0000000000172198
AUTHOR
Mitchell Young
Resilience in Organizations and Societies: The State of the Art and Three Organizing Principles for Moving Forward
AbstractResilience has attracted a multitude of scholars from diverse backgrounds and disciplines as it is a desired feature for responding to the adversities that modern societal systems face, not least the Covid-19 pandemic. Existing research displays little convergence on the definition of the concept making a robust theoretical framework and empirical understanding of resilience highly desirable. The aim of this chapter is to provide a more holistic understanding of the complex phenomenon of resilience from a multi-sectorial, cross-national and multidisciplinary perspective by proposing an original approach into the state of the art that might enhance future research. This chapter ident…
Towards Resilient Organisations and Societies? Reflections on the Multifaceted Nature of Resilience
AbstractAs the chapters in this volume have shown, resilience is a multifaceted and malleable concept that can be fruitfully applied to a wide range of phenomena at all levels of society. At the same time, there is a distinct danger of concept stretching. In this concluding chapter, we look at both the extensiveness of the concept, reviewing the range of complementary concepts that have been engaged by the authors, and how it can be delimited to maintain conceptual distinctiveness and explanatory value. What is more, we provide some recommendations on how scholars working across disciplinary boundaries may go about unpacking resilience in and for organizations and societies.
The Post-entrepreneurial University: The Case for Resilience in Higher Education
AbstractHistorically speaking, the university has been a highly resilient organizational form; however recent pressures to become entrepreneurial threaten the institutional foundations on which that reliance is based. The chapter first provides conceptual clarity by revisiting what we argue are two distinct schools of thought on the entrepreneurial university. We show how the economic school’s conception intertwines with the rise of New Public Management (NPM) in Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reframing the concept in ways that made it incompatible with resilience thinking. However, we argue that by tying back into ‘lost’ elements of sociological school’s conception, and associat…
University Complexity and Regional Development in the Periphery
Higher education institutions (HEIs) located in peripheral areas tend to struggle when it comes to attracting talented students, staff, and competitive funding, and they often lack in-house research capacity, which limits the developmental roles they can play in their host regions. This, in turn, generates a set of internal and external tensions that universities need to address in their quests for legitimate places in the increasingly competitive domestic and international higher education field, as well as in their immediate geographic surroundings. Building on earlier work in the field, combining seminal insights from organisational and higher education studies, this chapter provides a b…
Conclusion: University Ambiguities and Analytic Eclecticism
This volume has examined six cases of university engagement in peripheral regions. While these regions have often been overlooked in the mainstream literature on university-region dynamics because they do not readily offer up success stories, they do facilitate an exploration into the challenges and difficulties that arise at the intersection of the university and region. Beginning with a theory rooted in institutionalist literature that depicts the university as a set of five ambiguities rather than as a coherent whole, the chapters have sought to apply the ambiguities of intention, causality, history, structure, and meaning to their regional context. In this conclusion, we pull together a…