Resilience building mechanisms within Global Value Chains: coping with uncertainty and addressing sustainability opportunities

Although MNEs undoubtedly operate in an uncertain environment the last few years have proven especially challenging. The global financial crisis of 2008, the increase of nationalistic tendencies,warfare, environmental disasters and a pandemic are just a few events on the extremely long list of disruptions that MNEs have had to face in the last 15 years Consequently, in the last few years IB researchers have to address the topic of resilience. It is in fact widely believed that resilience is what will allow MNEs to overcome sudden disruptions. Nevertheless, the urgent challenges that endanger MNEs operations and global value chains (GVC) in general have contributed to the start of the study of resilience in the IB field, which at the moment results mostly conceptual and lacks empirical investigation. Therefore, the present doctoral research addresses an existing research gap in the IB field concerning GVC resilience and it adopts a qualitative methodological approach because of the complex and multi-layered nature of the research scope. The thesis is composed of three interrelated chapters, each of which represents a paper addressing a specific research question. The first chapter aims at developing a theoretical framework of GVC resilience by conducting a systematic literature review that bridges IB and operations management literatures . In particular, the systematic literature review investigates how GVC resilience is conceptualized, measured in existing literature and aims at understanding what are the contributing factors to GVC resilience. The objective of the second chapter is the development of a theoretical model that identifies what are the resilience building mechanisms in GVCs, with a focus on governance structure and geographical dispersion of value chain activities. The theoretical model is developed through a multiple case study featuring 5 MNEs operating in the healthcare industry. Finally, the third chapter represents a preliminary empirical contribution to the nascent research theme of trade-offs and synergies between resilience and sustainability as strategic objectives in IB. The study is developed using a Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) perspective and follows the Extended Case Method (ECM) in the analysis of a GVC in the semiconductor industry. Specifically, the study investigates how power asymmetries between MNEs and suppliers influence the design of resilient and sustainable GVC. Overall, the contribution of the present doctoral thesis is threefold. First, it provides a definition of resilience that applies to the GVC context , taking into consideration both governance structure and geographical dispersion . Second, by associating the topic of GVC resilience to the business model perspective, it detects how governance structure and geographical dispersion of the GVC can interact for what concerns GVC resilience. Third, it empirically supports the synergy between resilience and sustainability in the GVC. In particular, findings evidenced how a RDT perspective is relevant when addressing both objectives, because of the role played by power asymmetries between parties and specifically differences in resources and capabilities.