Organisational Resilience

Concepts, Integration, and Practice

Ran Bhamra

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367833046
• eBook ISBN: 9781498766746
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Design
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An eternal dilemma for all organizations, and one that a considerable portion of management schools are set up to address, is how to become and stay competitive. Organisational Resilience: Concepts, Integration, and Practice brings together, for the first time, key works that describe the scope and nature of resilience and provides direction to tak

Section I

Organisational Resilience Concepts

The aim of this section is to try to both capture and indicate some of the breadth of lenses with which resilience is viewed; indeed the works included here in Chapters 1 through 4, although only a sample, are very representative. Chapter 1 begins with a full update of a recent work by Bhamra et al. on organisational resilience. This chapter is a wide-ranging review of resilience perspectives, concepts and methodologies utilised in research in this burgeoning field. Following investigation into different definitions of core resilience related terms, the authors call for better understanding of whether resilience is a philosophy, a capability, a business measure or a complex facet of organisations. In Chapter 2, Hassler and Kohler, from the perspective of built environment, encompass the systems view as applied to infrastructural resilience. Here, they consider resilience as a set of different capitals, namely – natural, physical, economic, social and cultural. They put forward that each of these capitals have different timescales within which factors such as stability, uncertainty, robustness and so on, will impact. Importantly, the authors assert that resilience thinking must be incorporated into sustainable management of the built environment.

In Chapter 3, Comoretto considers the notion of resilience as applied to human individuals. Here, resilience is about the factors that promote well-being in people who operate in highly stressful environments, in this case humanitarian aid workers. The concepts in this chapter include the consideration of aspects such as cognitive protective factors, which comprise the nature of human motivation and coping skills. This study provides an interesting insight into what we may call resilience within individuals. In Chapter 4, Miles and Petridou explore resilience from the political perspective, in the context of decision making during crisis management. The authors assert that successful resilience is made possible by certain entrepreneurial actions that occur within the ‘gaps’ that lie between resilient systems and resilience planning. This work is intriguing as ‘entrepreneurial/political resilience’ may not be an area that readily comes to mind when we first think of resilience, but nonetheless it appears to be a crucial element to understanding the completeness of the resilience concept.

Chapter 1

Resilience

The Co...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Section I - Organisational Resilience Concepts
• Section II - Integration
• Setion III - Practice