Entrepreneurial Responses to Disruptive Transformations: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Hospitality Industry of Post-Quake Christchurch, New Zealand

Abstract

Disaster-induced crises in business operations have become an increasingly complex phenomenon and continue to become more frequent and destabilising. Far-reaching socio-political and economic consequences of globalisation, increased urbanisation and environmental changes serve to make the threats posed by disasters greater than ever. When not in crisis, global destinations are in an extended programme of pre-event limbo, almost waiting for a significant trigger event to take place to challenge the existing structure, routine operations and survival of businesses. While inevitable crisis events affect all industries, the tourism sector seems predominantly vulnerable due to its multidimensional consumption and production process; the interconnectivity of tourism networks between individuals, communities and businesses increases its vulnerability. However, a significant gap in the extant literature calls for exploratory research approaches to uncover the phenomenon of entrepreneurial responses to the abrupt and high magnitude shocks in urban tourism, with specific reference to the hospitality industry therein.

The literature on business management emphasises pro-active planning and strategic action in frameworks for disaster recovery and crisis management. Organisational crisis management is operationalised as a cyclic process where the learning phase is thought to enable creative processes that modify holistic frameworks for disaster preparedness and response based on relevant evidence. Christchurch, the second largest city of New Zealand, has gone through an unprecedented renewal of urban spaces, resulting from the post-quake environment of recovery governance, policy interventions, catalyst investments by the government and the city council, changes in resident and visitor demographics, organic (re)growth of the economic hotspots, and evolution of tourism spaces. The tourism crisis management literature on the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, mostly quantitative studies, addresses the vulnerability of tourism destinations, organisational resilience to disasters, and visitor management.

This exploratory qualitative research aims to understand the phenomenon of disruptive transformations in the post-quake hospitality business environments of the Christchurch Central City and entrepreneurial responses to survive and thrive. Theoretical constructs of urban tourism, crisis management, disaster recovery, organisational resilience, business continuity and evolutionary ecology underpin the conceptual frameworks of this research. Twenty-four in-depth semi-structured interviews with representatives of Crown agencies, Christchurch City Council (CCC), CCC-owned companies/economic development agencies, regional tourism organisations, community leaders, advocacy groups, business associations, and hospitality entrepreneurs form the empirical basis of this study. It is further based on an in-depth content analysis of a large volume of documents pertaining to Christchurch’s recovery such as policy documents, recovery blueprints, government reports and press releases, business cases, industry research reports and local news, among others. Niche Construction Theory (NCT) is adopted as an analytical framework to make sense of environmental selection pressures and stakeholder-led modifications of the environmental conditions. This research thus illustrates how a major disaster has led to disruptive transformations in urban tourism business environments. The empirical data further explains the phenomenon of evolutionary responses of hospitality enterprises to the environmental conditions in a post-disaster urban context.