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Operational risks can cause considerable, atypical disturbances and impact food supply chain (SC) resilience. Indicatively, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions in the UK food services as nationwide stockouts led to unprecedented discrepancies between retail and home-delivery supply capacity and demand. To this effect, this study aims to examine the emergence of digital platforms as an innovative instrument for food SC resilience in severe market disruptions.

An interpretive multiple case-study approach was used to unravel how different generations of e-commerce food service providers, i.e. established and emergent, responded to the need for more resilient operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SC disruption management for high-impact low-frequency events requires analysing four research elements: platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency. Established e-commerce food operators use partner onboarding and local waste valorisation to enhance resilience. Instead, emergent e-commerce food providers leverage localised rapid upscaling and product personalisation.

Digital food platforms offer a highly customisable, multisided digital marketplace wherein platform members may aggregate product offerings and customers, thus sharing value throughout the network. Platform-induced disintermediation allows bidirectional flows of data and information among SC partners, ensuring compliance and safety in the food retail sector.

The study contributes to the SC configuration and resilience literature by investigating the interrelationship among platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency for safe and resilient food provision within exogenously disrupted environments.

This paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.

The authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.

The authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.

Comparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.

This study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.

Different age groups display different shopping patterns in terms of how and where consumers buy products. During times of crisis, such behavioural differences become even more striking yet remain under-researched with respect to elderly consumers. This paper investigates the impact of age on retail-related behavioural changes and behavioural stability of elderly shoppers (in comparison to younger consumers) during a crisis.

The authors surveyed 643 Austrian consumers to assess the impact of perceived threat on behavioural change and the moderating effect of age groups. Based on findings from this survey, they subsequently conducted 51 semi-structured interviews to understand the causes of behavioural change and behavioural stability during a crisis.

Elderly shoppers display more stable shopping behaviour during a crisis compared to younger consumers, which is influenced by perceived threat related to the crisis. Such findings indicate that elderly shoppers reinforce their learnt and embedded shopping patterns. The causes of change and stability in behaviour include environmental and inter-personal factors.

Through the lens of social cognitive theory, protection motivation theory and dual process theory, this research contributes to an improved understanding of changes in shopping behaviour of elderly consumers, its antecedents and consequences during a time of crisis. The authors reveal reasons that lead to behavioural stability, hence the absence of change, in terms of shopping during a crisis. They further outline implications for retailers that might wish to better respond to shopping behaviours of the elderly.

Although significant research has examined the concept of transformational leadership, few studies have explored the indirect impact of transformational leadership on individual and organizational outcomes within the context of crisis. Accordingly, this study aims to advance our understanding of the indirect impact of transformational leadership on school performance and principals' work alienation within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, this study contributes to this developing stream of literature by hypothesizing the indirect effect of two relational resources, namely employee trust and relational coordination, which mediate the relationship between transformational leadership, school performance and principals' work alienation.

This study draws on a unique sample of 634 principals from Irish primary schools navigating the COVID-19 crisis. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed using Mplus 8.3 to test the hypothesized model.

Mixed findings emerged concerning the mediating process of relational resources and their impact on transformational leadership, school performance and principals' work-alienation. In particular, support is found for the critical role of principals whose transformational leadership style can help increase school performance. However, evidence suggests that employee trust does not mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and principals' work alienation.

This study provides several practical insights for education professionals, policymakers and HRM practitioners across each phase of the crisis management cycle. Firstly, regarding the pre-crisis stage, educational institutions should invest in targeted leadership development programs that prioritize relationship-building and effective communication among stakeholders. Second, during crises, the study emphasizes the role of relational resources in mediating the impact of leadership on school performance. Moreover, the study illustrates the importance of proactively cultivating strong connections with stakeholders, fostering timely, problem-solving-based communication. Finally, in the post-crisis phase, collaboration with government stakeholders is recommended to inform recovery policies.

