles. the success of crisis management effectiveness depends on the degree of the leaders' awareness and their fulfillment of these roles. therefore, these assumptions need future studies to verify them. this is an invitation to researchers specialized in the field of crisis management. the present study aimed to build a broad conceptual theory by applying the grounded theory approach to the islamic approach to crisis and disaster management, the strategies used in managing it, the stages of crisis management, the characteristics of the leader who manages crises, and the roles assigned to overcome these crises such as the outbreak of the pandemic covid- . the qualitative analysis of the verses of the noble qur'an and the noble hadiths of the prophet, it is possible to derive the qur'anic approach from the book of god and the noble prophet's sunnah. by these results, the study offers some important insights which fills a gap in the literature of the islamic crisis management model. therefore, these findings may benefit officials and decision-makers in crisis management-a pandemic outbreak crisis, covid- -as a model, and also provides them with strategies that enable them to manage these crises effectively to overcome them and eliminate the dire consequences that may result from them, as well as increase their awareness of the stages of crisis management according to the approach quranic and prophetic, and their insight into the characteristics of the leader who manages crises, and the roles assigned to them. these results may be useful through a qualitative study of crisis management in developing programs to train leaders in crisis management. there are several important areas where this study makes an original contribution to the islamic model of crisis management, thus the results of this study may constitute a basis for future studies as a set of basic data, and as a starting point for training leaders in crisis management strategies and stages. despite the applied importance of the results of the current study, the reader should bear in mind that there are a number of limitations to this study, including the size of the verses of the qur'an and the noble hadiths were analyzed. the second of these limitations, that is this study consider a qualitative study that applied the grounded theory approach. therefore, we invite future studies to apply other methods for qualitative research in the study of the topic of crisis management in islam, such as the case study and the phenomenological study approaches. the third limitation is that the results of this study should not be considered widely general, but researchers can use these results presented to them as a baseline and hypotheses for other qualitative and quantitative studies on the topic of crisis management. in light of the results of this study, we recommended that: . training leaders in the crisis management strategies. . training leaders in the crisis management stages process. . developing leaders' awareness of the characteristics of leaders' managing crisis. . increasing leaders' awareness of the roles required of them when managing crises. good values, ethics, and behaviors optimism and the promise of pessimism do not hesitate, firm, and work involving the parties to the crisis in taking decisions to solve them and choosing between alternatives courage when confrontation altruism and goodness to others cooperation and support for others today's world is witnessing large numbers and many forms of cri-references crisis management, integrated entrance the position of principals of basic education schools on some crises and planning to face them. the future of arab education management of the educational crisis in schools, causes and treatment religiosity, psychological resilience and mental health among breast cancer patients in kingdom of saudi arabia leader's spiritual intelligence and religiousness: skills, factors affecting, and their effects on performance (a qualitative study by 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of the recent trends in management science. future of arab education magazine sahih muslim constructing grounded theory basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory crisis management. local and global experiences public relations department between strategic management and crisis management getting out of dilemma: the art of crisis management theoretical sensitivity: advances in the methodology of grounded theory the discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research crisis management skills. the crisis between prevention and control crisis management in the terrorist event general rules for dealing with crises (crisis management) designing qualitative research educational administration new entrances to a new world the noble qur'an chairman of the board of trustees in ethraa almarefah company. she won prince naïf bin abdulaziz award for prophetic sunnah and contemporary islamic studies in a research entitled: (women's rights in the light of the prophet's sunnah) in h. as well as she obtain academic accreditation for internal auditing in the corresponding experiences project "prepare the trainers and internal auditors for and won princess noura bint abdulrahman university award for research excellence-section i-the quality of scientific research in the field of humanitarian h/ she has published several books in psychology such as the secret of extremism, applied of positive psychology in counseling psychology and psychotherapy, encyclopedia of counseling and psychotherapy, a global-vocational counseling and psychotherapy, psychological measurement, stress of life, mental disorders of children, readings in modern psychology, spiritual intelligence and counseling and psychotherapy, etc. over the time, she also published more than psychological scales. as well as she was published about scientific paper studies in different fields of psychology. she also supervised and discussed a number of thesis for the master's and doctoral degrees how to cite this article: al eid na, arnout ba. crisis and disaster management in the light of the islamic approach: covid- pandemic crisis as a model (a qualitative study using the grounded theory) the authors would like to express their gratitude to the ethraa almaerifa co., ltd., riyadh, saudi arabia, through providing financial and administrative fund to researchers. the authors declare no conflicts of interest. all data underpin this study were found in this manuscript, there are no any additional data. the authors of this manuscript have complied with ethical principles in their treatment of individuals participating in the research policy described in the manuscript. boshra a. arnout https://orcid.org/ - - - key: cord- - h mmp j authors: al-azri, nasser hammad title: antifragility amid the covid- crisis: making healthcare systems thrive through generic organisational skills date: - - journal: sultan qaboos univ med j doi: . /squmj. . . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: h mmp j nan d isasters and crises are disruptive to the structures and functions of communities. however, the challenges they present also bring opportunities for learning and changing at both individual and organisational levels. healthcare systems owe much of their developments and advancements to crisis situations. hence, healthcare organisations need to pay attention to these opportunities for thrivingand not just surviving-amid the chaos of adversities. thriving through and within crises requires systems to be antifragile. taleb coined the term "antifragility" to describe systems that "benefit from shocks" and "thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty". taleb advances the notion that "by grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to non-predictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general". in other words, antifragile systems need to be built and designed so they not only survive during a crisis but thrive through it. the current global outbreak of covid- presents exceptional challenges that can serve as an opportunity for healthcare systems to thrive and boost their antifragility as the pandemic continues to spread and evolve over time. this makes the current time a valuable chance for healthcare systems to develop their organisational skills proactively in tandem with the development of the crisis itself. this opportunity to thrive, however, should not be taken for granted. instead, healthcare systems and organisations need to be prepared, guided and directed towards this thriving learning mode during the crisis. unfortunately, many healthcare systems are ill-prepared for pandemic crisis management and are not prepared at all for the opportunity to thrive under such circumstances. in , both the global preparedness monitoring board and the global health security index reported a global lack of preparedness for health emergencies worldwide. , during a pandemic, health systems are typically absorbed in managing the chaos that ensues and these systems find themselves exhausted afterwards. hence, they may lose a great opportunity to thrive amid the chaos of a crisis. it is the responsibility of healthcare leaders to guide their systems through the transition of surviving the crisis to thriving in it. much like individuals, organisations have mechanisms and skills that allow them to survive and thrive. living organisms might survive with the provision of minimal requirements for living such as breathing, eating and drinking. however, these organisms need more proactive efforts for thriving and growing. each living organism has its own mechanisms for surviving and thriving. similarly, organisations and systems can survive with the provision of their basic requirements but thriving requires planned proactive efforts that best suit the organisation. there are two types of organisational skills used during crises: specific and generic. on the one hand, specific skills are needed to manage a particular crisis, such as the development of management protocols and measures to manage the outbreak of covid- . hence, specific skills can be viewed as the 'survival skills' necessary to allow the system to continue functioning despite the crisis. on the other hand, generic skills are necessary for the organisation to carry out its functions and duties to achieve its goals and are usually applied to routine duties. these generic skills are also the platform for applying specific skills during a crisis. generic skills include aspects such as leadership, teamwork and communication, and they can enhance the antifragility of the system. although generic organisational skills are not specific to a single type of crisis, they are critical for initiating, building and maintaining specific organisational capabilities before as well as during a crisis. moreover, because they are applicable to routine duties, generic skills remain relevant after the crisis. if these skills are well developed, they can help an organisation thrive well beyond the crisis, adding to the system's reservoir of antifragility mechanisms. much of the current literature concerning covid- management is focused on the specific organisational skills needed to control the outbreak. however, little is being said about generic organisational skills as the basis of specific skills and how they should be realised. hence, the focus of this article is on crisis management through the lens of five critical generic organisational skills that give healthcare systems an opportunity to grow and thrive amid the covid- pandemic. vuca is a military term used to describe situations characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. disasters and crises are deemed to have a vuca nature. in the disruptive crisis environment of vuca, some systems become fragile and breakdown under pressure, while others remain robust and, relatively, indifferent to change. yet, there are systems that take the opportunity of the disaster to grow and develop their antifragility amid the crisis. many systems choose to adapt and survive, but antifragile ones evolve, grow and thrive, becoming more resilient in the future. the following discussion briefly presents an example of five generic organisational skills that give healthcare systems a chance to boost their antifragility in a vuca environment like the current covid- crisis. these skills include leadership, teamwork, communication, system design and learning and feedback. leadership is a cornerstone for any system or organisation. the whole activity of a system revolves around the leadership style manifested in that system. leadership is not an individual task but rather a mindset that diffuses throughout the organisation. almost all other organisational skills, whether specific or generic, are dependent in their execution on organisational leadership, and crisis management relies heavily on leadership. leadership is essential to build capacity and mitigate risks during pandemics. the covid- outbreak has shown that leaders need to act now. in particular, vuca environments, like the covid- pandemic, require unique leadership characteristics. lawrence suggests a set of leadership characteristics known as vuca prime to be used in vuca environments; these characteristics include vision, understanding, clarity and agility. to be properly prepared, leaders need to have developed these traits well ahead of a vuca situation. this is achieved through practice and applying the correct type of leadership styles to daily/routine situations prior to a crisis. how systems and organisations perform is defined by the integrative activities of their actors. teams are the backbone of healthcare systems and teamwork is a rate-limiting factor for organisational outcomes. the execution of healthcare activities cannot be achieved without coordinated teamwork. however, a crisis is a hard test for teams as it stretches the systems' needs beyond the normal capacity of the system. teams in healthcare systems are the source of power in the system. in fact, there is sufficient evidence that teamwork is more important than technical prowess for preventing and mitigating a major crisis or disaster in high-risk fields such as healthcare. unfortunately, it is not uncommon during a crisis for some managers to strip teams of their professional autonomy and ability to cooperate with others through the piling up of structures such as procedures and formal rules. as systems are stretched beyond their means during a crisis, more gaps appear at critical times, and the organisational capacity for patching and stitching that prevails during routine work is no longer sufficient. undoubtedly, teamwork has been proved essential to address concerns related to the covid- pandemic, and systems cannot succeed in managing the crisis without good teamwork. a crisis is a time for teamwork; leaders must equip their organisations with this invaluable skill. a single, reliable tool during a crisis has always been communication. over several decades, communication has been recognised as a key element for successful crisis management. moreover, poor communication has been repeatedly associated with crisis management failure. the joint commission in the united states asserts that "the success or failure of an eop [emergency nasser hammad al-azri operations plan] is often determined by timely access to communication that ensures the flow of critical information". the covid- crisis has shown how effective communication is serving as a key factor in managing the pandemic through proper flow of information, handling uncertainty and fear and promoting behavioural changes in the community. however, leaders must realise that this critical, key element cannot be developed overnight, especially during a crisis. instead, communication requires time and proactive efforts well in advance of the crisis in order to establish itself in the system. a crisis provides a live test for the quality of established communication strategies within an organisation. nevertheless, it is also a lesson for future planning. it is a fundamental concept in biology and physiology that the structure of a system determines its functions. using a medical analogy, one might think of the system's structure as the anatomy and the system's processes and functions as the physiology. for any system to serve specific outcomes, it is not enough to adjust the physiological functions through enforcing new or modified processes, policies, protocols and standards of the system unless the anatomical structure of the system is fit for the intended purpose. as has been shown during the covid- crisis, many healthcare systems failed as their anatomy was not made to meet the physiological adaptations needed during a crisis. a system that is not structurally designed to meet the challenges of crisis management will not be able to cope with the stressors resulting from required functional changes during a disaster. although it might be late to review and modify a system's design during an emergency status, how the system responds to the challenges offers invaluable insight into how the anatomical structure of the system might present a constraint to its processes and functionality. this insight should inform a better, future system designone that takes into account the needs that may arise during crisis management, and beyond. social systems, such as healthcare, are informationbonded. they change their behaviour in response to information flow within the system. hence, understanding the centrality of learning and feedback in such systems is massive as it provides the means for the system to adapt to a changing external, as well as internal, environment. the quality of embedded learning and feedback functionality within a system determines, to a large extent, the quality of change in response to a dynamic environment. the vuca nature of reality during any crisis precludes the ability to forecast much of the changes and prepare for them in advance. in such a dynamic and constantly unfolding environment, meadows once said: "we can't control systems or figure them out. but we can dance with them!". responding within such a dynamic environment requires consciously planned and continuously monitored learning and feedback loops that allow the system to self-organise its behaviour as it emerges within the crisis. disasters and crises disrupt the 'normal' activities of systems and organisations. however, amid this disruption, crises also offer organisations the potential to grow and thrive. the current covid- pandemic is a good example of such a potential. as much as healthcare systems focus on their specific organisational skills to mitigate the effects of the crisis, one must also pay attention to the generic organisational skills through which they can develop and improve. by focusing on both specific and generic organisational skills, systems will not only survive through the crisis but will also grow and thrive towards antifragility. antifragility and thriving are, therefore, a reflection of how much we have invested in our generic organisational skills through leadership, teamwork, communication, system's design, and learning and feedback. systems will, almost always, output during a crisis whatever inputted in them at routine times. antifragile: how to live in a world we don't understand global preparedness monitoring board. a world at risk global health security index. global health security index everyday crisis management developing leaders in a vuca environment making sense of disaster medicine: a hands-on guide for medics thinking through crisis: improving teamwork and leadership in high-risk fields responding to covid- -a once-in-a-century pandemic? six simple rules: how to manage complexity without getting complicated covid- : a critical care perspective informed by lessons learnt from other viral epidemics communicating throughout katrina: competing and complementary conceptual lenses on crisis communication crisis communication failure: a case study of typhoon morakot emergency management in health care: an all-hazards approach effective health communication -a key factor in fighting the covid- pandemic structure determines function systems thinking: managing chaos and complexity: a platform for designing business architecture thinking in systems: a primer key: cord- -f s t wg authors: hang, haiming; aroean, lukman; chen, zhifeng title: building emotional attaching during covid- date: - - journal: ann tour res doi: . /j.annals. . