The economy of Pakistan has faced many challenges due to COVID-19, leading to numerous systemic failures and leaving it struggling to recover. This research aims to shed light on the specific challenges faced by Pakistani textile companies during the pandemic. Comprehensive data was collected from one hundred fifty-three textile managers in Pakistan. Upon examining the impact of COVID-19 on businesses, it has been found that the most pressing issues revolved around working capital and strategies for generating new sales. Interestingly, many of these businesses were well-prepared in the digital realm, readily embracing digital knowledge and seizing opportunities by pivoting to the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) and N95 masks. This study aims to evaluate the early consequences of COVID-19 on Pakistan’s textile industry. Considering the scarcity of research on these challenges and opportunities, our work contributes to a better understanding of the hurdles the textile sector faces. Furthermore, it sets the groundwork for future research in this domain. It provides valuable insights for textile businesses, enabling them to align their strategies with the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.

Effective small and medium enterprise (SME) leadership demands creative solutions to ensure organisations survive and thrive during the turbulent times that COVID-19 continues to bring. This paper explores how SME leaders (in micro and small organisations) prioritise and access the skills and development needed to provide effective and sustainable leadership to organisations, focusing on the role of resilience and the benefits it provides. Participants were selected through purposive and snowballing sampling. Online surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted and provided qualitative data that contributes to an understanding of the role of resilience and the view of participants as to what is needed to effectively respond to a dynamic environment. Evidence shows that SME leaders prioritise learning and development opportunities that provide demonstrable benefits throughout the organisation. Building business resilience remains a fuzzy concept; however, viewing resilience as a multi-level construct offers benefits when designing and delivering development opportunities. It has been found that networking, partnerships, and relationship building promote resilience and may offer a solution to how to embed resilience building into development opportunities that SME leaders value and wish to engage with. This article contributes by illustrating and exploring leadership development within SMEs during a period of unexpected and untested uncertainty. The pandemic caused major shock waves within business communities, and SMEs were significantly affected. The research is limited in that it is expected to be a once-in-a lifetime event, and as such conditions may not be replicable, learning opportunities for other ‘shock’ events are possible. The findings of this paper have relevance to practice in that, while the event may be one-off, shocks to the business environment are not.

Rural tourism plays a crucial role in rural development in Indonesia by providing employment opportunities, livelihood, infrastructure, cultural preservation, and environmental preservation. However, it is prone to external shocks such as natural disasters, public health events, and volatility in the national and global economy. This study measures the resilience of rural tourism to external shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 24 rural tourism destinations in Indonesia covering four years from 2019 to 2022. A synthetic composite index of the Adjusted Mazziotta-Pareto index (AMPI) is used to measure rural tourism resilience followed by clustering analysis to determine the typology of the resilience. The AMPI measure is also compared with the conventional Mazziotta-Pareto index (MPI) method. The resilience index is composed of capacity and performance components related to resilience. The results show that in the first year of COVID-19, most tourism villages in Indonesia were severely affected by the pandemic, yet they were able to recover afterward, as indicated by positive differences in the AMPI index before and after COVID-19. Thus, rural tourism villages in Indonesia have a strong capacity and performance to recover from pandemic shock. Lessons learned from this analysis can be applied to policies related to rural tourism resilience in developing countries.

Research on community resilience has been ongoing for decades. Several studies have been carried out on resilience in different groups and contexts. However, few address the relationship between community resilience and depopulated rural areas. This study aims to dig deeper into this, considering the concrete impact of population decline in Spain. We carried out a systematic review of the most relevant contributions. A search protocol was developed and used to consult ten databases. Different combinations of terms such as ‘community resilience’, ‘rural’, and ‘depopulation’, or related terms, were used. 22 scientific texts were analysed. We obtained a set of publications that demonstrate the heterogeneity of research methods, approaches and analytical processes applied to the study of this relationship. A mostly qualitative approach was observed, either as the main technique or complementary to documentary reviews. The results underscore the complex nature of rural depopulation and related constructs. It emphasizes the specific importance of community resilience in these territories in terms of social capital, endogenous resources, sustainability, economic dynamism, local responsibility and effective governance. The findings identify a scarce mention to social intervention professions, which should have a more important role due to their core values. In the studies reviewed, it appears as an emerging and scientifically relevant area to explore, both for investigation and intervention purposes. The strength of a multidisciplinary approach to addressing the phenomena appears in the discussion as a main potential line of research.

Fire accidents are one of the serious security threats facing the metro, and the accurate determination of the index system and weights for fire assessment in underground stations is the key to conducting fire hazard assessment. Among them, the type and quantity of baggage, which varies with the number of passengers, is an important factor affecting the fire hazard assessment. This study is based on the combination of subjective and objective AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) with the available Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and the perfect CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) empowered fuzzy evaluation method on the metro station fire hazard toughness indicator system and its weights were determined, and a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model of metro station safety toughness under the influence of baggage was constructed. The practical application proves that the method provides a new perspective for the fire risk assessment of underground stations, and also provides a theoretical basis for the prevention and control of mobile fire load hazards in underground stations.

Purpose: The study examines the mediating effect of self-emotion appraisal and other-emotion appraisal on psychological safety, individual resilience, and organizational commitment at the workplace. Design/methodology/approach: This study generated 140 survey responses from workers in diverse occupations and industries during the COVID-19 pandemic. A mixed-methods data analysis was conducted. Hierarchical regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses, and process macroanalysis was used to generate the mediation analysis. Qualitative data analysis through thematic coding was adopted to interpret the respondents’ written opinions and narratives. Findings: The results revealed that self-emotion appraisal strongly correlates to resilience, but evaluation of self-emotion has no effect on organizational commitment. Other-emotion appraisal and psychological safety are not significant predictors of resilience at the workplace. Rather, psychological safety is a significant predictor of organizational commitment. The qualitative analysis generated from the respondents’ narratives provides deeper insight into the quantitative results. Additional data that emerged from the qualitative interpretation revealed other factors that are related to emotional appraisal, psychological safety, resilience, and organizational commitment. Practical implications: The findings shed light on the need to understand an individual’s emotional appraisal when instilling workplace resilience. Further, promoting psychological safety, such as by involving employees in the change process, managing fairness perception, and eliciting trust, enhances organizational commitment in the workplace. Integrating open communication, management intervention, and coaching programmes should form part of the employee engagement and development functions to help build organizational resilience and commitment. Originality/value: This research is an original contribution conducted during the global health crisis that led to abrupt changes in the workers’ lives and the workplaces in Singapore. Research implications: This present study demonstrated constructive findings on emotion regulations and perceived psychological safety associated with resilience and commitment amid the disruptive changes in work practices at the workplace. Further, the outcome of the study shows the mediating effect of self-emotional appraisal on psychological safety and resilience. The result draws parallels with past literature that showed that individuals who appraised their emotions tended to recalibrate and recognize their subjective behaviour and take actions to modify it. Social implications: Emotion regulation connotes employees’ emotion coping strategies, and research showed that emotion reappraisal produces a positive effect on workplace relationship quality.