title: Adapt and Flourish: An Examination of Ethics, Unsustainability and Disaster Recovery in Organisations
Creators: name: Bryde-Evens, M
Publisher: name: Liverpool John Moores University
Year: 2027

description: This study examines the interactions between ethics, sustainable development and disaster recovery in organisations. Specifically, it addresses the claims that examining sustainable development and disaster recovery concurrently is an urgent endeavour and that comprehension of the important ethical component of both concepts requires development. Despite the significant challenges that unethicality, unsustainability and disasters pose, many organisational approaches to address these issues often fall short of their objectives. As well as potentially damaging organisations, a failure to act ethically and sustainably and to be disaster recovery ready can also negatively impact wider society, as organisations are essential to the economies of cities, towns and villages. Given the significant impact that unsuccessful approaches to sustainable development and disaster recovery can have on organisations and society more broadly, further research in this area is required. Namely, there is a need to advance understanding of what difficulties organisations face when attempting to operationalise sustainable development and disaster recovery and how such approaches might be developed. This study addresses these areas of research that require development by utilising a dual-theoretical lens comprising stakeholder theory and virtue ethics. By integrating a management theory with a normative ethical theory, this research increases the explanatory power of stakeholder theory and virtue ethics. Thus, providing novel and interesting insights on the interactions between ethics, sustainable development and disaster recovery in organisations. 
Ethics, sustainable development and disaster recovery are critically examined through a qualitative, interpretivist study, conducted within the context of the hotel industry. An exploration of these concepts in this industry context is timely and important because hotels face substantial sustainability challenges and hence, have a significant impact on global sustainability. Moreover, hotels are extremely vulnerable to the rising threat of disasters whether biological, humanitarian, or natural. A multiple case study research design is utilised and purposive sampling is applied to select three cases which reflect varying types of hotel management and affiliation structures: independent hotels, hotels with a franchise contract and hotels with a management contract. Data is collected through company documents and 31 semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders. Thematic analysis is employed to recognise, categorise and interpret themes from the data and four key themes are presented: disaster management, behavioural focus, normativity in business and holistic systems. Building on extant literature and through a critical discussion of the empirical findings, the DRIVES (disaster recovery, inclusive of stakeholders, virtue ethical, sustainability) framework is presented. The DRIVES framework develops theoretical understanding of ethics, sustainable development and disaster recovery in organisations and provides practitioners with constructive guidance on the operationalisation of sustainable and disaster recovery ready organisations. By concurrently examining ethics, sustainable development and disaster recovery in organisations, this study advances current thinking, provides organisations with a tool to address the operationalisation of sustainable development and disaster recovery, and offers a solid foundation for future work.