Conclusion: towards a research agenda for organizational learning in crisis management

To date, most hospitality and tourism scholars that conceptualized organizational learning from a crisis have relied on a limited set of theories such as Argyris and Schön’s (1978) single and double-loop learning, Huber’s (1991) information processing model, March’s (1991) exploration-exploitation framework, and Senge’s (1990) learning organization. These theories are largely considered functionalist in the sense that they seek organizational change and effectiveness from crisis lessons rather than an understanding and a possible change of power and agency within the organization for more effective learning or changes in sense-making and identity. Therefore, a good starting point would be for future research to embrace other paradigms by moving away from the current functionalist approaches of crisis learning towards other theoretical paradigms that have shaped the organizational learning field over time such as the community-of-practice-based approach (Lave & Wenger, 1991), social network theory (Zhao & Anand, 2013), and critical theory (Fenwick, 2003). While empirical studies on crisis learning in hospitality and tourism are limited, this book has identified and explored several areas in which further research is needed