ABSTRACT
Security of people, investments and facilities has always been an important concern of corporate governance. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the coalition invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Bali bombings in October 2002, the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the war in Iraq in 2003, the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) bombings, security has become a key issue for corporate strategy and governance. This is highly relevant for the tourism industry which is impacted by global terrorism events as well as by targeted attacks on foreign tourists (e.g., in Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya and Indonesia) and natural disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. These shocks have increased concerns of risk and security of people who travel, switched their choice of travel destinations and, consequently, emphasised the importance of the ability of tourist firms, particularly in affected countries and their regions, to recover from crises. As any other industry, international tourism operates in external environments which are characterised by rapid global change, growing complexity and increased uncertainty. In such an environment, organisations deal with unplanned situations which cannot be predicted in advance. As Tsoukas (1996, 22) describes the situation ‘firms are faced with radical uncertainty: they do not know, they cannot know, what they need to know’. Hence, organisations are engaged in discovering the unknowable and their strategy has to assist them in this process in order to enable their firms to manage crises.