This study makes several contributions to the literature on leadership and crisis management. First, this study adds new insights suggesting how principals as leaders influence school performance during crisis. Second, by adopting a relational perspective, this study suggests two types of relational resources (i.e. employee trust and relational coordination), as the mediators between transformational leadership, school performance and principals' work alienation. Third, this study moves the existing research on leadership during crisis forward by focusing on the functional effectiveness of leadership while focusing on the principals' work alienation during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on medical education and training, with many medical schools and training programs having to adapt to remote or online learning, social distancing measures and other challenges. This paper aimed to examine the disruption for clinical training, as it has reduced the opportunities for students and trainees to gain hands-on experience and interact with patients in person.

The ethnographic qualitative research design was chosen as the research methodology. Using Gibbs' reflective cycle, the researcher explored the psychiatry clerks' (final-year medical students) reflections on the disruption of their clinical training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings demonstrated that the students had a significant psychological impact on their coping capacities as the crisis progressed from shock and depression to resilience. The students being the key stakeholders provided a concrete foundation for the development of a framework for improving practices during uncertain times.

Students' reflections provided valuable insight into the pandemic’s impact on their psychosocial lives with uncertainty and incapacity to cope up with changing stressful dynamics. The results will assist in planning how to best support medical students' well-being during interruptions of their educational process brought about by similar future crises.

Studies showed that construction digitalisation could prevent or mitigate accidents rate on sites. Digitalisation applications may prevent or mitigate building project collapse (BPC) but with some encumbrances, especially in developing countries. There is a paucity of research on digital technologies application to prevent or mitigate BPC in Nigeria. Thus, the research aims to explore the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies from preventing or mitigating building collapse and recommend measures to improve technology applications during development.

The study is exploratory because of the unexplored approach. The researchers collected data from knowledgeable participants in digitalisation and building collapse in Nigeria. The research employed a phenomenology approach and analysed collected data via a thematic approach. The study achieved saturation at the 29th interviewee.

Findings show that lax construction digitalisation implementation, absence of regulatory framework, lax policy, unsafe fieldworkers' behaviours, absence of basic infrastructure, government attitude, hesitation to implement and high technology budget, especially in developing countries, are threats to curbing building collapse menace via digitalisation. The study identified technologies relevant to preventing or mitigating building collapse. Also, it proffered measures to prevent or mitigate building collapse via improved digital technology applications during development.

This research contributes to the construction digitalisation literature, especially in developing countries, and investigates the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies usage in preventing or mitigating building collapse in Nigeria.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the tourism economy affects local food availability, access, utilization and stability in dessert-prone agricultural heritage sites. Specifically, the study aims to explore the relationship between the tourism industry and local agricultural practices and how this connection influences food security in the Siwa Oasis, located in the Western Desert of Egypt.

The study employs a qualitative exploratory research design using in-depth interviews and focus groups to investigate the impact of the tourism economy on food security and identify potential benefits and limitations for food security in the region.

The research reveals that the tourism economy in Siwa Oasis has only a marginal contribution to food security. The study highlights a lack of a strong connection between the tourism industry and local agricultural practices within the heritage site. As a result, the potential benefits and synergies that could be achieved between tourism and agriculture have not been fully realized, leading to a limited impact on food stability.

This study primarily relies on qualitative data from Siwa Oasis, Egypt, which may limit the generalizability of findings beyond this specific context. Additionally, while the study provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between tourism and food security, it does not quantitatively measure the magnitude of tourism's impact. Future research could incorporate quantitative methods for a more comprehensive understanding of this relationship in diverse desert-prone regions. Finally, the study highlights the need for more integrated approaches to enhance food security through tourism, but the specific strategies and policy recommendations require further investigation and adaptation to local contexts.

This study underscores the need for tourism development strategies that prioritize food security in desert-prone areas like Siwa Oasis. Policymakers and stakeholders should promote sustainable tourism practices that enhance local agriculture, create diversified income sources and foster equitable benefits for communities. Moreover, recognizing the seasonal nature of tourism, interventions to address food shortages during off-peak periods are crucial. Efforts should also focus on skill development and gender-inclusive opportunities within the tourism sector to ensure broader community participation. Additionally, collaborations between tourism and agriculture should be encouraged to optimize food availability and stability while preserving cultural food traditions.

