Accounting for resilience capabilities: structuring rationales for decision-making

Abstract

Organisational processes which address disruption such as risk management, business continuity and disaster management have acknowledged limitations in that they do not cater for disruptions which cannot be imagined or those which exceed reasonable estimations of expected magnitude. The challenge of coping with the perception of increasing uncertainty or escalating complexity while maintaining uninterrupted operations has raised the profile of organisational resilience within industry and academia. However, current understanding regarding its assessment remains underdeveloped, as the construct has been labelled ‘fuzzy’ obscuring assessment efforts. Additionally, empirical research on assessment methods that produce actionable measures remains extremely limited in scholarship. To address these concerns this study adopted a multidisciplinary perspective inspired by pragmatism and enacted through a type of action research. Based on an interventionist accounting approach, the study draws on qualitative data from two accounting interventions within UK government organisations and cross-industry interviews. This research examined: 1) important mechanisms for the assessment of organisational resilience 2) how the assessment method informed a rationale for decision-making 3) the scope of applicability for the assessment method. The assessment method was a maieutic performance which leveraged deliberative inquiry and problem structuring to direct participatory modelling, establishing indicators and predominate concerns related to resilience. This study presents the design, implementation and validation of a maieutic performance, a method that accounts for resilience ‘capabilities’ within organisations. The maieutic performance enabled learning and re-framing while locating relevant issues of concern. The performance also provides aggregated measures for identified capabilities which correspond to strategic organisational issues. The thesis contributes to current debates in accounting theory regarding how incompleteness can sustain inquiry and provide new visibility while locating a rationale for decision-making. Additionally, the development of a novel problem structuring method and insight into its affect contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the soft operational research literature.