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: f s t wg • shared emotions can establish emotional attachment with tourists. • emotional attachment increases intentions to visit after the current pandemic ends. • this can be crucial for tourism recovery after covid- ends. arguments in detail below. first, previous research suggests the feelings of fear and anxiety can trigger a desire for affiliation, increasing consumers' emotional attachment to a brand when consumers and the brand share the same emotional experiences (dunn & hoegg, ) . in other words, dunn and hoegg ( ) suggest shared emotional experience is a necessary condition for consumers to feel emotionally attached to a brand and such attachment does not require actual consumption. thus, we argue that crisis communication on shared emotions such as fear and anxiety can establish emotional attachment with tourists. extant literature also suggests when depicting brands with human-like minds (e.g. experiencing emotions), it makes consumers anthropomorphize them as humans (macinnis & folkes, ) . thus, we further argue emotional attachment is the result of tourists' anthropomorphising hotels to establish affiliation with them for reassurance. in other words, brand humanization mediates the impact of shared emotions on emotional attachment. thomson, macinnis, and park ( ) argue emotional attachment can lead to favourable brand attitudes and increased behavioural intentions. thus, we further argue shared emotions crisis communication can increase tourists' intentions to visit when covid- ends. this effect is mediated by their emotional attachment, which, in turn, is mediated by brand humanization. put formally: h . shared emotions crisis communication leads to higher emotional attachment than cognitive crisis communication and control (no crisis communication). h . brand humanization mediates the impact of crisis communication on emotional attachment. h . shared emotions crisis communication leads to higher intentions to visit than cognitive crisis communication and control (no crisis communication). h . brand humanization and emotional attachment sequentially mediate the impact of crisis communication on intentions to visit. we recruited american participants whose travel plan was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic via amazon mechanical turk (mturk). we focused on this group of sample because they are the main target of hotels' current crisis communication (e.g. cancelation policy and commitment to cleanliness). however, participants failed our attention-check questions (hotel name and location), leaving an effective sample size of ( females, males, m age = . , sd = . ). the experiment was a one-factor (crisis communication strategy: control vs. cognitive vs. shared emotions) between-subject design. we first collected participants' travel plan details (purpose and destination), perceived severity, susceptibility and emotions (fear, anxious, worry, uneasy) towards current coronavirus pandemic. then participants were randomly allocated to one of the three experimental conditions. participants in all conditions were exposed to the same experimental stimulusa fictitious middle-market international hotel chain (xyz) to control participants' pre-existing knowledge of existing hotels. participants in the control condition were not exposed to any crisis communication message. in the other two conditions, the hotel's crisis communication focused on the same areascommitment to cleanliness and cancelation policy but they differed on why the hotel wanted to do this. in the cognitive condition, consistent with many hotels' current response (e.g. four seasons), the crisis communication explained the hotel's commitment to cleanliness was to reduce health risk. in the shared emotions condition, the crisis communication explained the hotel's commitment to cleanliness was because it shared the same emotions as tourists: the hotel employees and their families are susceptible to coronavirus just like everyone else. the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic also makes the hotel anxious and worry because "it makes it hard for us to know how exactly we will' be impacted or how bad things might get". the rest of materials were identical across conditions. participants then answered attention check questions and manipulation check question (to what extent the crisis communication focused on shared emotions). the -item -point scale in aaker, vohs, and mogilner ( ) was used to measure brand humanization. sample items in the scale were "xyz feels like a person" and "i've been think about xyz as a person". emotional attachment was gathered via the same items as in dunn and hoegg ( ) (also via -point scale). intention to visit was gathered via a single-item -point multi-category ordinal answer format. descriptive statistics and correlations are reported in table . participants' emotions and perceived severity and susceptibility did not differ across conditions (all ps. > . ), and thus they were excluded from further analysis. manipulation check suggested participants in the shared emotions condition were more likely to agree that crisis communications focused on shared emotions than the other two conditions (f ( , ) = . , p < . ), suggesting our manipulation was successful. an anova with crisis communication strategy as the independent variable and emotional attachment as the dependent variable suggested emotional attachment differed across conditions (f ( , ) = . , p < . ). post-hoc contrast effects further suggested shared emotions condition (m = . , sd = . ) led to higher emotional attachment than cognitive condition (m = . , sd = . , p < . ) and control (m = . , sd = . ; p < . ), supporting h . to test h , we used a bootstrapping-based method (with resamples) and process macro (model ) with crisis communication strategy as the independent variable, brand humanization as the mediator and emotional attachment as the dependent variable. we found brand humanization had a significant indirect effect on the impact of crisis communication strategy on emotional attachment (coefficient = . , se = . , % ci = . , . ), supporting h . another anova with crisis communication strategy as the independent variable and intention to visit as the dependent variable suggested intention to visit differed across conditions (f ( , ) = . , p < . ). post-hoc h. hang, et al. annals of tourism research xxx (xxxx) xxxx contrast effects further suggested shared emotions condition (m = . , sd = . ) led to higher intentions to visit than cognitive condition (m = . , sd = . , p < . ) and control (m = . , sd = . ; p < . ), supporting h . finally, a bootstrappingbased method (with resamples) and process macro (model ) with crisis communication strategy as the independent variable, brand humanization and emotional attachment as mediators and intention to visit as the dependent variable suggested: brand humanization and emotional attachment had a significant indirect effect on the impact of crisis communication strategy on intention to visit (coefficient = . , se = . , % ci = . , . ), supporting h (fig. ) . our experimental results suggest during covid- , crisis communication emphasising on shared emotions can establish emotional attachment with tourists. this is because such approach makes tourists humanize the hotel to fulfil their desire for affiliation. thus, our research extends extant tourism risk perception literature by highlighting the importance of focusing on tourists' emotional responses to risks. our results further suggest crisis communication on shared emotions can increase tourists' intentions to visit when the outbreak ends. thus, our research also contributes to tourism crisis management literature by providing unique insights on the impact of crisis communication during a crisis. this can complement extant literature that is dominated by crisis communication after a crisis. finally, we theorize and empirically demonstrate brand humanization underlines the impact of shared emotions on emotional attachment. thus, our research goes beyond dunn and hoegg ( ) to demonstrate the key reason shared emotions can trigger emotional attachment. practically, our research challenges the cognitive approach that dominates hotels' current covid- communication. instead, our research suggests hotels should emphasis on shared emotions to build emotional attachment. this can increase tourists' intentions to visit afterwards. in terms of limitations, our research only measures tourists' behavioural intentions. thus, future research could measure tourists' actual behaviour to test the robustness of our framework. in addition, we encourage future research to examine the impact of hotels showing empathy on tourists' emotional attachment and behavioural intentions. note: *p < . (one-tailed), **p < . (one-tailed), ***p < . (one-tailed). nonprofits are seen as warm and for-profits as competent: first stereotypes matter tourism, crisis, disaster: an interdisciplinary approach travelers' health risk perceptions and protective behavior: a psychological approach protecting organization reputations during a crisis: the development and application of situational crisis communication theory the impact of fear on emotional brand attachment humanizing brands: when brands see to be like me, part of me, and in a relationship with me chaos, crises and disasters: a strategic approach to crisis management in the tourism industry a review of research on tourism risk, crisis and disaster management: launching the annals of tourism research curated collection on tourism risk, crisis and disaster management the ties that bind: measuring the strength of consumers' emotional attachments to brands tourism risk and uncertainty: theoretical reflections focusing on consumer experience and strategic marketing in social media, creative & tourism industry, he has published in the international journal of operations & production management her work is cross-disciplinary by nature, characterized by the use of psychological theories and experimentation to gain insights into fundamental social and accounting issues his main research areas are consumer psychology, tourism, retailing and corporate social responsibility. he has published in leading journals such as annals of tourism research xxx (xxxx) xxxx key: cord- - d vi c authors: brinks, verena; ibert, oliver title: from corona virus to corona crisis: the value of an analytical and geographical understanding of crisis date: - - journal: tijdschr econ soc geogr doi: . /tesg. sha: doc_id: cord_uid: d vi c the term ‘crisis’ is omnipresent. the current corona virus pandemic is perceived as the most recent example. however, the notion of crisis is increasingly deployed as a signifier of relevance, rather than as an analytical concept. moreover, human geography has so far little contributed to the interdisciplinary crisis research field which is fixated on the temporal aspects of crisis but neglects its spatiality. against this background, the first aim of the paper is to demonstrate the value of thinking about crisis analytically. therefore, we introduce theoretical knowledge developed within a recently emerging literature on crisis management. second, we demonstrate the relevance of including geographical thinking into crisis research more systematically. based on the tpsn‐framework by jessop et al., we illustrate spatial dimensions of the ‘corona crisis’, its perception and handling in germany. the empirical references are based on media reports. the spread of the coronavirus has turned into a crisis. this finding is hardly surprising and the majority of readers will agree. but when and how did it turn into a crisis? this question is much more difficult to answer, mainly due to the fact that the term 'crisis' is anything but easy to grasp. it is omnipresent and frequently used in very different contexts. the term is, for instance, used to signify the enhanced relevance of the respective research. as a consequence, the notion of crisis is mainly deployed intuitively, rather than analytically. similar to other disciplines, most geographical contributions related to crisis dynamics are driven by an empirical phenomenon, which is framed as being in crisis. in economic geography, the 'financial crisis' has received particular attention and geographers have made significant contributions by exploring the manifold spatial references of this global phenomenon (e.g. aalbers ; martin ) . within the geographic discipline, diagnoses of 'crisis' are often associated with neoliberalism and capitalism apparently producing manifold social, economic and political stresses (jones & ward ; larner ) . particularly, geographers in marxist tradition (most prominently represented by david harvey) deploy crises as an inherent and recurring feature of capitalism; or to cite harvey ( , p. ) : 'capital never solves its crisis tendencies' (emphasis in orig.). in addition, climate change, rising religious fundamentalism and newly emerging economic powers outside the traditional industrial centres pose challenges of truly global scope that invoke crises in all parts of the world (larner ) . this literature emphasises that we live in times of crises and doubtlessly provide important insights on the social, economic and political configurations that contribute to crisis diagnosis. however, so far little attention has been paid to specify the nature of 'crisis' itself as an exceptional and stressful human experience. if we accept the diagnosis that we live in times of crises, it becomes more important than ever to develop a more profound understanding of crisis as a particular context for action and a possibility for intervention. in this paper, we therefore propose a conceptual shift from the structural conditions that cause crises to an actor-centric approach focused on the practical consequences of crisis for individual and collective agency. we introduce theoretical knowledge developed within a recently emerging, interdisciplinary literature on crisis management. moreover, we illustrate this analytical understanding with reference to the recent 'corona crisis' to connect abstract ideas on the general characteristics of crises with empirical observations. the term crisis is ripe with temporal implications. these temporal aspects predominate in the crisis management literature. what lacks so far, however, is a systematic conceptualisation of the spatial aspects of crisis. while the crisis management literature does use spatial categories, such as epicentres, distance, scaling or territories, it lacks a systematic approach to integrate spatial imaginations into theories and practices of crisis management. social and economic geographers could thus contribute to the inter-disciplinary discourse by integrating the spatial dimension into the conceptualisation of crisis. in this paper, we set out to suggest a conceptualisation of the 'geography of crisis' informed by social and economic geography. the empirical material presented in this paper stems from different media sources. it has to be mentioned that this paper does not draw on an already fully-elaborated or finalised media analysis but is inevitably provisional and selective due to the highly dynamic development at the time this paper has been written. the analytical and conceptual thoughts presented here are based on current research on crises (brinks & ibert ) . within different research contexts, we analysed literature on crisis (management) and also benefited from empirical insights collected in interviews with crisis experts and own participation in interdisciplinary workshops on crisis and crisis management. the paper is subdivided into two main parts. first, the subsequent chapter introduces our definition of crisis based on literature from the interdisciplinary practice of crisis management and social scientific crisis research. second, we outline a geographical perspective on crisis, by exploring different dimensions of the spatiality of crisis. we use the tpsn approach as suggested by jessop et al. ( ) to systematise our observations. the paper concludes by highlighting the added value of a geographical approach. a crisis is related to, yet distinct from other terms, such as 'problem'. a problem denotes a gap between an observed condition and a desired condition (rittel & webber ) . such a gap is present in every crisis as well, for example, the gap between the fastgrowing numbers of people who became infected with the corona virus and the general desire that the population should be healthy. yet, such a gap is not a sufficient condition for a crisis. in order to talk of a crisis, a few more ingredients are necessary: uncertainty, urgency and threat (boin & 't hart ) . uncertainty denotes 'that we cannot predict or foresee what will happen when acting or not acting' (aspers , p. ) . in the corona case, uncertainty is caused by a lack of knowledge (e.g. about the ways of infections, dark figures of a-symptomatic cases), ambiguous signals (e.g. unspecific symptoms), a lack of viable means to counter the epidemic (e.g. the absence of an effective medicine and vaccination) and undetermined timeframes (e.g. when will a vaccination be available), to mention only few. the second ingredient, urgency, refers to the necessity to act, despite high degrees of uncertainty. in crisis, inactivity and non-decision are no options as they will only exacerbate the serious situation. yet, as acting has to take place under conditions of uncertainty, routines are no longer available and action has a strongly improvisational or experimental character (boin & rhinard ; milstein ) . the last ingredient to crisis is an existential threat of highly valued societal assets. the corona pandemic does not only threaten the health and lives of wide parts of the population, but also imperils economic interests and core institutions of the political order. due to the underlying fundamental uncertainty, 'the emotional response to crisis is not fear (such as fear from fire) but existential angst, which has no identifiable object that could offer a grip for a learnt response' (kornberger et al. , p. ) . in addition to these fundamental characteristics of crisis it is important to unpack the term a bit further. it is important to understand how crisis becomes enacted in practice. a crisis as an empirical observation cannot be deduced directly from the underlying societal conditions. rather similar, objectively measurable conditions (like unemployment rates, levels of distrust in political institutions) sometimes entail crisis diagnosis, and sometimes do not. sometimes relatively unimportant issues are treated as a crisis (the 'brent spar' controversy is a widely cited example of an escalating risk communication; löfstedt & renn ) , while even the most alarming scientific reports about climate change are not sufficient to mobilise a collective sense of urgency. what all crises share in common, thus, is not only a severe problem, but a shared perception of uncertainty, threat and urgency around that problem. the key importance of perceptions can also be found in the corona case. in our observation of the public discourse in germany, at the beginning of the government as many others in the western hemisphere looked at the early epicentre of the pandemic, the wuhan region in china, 'with a combination of fascination and fear' but without any sense of urgency or immediate threat until new information about corona infections in europe emerged (boin et al. ) . not earlier than february , we noticed a shift from 'corona epidemic' to 'corona crisis' in the german speaking debate for the first time in an article published in the online portal of the german newspaper der spiegel. two days earlier, in many parts of germany, carnival was celebrated on the streets -a mass meeting with thousands of people standing close to each other. from march onwards, all public events of major size were prohibited, schools were closed across all federal states in germany and a few days later restaurants, production plants and retail shops followed. it was a matter of days, during which the publicly shared framing of the situation has changed fundamentally. typically, at some stage in the public 'framing contest' that takes place in advance of a crisis, the public opinion transcends an invisible 'tipping point' beyond which a problematic situation turns into a crisis (boin et al. ). however, this tipping point can only be noticed ex post, while it is impossible to determine it in advance. for most participants, thus, crisis comes unexpected. crisis is not only a matter of perception; it also unfolds performative qualities. here, performative means that the crisis diagnosis is not a mere description of the state of reality rather, a crisis diagnosis changes reality and therefore contributes to the enactment of crisis: 'if individuals (and the media) define a situation as a crisis, it is a crisis in its consequences' (rosenthal & kouzmin , p. ) . for decision-makers, once in place, the crisis immediately ascends the first place of the agenda. due to the performative qualities, the crisis unfolds its dynamics irrespective of subjective interpretations or experiences. for individual decision-makers, it is for instance no longer possible to ignore the crisis, or, if one tries, like donald trump did until the first weeks of march, it happens at immense political and economic costs. for professional crisis managers, the declaration of a crisis has very practical and robust consequences. they perceive a crisis as an effective 'coping structure' (term used in crisis management practice jargon) societies and organisations have to prioritise a certain topic and to mobilise resources to address a problem. crisis diagnoses emerge in multi-stakeholder constellations. some stakeholders even support the escalation of a crisis or reframe the crisis diagnosis in ways that exert pressure on organisations or states. crisis diagnoses thus are contested and the framing is subject to controversy in the public debate (boin et al. ). in contrast to the term 'catastrophe', the term crisis highlights that despite existential threats, it is not yet too late to prevent the disaster (boin & 't hart ) . in medicine, crisis marks the decisive phase in the course of an illness in which a positive or negative outcome is still possible (ricoeur ) . crisis, in other words, is strongly associated with the idea of an open future (kornberger et al. ) that can be created through individual or collective agency. in the current crisis, the first discussions emerge about the potential long-term structural effects of the corona crisis. for instance, visionaries from silicon valley highlight the enhanced possibilities to establish new practices of remote digital learning and work (thrun ) . at the same time, warning voices (sennett ) point at potentially problematic long-term effects of lockdown policies and the increased use of surveillance technologies on the human rights situation and vulnerable democratic institutions in weak democracies. when we think of or undertake research on crisis, we should also be aware of one additional observation. as mentioned above, decisions in crisis have to be made while the present is uncertain and the future is open (kornberger et al. ) . under such conditions, action does not take place within a given frame of meaning. rather, in crisis participants are forced to learn by interpreting the situation tentatively while acting on it. therefore, crises are usually perceived twice. in a first loop, participants encounter a critical turn in the course of events surprisingly. they experience an open-ended phase of chaos and escalation during which they struggle to regain control while action and sensemaking remain incompletely connected. in contrast to the abrupt beginning, the end of the acute crisis comes much more gradually. as a first step toward a (new) normality, after having responded to the challenges, participants eventually perceive a slowing down in the dynamic of escalation and try out new interpretations of the situation. however, against the background of the previously experienced uncertainty, participants tend to distrust this new stability. they remain unsure, how far their explanations will hold and whether or not the absence of another surprising turn is just a pause in the course of escalation or already a (re)turn to (new) normality. the ultimate end of the crisis, however, has to be 'declared' by decision-makers, which is another performative act. in a second loop, the course of events that led to the acute crisis is reconstructed ex post in the light of the newly established sense and certainty. as an interpretative act of sensemaking, the starting point and the end of the second loop are not fixed and can never be defined in advance. according to weick ( , p. ) , sensemaking is enacted since 'parts of what the explorer discovers retrospectively are