This study adds original insights by examining the specific impact of the tourism economy on food security in dessert-prone agricultural heritage sites. The study's originality lies in its exploration of the untapped potential for synergy between the tourism and agricultural sectors and the implications for local food security. This research contributes to understanding how tourism can improve food security in specific contexts and provides valuable insights into sustainable development in heritage sites.

The ability of companies to develop organizational resilience before, during and after crises is crucial for their development and growth. The future forecasts increasingly more crises, thus this paper aims at identifying key topics around organizational resilience in COVID-19 times, differentiating them of pre-crisis literature and synthesizing them into a research framework.

Based on Web of Science and Scopus, the authors analysed the content of the only twenty-seven VHB-ranked primary studies discussing organizational resilience during COVID-19, providing a complete survey of this research area.

Following a content analysis, the authors identified main topics of interest for researchers at the moment of COVID-19, how it differed from before this adversity and provide an outlook on future research. The results presented include in the COVID-19 context: an adapted definition of organizational resilience, key theoretical framework, insights for future research. Some topics have been found to be increasingly more important during COVID-19 (i.e. digitalization, partnerships and learning) while others have been less explored although present in pre-COVID-19 research on organizational resilience (i.e. dynamic capabilities, anticipation and preparedness).

Understanding key issues in global disruptions could help practitioners in fostering resilience as much as researchers in identifying new ways to advance and maintain resilience. This paper differs from other reviews by providing a full text analysis, based on qualitative content analysis, of all ranked published papers in the considered period.

Climate hazards in the form of cyclones are projected to become more intense under the pressures of future climate change. These changes represent a growing hazard to low lying coastal cities like Beira, Mozambique. In 2019, Beira experienced the devastating impact of Cyclone Idai. One of the many impacts resulting from this Cyclone was disrupted drinking water access. This investigation explores the distribution of Cyclone Idai’s impact on drinking water access via an environmental justice lens, exploring how preexisting water access characteristics may have predisposed households to the impacts of Cyclone Idai in Beria.

Relying on household survey data collected in Beira, the investigation applied a decision tree algorithm to investigate how drinking water disruption was distributed across the household survey sample using these preexisting vulnerabilities.

The investigation found that households that mainly relied upon piped water sources and experienced inconsistent access to water in the year prior to Cyclone Idai were more likely to experience disrupted drinking water access immediately after Cyclone Idai. The results indicate that residents in formal areas of Beira, largely reliant upon piped water supply, experienced higher rates of disrupted drinking water access following Cyclone Idai.

These findings question a commonly held assumption that informal areas are more vulnerable to climate hazards, like cyclones, than formal areas of a city. The findings support the inclusion of informal settlements in the design of climate change adaptation strategies.

Conflict and violence are the main drivers of globally escalating humanitarian needs. Local grassroots initiatives are pivotal in distributing humanitarian supplies in the acute response phase until more established humanitarian aid organizations can enter. Nevertheless, scant research exists regarding the role of grassroots associations in providing humanitarian assistance during a military conflict. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of grassroots associations and identify important themes for effective operations.

This paper adopts a case-study approach of three Ukrainian grassroots associations that began operating in the immediate days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The findings are based on analyzing primary sources, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers, and are supported by secondary sources.

Grassroots associations have local contacts and a contextual understanding of population needs and can respond more rapidly and effectively than large intergovernmental agencies. Four critical themes regarding the operations of grassroots associations emerged: information management, inventory management, coordination and performance measurement. Grassroots humanitarian response operations during conflict are challenged by personal security risks, the unpredictability of unsolicited supplies, emerging volunteer roles, dynamic transportation routes and shifting demands.

Grassroots responses are central to humanitarian responses during the acute phase of a military conflict. By examining the operations of grassroots associations in the early months of the 2022 war in Ukraine, the authors provide a unique perspective on humanitarian logistics. Nonetheless, more inclusive models of humanitarian responses are needed to harness the capacities and resilience of grassroots operations in practice.