Exploring the Attributes of Event Resilience: A Content Case of Academic Events

Abstract

The resilience of events has been primarily entangled to the recovery and coping capacity of the host destination. This approach considers events to be destination dependent, omitting sufficient consideration on an event's internal systemic dynamics that dictate its inherent self-organizing and adapting capacity to externalities at operational level. This study adopts a systems thinking approach to explore the dynamic interface of interacting elements, attributes, and actors that dictate an event's identity, structure, and behavior, as grounding foundations of its operational resilience independently to the hosting destination. Resilience thinking has been employed through the exploration of the seven principles of socioecological systems (SES) resilience. Building on the contextualization of academic events, the study applied a qualitative research design to explore perceptions, attitudes, and experiences of primary academic event stakeholders (participants, attendees, keynotes, members of event academic committee, and members of event organization) during the period of COVID-19 pandemic. Research findings contribute to the conceptualization and operationalization of operational academic and business event resilience, through the identification of enablers and inhibitors from the perspective of primary stakeholders. From a managerial perspective, research findings inform event contingencies and management during times of system disturbance with the aim to ensure event viability and multistakeholder value satisfaction.