consequences of his own making'. by the very process of acting in crisis, a rising stream of new information and experiences have to be included in the sensemaking process. thus, the second loop always starts after the first loop but usually at an early stage in the crisis course. in this second loop, the crisis is deliberately embedded in the classical phase model encompassing the phases of pre-crisis, acute crisis and post-crisis (e.g. fink ) , while the boundaries between the phases are still in motion. during sensemaking the considered timeframe is expanded both, into the past and the future. when reflecting on the pre-crisis phase, the focus is on weak warning signals that have been neglected beforehand or wrong decisions that contributed to an escalation of events. the post-crisis phase, in contrast, provides the (oftentimes missed) opportunity to learn from the crisis (birkland et al. ). once the crisis is overcome, time is ripe to reiterate the acute crisis several times in order to get a detailed understanding of the sequential order of actions. of course, the acute crisis itself cannot be repeated. yet, the pre-and post-crisis phases cannot emerge without the experiences made during the acute crisis. the awareness of these two loops of crisis experience is helpful to keep in mind for the corona crisis. while writing this paper, we are still witnessing the escalation of events and the tentative form of sensemaking while acting on the situation. yet, we can already discover first signs of time expansion. presently the public debate has already turned towards the past by discovering early warning signs that have previously been ignored. for example, a paper published in march , in which the authors warned against (at that time) future outbreaks of a corona virus caused by cross-species transmission (fan et al. ) has received broader attention in the last weeks, that is one year after publication. in china and in italy suspicious accumulations of pneumonia cases attract the attention of epidemiologists aiming at reconstructing the outbreak. at about the same time, governments around the world start to plan for the future. they design graduated schemes back to normality, envisioning the possible ends of the crisis and speculating about new post-corona normalities. finally, the severity of a crisis is widely associated with its perceived scope. the scope of the crisis describes the degree to which the perceived escalation of problematic events can be contained within separable units of society. critical events are much more likely perceived as severe crises, the more they 'spill over' (bundy et al. ) existing boundaries. on the territorial level, 'transboundary crises' (boin & rhinard ) have an inter-regional or even an inter-national character. transboundary also denotes the overstepping of institutionalised boundaries, for example, the vertical sectoral responsibilities of political or administrative bodies (boin & rhinard ) . a true sense of crisis tends to emerge if multiple boundaries are overstepped and causes and effects of a crisis spill over from one compartment into the other. the scope of a crisis is also dependent on the sources of uncertainty. sometimes, these sources are clearly external, for instance, an earthquake or a cyber-attack. such external events can unfold disruptive qualities, yet they are usually easier to manage, as no decision-maker can be directly blamed for them. it thus seems sufficient to manage their negative consequences before returning back to old normality. more difficult are crises that are driven by internal sources. for instance, the structural crisis of a whole industry to a wide degree is caused by the insufficient strategic capabilities of the core decision-makers. here, the crisis is interpreted as a 'brutal audit' (orton & o'grady ) that unveils the lack of foresight and understanding of decision-makers. crises caused by internal factors enact a much higher degree of uncertainty, as any framing of the problem goes hand in hand with blaming of responsible persons or organisational units (boin et al. ). of course, in practice, it is difficult to clearly separate internal from external sources of uncertainty, as often critical external events raise the awareness of internal deficiencies. in the case of the corona pandemic, the crisis fulfils the character of a 'transboundary crisis' (boin & rhinard ) in an almost ideal-typical sense. the spread of the virus is no longer restricted to any geographically confined territory, vertical segments of society or particular societal layers. rather, within a few months, the virus is present almost everywhere on the globe, justifying the whoclassification as a 'pandemic'. further, it affects several societal systems, most crucially the health services, but beyond that also has severe spill-over effects to almost every economic sector, a wide range of institutions of political order and all parts of society. the tendency to transgress boundaries also makes the corona crisis particularly threatening. while the origin of the crisis is external to society, the corona pandemic can be seen as a brutal stress test that unveils internal dysfunctionalities in national health systems, social security programmes or value chains. even though the geographical dimensions of crisis are recognised by some crisis scholars, a systematic and theoretically-guided analysis of the spatiality of crisis has not yet been advanced in this field. such a systematic exploration, we argue, is a possible contribution of economic and social geography to social scientific crisis research. the agenda we suggest here is thus a bit different from previous geographical studies that use the term crisis prominently to signify they are dealing with severe problems within specific empirical fields, like, for instance, the bursting of financial bubbles in mortgage and real estate markets (e.g. aalbers ) or emergency practices in humanitarian aid (e.g. fredriksen ). we suggest the use of the tpsn framework (territory, place, scale, network), as developed by jessop et al. ( ) to explore the geography of crisis. according to gailing et al. ( , p. ) it provides a useful heuristic that can be flexibly applied to diverse empirical fields 'to allow for a synoptic perspective on this field'. at the same time, the authors also warn that tpsn should not be mistaken as a 'complete answer to everything' (gailing et al. , p. ) , as it lacks the necessary, field-specific theoretical terminology. hence, they argue that tpsn needs to be complemented with the respective theoretical terminology to unfold its full explanatory potential. for our agenda, the absence of theoretical assumptions in the tpsn-heuristic is an advantage. crisis, as we understand it, is not an 'empirical field' in the sense of gailing et al. ( ) , but rather a conceptual endeavour to advance a general understanding of practices and dynamics prevailing in situations of uncertainty, threat and urgency. in the following paragraph, we thus use theoretical claims from social scientific crisis research and combine it with spatial dimensions as suggested in the tpsn heuristic in order to delve deeper into the so far underdeveloped spatial aspects of crisis theory. in the following, some starting points for such an investigation are indicated by referring to the corona crisis as one illustrative empirical field (table ) . even though crises increasingly cross territorial boundaries, the territorial dimension remains particularly important. the corona crisis produces countless cartographic visualisations documenting the spread of the pandemic. the number of infections announced by the johns hopkins university ( ) has become an internationally much-cited data source for tracing the dynamic development of the spread as well as regional differences worldwide. the total number of confirmed cases worldwide is presented on the national level. recently, a further map demonstrating the intensity of the outbreak in us counties has been launched by the university (johns hopkins university ). the territorial representation of the corona crisis is largely caused by the report system of public agencies which are bound to territorial units. likewise, many institutional crisis responses, such as the official declaration of an emergency situation, are bound to territories. however, territory affects crisis even beyond administrative responsibilities. the crossing of a territorial boundary, for instance, frequently cause shifts in the perception of crises as being more threatening (since the perceived distance to crisis declines) and escalating (fear of losing control). 'patient ' as the first documented case in a certain territory is well reported as well as the first case of covid- outside of china on january. manifold media reports refer to 'first cases' or 'first deaths' inside or outside a specific territorial unit. some places are more affected by crisis than others (see aalbers for the financial crisis). some crises culminate in a single epicentre. a school shooting creates such a mono-centric geography and 'place renewal' can be an adequate way for crisis recovery (wombacher et al. ). more typically, however, crises unfold complex, multi-local geographies. in the case of the corona pandemic, we can already identify several symbolically charged places. above all, the huanan seafood market in wuhan has been reported as the point of origin of the outbreak. related to that, the use of the term 'wuhan virus' by the us government can be conceived as a framing and blaming strategy jessop et al. ) . portrayal of outbreak according to territorial entities activation of territoriallybound resources 'first case' inside or outside a territory place emergence of places of crisis such as supermarkets 'epicentre' and 'superspreader' locations scale assignment of responsibility inter-national organisations such as the who network expert communities '#flattenthecurve' (boin et al. ) through spatial dissociation and association (ibert et al. ) . further places, such as the notorious après ski bars in ischgl in austria, or the football stadium in milan have become spots of investigation as potential 'super spreader' locations from where the virus disseminated across europe (merlot ) . surprisingly, supermarkets have emerged as relevant places of the corona crisis. as places of food provision, in times of lockdown these facilities have transformed rapidly into critical infrastructures equipped with additional safety precautions. in contrast, hospitals represent classical institutions of crisis response. yet, when becoming activated for this crisis, their regular safety standards needed to be adapted to the particular challenges of the corona pandemic. the notion of scale is closely related to spatial hierarchies (jessop et al. ) . it is a particularly important dimension in crises when it comes to negotiation of responsibility and coordination of action (which scale is the right one to (re)act on crises?). the corona crisis provides a vivid example here. in germany, for instance, the corona crisis induced a discussion of the federal constitution. where in other states, the national governments decided about the closing of retail stores, etc., the national government in germany is not authorised to decide about such measures since infection protection is situated at the federal state-level (bundesländer) (leitlein & schuler ) . moreover, the health authorities, which report about confirmed corona infections and are authorised to impose measures such as quarantine, are based on the level of administrative districts (landkreis) or district-free cities in germany. located at an inter-national scale, the who receives particular attention in these days. though not authorised to impose measures, the who has an important function in terms of policy recommendation. the who's declaration of the covid- outbreak being a 'pandemic' on march can be interpreted as a means justifying considerable state interference with fundamental rights. the network perspective on crisis focuses on the relations between nodes (of every kind). it can be enriched by deploying the concept of 'relational proximity' (gertler ) and the function of medical experts in the corona crisis. medical professionals such as epidemiologists and virologists currently receive particular attention as policy advisors. they are embedded in trans-local professional communities. they share knowledge about the corona virus internationally, for instance, through rapid publication practices in academic journals (see for instance the lancet). members of these professional communities are characterised by relational proximity, which means that based on a shared repertoire of practices and similar expertise they are able to collaborate closely even across physical distance. another example of the network dimension are social media having an enormous relevance in the corona crisis in terms of establishing a common understanding of the situation and sharing (similar) experiences across distance. calls such as 'flatten the curve' or 'stay at home' went viral online and contributed to a shared perception of the corona crisis even when the locations and individual concerns with the corona virus are different. as jessop et al. ( ) argue, the empirical reality cannot be separated into the categories territory, place, scale and network. rather, the dimensions are interwoven in 'sociospatial relations'. similarly, gailing et al. ( ) find typical nexuses between several dimensions when studying empirical cases from the german energiewende. the following sub-sections aim at providing some examples of such interactions between spatial dimensions in the corona crisis -importantly, without any claim of completeness and admittedly presented in a rather sketchy and unsystematic fashion. at the present state, it would be an impossible endeavour to outline all spatial relations, too dynamic is the escalation in the course of events. therefore, we focus on three nexuses that can be detected in prominent public discourses to demonstrate the principle of our approach. network-place: topologies of interconnected places -as mentioned earlier, supermarkets have turned into strategic places in the fight against the pandemic across the globe. during the past few weeks, we witness a gradual reshaping of their physical setup and practices of staff to accommodate these places to the new requirements of 'social distancing' while maintaining a high turn-over of people. items from hospital environments, like surgical masks and gloves have been transferred to supermarkets in order to protect staff and clients. planes of acrylic glass have been fixed at checkout counters to minimise the physical contact between cashiers and customers and tapes attached on the floor remind shoppers to hold minimum distance. at the same time, familiar items, such as customer divider bars, loyalty cards or cash money have been banned from some supermarkets as they are now reinterpreted as potential carriers of the virus. however, it would be inaccurate to primarily conceive supermarkets as singular places. most supermarkets are not single-owned stores but rather branch stores belonging to chains of multi-national retail chains. of course, supermarkets are places, though places that belong to wider networks operated and orchestrated by grand retailers. supermarkets, in other words, are part of networks of practices (brown & duguid ) . the concrete local practices and settings are thus not idiosyncratic, but depend strongly on the affiliation to a certain retail chain. moreover, these practices might vary slightly from chain to chain while they are made similar from place to place through standards orchestrated through the respective networks. a similar topological perspective on crisis has been elaborated by fredriksen ( ) . the author focuses on emergency infrastructure which is used in different humanitarian crises. according to the author, emergency tents as material objects, which have constantly been developed further after crisis experiences, represent 'lessons learned' from different crises. moreover, since they are highly mobile and used at different sites affected by crisis, the places resemble one another and thus become nodes in a 'network topology' of crises (fredriksen ) . in a longer timeframe, experiences gained in supermarkets will most probably turn out to be extremely important for all kinds of retail stores. as soon as legislation will step by step relax the regulations on social distancing, the network of practice will most likely expand from the realm of supermarket(s) (chains) to other retailers, for instance in fashion retail or book stores. negotiation of crisis governance -the connection of scale and territory is obvious in crisis settings since public crisis response strategies are usually immediately connected to territorial units. scaling in the sense of deciding which level is the most effective one for coping with crises is a key question in crisis management (e.g. boin et al. ) . the different levels usually present territorial units where the smallest level is always fully integrated in the next larger level (municipal level, national scale, european scale, etc.). this leads to the key issue of coordination in crises. a certain threatening situation has to be assigned to a specific scale, responsible for crisis response. these responsibilities are usually determined beforehand. in the corona crisis, the formal assignment of authority in epidemic events (as mentioned, the federal states (bundesländer) are responsible instead of the national government in germany) is now critically eyed and political efforts have been started to change the respective law in order to allow the upscaling of competencies to the national level in such crises (waschinsky ). at the same time, local hubs of the outbreak are intensively investigated such as the district of heinsberg in the federal state of north rhine-westphalia in germany. authorities aim at deriving strategies for larger territorial areas, arguing that 'the district of heinsberg portrays the nationwide occurrence of infections in a nutshell' (Ärzteblatt ) . however, in the corona crisis some of the limitations of thinking of crisis in territorial units and instruments of territorial scaling also come to light. even though the corona virus crosses geographical and territorial boundaries, the virus does not spread homogeneously in space. as in many other countries, the shutdown of public life in germany is a nationwide strategy (with variances across different federal states). this also means that more and less affected areas are treated the same way. when discussing potential strategies for the time after the shutdown these questions of territorial on a more general level, the corona crisis demonstrates the interplay of territory and scale by pointing to strategies, limitations and challenges of upscaling and downscaling processes (see also boin et al. , on upscaling) . also fundamental differences occur between centralistic and federal states. determining the right scale, activation of respective structures when necessary and flexible adjustments in territorial scaling are central issues of crisis management. yet, as observed in other cases, the transgressive forces driving the corona crisis requires complex settings of multi-level governance that includes several scales and political sectors (bundy et al. ) . another interesting question is whether or not the scale of the crisis and the scale of crisis response always have to be congruent for most effective crisis management. territory-place-network: 'social distancing' policies -the spreading of the corona virus takes place from human to human being. without changes in the social behaviour, every infected person in average spreads the virus to - other people. therefore, most national authorities have enforced so-called 'social distancing' policies. the aim is to reduce the ratio of infection, in the ideal case below (which means in the long run the epidemic will run out because then, statistically, each infected person infects less than one other person). a chain of infections can be interpreted as a network (kuebart & stabler, ) , with every infected person representing a node and every infection from person to person representing a tie. in the terminology of structural network analysis, decreasing infection rates lead to decreasing network connectivity. from a geographically informed perspective on proximity and distance, the term 'social distancing' is a bit misleading, as it suggests that social contacts should be avoided. in fact, rather on the contrary, social distancing encompasses a set of behavioural regulations that seek to allow social contacts, yet in a way that minimises physical proximity and thus promises to disrupt the chain of infections. 