Prof. Girish Prayag gave a Special Guest presentation on "Organizational Resilience: Looking for the Future in the Past" at the University of Oulu

FRONT Research Programme and Resilience Oulu Academy Mobility (ROAM) visiting researcher Prof. Girish Prayag gave a Special Guest presentation at the University of Oulu on 10th of October. "Organizational Resilience: Looking for the Future in the Past" delved into how we can better theorize the concept of resilience and highlight its unique relationship with other resilience concepts, such as psychological, employee, and entrepreneurial resilience. University of Oulu´s assistant Professor Alberto Amore, opened the visit with welcoming words.

"An organization is not a unit; it is connected to many things, such as supply chains and networks"

Prof. Prayag emphasized that we should move beyond examining specific organizations and begin to look at systems as a whole. "An organization is not a unit; it is connected to many things, such as supply chains and networks."

Organizational resilience is not a new concept but overwhelmingly the managerial view permeates its theorization. Drawing from various disciplines and using a socio-ecological lens, I will highlight some of the key trends that have shaped research in this area and the current challenges. I will offer some directions on how to better theorise the concept and highlight its unique relationship with other resilience concepts such as psychological, employee, and entrepreneurial resilience.

There was a lively conversation and many insightful questions following the talk, including one about the relationship between resilience and sustainability. Prayag stated that from a short-term perspective, an organization can be resilient without being sustainable; however, a sustainable organization is, by definition, always resilient.

UC Business School's Marketing Professor Girish Prayag is an expert in Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management

Girish Prayag is a Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management, Marketing and Tourism at the UC Business School, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is co-author of the book “Tourism Resilience: Individual, Organizational and Destination Perspectives” published by Channel View. He has published more than 100 articles in leading tourism and marketing journals and is the Editor (Method & Practice) for the journal Current Issues in Tourism and speciality editor for crisis and disaster management and resilience for the new open access journal, Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism.