Research Symposium 2022
Resilience in Extreme Contexts
What can we learn for future pandemic management in healthcare organizations?
September 29, 2022, 12 pm – 5:30 pm CET
Chemnitz and Online
Copy Right: Charlotte Förster
The underestimation of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has impressively demonstrated us that socially significant organizations, such as healthcare organizations need to be resilient in order to deal with the current situation. Considering organizations as the connection “between individuals and societies” which are delivering “essential services”, such as health in case of hospitals (van der Vegtet al., 2015: 971f.), we need to understand how resilience was expressed during the COVID-19 crisis in order to handle future pandemics or other severe and large-scale crisis, for instance the global climate crisis. Paying attention to the context in which organizations operate is highly important to thoroughly understand what is happening in organizations (Hällgren et al., 2018; Hannah et al., 2009), particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic has not affected all of us “in the same way or to the same extent” (Rouleau et al., 2020: 1).
While healthcare organizations typically operate in a high-risk environment where catastrophes are an ever-present possibility, only individual units of these organizations (e.g., emergency or intensive care units) actually have to deal with catastrophes – an environment that can be classified as an emergency context (Hällgren et al., 2018). Even though the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 and the following pandemic has certainly become a herculean task for our society, it also has moved healthcare organizations from organizations mostly operating in a risky context to organizations constantly operating in an emergency context (Hällgren et al., 2018).
Due to the urgency of the situation, we would like to discuss what resilience in extreme contexts means. For this purpose, we will have the opportunity to listen to nine international research presentations, each dealing with different aspects of this topic.
During this symposium, we will also give insight into the results of our interdisciplinary research project COVRES (Health care organizations’ resilience in the COVID-19 crisis: A multi-dimension study across Europe) located at the JKU Business School.
The research symposium is funded by the Germany Research Foundation (DFG).