'social proximity' thus enables physical distancing since through grown and trusted relationships, familiar face-to-face interaction in physical co-presence can partly be substituted by online media and the like (boschma ) . social distancing policies do not only address interaction between people, they also include the spatial setting in which interaction occurs. the discourse on super-spreaders, for instance, focuses not only particular persons who spread the virus at disproportionally high rates, but almost always also includes particular types of places, where the infective encounters took place. hence, social distancing policies almost always are place sensitive and frequently entail the closure of the respective venues (night clubs, pubs, sports stadiums, concert halls, even playgrounds). finally, social distancing policies are enforced on a territorial level, most typically by the national states. however, different territorial approaches co-existed. while today most countries pursue social distancing policies, not all did so or did not from the very beginning. for instance, sweden, the netherlands and the uk preferred another approach of isolating only the most vulnerable individuals while the rest of the population can face the risk of infection in order to reach 'herd immunity' sooner rather than later. other countries, especially in asia, concentrated on infected persons and followed the strategy of preemptive mass-testing to identify infections early on and of isolating infected persons from the rest of the population. territorial differences in terms of crisis response are also known from other crises. regarding the h n pandemic (better known as swine flu), baekkeskov and Öberg ( ) analysed different vaccination policies of denmark and sweden, each supported by the dominant national expert opinions. while sweden followed the approach of vaccinating large parts of its population, denmark decided to recommend vaccination for risk groups only. both policies were supported by the majority of expert opinions reported in the respective national mass media. their findings emphasise that territorial differences in policy strategies are reflected by public discourses on the crisis in the territories. even though the general direction of social distancing policies is similar everywhere, there is much variation in detail between territories. for instance, italy and spain sought to decrease the amount of social contacts by imposing a lockdown, hence people are no longer allowed to leave their private homes apart from buying food or for health services. in germany, in contrast, authorities declared a prohibition of social interaction. german citizens are thus still allowed to leave their homes, as long as they follow the commandments of keeping a minimum distance to other citizens of . metres and seeking only the company of members who live in the same household or at most one other person. as a federal state, however, germany resembles a fragmented patchwork of territories with slightly different rules and approaches (see above). another set of interesting territorial differences in social distancing policies occur in the attribution of surgical masks in public spaces. in japan, for instance, 'mask-wearing since the s … became a civic duty of those who sneeze and cough not to be a source infection, while for the healthy general public, mask-wearing embodies neoliberal ethics of being self-caring and self-responsible to one's health' (horii ) . while japan is the internationally most well-known example, similar practices can be observed in other countries, especially in east asia, as well. in the european context, by contrast, the same practice has been widely dismissed by public opinion until very recently. here, the wearing of surgical equipment is seen as part of a professional practice that is little useful when used inappropriately by laypersons and outside of the professional setting. therefore, surgical masks played a major role in some national policies in the east-asian context while they have been ignored in most western contexts. however, the perception of masks has shifted quickly recently, as austria exemplifies, whose government decreed at the beginning of april the duty of wearing a mask when entering a supermarket. in germany, the national government recommended the use of masks in the public space in mid-april. one by one, the federal states governments did not only take up this recommendation but, similar to austria, even tighten the rule by declaring the obligation of wearing masks in retail stores or in public transport. in this paper we set out to suggest a conceptually grounded notion of crisis and to explore its geography. the present corona crisis served as an illustrative empirical background to substantiate the analytical spatial dimensions with concrete examples. the term crisis, we suggest with references to contributions from crisis management and organisation studies, encompasses the elements of uncertainty, urgency and threat. crises are related to societal problems, yet cannot directly be deduced from them. rather, a crisis becomes only a crisis, if the situation is collectively perceived and declared as a crisis. moreover, crisis has performative qualities. a crisis diagnosis thus is not primarily a proper description of reality, but a creator of a new reality in which uncertainty, urgency and threat predominate, no matter if decision-makers like it or not. right because of the performative nature of crisis diagnoses, the discursive framing of the crisis is a highly contested issue in public debates. it takes place in complex, multi-stakeholder settings and different interests and worldviews are mobilised. some stakeholders might even be driven by a strategic interest in further escalating the situation (löfstedt & renn ) . while crisis management has spent considerable effort to theorise on the temporal aspects of crisis, reference to its spatial aspects remained sparse. against this background, we suggest that human geography can contribute to inter-disciplinary research on crisis by unpacking the geographical aspects systematically. we used the tpsn heuristic as suggested by jessop et al. ( ) to delve into the different dimensions of the spatiality of crisis: we explored its territorial dimension, its scalarity, place-based accounts and the relational spaces of networks. furthermore, the corona crisis served as a vivid example to illustrate that the tpsn approach is not primarily valuable to disentangle empirical observations and rearrange them along separate dimensions. rather on the contrary, we used the examples of the recently observable restructuring of supermarket spaces, of flexible re-scaling of crisis response policies and of social distancing policies to demonstrate that it seems much more promising to scrutinise the multiple forms of interaction and overlap of several spatial dimensions in the same empirical observation. what is the particular contribution of a conceptually informed, geographical understanding of crisis? we see at least three distinct qualities of such an approach: first, an emerging topic related to the corona crisis is regionally specific response strategies. here a geographically informed understanding of crisis has much to contribute to the debate. it could support approaches that seek to adapt policies to different regional characteristics (e.g. social distancing policies for urban or rural regions) or to regionally unequally affected areas (e.g. hotspots of the crisis vs. little or no affected areas). second, and related to the first point, systematically thinking about the geography of crisis can contribute a lot to the question of scalarity in crisis. the corona crisis (as many other crises) demonstrates the challenge of defining the scale of the crisis and respective crisis response strategies (which scale is the right one to (re)act on crises? how to choose the right scale? does the chosen scale necessarily have to match with a territorial unit?). in fact, due to its transboundary character it evades any single scale and instead calls for complex strategies of multilevel governance adapted to the institutional idiosyncrasies of different nation states. third, the corona crisis forces the rapid implementation of several new practices such as avoiding hand contact in supermarkets. thus, specific places transformed into critical localities, rapidly equipped with special safety infrastructure. the transformation of specific places is observable in our daily lives; however, it cannot fully be understood without references to other similar places. geography established an analytical understanding of the relations between mobility of practices (supermarket a and supermarket b) and context dependency of practices, enabling a more profound understanding of currently emerging crisis topologies. the corona crisis will certainly occupy us for a long time. a variety of studies and research projects will surely start in the near future (some already started) in order to reflect on specific aspects of the crisis. our aim in this paper was to closer investigate the notion of crisis and how a crisis diagnosis changes the present, as well as the view of the past and the future. crises unfold in time and space. the exact geography of a crisis, of course, depends on the empirical case. however, just as thinking about the temporality of crisis, the spatiality of crisis is worth investigating. we made one proposal by drawing on the tpsn framework (jessop et al. ) but possible approaches are far from exhausted. we argue for a stronger engagement with 'crisis' within human geography since its spatiality is so far kind of an empty space in crisis research. geographies of the financial crisis heinsberg-studie zur klärung von ansteckungswegen beginnt forms of uncertainty reduction: decision, valuation, and contest freezing deliberation through public expert advice disasters, lessons learned, and fantasy documents the corona crisis: a creeping crisis managing transboundary crises: what role for the european union? the crisis approach crisis exploitation: political and policy impacts of 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cosmology episodes: a reconceptualization la crise: un phénomène spécifiquement moderne? revue de théologie at de philosophie dilemmas in a general theory of planning crises and crisis management: toward comprehensive government decision-making available at <https:// www.tages spieg el.de/kultu r/richa rd-senne tt-zurcoron a-krise -wir-muess en-wachs am-sein/ bund will kompetenzen im kampf gegen das coronavirus an sich ziehen. handelsblatt enacted sensemaking in crisis situations the complexities of place in crisis renewal discourse: a case study of the sandy hook elementary school shooting the paper is based on ideas and thoughts, developed in the research project 'coping with crises in a resilient manner: the role of expert advice in the creation and use of "opportunities" in crisis situations', funded by the federal ministry of education and research in germany. warm thanks are due to our project team member tjorven harmsen for valuable inputs, conversations and discussions. we also wish to extend our gratitude to the leibniz research alliance "crises in a globalised world" that served as an inspiring platform for academic debate. key: cord- -jp ge authors: anderson, barbara a title: crisis management in the australian tourism industry: preparedness, personnel and postscript date: - - journal: tourism management doi: . /j.tourman. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: jp ge abstract since the pilots’ strike of , the australian tourism industry has experienced a series of ‘shocks’ or crises which have included the gulf war, the asian economic crisis in , the dotcom crash of , the collapse of the hih insurance company, the world trade centre attacks and the demise of ansett airlines in , the bali bombings in and the iraq war and the outbreak of the sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in . in , a research project was carried out in a range of sectors of the australian tourism industry to investigate the impact of the collapse of the hih insurance company, the world trade centre attacks and the demise of ansett airlines on these organisations and the range of responses adopted to these events. this paper describes the preparedness of organisations to respond to these events; the personnel or human resource (hr) strategies implemented and the postscript, the organisational learning which had occurred. interview findings indicate that there was little preparation for such events, a widespread reluctance to retrench staff, and limited organisational learning had taken place. since the pilots' strike of , the australian tourism industry has faced a series of crises, which have included the gulf war in , the asian economic crisis in , the dotcom crash of , the collapse of the hih insurance company, the world trade centre attacks and the demise of ansett airlines in , the bali bombings in and the iraq war and the outbreak of sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic in . in , a research project was carried out among a number of sectors of the australian tourism industry to investigate a variety of issues associated with the collapse of the hih insurance company, a major australian insurance company, the world trade centre attacks and the demise of ansett airlines, australia's second largest airline. issues explored included identifi-cation of the factors influencing the impact of these events, the relative impact of these three events on these organisations, and their short-and medium-term responses. the study also highlighted aspects of the broader operating environment, such as role of organisational policies in guiding responses to these events, and compared the events of with other 'shocks' experienced by the tourism industry. this paper, drawn from the broader study, focuses specifically on the preparedness of organisations to respond to these events, in terms of the role of policies in guiding their responses; the personnel or human resource (hr) strategies implemented, and the postscript, the extent of organisational learning which had occurred. faulkner ( , p. ) suggests that crises or disasters can be described as 'sudden challenges which might test the organisation's ability to cope'. pearson and mitroff ( , p. ) suggest that crises are events which pose threats to the viability of organisations. faulkner ( , p. ) has distilled the work of a number of authors and indicated that the key elements of crisis situations are: a triggering event, which is so significant that it challenges the existing structure, routine operations or survival of the organization, high threat, short decision time and an element of surprise and urgency, a perception of an inability to cope among those directly affected, a turning point, when decisive change, which may have both positive and negative connotation, is imminent, characterised by 'fluid, unstable, dynamic' situations. the attacks on the world trade centre clearly demonstrate the potential risk which terrorism poses for the tourism industry. a number of authors have highlighted the fact that tourists have become soft targets and are at risk from hijacking and terrorism (faulkner, ) . furthermore, studies have shown that tourists substitute risky destinations with safer choices, demonstrate a delayed reaction to terrorism and exhibit cultural differences in their reactions to risk (sonmez, , pp. - ) . for example, as a result of terrorist activity in , . million americans changed their foreign plans their following year (sonmez & graefe, , p. ) . when the hih insurance company collapsed on march , it was australia's second largest general insurer, with almost per cent of the public liability market. in the following (june) quarter, the net premium for insurers increased by . per cent, indicating that hih's rivals had taken advantage of its collapse to obtain premium price rises which had been limited by competition (white, ) . the terrorist attacks further compounded the impact on insurance premiums. switzer ( ) records that premium forecasts made before september indicated that the rises would be per cent at the most, but after these attacks, the increases could be as high as per cent in some cases, as occurred in thorpedale, victoria. the public liability premium for the annual potato festival has risen per cent since . in tumbarumba, southern new south wales, the easter tooma gymkhana was cancelled after premium rises from $ to $ , (hughes, ) . ansett airlines, owned by air new zealand and a partner in the star alliance of airlines, had per cent of the domestic market at the time that it was placed into receivership on september . this event had a number of serious implications for the australian tourism industry, which included the loss of tourists from new zealand, disruption of services to rural australia and customers of star alliance partner airlines were no longer able to use their frequent flyer points for travel to and within australia (prideaux, ) . in response to a crisis, invariably, urgent management decisions, which are not part of an organisation's normal operating procedures, will have to be made. pearson and mitroff ( , p. ) suggest that 'the purpose of crisis management is not to produce a set of plans; it is to prepare an organization to think creatively about the unthinkable so that the best possible decisions will be made in time of crisis'. indeed, faulkner ( , p. ) suggests that good management means having strategies for coping with unexpected events over which organisations have no control. spillan and hough ( , p. ) suggest that 'crisis management entails minimizing the impact of an unexpected event in the life of an organization'. effective crisis management means that senior management must manage the impact of the crisis on various sections of the organisation, such as information systems, operations and human resources (hickman & crandall, ) . with respect to human resources, management must be mindful that its employees may experience considerable personal loss in such times and that there may be a decline in their workplace performance (heath, ; hickman & crandall, ) . moreover, employees may be working in conditions of greater levels of stress. crisis-induced and post-crisis stress may increase under a number of circumstances, which include 'when informational certainty is low; y the size and scale of the event appears overwhelming; y executives, managers and even onsite team leaders show little support' (heath, , p. ) . in response to these circumstances, heath ( , p. ) recommends that managers ensure that as much reliable information is provided as possible and use a range of 'post-crisis stress reduction strategies', ranging from informal peer interaction to formal professionally conducted programs. these recommendations highlight the need to obtain reliable information as a means of protecting an organisation's workforce (heath, , p. ) . crises are also times in which the relationship between management and employees can potentially become stronger, as they work together in the face of adversity to restore their organisation (hickman & crandall, ) . however, during such times, staffing levels may have to be adjusted and it is imperative that organisations have appropriate policies in place to guide their responses. the use of casualised workforces has been one strategy which has allowed organisations to cope with variations in demand. indeed, workforce 'flexibility' has been seen as the answer to uncertainty (pollert, , p. ) . the deregulation of the industrial relations system has been carried out in the name of increased labour flexibility in the following areas: . numerical-the right to hire and fire staff to suit prevailing economic conditions; . work time-the ability to adjust time and quantity of work time with relation to overtime, shift work, flexible starting times and stand down arrangements; . functional-the ability to extend the range of tasks a worker can perform; . wage-the ability to alter wages and conditions to suit the prevailing economic conditions; . procedural-the establishment of a procedural framework which will allow consultation and negotiation to occur at an enterprise level between an employer and their employees (buultjens & howard, , p. ) . a study involving registered club managers in new south wales indicated that the most important areas of flexibility were work-time, functional and numerical flexibility (buultjens & howard, , p. ). crises such as those which occurred in create critical periods of learning readiness in organisations. this period of learning has three phases, namely, defensiveness, openness and forgetfulness. when faced with a crisis, managers and employees involved may feel defensive and be moved to protect themselves. however, once the immediate threat or incident has passed, they may be open to understanding their organisation's vulnerabilities and assessing its performance in managing the crisis. it is in this phase of openness when most learning can take place. however, the extent to which organisational members are open to learning and the duration of this phase are largely dependent on the behaviour of the top management. after the crisis, operations must be restored as soon as possible. hence, the sense of urgency which motivates a desire for change is lost and all the superficial learning is forgotten (kovoor-misra & nathan, ) . they suggest that 'healthy forgetfulness involves moving on, but only after the necessary lessons have been learned.' (kovoor-misra & nathan, , p. ) . although there is the potential to learn from crises, indeed, faulkner ( , p. ) observes that crises have 'transformational connotations'; with potentially positive as well as negative consequences, it has become evident that many organisations do not learn from them (kovoor-misra & nathan, ; roux-dufort, ) . roux-dufort ( , p. ) suggests that 'the organization's priority is to come back and maintain the status quo as soon as possible rather than exploring the extent to which the crisis is a privileged moment during which to understand things differently.' confirming this view, henderson ( , p. ) reports that the results of a survey of leading tourist attractions in singapore investigating the consequences of the asian financial crisis indicated that there was no crisis management planning and that there was a need for such planning in the light of the nature of the travel and tourism industry, with its exposure to risk and disaster. this finding confirms the observation made by cassedy ( , p . ) that many tourism organisations do not include the possibility of disasters in their strategic plans. indeed, cassedy observes that 'given the travel industry's dependence on transportation, the exchange rate, the political situation, discretionary income and weather, this industry is highly susceptible to unexpected change' (cassedy, , p. ) . this absence of some form of crisis management planning perhaps reflects the fatal mistake made by many businesses that a crisis will not happen to them (spillan & hough, ) . they report the results of a survey of small businesses in pennsylvania and new york, which indicated from the responses, that little emphasis had been placed on crisis planning in these businesses, the majority of which had less than employees. the study also concluded that 'concern for crises was generated from the past experience of those crisesy' (spillan & hough, , p. ) . it would appear that not only tourism organisations were unprepared to respond to the events of but also the australian government did not have any predetermined response guidelines; hence, its responses were made largely on an ad hoc basis without a complete understanding of the problems being faced or thought given to their longer-term implications (prideaux, ) . the manner in which governments respond to shocks in the tourism industry is important, as it may influence the rate of recovery of the industry (prideaux, laws, & faulkner, ) . queensland was the first state to have a tourism crisis management plan, which was formulated after the events of september and ansett's demise in (tourism queensland, ) . development of the national tourism incident response plan commenced after the bali bombings, in october , and was ready for activation in time for the start of the iraq war in . in summary, in view of the volatile environment in which the tourism industry is now operating, it is imperative that appropriate policies are in place, at governmental, sector and organisational level, to guide decision-making in key areas such as the management of human resources. it is also important to ensure that in the rush to return to the 'status quo', valuable lessons are not forgotten which would help guide responses to the next crisis which will inevitably occur. a qualitative methodology was considered most appropriate to describe and explore the complex issues associated with organisational responses to the events of , namely, the collapse of the hih insurance company, the world trade centre attacks and the demise of ansett airlines. the use of semi-structured interviews, with a number of pre-determined questions, allowed some comparison between the responses of the participating senior managers, and also afforded the opportunity to digress and probe further, when appropriate. these senior managers were drawn from organisations in a range of tourism sectors, namely, accommodation, business tourism, entertainment, tourism management and transportation, which includes car hire and tour operators and in a range of locations around australia (adelaide (a), alice springs (as), sydney (s), melbourne (m), cairns (c) and the gold coast (gc)). by conducting interviews in different sectors of the tourism industry and locations, an understanding of how a variety of tourism operators in a number of destinations around australia responded to the events of could be ascertained. a profile of the interviewees is given in table . some of these organisations had operations in more than one sector and geographical location. the interviews, lasting between and min, were audio-taped and later transcribed. interviewees' names have been changed to preserve their anonymity. at the end of each quotation, the following information is provided as follows: (pseudonym of interviewee, tourism sector, location, total number of employees (when provided)). it should also be mentioned that the phenomenon of 'self-presentation' was observable amongst a number of interviewees. general, broad, sanitised answers were given frequently. as it is not possible to report all the responses here, a range of quotations have been provided to illustrate the issues under consideration. in this section, the interview findings and discussion are presented under the following headings: preparedness, personnel: hr strategies and postscript: organisational learning. in discussing the short-term responses to these events, a certain sense of helplessness was detected in the one interviewee's comment, 'just pulled our hair out, played more golf, there was nothing we could do' (trent, car hire, c: ). however, it was also widely recognised that there was the need to be flexible, as can be judged from these comments: y so therefore, the industry had to re-adjust and y we live in a changing world and if, if you're not in tune with what is happening in the world, you're quickly out of business. (douglas, business tourism, a: ) y one lesson out of those events was that y we need to have that flexibility to be able to y make some changes with the direction of the companyy (paul, accommodation and tours, s) the importance of the ability to be able to act quickly and change in response to such events being embedded in an organisation's culture was highlighted by one tour operator, who indicated that this had allowed her employees to cope better with the changes which had to be made in response to events of : yi think if you make them [personnel] y comfortable with the idea that the company has to be quick on it's feet all the time, then when something happens, they won't be phasedy (renata, tour operator, s) from the responses to a question regarding the role of organisational policies in guiding responses to these events, it became clear that the majority of organisations had not been prepared for such events by the development of appropriate policies, confirming numerous reports in the literature about the absence of this type of planning. we didn't have any plans in placey (david, car hire, a: ) ypolicies, that presupposes we have a long-term vision and plan. no, no, we're a small business y (lachlan, transportation, a: ) however, one interviewee did acknowledge the need for plans in the following comment, 'i just think that businesses the size of ours have to have plans in place, because in fact, that [crises] happens everyday, all you're looking at is the magnitude', (ray, entertainment, gc). the comment of another interviewee who had found that his organisation's crisis plans had not been of any value, highlighted the need for appropriate or relevant policies: and normally you would have crisis plans which you would pull out of the drawer every year or two and dust it off and say 'is it still relevant?' but the crisis plan didn't even address anything like this, so i don't think anybody could have planned what they were going to doy being honest, y we literally ran around for a couple of weeks wondering what the hell we were going to doy the normal business practices did not seem to apply. (nigel, accommodation, c) while a number of organisations did not have any formal policies to guide their responses to the events of , the organisational learning which had been acquired during other times of crisis was acknowledged as having guided their actions. yi can remember myself in or y and the pilots went on strike, it was a similar sort of thing, so you called on your experience and did what the best you could and you relied on your experiencey (mark, car hire, as: ) y examples, which would have provided a precedent for management, would have been the gulf war and the pilots' strike in y the boss has been in the game now for - years, i think that y in the background, these guys had some y sort of strategy in place so that, should something like that arise again, they would put into place. (martin, coach company, s: ) these comments confirm the influence of previous experience of crises on organisations reported by spillan and hough ( ) . organisations, irrespective of size, sector and location, responded to these events by adopting a range of hr strategies. there was widespread reluctance to retrench staff as it was acknowledged that they would be needed when the industry recovered from its decline. we tried to cut costs as much as possible y the first thing that comes to mind is retrenchment which we wouldn't do, we tried to push people out on holidays, as much as possible, fortunately, this company isy owned % by one man y and he's sort of been in the business now for many, many years, so he's seen the ups and downs. so, y rather than flicking people, when the business comes back, you're then left with a, not enough staff or b, you have to retrain everybody, so the customer service goes down, consequently you lose more business. (martin, coach company, s: ) nobody lost their job, and y that's why the management volunteered to take a % pay cut, because they wanted to have their staff there, so that when business picked up, they wouldn't have lost all crucial staffy (renata, tour operator, s) all staff were met and because ours are on hourly shiftwork arrangements yall the drivers that were working y or hour weeks, were reduced to and , and they agreed, because we wanted to maintain the skill base that we had, y (pat, tour operator, gc: ) many interviewees acknowledged the importance of keeping staff informed as to what was happening and involved them in decision-making about employment options: [we] kept them very much informed of what was going on within the market. i also made a commitment to them that y there would not be any kneejerk reactions to what was transpiring and that we would keep them informed as to what y the consequences of any, if any significant down-turn in business would occur. i think if you communicate well with your staff and they have an understanding of what's going on, they also understand what is required and the needs of the business y they feel comfortable about things that are happening around them. (michael, accommodation, a: ) i spoke to my staff and i had choices, either put some off y or cut back their hours. so i brought them in here [coffee shop] y one by one, had coffees a day, and they all agreed that they'd be happy to just have a day or so off during the week, no pay, so we effectively got rid of staff y just generally tighten up, try and ride it out because we knew that eventually consumer confidence would return. (peter, transportation, a: ) y from a company's point of view, we did realise that at the time, that there would be some anxt and anxiety amongst our staff and y we had a meeting with our staff y from an employment point of view, y it takes y a long time to get, to find the right people, it takes a long time to get settled in, it takes a long time to get them being a very important person for our clients, y the thought of having to lose any of them, it's not a good thought in anybody's mind y and so, i'm very pleased to say no, we didn't have to retrench anybodyy (trevor, business tourism: ) i addressed staff out in the depot standing on step and i'm crying y and i said to them, ''i'm sorry, but it's not out of poor service or poor management or poor practices by you or i or anybody, it's totally out of our control and we're just going to do the best we can to hold it together and i'm imploring you to help us to that''. they did, you know, they did, which was really good. (pat, tour operator, gc: ) in summary, the importance of communicating with staff in times of uncertainty was widely recognised, confirming heath ( ) . it was also generally accepted that it was imperative to retain staff if at all possible and flexible work-time arrangements were instrumental in allowing this to happen, corroborating the findings of buultjens and howard ( ) . there was also evidence of management and staff 'pulling together' during this time, as suggested happened by hickman and crandall ( ) . with respect to the organisational learning which had taken place as a result of the events of , there were a variety of responses. a number of interviewees were satisfied with their responses and did not see the need to do anything differently should a similar situation happen again: i just think that that what happened actually probably reinforced the way we went around doing our business, that we basically had in place the necessary procedures to actually alter the business accordingly to what was happening at the time. (michael, accommodation, a: ) i don't think they should change anything, they did a good job. (kate, car hire, as: ) no, i don't think so. no, because we, we came through about as well as we could have come through it. (renata, tour operator, s) other interviewees reported that certain lessons had been learned from these events, e.g.: y it's made us much more cautious than what we were previously y if we'd had our time over again y a number of things i would have done differentlyy (david, car hire, a: ) our yield management is more sophisticated now, so that would work better. but no, i wouldn't change much. (lachlan, transportation, a: ) one interviewee (trevor, business tourism, m: ) acknowledged that people in his organisation had been caught up in the emotion of the time, and that the next time such an event occurred, they would wait for reliable information before planning their response. indeed, confirming heath ( ) , there was broad acknowledgement that any responses should be based on accurate information: first one was, to rapidly y increase our intelligencegathering information, so to ensure that the decisions we were making were based on fact, not on reaction. (ray, entertainment, gc) well the very first thing we had to do was to try to establish what effect it was going to have on those traditional feeder markets because it caught us totally unawares. (nigel, accommodation, c) in discussing the perceived benefits of the events of to the tourism industry, a number of interviewees again highlighted the value of organisational learning as a result of these events: i think the operators get a chance to sit down and really look at what their business is all about y it forces people to also explore other markets that they probably wouldn't have explored in the first place, had the business been just bopping along. it also gives operators an opportunity to review their cost structures and rationalize if they need to and understand that their, their existing clientele is of utmost importance and their staff morale and staff, ability to be able to hold staff during those periods is also important in producing a product that continues to be outstanding. (michael, accommodation, a: ) one interviewee suggested that there were benefits at the industry and organisational levels: the benefits are, i reckon, for the industry would be just working out smarter ways of doing business, being more efficientythings like this made people sit up and pay attention and be a bit more strategic in their approach, marrying up short-term gain with long-term objectives. from our point of view, it's caused us to look fairly closely at the business in that respect. y it sharpens us up in our business management approach, it sharpens us up in our service delivery, because we're now competing for a tighter market. (brad, tour operator, s) side-benefits should always be that we increase our level of understanding and the knowledge and intelligence y that is, despite a negative event, what do we learn from it? y so as to avoid it in the future, to be able to manage it more effectively in the future, but more importantly, to increase organisational capabilities to responding to events in the future, so everything is a learning experience, at a strategic and an organisational culture level. (ray, entertainment, gc) hence, while a number of interviewees learnt that their responses to these events had been adequate and hence would not change their response to future such events, other interviewees did learn a variety of lessons resulting in a number of organisational changes. indeed, the value of the organisational learning which occurs at such times was acknowledged by some interviewees as a benefit of these events. the events of considered in this study display the characteristics of crises, in that they presented sudden challenges which had tested the ability of organisations in the tourism industry to cope (faulkner, ) . the lack of preparedness for such events was demonstrated by the widespread absence of policies to guide organisational responses, confirming the observations of henderson ( ) , that while there was a need for crisis management planning, none had been done. the need to support personnel in such times by the provision of reliable information, reported by heath ( ) , and the importance of workforce flexibility in areas such as work-time, mentioned by buultjens and howard ( ) , have also been confirmed. in contrast to the comments of kovoor-misra and nathan ( ) and roux-dufort ( ) , there was evidence that organisational learning had taken place, which confirmed the observation of faulkner ( ) that such events can have positive consequences. these findings have a number of implications for the australian tourism industry. most importantly, it must be recognised that organisations are now operating in an increasingly volatile environment and it is imperative that good networks are developed and maintained so that accurate information can be gained on which appropriate responses to any crisis can be planned. it is vital that organisations become flexible in their approach to their operations, one aspect of such flexibility being with respect to staffing. in this study, work-time flexibility has been shown to be particularly important means whereby staff could be retained, as there was a widespread reluctance to retrench staff, who would be needed once the industry had recovered. it is also critical that lessons learnt during such times are not lost, but become part of the 'corporate memory', such that they can guide future decision-making. the findings of this study are limited by the small sample size and it is recommended that a similar study be conducted in other sectors and geographical locations to confirm the findings. also, a follow-up study of participating organisations investigating their responses to the outbreak of the sars epidemic and the iraq war would be particularly valuable. indeed, one interviewee suggested that the timing of another crisis would dictate his organisation's response: y i would say that it that happened within the next year and business dropped, we'd probably have to retrench staff- big hits like that, years runningy in the short-term, it would be harder to hold staffy (martin, coach company, s: ) in addition, such a study would identify the extent of organisational learning which has taken place in that time. labour flexibility in the hospitality industry: questioning the relevance of deregulation crisis management planning in the travel and tourism industry. the pacific asia travel association towards a framework for tourism disaster management crisis management for managers and executives. london: financial times management managing the asian financial crisis: tourist attractions in singapore before disaster hits: a multifaceted approach to crisis management give back our source of funds, and fun. the australian timing is everything: the optimal time to learn from crises from crisis prone to crisis prepared: a framework for crisis management the 'flexible firm': fixation or fact? work the need to use disaster planning frameworks to respond to major tourism disasters: analysis of australia's response to tourism disasters in events in indonesia: exploring the limits to formal tourism trends forecasting methods in complex crisis situations why organizations don't learn from crises: the perverse power of normalization tourism, terrorism, and political instability influence of terrorism risk on foreign tourism decisions crisis planning in small businesses: importance, impetus and indifference premiums soar as insurers fear backing the wrong horse. the weekend australian tourism crisis management plan post-hih premium spike inflates insurers' profits. the weekend australian the funding for this study was provided by a grant from the co-operative research centre-sustainable tourism. key: cord- - mikqjpj authors: obal, michael; gao, tao title: managing business relationships during a pandemic: conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward date: - - journal: industrial marketing management doi: . /j.indmarman. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: mikqjpj abstract during stable times, firms will generally aim to create reliable b b relationships that provide increased efficiency and profitability. however, tumultuous times, such as the time during a major pandemic, cause many significant disruptions in both internal and external environmental domains. thus, we argue that it is critical during this time to reevaluate the company's business relationships as a whole. while long-term partnerships are great for handling incremental changes during stable times, disruptive environmental changes may require managers to consider disruptive changes to their businesses. a pandemic may also present opportunities for establishing new relationships as there may be other partners/suppliers who are better equipped to help the company address urgent short-term needs and to capitalize on significant long-term opportunities. in this paper, we design a new relationship audit template to help b b firms weather the immediate crisis at hand and position themselves more strategically for the future. we explore this idea in relation to the coronavirus outbreak, introduce the idea of a b b crisis relationship audit, and offer potential steps forward for firms. the existing industrial marketing literature provides numerous guidelines to b b managers on how to build and sustain key business relationships to support their essential business operations (e.g., dwyer, schurr, & sejo, ; heide, ; jap & anderson, ; kumar, stern, & achrol, ; lusch & brown, ; palmatier, dant, grewal, & evans, ; wilson, ) . generally speaking, b b companies should consider both internal factors (such as company objectives and resources) and external factors (such as supply and market conditions and regulatory factors) in designing their relationship marketing strategies (buchanan, ; pfeffer & salancik, ) . within a stable environment, firms are usually motivated to focus on improving profitability and efficiency by leveraging trusted b b relationships (dwyer et al., ; mcquiston, ; weber, ) . however, unstable environments can make it more difficult for firms to focus on such narrow criteria and can make reliance on existing relationships more risky (gao & eshaghoff, a; larson, ; baker, ) . in a crisis situation, we argue that firms should consider reevaluating their existing relationships based on criteria that are uniquely appropriate for such an unstable environment. given the disruptive nature of the coronavirus pandemic, we believe it is appropriate for firms to conduct a relationship audit on their existing b b relationships and consider necessary (and even drastic) changes to their relationship portfolio. within this paper, we develop a research-based template that is straight-forward and practical to use for managers. we ground this template on prior literature on b b relationship value (e.g., cost vs. benefits) (ulaga & chacour, ; walter, ritter, & gemünden, ; zeithaml, ) and relationship states (e.g., trust, commitment) (dwyer et al., ; lusch & brown, ) . we then introduce some emerging considerations that are unique to the pandemic crisis: health-related threats, economic threats, humanitarian needs, regulatory changes, and emerging opportunities (gao & eshaghoff, a; smith ; larson, ) . we ask managers to evaluate the velocity, volatility, and criticality of changes in these factors and formulate appropriate responses to them (gao & eshaghoff, b; palmatier, houston, dant, & grewal, ) . then, we offer managers some practical advice based on the results of this relationship analysis, including when to leverage an existing relationship and when to begin a new b b relationship. in the next section, we discuss the motivations and structure of the relationship audit template. before moving forward with any specific relationship management strategy to cope with a major public crisis, we recommend that firms "audit" their relationships to better understand the virtues and limitations of each existing partnership in light of the evolving pandemic (weber, ; mcquiston ; lindgreen, palmer, vanhamme, & wouters, ) . early