Continuity & Resilience Review (CRR): interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and inclusive

Citation

Massie, R. (2019), "Continuity & Resilience Review (CRR): interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and inclusive", Continuity & Resilience Review, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 2-4. https://doi.org/10.1108/CRR-06-2019-012

Continuity & Resilience Review (CRR): interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and inclusive

Welcome

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI), Emerald, the Editorial Board and myself would like to warmly welcome you to this new journal. CRR has been set up in response to an identified need for a place where both academics and practitioners can come together to extend and share their knowledge on continuity and resilience.

This journal aims to increase the body of knowledge relating to both continuity and resilience as they relate to each other and all aspects of organisations. The scope of the journal is broad and includes topics such as:

• organisational resilience;

• business continuity;

• risk management;

• information security

• physical security;

• facilities management;

• emergency management;

• disaster recovery; and

• crisis management and crisis publications.

The journal aims to include articles spanning organizational-level research through to global-level research. Papers will include those focusing on just one discipline, those going across multiple disciplines and those which aim to integrate multiple disciplines. The research will not be limited just to companies but span all types of organisations as well as geographies.

Additionally, the journal will include both the viewpoint from the practitioner as well as the research from the academic. The practitioner papers will focus, generally, more on practical experience and their reality in industry. The academic papers will be focused on rigorous academic research. Nonetheless, papers from both sources are welcome and, indeed, encouraged. Furthermore, integrated papers written by practitioners and academics together are eagerly sought; the interplay between academic research and practitioner experience will be a defining aspect of this new journal.

This journal aims to be an inclusive journal, a unique space where both qualitative and quantitative research on the topics is welcomed, from grounded theory to structural equation modelling and from individual cases to the analysis of large datasets. Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to engage with both their experiences and the academic research. As such, each paper will focus on the “so what” of their research; what can be learnt, applied, or developed from this research.

This journal will be published twice a year initially and, in future years, will be published quarterly. As such, there is plenty of space and scope for a wide range of debates within resilience and continuity. This journal aims to be a place for constructive debate, where reasoned arguments and breadth of topics are incorporated to provide for thought leadership to the discipline.

Topic: width and breadth

When setting up a new journal, it is important to understand both the topic and the interest levels for the topic. As such, an initial review of a major academic journal repository provides a simple, if simplistic, place to start. A review of the EBCSOHost database for “Business Continuity” shows the term in 566 paper’s abstracts across 48 scholarly journals. “Disaster Recovery” AND “Information Technology OR IT” in the abstract itself gives 50 different publications, though far fewer papers (162). Broaden the latter search to just “Disaster Recovery” in the abstract and there are 454 scholarly papers across 50 scholarly publications. Likewise, an “organisational/organizational resilience” search produces 111 articles across 50 scholarly journals. This identifies that people are writing about the topics this journal aims to focus on; however, there is not a focus for the debates given the spread of journals. Therefore, there is a clear need for CRR.

Having established that the terms common to this industry are being discussed in scholarly journals, the next question is that of definition. This journal, purposefully, has chosen not to utilise a single definition for each of the broad topics of interest. Instead, this paper aims to provide a range of definitions, not to confuse the reader but to illustrate breadth of topics and to encourage further shaping of the definitions as the research evolves. One of the earliest attempts at defining resilience comes from the work of Holling (1973), who looked at resilience within ecology and defined two core elements of resilience:

• Engineering resilience: the time it takes to return to a state of equilibrium.

• Ecological resilience: the amount of shock a system can absorb before it breaks down.

Bhamra (2016) goes further by explaining the difference between continuity and resilience:

[C]ontinuity management is essentially returning a business to “business as usual”, and nothing more. Resilience […] not only enables organisations to continue with business as usual, but also to learn, progress and flourish […] which will likely involve transformation (p. xvii).

These two definitions alone highlight a number of variables that are worthy of further research, for example does the amount of shock absorbable vary where the shock was instantaneous verses a creeping disaster? How do management decide what an organisation needs to reform to after an incident? How is learning undertaken after an incident? Each of these questions, and many more, is worthy of research and an understanding of lived experiences. This journal aims to be a home for both research and debates on the many questions surrounding continuity and resilience.

The first issue

This first issue purposely contains a variety of papers from practitioners and academics. Three focus on the broader issues surrounding organisational risk and resilience from differing viewpoints (Bell, 2019; Burnard and Bhamra, 2019; Engemann, 2019). Furthermore, one looks at a specific case study (Ferguson, 2019) and the other is a survey (Naghshineh and Lotfi, 2019). These papers present a sample of the breadth of both topics and styles that will form the bedrock of this journal.

The three focusing on organisational risk and resilience are designed to inspire future authors to consider wider questions; Bell, for example, highlights three key issues and Burnard and Bhamra identify three areas for future research. Engemann looks at the changing nature of organisations and how the view of risk has, or needs to, change.

Both Ferguson and Naghshineh and Lotfi’s paper look at specific aspects of resilience; the latter’s results look at the value of information sharing for resilience across the supply chain. The former looks at the role trade unions have with regards to business continuity and the value they can bring to the processes. Both of these papers provide illustrations of diversity of resilience and continuity topics that this journal aims to discuss and debate.

Future issues

The journal will be accepting articles for both open edition and for special editions. Alongside the standard editions, there will be regular calls for papers on specific topics, including the current one focusing on investment in resilience. The investment in resilience call aligns with the BCI’s 2019 Business Continuity Awareness Week. The aim of that call is to understand topics such as the economics, the financial investment and the return on investment to name just a few. It also aims to consider the broader investments need to be undertaken in continuity and resilience, such as time, resources, people and training.

Finally, I would like to thank the editorial board for the time they have given in developing this journal. I would also like to thank the reviewers who have undertaken the reviews of the papers in this journal edition. We continue to look for reviewers for the journal, should you wish to volunteer please do contact myself through the CRR website.