Organisations play a vital role in assisting communities to recover from disasters. They are the key providers of goods and services needed in both response and recovery efforts. They provide the employment which both anchors people to place and supports the taxation base to allow for necessary recovery spending. Finally, organisations are an integral part of much day to day functioning contributing immensely to people’s sense of ‘normality’ and psychological wellbeing. Yet, despite their overall importance in the recovery process, there are significant gaps in our existing knowledge with regard to how organisations respond and recover following disaster. This research fills one part of this gap by examining collaboration as an adaptive strategy enacted by organisations in the Canterbury region of New Zealand, which was heavily impacted by a series of major earthquakes, occurring in 2010 and 2011. Collaboration has been extensively investigated in a variety of settings and from numerous disciplinary perspectives. However, there are few studies that investigate the role of collaborative approaches to support post-disaster business recovery. This study investigates the type of collaborations that have occurred and how they evolved as organisations reacted to the resource and environmental change caused by the disaster. Using data collected through semi-structured interviews, survey and document analysis, a rich and detailed picture of the recovery journey is created for 26 Canterbury organisations including 14 collaborators, six non-traders, five continued traders and one new business. Collaborations included two or more individual businesses collaborating along with two multi-party, place based projects. Comparative analysis of the organisations’ experiences enabled the assessment of decisions, processes and outcomes of collaboration, as well as insight into the overall process of business recovery. This research adopted a primarily inductive, qualitative approach, drawing from both grounded theory and case study methodologies in order to generate theory from this rich and contextually situated data. Important findings include the importance of creating an enabling context which allows organisations to lead their own recovery, the creation of a framework for effective post-disaster collaboration and the importance of considering both economic and other outcomes. Collaboration is found to be an effective strategy enabling resumption of trade at a time when there seemed few other options available. While solving this need, many collaborators have discovered significant and unexpected benefits not just in terms of long term strategy but also with regard to wellbeing. Economic outcomes were less clear-cut. However, with approximately 70% of the Central Business District demolished and rebuilding only gaining momentum in late 2014, many organisations are still in a transition stage moving towards a new ‘normal’.
The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010-2012 have been generation shaping. People living and working in and around the city during this time have had their lives and social landscapes changed forever. The earthquake response, recovery and rebuild efforts have highlighted unheralded social strengths and vulnerabilities within individuals, organisations, communities and country writ large. It is imperative that the social sciences stand up to be counted amongst the myriad of academic research, commentary and analysis.
This study explores the impact post-earthquake images from Christchurch, New Zealand inserted into a task requiring sustained attention or vigilance have on performance, selfreports of task-focus, and cerebra activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The images represent the current state of Christchurch; a city struggling to recover from devastating earthquakes that peaked in February, 2011, killing 185 people, injuring hundreds more and causing widespread and massive damage to infrastructure, land and building in the region. Crowdsourcing was used to gather a series of positive and negative photos from greater Christchurch to be employed in the subsequent experiment. Seventy-one Christchurch resident participants (51 women, 20 men) then took part in a vigilance task with the sourced images embedded to assess possible cognitive disruptions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: embedded positive pictures, embedded negative pictures, or embedded scrambled image controls. Task performance was assessed with signal detection theory metrics of sensitivity A’ and β’’. Individuals viewing the positive images, relating to progress, rebuild, or aesthetic aspects within the city, were overall more conservative or less willing to respond than those in the other conditions. In addition, positive condition individuals reported lower task focus, when compared to those in the control condition. However, indicators of cerebral activity (fNIRS) did not differ significantly between the experimental groups. These results combined, suggest that mind wandering events may be being generated when exposed to positive post-earthquake images. This finding fits with recent research which indicates that mind-wandering or day dreaming tends to be positive and future oriented. While positive recovery images may initiate internal thoughts, this could actually prove problematic in contexts in which external attention is required. While the actual environment, of course, needs to recover, support agencies may want to be careful with employing positive recovery imagery in contexts where people actually should be paying attention to something else, like operating a vehicle or machinery.
The Canterbury earthquakes and the rebuild are generation-defining events for twenty-first century Aotearoa/ New Zealand. This article uses an actor network approach to explore 32 women’s narratives of being shaken into dangerous disaster situations and reconstituting themselves to cope in socially innovative ways. The women’s stories articulate on-going collective narratives of experiencing disaster and coping with loss in ‘resilient’ ways. In these women’s experiences, coping in disasters is not achieved by talking through the emotional trauma. Instead, coping comes from seeking solace through engagement with one’s own and others’ personal risk and resourcefulness in ways that feed into the emergence of socially innovative voluntary organisations. These stories offer conceptual insight into the multivalent interconnections between resilience and vulnerabilities and the contested nature of post-disaster recovery in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These women gave voice to living through disasters resiliently in ways that forged new networks of support across collective and personal narratives and broader social goals and aspirations for Aotearoa/New Zealand’s future.
