Article Series: The Resilience Forum
Series of 3 articles in Management and Organization Review on the “Forum on Resilience”
Välikangas, L., & Lewin, A. (2020). The Lingering New Normal. Management and Organization Review, 16(3), 467-472. doi:10.1017/mor.2020.32
Välikangas, L. (2020). Leadership that Generates Resilience: An Introduction to Second Resilience Forum. Management and Organization Review, 16(4), 737-739. doi:10.1017/mor.2020.52
Välikangas, L., & Lewin, A. (2020). The Resilience Forum: A Lingering Conclusion. Management and Organization Review, 16(5), 967-970. doi:10.1017/mor.2020.71
How do societies manifest resilience in a crisis, and why are some societies more resilient than others? This Resilience Forum was incubated by the COVID-19 pandemic and given voice by the Letter from the Editor (MOR 16.2 with Peter Ping Li and Liisa Välikangas https://www.cambridge.or/or/ournal/anagement-and-organization-revie/rticl/etter-from-the-edito/FFE74B39CCB3A7A788BC22CBCAFCDE7).
The Forum is privileged to feature perspectives by Xueguang Zhou (Stanford University); Anna Grandori (Bocconi University); Gordon Redding (Hong Kong University); and Peter Ping Li (University of Nottingham Ningbo and Copenhagen Business School). The four perspectives are anchored in the experience of several countries (China, Finland, Italy, Japan, and the US), exploring the ways in which the different societies, and their governments, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic during the crucial early six months. The authors draw implications for country resilience – including admonition not to learn the wrong lesson from early ostensibly successful handling of a crisis (Zhou, 2020); advantage of ‘knowledgeable decentralization’ (Grandori, 2020); ‘communal sense’ in Japan coupled with ‘dispersed authority, and unique way of absorbing change without losing itself’ (Redding, 2020); and the benefits of rethinking loose coupling and flexible interdependence of systems and platforms (Li, 2020).
The first paper explores the appropriability logics (Winter, 2006) of resilience in three stages in the context of the current pandemic. This approach builds on the call by Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, and Zhao (2017) and van der Vegt, Essens, Wahlström, and George (2015) to consider research on risk management and resilience in a more integrated way and move toward a process view of resilience. Williams et al. (2017) write of stages of a crisis. Accordingly, in this introduction resilience is explored at three stages – prior to a crisis, during the crisis, and beyond, in a context where a crisis may not have ended but rather constitutes a lingering new normal. Each stage fashions its own resilience logic as discussed below.
The second paper explores how in challenging and strenuous times such as during the current pandemic, public and private leadership is faced with extraordinary pressures on their leadership. On what basis should urgent yet critical decisions be made? And practically, how to legitimately lock down a society, closing down businesses and educational institutions, or decide to leave them open when such decisions carry heavy costs to people and organizations?
In the third paper, we conclude the forum by reflecting on the persisting – perhaps hopeful, perhaps disturbing – take-aways. Not surprisingly, some companies have demonstrated resilience capabilities in quickly seizing opportunities even when faced with what initially looked like the end of business. Such determined agility represented, for example, improvising an emergent-opportunity-fitting strategy or it may have been manifested by government action (e.g., China, New Zealand, and Finland). Most famously, Zoom, the by-now ubiquitous video communications company, benefited from being in the right place at the right time, but also effectively dealt with issues such as ‘zoom bombing’, a security breach, including an upgrade of its encryption. Such successful growth strategy requires being ready for an opportunity. But the backward-looking depiction of successes also highlights the absence of a developed science of organization design underlying resilience and management practices (Lewin & Välikangas, 2020). In addition, building cognitive and stakeholder preparedness, as Zhang, Dong, and Yi (2020) and Liu and Yin (2020) point out, may be important, as well as considering leadership implications discussed by Giustiniano, Cunha, Simpson, Rego, and Clegg (2020) in the context of coping with the paradoxes unleashed by resilience. Emergency management systems become sorely tested (Cai & Ye, 2020). Do we have a new buzzword for uncertain times (Cai, 2020) or something to learn from that will help in coping with future crises or understanding the renaissance of resilience? Some themes rise above others.