Disciplines of organizational resilience: contributions, critiques, and future research avenues
Literature on resilience in business and management is increasing and has made considerable progress, yet researcher criticize the concept for being ambiguous and to lack clarity in terms of its definition and measurement. This paper investigates causes for ambiguity and disciplines that shaped the understanding of the concept. Five disciplinary perspectives are identified and critically reviewed in terms of how they influenced the understanding of resilience. Those different perspectives have different ontologies, resulting tools and methods to study the concept and thus led to differences in how organizational resilience is understood. Researchers have borrowed ideas from those perspectives and combined them with other perspectives to provide new insights. However, this wealth of perspectives leads to resilience that as its current stage has the notion of an umbrella concept that loosely encompass a set of diverse organizational phenomena. Resilience literature that draws from those disciplines is reviewed in terms of key findings. Contributions of each discipline are highlighted and critical questions are raised for future research.