Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Business and Society, 60 (1), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2018 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Business and Society page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/bas on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 285 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Cross-Scale Systemic Resilience
T2 - Implications for Organization Studies
AU - Williams, Amanda
AU - Whiteman, Gail
AU - Kennedy, Steve
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Business and Society, 60 (1), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2018 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Business and Society page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/bas on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
PY - 2021/1/1
Y1 - 2021/1/1
N2 - In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo.
AB - In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo.
KW - adaptive cycle
KW - cross-scale
KW - natural science
KW - resilience
U2 - 10.1177/0007650319825870
DO - 10.1177/0007650319825870
M3 - Journal article
VL - 60
SP - 95
EP - 124
JO - Business & Society
JF - Business & Society
SN - 0007-6503
IS - 1
ER -