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

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-organising 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 behaviour, 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 Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) resilience. Building on the contextualisation 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 organisation) during the period of Covid-19 pandemic. Research findings contribute to the conceptualisation and operationalisation 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 multi-stakeholder value satisfaction.