The resilience of firms: a conceptualization through inductive content analysis

Contemporary organizations face significant challenges including, government debt and faltering economic growth, environmental degradation and climate change, poverty and social inequality, geopolitical instability, extended life expectancy and health, social media and the digital economy and the proliferation of big data. These problems tend to be intractable and elusive because they are influenced by many dynamic, complex and interconnected social, political, economic and technological factors. For many people, the failure to provide convincing responses to these challenges has exacerbated their sense of powerlessness, which in turn threatens to undermine politics, the authority of government and the legitimacy of our institutions. Consistent with these challenges, much discussion is taking place in management and organisation studies regarding how best to cope with and respond to these large, unresolved societal problems and thrive the turbulent times we live in. Just as the old certainties and big assumptions about the world order that have governed our thinking no longer seem valid, it has become clear that many of our old models and theories were formed to deal with a very different set of circumstances and are therefore of questionable relevance to the contemporary work environment. We need new ideas, models and epistemologies consistent with connective, unpredictable, distributed, dynamic contexts. Such work needs to be undertaken from multiple perspectives and practices of different research disciplines.