Business Community Resilience Enablers Informing The Development Of A Transferable Benchmarking Tool
Creators: name: Kaiser, Max
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: 40604 Natural Hazards
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: 150301 Business Information Management (incl. Records, Knowledge and Information Management, and Intelligence)
subject: FOS: Economics and business
subject: FOS: Economics and business
subject: 150205 Investment and Risk Management
subject: 150314 Small Business Management
subject: 150399 Business and Management not elsewhere classified
subject: 120501 Community Planning
subject: FOS: Social and economic geography
subject: FOS: Social and economic geography

description: MSc dissertation as submitted (unreviewed).max.kaiser.15@ucl.ac.uk----------Today’s world is not only endangered by natural hazards, but also by economic, geo- political, societal, and technological issues. Businesses in communities are also af- fected, and desire to evaluate their resilience level in order to cope with these shocks and stresses. Community resilience is a way to withstand, bounce forward, and en- sure a long-term, sustainable future as a collective. There is already a great deal of literature on community resilience and its assessment. However, much of the debate is theoretical or speculative; often resting on secondary or recycled data. Whilst many definitions seem common on the surface, the area remains conceptually unclear. Apparently common ideas, such as benchmarking, and assessment, lack evidence. However, because the benchmarking tools tend to focus on specific regions and types of shocks or stresses (e.g. natural disaster, regional emergency), they are much less transferable in practice than might at first appear. To address this issue, the present research project starts off from the ground: Us- ing a qualitative research method, the factors that allow for and enhance community resilience in a business context (enablers) are explored by means of interviews with experts from different backgrounds and a workshop with communities (Westfield UK Stratford City, Heart of London Business Improvement District, Safer London Busi- ness Crime Reduction Partnership) that have different characteristics. The aim is to find those resilience factors (enablers) that are transferable for business communities to set the basis for the creation of an evidence-based benchmarking tool. When examining the key enablers for community resilience, the research findings and assessment tools in the extant literature show a high degree of focus on physical, procedural, and social enablers. This is whilst addressing multiple conceptualisations of community resilience and especially around softer findings as proposed in this research project. What is clear from the conclusions is that there needs to be a greater focus on un- packing the behavioural characteristics associated with ‘soft community resilience enablers’. The evidence suggests that these will transfer more effectively, and more meaningfully, across business communities that have different characteristics. Still, it must be considered that the high degree of softness might lead to the loss of spe- cificity. Additionally, there are many links between the soft factors and the somewhat controversial concept of ‘social capital’.