on in a crisis, it is important to figure out which relationships can be leveraged in both the short-term and the long-term. further, firms must decide what the criteria to use in judging their relationships. we specifically propose that companies should evaluate both the unique contextual factors surrounding each business relationship during a pandemic (e.g., arising health and humanitarian challenges) and key attributes of the relationship itself, most notably the relationship value and relationship states. while the focus of this audit is to identify the areas of the b b relationship that have changed most during a crisis, we also encourage managers to provide some baseline information detailing the relative strength of the relationship value and state immediately before a crisis. the b b company should attend to all kinds of business relationships that have major impacts on the company's performance, whether those impacts are direct (such as key suppliers, distributers, and customers) or indirect (such as key innovation and information partners, the community, or broader regulatory environment) (walter et al., ) . companies can decide on their own as to how to define the scope of their relationship audit efforts. while we do suggest including relationships with various stakeholders, the b b company can choose to limit the scope of the audit to only include major partnerships in each domain if the number of general relationships is very large. alternatively, the company can expand the audit to cover more relationships if the total number of relationships is relatively small. companies are advised to closely monitor changes in key domains of their external business environment and seek to address immediate and critical threats arising from the pandemic. drawing on a study on how multinational companies responded to the argentine financial crisis (gao & eshaghoff, b) , we consider two factors as being particularly important to emphasize in designing the company's pandemic response strategies: ( ) volatility -the size of the possible change to a factor caused by the pandemic or economic crisis, and ( ) criticality -the factor's relevancy to strategic decision-making during a pandemic/ crisis. we also consider the velocity of the possible change to a factor caused by the pandemic (c.f. palmatier et al., ) . by considering these factors, we aim to provide managers with a manner in which to evaluate the size, speed, and importance of the relationship changes that could be triggered by a crisis. during stable times, a firm is likely motivated to focus on how their b b relationships can benefit their economic/financial standing, help identify emerging opportunities, and perhaps enable regulatory compliance (dwyer et al., ; mcquiston, ; weber, ) . however, new concerns emerge during a pandemic. the economic, regulatory, and opportunities considerations become more salient, while new humanitarian and health-related concerns arise (gao & eshaghoff, a; smith ; baker, ) . larson ( ) argues that traditional business logistics often do not match up with health and humanitarian logistics, which often deal with changing partners and uncertain demand. "in business logistics, actors have the profit motive and generally operate in uninterrupted environments. to the contrary, in humanitarian logistics, …interrupted environments are the norm, especially in the case of disaster relief" (larson, , p. ) . along this line of thinking, we argue that firms must go beyond generic profit motives and consider health-related and humanitarian factors during a crisis. thus, we propose that companies consider the impact of the following five major contextual factors on each b b relationship during a pandemic: healthrelated, economic, humanitarian, regulatory, and opportunities factors. within a crisis scenario, a company would want to build and retain relationships that will allow it to minimize any immediate impacts. thus, a company should aim to identify which relationships have a direct impact on the physical health of the company's key stakeholders (kuckertz et al., ) . for example, a company may question if there are suppliers, perhaps due to contaminated production facilities, that cause direct health risks to the company's other stakeholders such as employees and customers (baker, ; rassy & smith, ) . conversely, there may be existing suppliers who are capable of shifting production capabilities to produce products that can enable a healthy work environment (distilled spirits, ) . in both scenarios, the company should identify those relationships and address the associated challenges accordingly (larson, ) . a firm should also ask itself within a crisis scenario: which relationships are causing the most disruptions in the supply chain and marketplace for the company (rassy & smith, ; turner & akinremi, ) ? prior research has shown that companies tend to focus on economic stability, perhaps at the cost of prior goals (e.g., market share growth), during a crisis situation (kunc & bhandari, ) . it is imperative that the company identify relationships at most risk of causing major and urgent impacts on product sales, sourcing of key supplies, and continuity of essential operations (singh & yip, ) . decisions should be made on whether to retain these relationships and how to find substitutes for them should be explored. at the same time, the firm should identify the existing relationships that can be leveraged in the short and long term (kunc & bhandari, ) . just as the company should pay attention to the job security of its current employees, it should also consider the business security (i.e., threats to survival) for its key, long-term business and community partners. this criterion takes on a more holistic look at b b relationshipsas opposed to simply asking how a relationship can benefit the firm, this asks how the relationship can benefit the entire ecosystem including employees, business partners, and communities (weber & hine, ) . once such relationships are identified, the company should take a humanitarian approach to the management of the concerned relationships. humanitarian activities can include providing food and shelter for vulnerable populations and offering financial assistance for those partners in immediate need (starr, van wassenhove, & l. n., ) . starr et al. ( ) note that prior logistics literature often overlooks the role of humanitarian management and that there is a need to connect theory to practice in this area. specifically, they argue that the largest gap in this area is the relative lack of empirical data. thus, tracking the role of b b relationships on changing humanitarian needs provides a novel method to connect theory to practice, provides instruction for managers in the near term (e.g., "who are the most at risk partners in our supply chain?"), and adds to the lack of data in this area. as has been demonstrated in the coronavirus pandemic, there could be emerging regulations from the federal/national, state/provincial, and local governments during a crisis, such as lock-down decrees and limiting the operations of the focal company and its key business partners (glass, glass, beyeler, & min, ) . it is important to monitor such regulatory developments and develop contingency plans for the current and/or impending disruptions (singh & yip, ) . it has been claimed that firms are often unprepared for regulatory changes related to crisis management and that supply chain complexities can exacerbate this unpreparedness (barnes & oloruntoba, ) . along these lines, we argue that firms should identify relationships within the supply chain that lead to a weak response capability to crisis management regulations. conversely, the firm should aim to leverage b b relationships that best enable regulatory compliance. while it is essential to address any urgent threats from the pandemic, the company should also look at the unique, often transient opportunities emerging at a time of major crisis, especially those that do not usually occur in normal business conditions (gao & eshaghoff, a; teece, ) . a crisis can be an inexpensive time to build relationships, perhaps with partners/suppliers/customers who would not have been available otherwise due to interests, costs, or time constraints. it is also important to consider that the terms of trade (e.g., what it takes to effectively establish a relationship) will have likely changed to a prospective relationship partner during a crisis. furthermore, a crisis may be the time to decide if current partnerships should be replaced with those that offer more short-term and long-term benefits, perhaps addressing some of the aforementioned considerations in the process. if all firms are expected to suffer during a crisis, then there is less of a switching cost in making relationship changes during this time. as such, it could be argued that it is less risky to proactively search for new partnerships during a crisis than to rely on older relationships that may or may not survive the crisis. the marketing literature presents numerous insights on how companies can build relationships with key internal and external stakeholders. the basis for building and sustaining long-term relationships is a provision of mutual value by relationship partners (zeithaml, ; walter et al., ; ulaga & chacour, ; lindgreen & wynstra, ) . existing research in marketing typically conceptualizes customer value as the customers' assessment of the worthiness of a purchase based on considerations of both benefits and costs associated with buying from the supplier (zeithaml, ) . according to ravald and gronroos ( ) , in order to fully understand how customers assess value in purchase relationships, both transactional (or episodic) and relational benefits and costs need to be examined. episodic benefits are the core procurement benefits (functional benefits related to concerns such as quality, volume, and delivery) that are important to each and every purchase task (gao, joseph sirgy, & bird, ; ritter & walter, ) . relational benefits are utilities beyond the core performance offerings that the customer can obtain from the formation, development, and maintenance of a long-term buyer-seller relationship (eggert, ulaga, & schultz, ) , which may include confidence, interpersonal goodwill, customization, and supply stability benefits (gremler & gwinner, ; walter et al., ) . episodic costs mainly consist of product costs (i.e., price), acquisition costs, and operating costs (cannon & homburg, ) . gao et al. ( ) define relational costs as the resources committed to initiating, managing, and dissolving a buyer-supplier relationship (cf. heide, ; williamson, ) . flint, woodruff, and gardial ( ) emphasize the need for companies to keep track of changing value needs by their customers. in particular, payne, storbacka, and frow ( ) discuss the importance for the supplier to seize opportunities provided by external forces such as technological breakthroughs and changing industry logics to cocreate value with the customers. we suggest that the b b company should reevaluate the evolving virtues and limitations of each existing relationship in the context of the pandemic in terms of the above benefit and cost categories. aside from auditing the relationship on the value it provides the focal company, the b b company should also reevaluate the changing states of the relationship. the marketing literature generally views trust, commitment, dependence, and relational norms as the four most notable relationship states (zhang, watson iv, palmatier, & dant, ) . thus, it is particularly important to monitor the velocity of each relationship or the rate and direction of changes in these key relational states in each stakeholder relationship (palmatier et al., ) . adverse, fast moving business situations such as a pandemic, an economic crisis, or both as what is transpiring in the current covid- pandemic provide touchstones for true business partnerships. trust is a company's perceptions of reliability and integrity of its exchange partner (morgan & hunt, ) . for example, a b b company is said to have trust in a supplier if it believes the supplier possesses the ability to perform effectively and reliably and considers the buyer's best interests in taking actions (doney & cannon, ) . commitment refers to an enduring desire of an exchange party to maintain a valued relationship (moorman, zaltman, & deshpand'e, ) . dependence reflects an exchange party's realization that its relationship partner provides key resources for which few alternative sources exist (emerson, ; kumar, scheer, & steenkamp, ) . relational norms represent shared expectations about exchange behaviors in a relationship (heide & john, ) and their presence can help ensure equitable sharing of benefits and costs, curtail opportunism, and provide normative governance to a relationship (gundlach, achrol, & mentzer, ) . zhang et al. ( ) note the nonredundant and complementary nature of these four relationship constructs in capturing the overall climate of an exchange relationship. while trust, commitment, dependency, and relational norms tend to take a long time to develop and are generally stable overtime (dwyer et al., ; lusch & brown, ) , they could all quickly change during a pandemic. for example, certain suppliers may use the pandemic as an excuse to renege on their past promises or they simply may have lost the capacity to fulfill their volume commitments made in a much quieter time. also, when both internal and external situations are fast evolving, some firms may no longer display the same collaborative orientation in dealing with tough issues quickly arising in a business partnership. further, as demands for old products sink and opportunities for developing new products especially needed during a pandemic (such as masks, ventilators, and disinfectants) arise, the balance of interdependency could change rapidly as well (jap & anderson, ; pfeffer & salancik, ) . table shows the relationship audit template we propose based on the above discussions. each factor is evaluated on three criteria pertaining to changes occurring during the pandemic to a relationship (its contextual conditions, value to the focal company, and relationship states): volatility, velocity, and criticality. for volatility, managers are tasked with determining how many changes have already occurred or are about to emerge to the relationship due to the crisis (gao & eshaghoff, b) . for velocity, the manager must decide how quickly the changes are taking place or how fast the situations in the pertinent domains are evolving as a result of the pandemic (c.f. palmatier et al., ) . for criticality, managers must decide how important it is for the company to consider the above changes in the relationship in formulating their crisis response strategies, both during and after the crisis (emerson, ; pfeffer & salancik, ) . a key dimension in relationship dependence (emerson, ; pfeffer & salancik, ) is importance, or the criticality of resources obtained from the external environment/partners. our notion of criticality is conceptually similar to the concept of importance in the discussions of external dependence, and it specifically pertains to the criticality of the volatile and fast-moving changes transpiring during a pandemic that impact the proper functioning of the relationship and call for appropriate company responses. while many of the contextual changes happening during one of the worst health and economic crises in modern history are threats (or having negative impacts) in nature, they all tend to have major impacts on the company's performance and could cause major short-term and long-term damages to the company if they are left unaddressed. in turn, the rare opportunities that do uniquely appear during a pandemic, if properly identified and capitalized on, could translate into major competitive advantages for the company (courtney, ) . the first section highlights the aforementioned contextual concerns. for example, managers will need to determine how much new healthrelated challenges (volatility) have appeared around a given b b relationship, how quickly those changes are occurring and must be addressed (velocity), and how important those health-related concerns are to the relationship (criticality). this process should be completed for economic, regulatory, humanitarian, and opportunities concerns as well. managers may be able to identify which existing relationships should be adjusted or can be leveraged into addressing emerging health, regulatory, and humanitarian concerns in this section. managers should also be able to identify which partners can best assist with traditional goals, such as economic health and opportunity identification. the second section highlights the costs/benefits portion in both a short-term context (episodic) and a long-term context (relational). in this section, managers must ask how much the benefits and costs of each relationship may have changed or are expected to change (volatility), how quickly those changes are unfolding to the cost/ benefit structure of the relationship (velocity), and how important those changes are to the continuation of the relationship (criticality). thus, managers may realize in this section that they require a cost reduction from a supplier or perhaps an increase in benefits (e.g., access to new supplies) in this section. the third section highlights the current state of the relationship. for example, managers will be tasked with identifying how much trust has changed during the crisis (volatility), how quickly that trust has changed (velocity), and how important that trust is to the continuation of the relationship (criticality). this process should be completed for partner commitment to the relationship, relative dependence within the relationship, and relational norms (e.g., shared expectations of behavior between partners). this section is most useful for managers to determine how existing relationships may have changed during the pandemic and the relative importance of those changes. we also include a baseline information column to help the company record how things were right before the pandemic, mostly in terms of the value the relationship affords the focal b b company and the relationship states as seen by the b b company. our recommended baseline standard for relationship value and relationship states is the state of affairs in these key relationship properties existing immediately before the pandemic. while all partnerships chosen in this audit were deemed functional prior to the pandemic, much may have changed to each partnership from its surrounding context to its internal value and states, as seen from the focal b b company's perspective. because not all good and functional relationships are the same, this baseline evaluation serves as a reminder on where things were before the pandemic started. the scales going from "least" to "most" help capture the evaluations of the changes in both the contextual factors and inherent properties of each relationship. given the variance of information across the evaluative areas and among different types of relationships, we do not recommend a fixed set of guidelines on how to assign the scores on each evaluative aspect. we submit that different companies could have different views on the severity and pace of changes. for example, while a complete lockdown mandate by the local government could certainly qualify a regulatory change in a particular relationship to a , other b b companies could view a partial lockdown as severe enough to warrant a assignment as well. the same understanding goes with adverse changes in episodic benefits where either an % or a % supply volume reduction could lead to scores of , pending on specific situations faced by two different b b companies. we now include a summary column in the audit form to help the evaluator record the key events and changes triggering assignments of extreme scores in certain evaluative areas. by serving as a reminder on what kinds of events would qualify a relationship for a particularly high score in an area, such a column also helps increase consistency in a focal company's evaluations of different relationships. we recommend that managers add a summary description for any instance in which baseline evaluation: relationship value and states immediately prior to the crisis. key contextual factors (e.g., crisis-related factors) are excluded from this evaluation. volatility: the size of possible change in a factor caused by the crisis (gao & eshaghoff, b) . velocity: the rate of change in a factor caused by the crisis (palmatier et al., ) . criticality: the factor's relevancy to strategic decision-making during the crisis (emerson, ; pfeffer & salancik, ) . summary notes: detailed explanation of any or scores. they give a score of or , indicating a drastic change to a b b relationship. thus, the focus for managers completing this audit will be to identify the instances in which the most dramatic change will occur. after conducting these evaluations, managers can tally up their totals to gauge what relationships require immediate attention. based on the total scores earned in the volatility, velocity, and criticality columns, the company can divide the partners into two group: high priority response group (with individual score ≥ in any evaluative area) and low priority response group (all individual scores < ). the high priority response group represents firm relationships that have already changed or are expected to change dramatically in the face of the crisis. in some instances, these relationships will take on increasing importance while in other instances, these relationships will become less important, perhaps obsolete. it should also be noted that some relationships may become crucial for addressing very specific concerns, hence the importance of the key contextual factors. for example, a relationship with a medical supplies firm may be very important in addressing emerging health-related concerns, but they may not have much impact on other factors. in this case, you would expect scores of or on volatility, velocity, and criticality across the "health-related concerns" row, but much lower scores on the other factors. thus, these relationships should still be addressed immediately even though the total scores may not be very high. in this section, we provide some guiding principles to b b companies in their formulation of a pandemic response strategy. each one represents a different guideline, and when all are considered, we hope to offer companies a relatively complete set of thought processes needed in relationship management during a crisis. we will organize our discussions by addressing