Organizational Resilience and Sustainable Business Practices: Advancing the Field through Theoretical Integration and Holistic Modeling

Dear Colleagues,

Organizational resilience has become a topical theme in management and organizational research in the last few decades and researchers from a sustainability perspective have also shown an interest in the way firms are organized in order to be sustainable. However, a problem in this research is the lack of a more coherent theoretical framework, although some important integrative efforts have been made (Powell et al, 2020). Organizational resilience is thus understood in several ways that are both definitional and theoretical in scope, with a focus on various levels of resilience while neglecting others (Duchek, 2020). A problem that arises from this problem is the growing diversity in the theoretical understanding of what organizational resilience consists of and how it can be developed and maintained.

The aim of this Special Issue is to create more of a common ground for organizational resilience and sustainable business practices through papers which seek to integrate the existing research and to create a more common theoretical ground. Papers that present empirical data are welcome if there is ambition to contribute to theoretical integration.

This call is for papers that may address the following points but are not limited to them:

Organizational resilience as a capability.

What capabilities does an organization need to possess in order to be able to withstands shocks, environmental changes, and adverse events?

Organizational resilience and human resource management.

Human resource management has an important impact on organizational resilience (Liu et al, 2019). What features of employees and other types of human actors are important for an organization to be resilient?

Theoretical integration in research about resilient engineering systems.

Resilience engineering (Hollnagel et al., 2006; Patriarca et al., 2018) is a viable research area. How can this research contribute to our understanding of organizational resilience?

Theoretical integration in research about resilient supply chains.

Here, a mission could be to integrate theories about supply chain management and organizational resilience.

Theoretical integration in research about organizational resilience and sustainability.

There are many overlaps between organizational resilience and sustainability concepts which have attracted research attention in recent years (Jung, 2019). Is it possible to make further cross-fertilizations between the fields?

A meta-perspective of organizational resilience.

There are many opportunities to make theoretical contributions by viewing organizational resilience as a multi-level construct which can simultaneously be understood as something residing in capabilities, traits, processesm and/or resources (Tengblad and Oudhuis 2018). Instead of seeing these levels as competing, they can together help us to understand what organizational resilience is all about.

References:

 Duchek, S. (2020): Organizational resilience: A capability-based conceptualization, Business Research 13, 215-246.

Hollnagel, E., Woods, D. D. & Leveson, N. C. (Eds.) (2006). Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Jung, K. (2019) Sources of Organizational Resilience for Sustainable Communities: An Institutional Collective Action Perspective. Sustainability, Vol 9, 1141.

Liu, Y., Cary L. Cooper, C. L., and Shlomo Y. Tarba, S. Y. (2019) Resilience, wellbeing and HRM: a multidisciplinary perspective The International Journal of Human Resource Management 2019, Vol. 30, No. 8, 1227–1238.

Patriarca, R., Bergström, J., Di Gravio, G. & Costantino, F. (2018) Resilience engineering: Current status of the research and future challenges Safety Science, Vol 102, Feb, pp 79-100.

Powell, E. E., Casa, B. B. & Casa, A  (2020) Research Handbook of Organizational Resilience. Edvard Elgar.

Tengblad, S & Oudhuis, M. (Eds.) (2018) The Resilience Framework: Organizing for Sustained Viability. Singapore: Springer Nature.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Tengblad
Guest Editor

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• organizational resilience
• resilience engineering
• supply chain management
• human resource management
• sustainability