Institutional resilience refers to the capacity of institutions to deal with adversity. Crises are a major source of adversity. However, we poorly understand the relations between institutional resilience and crises. Through a comparative process tracing across three European countries, I investigate how multistakeholder partnerships in work integration contributed to institutional resilience in response to the economic and the refugee crises. I present these foremost as moral crises, where public, private, and nonprofit actors choose to engage or not engage out of (...) a sense of responsibility. I develop a framework and research propositions on how multistakeholder collaboration may increase institutional resilience when it is affected by moral crises and make three contributions: First, in contrast to the destructive effects of crises often stressed, I identify pull and push factors triggered by moral crises that may galvanize fragmented efforts into joint action. Second, I conceptualize nested contingencies of institutional resilience, by explaining how resilience is affected by interaction between (1) the capacity of existing institutions and the level of adversity produced by crises and (2) institutional precursors that new actor constellations can build on and crises challenge existing institutions directly or indirectly. Third, I conceptualize which type of actor is likely to take the lead, and under which context conditions, when multiple stakeholders engage in increasing institutional resilience. I derive implications on how anticipatory embedded agency can prevent crises and how moral pro-activity may not only benefit institutional resilience, but also the organizations who choose to act. (shrink)

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well (...) managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo. (shrink)

Understanding how hybrid organizations resist mission drift and sustain the joint pursuit of their plural goals over time remains a central theoretical and practical concern in the business and society literature. In this article, we mobilize an organizational politics approach to elucidate how hybrid organizations react to mission drift and strive to rebalance the relationship between their conflicting missions. Drawing on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of a project developed within a multinational worker co-op to reverse mission drift, we elaborate a (...) process model showing how shifting patterns in the mobilization of episodic and systemic forms of power provoke critical changes in the way that plural missions are construed and enacted within hybrid organizations. This study also contributes to the field of co-operative organization and management studies by revealing that the transfer of organizational practices within multinational co-ops is more critically shaped by power relations and conflicting interests rather than, as much of the previous literature has argued, by host country institutions. (shrink)