Convenors:

 

María José Fernández Aldecua

Universidad del Mar, Huatulco, México

mjose@huatulco.umar.mx

 

Chintan Kella

LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy

ckella@luiss.it

 

Tomislav Rimac

ESCI-UPF, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

tomislav.rimac@prof.esci.upf.edu

 

Ute Stephan

Aston Business School, Birmingham, United Kingdom

u.stephan@aston.ac.uk

 

 

 

Call for papers

 

In recent decades, we have been witnessing rapid acceleration in environmental degradations, uneven distribution of rewards from the productivity and prosperity gains that globalization and technology revolution have engendered, the widening chasm between citizens and political elites, and other systemic imbalances. These trends have underlined that our development model, which only achieves equilibrium through an indefinite growth of needs and extractions from the environment, and has entertained an illusion of infinity of natural resources, is exhausted and needs re-thinking. In such an ever more uncertain world, organizations need to develop resilience capacity, which implies much more than simple ability to survive (Somers, 2009). It implies organization’s ability to effectively deal with unexpected, develop situation-specific responses, and ultimately engage in transformative activities (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011).

 

While many enterprises struggle to cope with shocks and growing uncertainties, many hybrid organizations, organizations whose objective is to create a sustainable positive social and environmental change through application of market mechanisms (Haigh et al., 2015; Ebrahim et al., 2014), appear resilient (e.g. Stephan & Huysentruyt, 2016). Not only have hybrid organizations (e.g., social enterprises, cooperatives, community based enterprises) become more financially self-sustainable and more effective in social value creation, but they also have seen growth in acceptance of their business models which many customers, employees, and policy makers increasingly choose to respond to new economic and social realities.

 

Although academic interest in organizational resilience has grown over recent years, it commonly focuses on resilience as an outcome, i.e., situations when individuals or organizations continue to perform in challenging situations and bounce back from adversity. Much less attention has been dedicated to processes and capabilities that may engender organizational resilience. Furthermore, while the entrepreneurship literature has addressed the concept of resilience, mostly at the individual level, (e.g., Ayala & Manzano, 2014; Bullough, Renko, & Myatt, 2014), it still needs to analyze resilience of hybrid organization both at the organizational and individual level (i.e. entrepreneurs, employees/members, and beneficiaries/clients).

 

This sub-theme conceptualizes resilience as a set of capabilities which enable organizations to anticipate, cope with and learn from unexpected events. By focusing on three dimensions of organization resilience, each dealing with different time horizon, this sub-theme aims to explore why hybrid organizations appear so resilient and to analyze what resilient hybrid organizations do and how they develop their resilience. Our ultimate objectives are to increase our understanding of hybrid organizations as agents working towards sustainable positive social change (Stephan, Patterson, Kelly & Mair, 2016) and of resilience processes and capabilities associated with the change process. Specifically, we are looking for work that would challenge the conventional thinking and flip around the hierarchy by analyzing instances where hybrid organizations hold practical knowledge about resilience that if sourced-in or harnessed well, could increase the resilience of mainstream businesses wishing to contribute to the process of sustainable positive social change. We welcome theoretical as well as empirical work exploring any of the following topics, as well as other relevant topics:

• Coping capabilities: How do hybrid organizations cope with unexpected events? How do they accept a problem, search for a solution through processes such as collective sensemaking (Weick, 1993) and acting and implement a solution (Weick et al., 1999)?

• Adaptation capabilities: How do hybrid organizations learn in the aftermath of a crisis? How does this learning impact future resilience of hybrid organizations?

• Anticipation capabilities: How do hybrid organizations detect critical developments and identify relevant trends, without knowing their actual scope and importance, in their environments and within the organization? How do they adapt proactively and react to future changes before they happen through capabilities such as the systemic perception of weak signals (Ansoff, 1975) and the acquisition of general knowledge and technical abilities?

 

 

References

 

Ansoff, H. I. (1975). Managing strategic surprise by response to weak signals. California Management Review, 18(2): 21-33.

 

Ayala, J.-C. & Manzano, G. (2014). The resilience of the entrepreneur. Influence on the success of the business. A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Economic Psychology, 42 (2), 126- 135.

 

Bullough, A., Renko, M. & Myatt, T. (2014). Danger zone entrepreneurs: The importance of resilience and self-efficacy for entrepreneurial intentions. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 38(3), 473 – 499.

 

Ebrahim, A., Battilana, J., & J. Mair (2014), “The governance of social enterprises: Mission drift and accountability challenges in hybrid organizations”, Research in Organizational Behavior, 34, pp. 81–100.

 

Haigh, N., Walker, J., Bacq, S. & Kickul, J. (2015). Hybrid organizations: Origins, strategies, impacts, and implications. California Management Review, 57(3), 5-12.

 

Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Beck, T. E., & Lengnick-Hall, M. L. (2011). Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 21: 243-255.

 

Mair, J., Mayer, J. & E. Lutz (2015). Navigating institutional plurality: Organizational governance in hybrid organizations. Organizational Studies, 36(6), 713 – 739.

 

Stephan, U. & Huysentruyt, M. (2016). Resisting temptation – the Case of Triodos Bank. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall, 20-25.

 

Stephan, U., Patterson, M., Kelly, C. & Mair, J. (2016). How organizations drive Positive Social Change: A Review and an Integrative Framework. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1250-1281

 

Somers, S. (2009). Measuring resilience potential: An adaptive strategy for organizational crisis planning. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 17(1): 12-23.

 

Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4): 628-652.

 

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (1999). Organizing for high reliability: Process of collective mindfulness. In B. Staw, & R. Sutton (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior, 21: 81-123. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press.