steps forward for ) high priority response relationships (i.e., high volatility, velocity, and criticality), ) low priority response relationships (i.e., low volatility, velocity, and criticality), and ) managing the balance of the entire relationship portfolio. there are three major connections between this section and the previous two, in terms of the logical activity sequence, the theoretical basis of our formulated strategic recommendations, and necessary extensions to the current relationship portfolio. in terms of logical activity sequence, our above relationship audit tool enables the b b firm to evaluate each major relationship and identifies the relationships and specific aspects of those relationships (from most salient contextual factors to most notable relationship value and state variables) to focus on in formulating their specific pandemic strategies. hence, the preceding sections provide necessary inputs for further decision-making in the current section. in terms of the theoretical linkage, we organize our entire article by following the contingency perspective of structural design (chandler, ; venkatraman, ) . according to this theory, a firm's structure, including its external structure or the way in which it relates to other organizations (gittell & weiss, ) should conform to a set of organizational, environmental, and inter-organizational factors to produce best performance. our view of external business relationships as an organizational design issue in the domain of inter-organizational structure is consistent with the view expressed in shi and tao (tony) gao ( ) p. ). as much may have already changed in both the broader context and the essential properties of each business relationship, the b b company should first monitor and categorize such changes and then, specifically based on conclusions developed above, formulate specific relationship management strategies. in terms of the necessary extensions to current relationship portfolio, the b b company should go beyond the auditing of existing relationships to consider needs and opportunities for developing new relationships that were not part of the relationship audit. in this vein, the initial auditing results may illuminate areas that are lacking, thus requiring the establishment of new relationships. for example, if none of the current b b relationships can be leveraged to address emerging regulatory concerns, this will become apparent from this analysis and a new b b relationship should be sought after. below we recommend some steps forward based on the results of this relationship audit. because the high priority group requires the most pressing attention, we focus on these types of relationships first. for the high priority response group, we recommend the following strategies: • adjust the pace of relationship development based on fast evolving internal and external conditions. while all relationships go through the same five stages of development including awareness, exploration, expansion, maturity, and dissolution (dwyer et al., ; jap & anderson, ) , the pace of their developments across stages can vary, especially during times of major changes in a company's internal or external environments. the company should also recognize that as a partner migrates through different relationship stages over time, not all relationship marketing strategies (such as product mix, partner investments, communication, and compromise) will be equally effective (zhang et al., ) . this means that firms should be open to the expansion of some relationships, especially for high response and high criticality partnerships. however, firms should consider dissolution of other relationships, especially for high response but low criticality partnerships. • develop dynamic relationship management capabilities (learning from the pandemic, resiliency, response systems, etc.). drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective (teece, ) , we propose that a company's ability to manage complex business relationships in conditions of rapid and unpredictable change, such as those experienced in a pandemic or economic crisis, may become a key source of competitive advantage. this means that the role of client facing employees, such as the sales force, will change. sales dinners have moved to virtual meetings and conferences have been cancelled which means sales teams must get creative. one example of this is the merging of outside and inside sales teams. while these sales force members historically would work in separate functions, rarely seeing each other in person, the coronavirus has forced teams to embrace virtual selling together. this movement away from separate functions within the salesforce today could lead to more functional and integrated sales forces in the future. in other words, traditional inside and outside sales forces could become a relic of the past, replaced by hybrid sales teams (carson, ) . • be responsible and humanitarian in treating key internal and external relationship partners. firms should work closely with local communities, charities, and governments to participate in publiccorporate partnerships for pandemic response. for example, cockroach labs, a cloud database start-up, has moved away from providing perks and giveaways to win over clients and have instead offered to donate on behalf of their clients (carson, ) . this is an example of one firm shifting their relational norms to satisfy humanitarian concerns while concurrently developing further trust and commitment with their clients. • explore possibilities of producing new product lines particularly needed during a pandemic, such as masks, ventilators, protective equipment, and disinfectants. for example, distilleries have begun to product hand sanitizer in recent weeks as the demand has skyrocketed (distilled spirits, ). in this example, distilleries are using equipment that they already have available, but our introducing a new product to the market. the distilleries are reassessing existing and new partnerships with customers and retailers while addressing health-related, economic, and opportunistic concerns. • retreat as needed and possible. firms will need to end certain relationships in the short-term, which could be a difficult idea to accept. the relationship audit is especially helpful in these scenarios as the auditing manager will be easily be able to identify relationships that have a low criticality score but high volatility and velocity scores. specifically, the cost/benefit portion of the template should helpful in identifying the relationships that should not be further pursued. the pandemic presents an opportunity to end a relationship that no longer contributes to the company's strategic objectives both in the near-term and long-term. partners who are unable to embrace a shift to modern technologies are perhaps the clearest example of partnerships that should be terminated during the coronavirus crisis. • identify and aggressively pursue new opportunities. while many firms have taken a survivalist approach to the crisis, we argue that firms must not overlook potential opportunities. depending on the firm, a crisis can actually be a great time to respond to a changing market. one example of this can be seen from the leavitt corporation, an everett, massachusetts based company that produces teddie peanut butter. as the coronavirus pandemic has changed dining habits in u.s. and across the world, the demand for peanut butter (which is shelf-stable, low cost, and high in protein) has increased drastically. as such, grocery stores have had an increasingly difficult time keeping peanut butter on the shelves, even being forced to ration the amount sold to customers. in response, the leavitt corp. has tripled production since the middle of march . they leveraged current relationships with jar, lid, and label suppliers (economic criterion), while beginning new relationships with trucking companies that had lost business from other ventures shut down by the pandemic (opportunity criterion) (baker, ) . this example highlights how one firm identified high response, high criticality relationships and aggressively pursued new economic opportunities. • establish new relationships to address immediate threats arising from the pandemic. while the emerging threats during the pandemic are seemingly countless, one goal of the relationship audit is to identify the most immediate threats. for example, perhaps no current relationship provides the firm the tools needed to address new health-related concerns. thus, a new relationship is needed. in order to speed up production, leavvitt corp. did just this by buying facemasks and other health gear for employees in march and brought in outdoor porta-potties for the visiting truck drivers (baker, ) . in this example, new relationships were needed with a medical supply firm and a portable toilet rental firm. while these may appear to be relatively minor steps, they were necessary in order for leavitt corp. to keep their supply chain moving and to take advantage of the aforementioned opportunities. for the low priority response group, the response is to maintain relationships and consider contingency plans. although most b b relationships will change due to the pandemic, some will change less than others. in these cases, it is appropriate to maintain a cordial relationship, but also consider contingency plans if any issues arise. the level of effort spent maintaining will also depend on the criticality of those relationships. for example, coca-cola's brand dasani processes and bottles water from detroit municipal sources. in this case, the relationship with the city of detroit has high criticality scores for coca-cola and thus should be nurtured, but the low volatility and velocity scores would indicate that little change is expected. as of april , , there were no signs of a shortage of safe drinking water in the united states, thus the relationship should not change drastically (felton, ) . although demand changes are not expected, and the relationship with the city of detroit is less likely to change than other relationships, coca-cola should at least consider other potential sources of water as a contingency. marketing scholars have used the relationship portfolio approach to denote the range of business relationships a company forms with various types of actors such as customers, competitors, complementors, and suppliers (e.g., ritter, wilkinson, & johnston, ) . the b b company should also view the entire existing relationship portfolio/ network as a whole and evaluate its updated capacity/performance to meet the company's key strategic goals (ritter et al., ) . drawing on this research tradition, we propose a balanced portfolio approach to the management of business relationships during the coronavirus pandemic and associated health and economic crises. that is, b b companies should seek to establish a balanced portfolio of supplier and customer relationships that will enable to them to both weather the immediate challenges in the crisis and take advantage of unique strategic opportunities arising from the crisis. this approach inherently indicates that firms should expect to "lean in" to some relationships, while simultaneously adding new relationships, perhaps in replacement of suddenly failing, current relationships. in this context, we recommend that firms should consider the following steps: • first, firms should institute a new orientation toward relationship development during a pandemic by recognizing the pandemic as a whole new reality and becoming open to changing to the relationship portfolio. for example, leavitt corp. has offered a regular bonus for all employees while the state of emergency lasts and the factory runs at nights and weekends, thus addressing the emerging humanitarian concerns internally (baker, ) . in this case, leavitt corp. is nurturing a critical relationshipthe one with their employees. • second, firms should seek new relationship building opportunities (or embrace the pandemic, so to speak). while the relationship audit necessarily focuses on the reevaluation of all existing relationships, it is critical to recognize the need to develop new relationships using valuable and often transient opportunities emerging from a pandemic. in doing so, the company may need to increase resource commitments as needed (gao & sarraf, ), at a time when while many companies may be attempted to cut spending as a default crisis response strategy. • finally, we recommend that firms look at the results of the relationship audit holistically. in other words, we ask the managers to consider if they have addressed all concerns noted in the template. we argue that it is not enough to simply respond to the most critical relationships, but companies must also ensure that all relationships are complementary. general electric (ge) may provide a cautionary tale of how a firm can get in trouble for taking too narrow of a view. as the coronavirus began to spread in march , ge did as many firms have done and laid off workers. however, they focused too sharply on their economic concerns and overlooked their humanitarian concerns, especially related to the production of ventilators. ge workers and the unions that represent them responded to the layoffs by protesting at various facilities in the u.s. demanding that recently laid off employees be allowed to produce ventilators needed to combat the coronavirus (jones, ) . while ge has since begun the production of ventilators, the firm could have avoided these protests by better balancing their various relationships and considering the humanitarian concerns surrounding mass layoffs. we hope that this paper is useful to all the various employees, firms, and customers in the b b space who are affected by the coronavirus pandemic. we understand that managing a crisis is difficult for all firms and that a reliable "playbook" can be hard to come by. in this vain, we hope that the relationship audit template outlined in this paper can provide firms with an additional tool for managing a crisis. the pandemic has pushed practitioners and academics into a new reality that most of us are unfamiliar with. thus, we hope this paper can inspire an emerging stream of research and knowledge focused on crisis management in the b b context. given the newly developed nature of this relationship audit framework, this framework still requires comprehensive, empirical testing. with that said, we have applied the framework to evaluate a relationship with a food services supplier on behalf of the university where the authors work. we believe this is an appropriate example as the authors have both familiarity and prior experience navigating the university's relationship with their primary food service provider. (see the appendix). even though the focus of this article is on managing relationships during a pandemic, relationships do not exist in a vacuum and concrete; essential marketing decisions about product, price, communication, channel distribution, and target marketing provide the foundation on which relationships are built and adjusted. as such, we also contend that all areas of marketing decision-making within a crisis context could be up for review and possible change. for example, new product opportunities may emerge, price levels may need to be adjusted, and new communication messages would need to be formulated. we hope that this article, along with many others, spurs a new line of research that considers the changes seen within industrial marketing brought about by a global crisis. as regular food services have halted, relational norms have shifted in the short-term. new norms will need to be developed to maintain the relationship in the short-term. baseline evaluation: relationship value and states immediately prior to the crisis. key contextual factors (e.g., crisis-related factors) are excluded from this evaluation. volatility: the size of possible change in a factor caused by the crisis (gao & eshaghoff, b) . velocity: the rate of change in a factor caused by the crisis (palmatier et al., ) . criticality: the factor's relevancy to strategic decision-making during the crisis (emerson, ; 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mat som, ahmad puad; henderson, joan c. title: tourism crises and island destinations: experiences in penang, malaysia date: - - journal: tour manag perspect doi: . /j.tmp. . . sha: doc_id: cord_uid: ut qxyc crisis management and tourism is attracting increasing attention as an industry practice and subject of academic enquiry, not least in south east asia which has been affected by a number of severe crises in recent years. however, organisations are not always well prepared and response strategies can be deficient. the paper discusses issues of tourism crisis management with specific reference to the popular malaysian destination of penang. findings are based on qualitative research consisting of semi-structured interviews with industry leaders from assorted sectors. tourism in penang emerges as vulnerable to regional and global events which act as a trigger for tourism crises, demanding a response in which various strategies are employed. the destination is also seen to recover fairly quickly from experiences of crises, but a well designed and formulated tourism crisis management plan under the stewardship of the public sector is necessary to mitigate further damage in the future. since the late s, the tourism industry in the south east asian region has been subjected to several crises accompanied by substantial falls in inbound tourism. the loss of business, albeit temporary, posed severe challenges for the public and private sectors, raising questions about their ability to manage crises and readiness for future eventualities. this paper investigates tourism crises and their impacts in the malaysian state of penang which is one of the country's most popular destinations. semi-structured interviews were conducted with key industry players from a range of businesses in which questions were asked about the degree of exposure to crises, the most common types experienced, consequences and coping strategies. although there is an expanding volume of research on tourism crisis management, the field is relatively new and few studies have investigated the effects of tourism crises in malaysia as a whole and penang in particular. the current exercise is intended to help fill this gap and enhance understanding of the dynamics of tourism crises and their management within a south east asian framework. after a brief introduction to the study area, the literature is reviewed and findings are then presented before a final conclusion which highlights the main points. tourism has been an important industry in malaysia for a number of years (khalifah & tahir, ; musa, ) and international arrivals reached . million and . million respectively in and , compared to . million in (tourism malaysia, a . table shows international tourist arrivals to revenues received from until . growth rates have averaged around % since , but slowed in due to adverse economic conditions globally. malaysia's popularity can be attributed to a rich natural and cultural heritage and the diversity of attractions in the different states which make up the federation. one of the most visited states is penang which recorded just under six million hotel guests in , almost equally divided between domestic and foreign (tourism malaysia, b) . see table which shows international and domestic tourist arrivals to penang. the state comprises the island of penang and a narrow strip of land on the mainland to which it is connected by bridge. it has a long history as a destination dating back to colonial days when it was governed by the british and known as the pearl of the orient (hooi, ) . present day visitors are drawn primarily by its modern beach resorts as well as inland forests, ethnic cultures and heritage sites. the main city is georgetown which is one of the designated historic cities of the straits of malacca and a unesco world heritage site. the federal government in kuala lumpur has actively pursued a policy of tourism development and state officials awarded responsibility for promoting and developing the industry in penang to the penang development council (pdc) in . the pdc works with the central ministry of tourism (motour) and the malaysian tourism promotion board (mtpb), related government agencies and private enterprises to market penang as a premier holiday destination (ishak, aziz, & mohamed, ) . however, tourism in malaysia and penang has been regularly and negatively affected by a series of crises which have struck the industry in the past two decades. these include the asian financial crisis, the indian ocean tsunami; regional conflicts, the threat and incidents of terrorism and the sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic and subsequent outbreaks of avian influenza (bird flu) and h n (swine flu). in certain cases, these resulted in sharp declines in international tourist arrivals throughout south east asia and threatened the sustainability of some tourism businesses and destinations. crisis is derived from the greek word krisis which means differentiation or decision (glaesser, ) and is applied in various contexts (laws & prideaux, ) . there is no universally accepted definition, but most analysts agree that a business crisis is an unexpected event or occurrence which has the capacity to disrupt everyday operations and which requires action from managers (faulkner, ; laws, prideaux, & chon, ; santana, ) . appropriate steps can minimise any damage and enable a return to the status quo, but the worst crises may threaten the survival of the entity in the critical situation. in other incidences, fundamental change may occur. with regard to tourism, it is often the destination which is hit by crisis and the country as a whole may be implicated so that a response by relevant bodies is demanded at a national level. disaster and crisis are terms which are sometimes used interchangeably (kim & lee, ) and one can evolve into the other within the tourism arena (faulkner, ; ritchie, ) . at the same time, they are distinct (drabek, ; hills, ) and faulkner ( ) observes that disasters usually owe their origin to external factors, exemplified by extreme weather. organisational crises are the product of institutional stresses, perhaps provoked or exacerbated by outside happenings. crises are therefore by implication more amenable to control than disasters and some can be avoided. emergency is another term which is regularly employed, but refers to a less serious and therefore more easily managed development or threat. for the purposes of this exercise, a