The Development of the Concept of Business Resilience: A Qualitative Analysis of the Baiona Barnacle Collectors' Case

Abstract

Resilience, defined here as the ability to recover from a setback, is used in business management as a way to face speed of change and the complexity and limited availability of information in a corporate environment. Business resilience refers to the dynamic capabilities of a company to cope successfully with situations that threaten its survival, and on the basis of the accumulated learning it transforms its previous state or organizational form. In this article, we expand the definition of resilience for its use in other endeavors. We delimit the concept and stress the link with dynamic capabilities and we propose a practical application of business resilience. The study uses the qualitative methodology of document content analysis of the Baiona Galician barnacle collectors' case in Spain from 2002 to 2012. Analyzed documents are mainly newspaper articles, electronic archives of different media, and other websites. The case under study focuses on the analysis of those fishing professionals who work in collecting barnacles in Galicia, given that they have faced different setbacks in their work contexts and have addressed them through changes in organizational form. Findings reflect the development of business resilience as a dynamic capability, which has allowed the change of some structures to generate others more viable.

URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1503349