tourism crisis is defined as an event of sufficient magnitude to give rise to circumstances in which the routine functioning of the tourism industry is severely upset. a number of researchers have devised typologies of crises which can be helpful in management decision and policy making (evans & elphick, ) . various classifications pertain to business crises and are based upon measures such as underlying reasons, gravity, form and scale (booth, ; meyers & holusha, ; mitroff, shrivastava, & udwadia, ) . seymour and moore ( ) identify cobra and python crises, the first erupts suddenly while the second creeps up on an organisation. writing specifically about tourism, glaesser ( ) applies time pressure criteria to describe potential, latent and acute crises. other categorisations relate to scope and magnitude (laws & prideaux, ) and cause (henderson, ) . triggers are numerous and can be considered under the broad headings of economic, political, socio-cultural, environment, technological and commercial which act internally and externally. it seems that the tourism industry is especially prone to crises and faulkner and russell ( ) maintain that it exemplifies chaos theory whereby even apparently stable structures and processes exist on the edge of chaos. occurrences that might be judged minor have the power to precipitate instability and uncertainty which endangers whole systems. all industries can, however, be deemed to be vulnerable to crisis and, according to fink ( ) , any organisation not in crisis is in a pre-crisis mode. a review of the literature suggests that tourism crisis management is still relatively new as an industry practice and field of academic enquiry, even though it has been a recognised business and management research topic since the early s (keown-mcmullan, ) . for the commercial world in general, crisis management is the 'art of removing much of the risk and uncertainty to allow you to achieve more control over your destiny' (fink, , p. ) . managers need to envisage the evolution of a crisis as a series of steps covering signal detection, prevention, preparation, containment, damage limitation and recovery (pauchant & mitroff, ) . they should be proactive, not reactive, by seeking to predict crisis situations and getting ready for different scenarios as well as learning lessons from experiences of crises which can inform future policies for coping (mitroff, pauchant, finney, & pearson, ) . authors writing about tourism crisis management echo these ideas and santana ( , p . ) depicts it as an 'ongoing and extensive effort that organisations put in place in an attempt to understand and prevent crisis and to effectively manage those that occur, taking into account in each and every step of their planning and training activities, the interest of their stakeholders'. glaesser ( ) speaks of devising strategies, processes and measures to avoid and deal with crises while henderson ( ) describes managing the cycle of crisis from readiness through to resolution with the main objective of minimising damage. it is clearly difficult to anticipate and manage many tourism crises, taking into account the complex and multi-faceted nature of the industry (faulkner, ; prideaux, laws, & faulkner, ) , and endeavours to do so can generate conflict and dissonance (tse, ) . the character and dynamics of tourism crises also pose challenges for researchers and faulkner ( ) highlights the lack of systematic research, especially into the consequences of disasters. he calls for more work to be done to assist the tourism industry and destinations recover when disaster strikes. nevertheless, the body of literature is expanding in parallel with the number of actual crises (hall, ) and especially those linked to terrorism attacks which appear increasingly prevalent. several authors examine the relationship between terrorism and tourism (aziz, ; goodrich, ; hall, ; henderson, ; mckercher & hui, ; pizam & smith, ) while the repercussions of epidemics of human and animaltransmitted diseases (chien, ; kuo, chen, tseng, ju, & huang, ; mcaleer, huang, kuo, chen, & chang, ; page, yeoman, munro, connell, & walker, ; wilder-smith, ) and economic and financial turbulence (leiper & hing, ; pine, chan, & leung, ; prideaux & witt, ) have also received attention. tourism crises from around the world are discussed by researchers, with many asian illustrations, but analyses of malaysia remain comparatively few in number (de sausmarez, ; lean & smyth, ). as stated in the introduction, this paper seeks to illuminate attitudes towards tourism crises and ways of dealing with them from the perspective of senior industry managers based in penang. a qualitative research methodology was considered most suitable for the purpose, involving semi-structured face-to-face interviews in which a set of pre-determined questions were asked. such an approach allowed comparisons amongst the responses of participants and afforded the chance to digress and probe further when appropriate. issues raised were the types of tourism crises that had struck the businesses, outcomes, industry reactions and crisis management strategies. a total of twelve key persons judged to be industry leaders were interviewed and the sample was selected using the purposeful snowball method. according to this method, personal links were used to identify suitably knowledgeable respondents. the sample size for this study was determined by using the criterion of 'saturation', as defined by patten ( , p. ) : "at the point at which several additional participants fail to respond with new information that leads to the identification of additional themes, the researcher might conclude that the data collection process has become saturated". the managers represented hotels, official tourism departments, airlines, tour operators and travel agents. material collected was subject to qualitative thematic analysis which is a means of identifying, describing and reporting the content of data and emergent patterns. it aims to uncover the themes which are prevalent within a text at different levels and is a well established tool in qualitative research. results thereby discerned are outlined in the next section which features direct quotations to support the findings. according to respondents, tourism in penang had been affected by various regional and global crises which had become crises for the tourism industry. these could be classified in terms of health (sars, h n , avian influenza), natural disasters (tsunami, indonesian and icelandic volcanic eruptions, climate change), terrorism and political instability (bali bombings, unrest in thailand, iraq war, attacks in the usa) and economics (global downturn, fuel costs). originating largely outside of malaysia, these crises were a matter of grave concern to the tourism industry and confirm the statement by laws and prideaux ( , p. ) that 'there is scope for a crisis that has a local or regional origin to have impacts that reach far beyond the geographic boundaries of the local area or the region.' the spectrum and types of crises confronted indicates that the tourism industry on the island is not immune to exogenous shocks and is highly dependent on existing and perceived levels of international safety and security. crises in nearby and occasionally distant locations had a ripple effect which permeated the industry in penang in a manner previously observed by lean and smyth ( ) . regarding crises that had the greatest effect, there were divergences in opinion amongst respondents. natural disasters and diseases were identified by representatives of hotels catering mainly to the leisure market, resorts and airlines while tour operators, travel agents and hotels serving corporate clients cited adverse economic conditions and escalating fuel costs. the manager of a hotel with a largely business clientele said that the 'global financial crisis was very bad for us; it hit us twice in - months' and an airline manager explained that 'one of the most significant factors is the crisis of fuel which affects the bottom line of airlines. nearly % of airlines costs are from fuel. whenever there are shocks in the oil market, panic will also happen to airlines equally due to many reasons.' the force of the impacts was partly determined by dependency on certain source markets and reflective of the volatility of tourist demand which fluctuates with changing economic, social, political and environmental circumstances. susceptibility has a geographic dimension and a tour operator spoke about how 'some tour packages consist of many countries and they have been cancelled or postponed because of crises. for example, when there is a package that involves singapore-malaysia-thailand, if there is a crisis in one of these countries, the whole package may be cancelled.' the consequences of the crises for business operations included cancellation and postponement of travel, declining tourist volumes, erosion of customer confidence and reduced incomes and profits. hotel occupancies and airline load factors fell, corresponding to a general pattern whereby tourists alter their plans because of budgetary constraints and risks to personal safety and security at destinations (mansfeld, ; rittichainuwat & chakraborty, ) . a hotel manager recalled that 'we always have %- % occupancy rate, but during sars our occupancy rate was down to %- %. we lost our half market share, but in proportion we suffered less than bangkok, bali, phuket, singapore.' as the middle men in the distribution channel (evans, ) , tour operators and travel agents were also exposed to assorted hazards in ways which emphasised the inter-dependency of the various sectors and countries of arrival and departure. air travel is also an intermediary good and demand is influenced by many factors (rhoades & reynolds, ) , but especially economics. troubled economic times favoured budget carriers because of their more affordable prices, compared to scheduled airlines which lost a considerable amount of revenue as travel patterns changed. the national carrier was forced to revise its schedules and close loss making routes because of 'some slow down or decrease in demand at least for a short time. for example, in the case of zurich, we used to bring travellers from zurich to malaysia, but we stopped this route because of the global financial crisis.' although crises are disruptive events with the capacity to jeopardise the functioning and sustainability of the tourism industry, they can yield benefits for those involved. in tourism, as in other fields, crises are a source of commercial opportunities. people do not necessarily cease travelling, but may travel in different ways and fears about visiting a particular place can render alternatives more attractive. such an effect was apparent in penang and one respondent commented that 'certainly, those two crises, a coup in thailand and bali bombing, drove more business into destinations such as penang, langkawi and kuala lumpur. in the last minute, tourists will decide not to travel to unsafe countries. malaysia is relatively stable and safe destination.' another advantage of undergoing crises was organisational learning and improved preparedness to tackle future disruption, an actual and desired outcome which has been acknowledged by many analysts (cassedy, ; evans & elphick, ; henderson, ; miller & ritchie, ; sonmez, apostopoulos, & tarlow, ) . the enterprises represented by those interviewed responded to the various crises by implementing a range of measures which exhibited some similarities irrespective of organisation size and sector. the most common strategies were shifting attention from long haul to regional and medium haul inbound markets and endeavouring to cultivate domestic tourism. managers of hotels, travel agents and tour operators and destination marketers all sought new sources of visitors, depending on the crisis. one hotel employee spoke of looking at 'other safer international markets such as middle east, japanese market and so on, particularly within arab countries and certainly, iran' in light of economic turmoil in the western world. tourism authorities also prioritised their market segments, distinguishing between primary and secondary; whenever there was a crisis involving the former, for example the recession in much of europe, they would turn to other markets which were less affected. an interviewee from the government confirmed that the 'uk, australia, singapore, indonesia, china and so on, were malaysian traditional tourist market, but we are gearing to focus on middle east market, (saudi arabia, syria, iran, oman, uae), india in south east asia, japan and south korea in north asia, hong kong and taiwan in east asia, south africa in africa continent.' fellow association of south east asian nation (asean) members were also an ongoing target. considerable importance was attached to enticing more visitors from the middle east who were especially welcome because they are estimated to stay twice as long as tourists from other parts of the world and spend nearly three-times as much. malaysia has a particular appeal to arabs because about two-thirds of its population are followers of islam so that muslims can be assured of being able to meet the strict dictates of their religion. in addition to working in nations where muslim citizens predominate, marketers were active in countries with sizeable minority muslim populations. officials also advertised existing niche products more aggressively such as the homestay programme malaysia my second home for long stay visitors, healthcare and education tourism. advertising campaigns were directed at specific groups such as young executives, retirees, families and students. another strategy adopted by hotels, airlines and government organisations was the promotion of domestic tourism. the tactic had been initially used during the asian financial crisis of when malaysians were urged to visit and spend money at destinations within the country (de sausmarez, ; musa, ) . heightened domestic activity serves as a buffer in times of contracting international arrivals, offsetting losses and protecting jobs and services which might otherwise be lost (unwto, ) . demand is usually steadier and many respondents shared the view expressed by an hotelier that 'in any crisis, we will try to see whether we could gain some benefits. during crisis, we tried to boost our domestic tourism. when there is a crisis, we rely on local tourists.' another spoke of diverting 'our marketing strategy towards domestic tourism because this market was quite stable and it reduced our dependency on foreign tourists.' in contrast, tour operators and travel agents were interested in exploiting the potential of overseas tourism by malaysians. foreign travel was seen to generate higher revenues than domestic and a manager said that 'to be very honest with you, when we had such crises, we did actually a lot of outbound to other countries as well in order to survive.' additional tools and techniques to deal with crises were discounting and intensified marketing. cost savings and greater efficiency were pursued, amongst them staff redundancies, and airlines engaged in fuel hedging because, according to a manager, 'in every energy crisis, we had hedging fuel, because fuel is very vital for survival and when the oil price will go up, airlines will buy fuel in advance for their future needs.' there was a degree of product diversification designed to attract special interest markets and sometimes compensate for problems with established offerings caused by the crisis. for example, the state authorities sought to encourage cultural and heritage tourism in the aftermath of the indian ocean tsunami which damaged some of penang's beaches. an official stated that 'we have all diversity of products, but we need to focus on our heritage and preserve it. we have heritage, culture, heritage architecture and eco heritage. therefore, we need to focus on sustainability and preserve these heritages for the future generations. our beaches are polluted and over carrying capacity.' the natural disaster was thus an occasion for reflection and reassessment, although there was little sign of any serious efforts to address the environmental degradation which had accompanied resort development along stretches of the coastline. despite the challenges posed, there was a widespread belief that tourism in penang had recovered fairly quickly from each crisis encountered. respondents quoted a recovery period of a week to six months, with the exception of one hotel manager who was less optimistic. aspects of crisis impacts may thus be transitory as proposed by commentators discussing destinations generally (sonmez & graefe, ) . with specific reference to malaysia, studies that have been completed (de sausmarez, ; lean & smyth, ) conclude that the harm caused to tourism arrivals by the asian financial crisis, avian influenza epidemic and terrorist outrages was only temporary and followed by resumption of long term growth. whether the speed at which normality or near-normality was restored can be attributed to the effectiveness of response strategies in penang is a matter for debate. many respondents had mixed feelings about the public sector's success in handling assorted crises and some asserted that government agencies had not done enough. others had more positive views and spoke about how authorities had recognised the vital need to support the industry and initiated publicity drives. guidelines had been drawn up and attempts made to ease the financial pressures on businesses and boost investment. one interviewee agreed that 'like in any industry, the government both at federal and state levels helped us. they were trying to provide the necessary infrastructure during natural disasters to rebuild the industry and increase marketing exposure.' there were two different perspectives when respondents were asked about their former and current crisis management or contingency planning. it appeared that state organisations did not have any plans or pre-determined guidelines. according to an official, 'i never heard of it before. we just are trying to come out with this fiveyear plan and secondary ten year-plans for the state's tourism. i admit that we had not looked into tourism crisis management plan and no budget has been allocated to it.' past responses had been made largely on an ad hoc basis, sometimes without a complete appreciation of the problems faced. the lack of preparedness, suggesting an assumption of invulnerability and a somewhat inflexible attitude, is surprising given the increasing awareness of the significance of crisis management. however, the finding is similar to that of prideaux et al. ( ) who reported that governments rarely have written plans and often do not want to dwell on the possibility of incidents of crisis. unlike government agencies, private businesses had given thought to crisis management planning and possible benefits that they could attain from crisis situations. managers in the hotel and airline sectors acknowledged that they had documented plans which had been applied during each crisis, one representative of the former describing how 'we have crisis management plan at hotel level. we have various crisis manuals focusing on different phenomena such as terrorism, diseases, protest, etc. for example, in the case of the tsunami that hit penang, we had a manual here, how to cope with tsunami, first warning, second warning and after that we had to prepare ourselves. we have meetings once in month, we share our information, and we all think about penang as a destination not just for our business.' tour operators and travel agents professed to have unwritten plans, the contents of which were conveyed verbally to their employees. airlines had also drawn up contingency plans to deal with uncertainties of various types and a manager noted 'because we have been through the multitude of crises, we have fuel crisis management plan. for example, in every crisis, we had to hedge fuel cost. it is very important for crisis management. more importantly, we also embark on a renewal programme, trying to get newer aircraft with the latest technology and fuel-efficient. in order to reduce costs, we also undertake a business transformation programme for the airline business.' a critical aspect of crisis management is communications and there was a consensus that the media plays an important role since it has the power to shape the public's understanding of events and destination conditions as well as the performance of those with responsibility for managing the crisis. news disseminated by the media has an effect on attitudes, particularly if information is sought and opinions are being formed for the first time (glaesser, ) . respondents concurred that accurate media coverage was essential, but that negative stories had often tarnished the image of the destination and impeded the recovery process. almost all respondents believed that the media exaggerated the extent and harmful outcomes of crises and neglected the post-crisis period, failing to help rebuild tourist confidence by circulating positive stories. this is a universal phenomenon and there are many instances where media coverage has exacerbated and perhaps prolonged a destination crisis, although reports in the aftermath of the tsunami did refer to the manner in which tourists were contributing to recovery through charitable donations and by returning to stricken destinations (beeton, ) . penang has therefore been struck by a range of regionally and globally inspired crises encompassing economic downturn, natural disasters, disease epidemics, terrorist attacks, political instability and volatile energy costs. the list reflects the vulnerability of the tourism industry to events in the external environment and the ensuing fluctuations in tourist demand. incidents discussed in this paper reveal how happenings in distant countries can affect tourism operations in another, illustrated by the consequences of the volcanic eruptions in iceland in which caused massive disruption to air travel around the world. at the same time, the tourism industry and demand from tourists has demonstrated great resilience as recovery from crisis appears to be fairly quick with a return to the status quo after a relatively short period. nevertheless, the findings indicate the need for close cooperation and coordination amongst the numerous stakeholders in the industry, both public and private. well designed and executed tourism crisis management plans under the stewardship of official agencies are vital to minimise risks and mitigate the damaging impacts of the 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