Riassunto analitico
Today we are witnessing the introduction of the term resilience in almost - if not all - research areas, firmly contributing to classify it as a topic of great relevance and importance. Initially introduced into the ecological sector, and then enlarged within the social sciences, the concept of resilience has been also applied to the business and management field.
Within this context, the main objective proposed to achieve through this research is assessing the motives leading some organizations to positively recover when they are forced to face natural disasters, whereas others fail in giving continuity to their business; therefore, discovering dimensions or elements able to influence or enhance organizational resilience is considered as crucial.
In the context of entrepreneurial resilience, what emerges are the diverse responses from the well-established bigger companies compared with SMEs.
In fact, in this thesis we will refer in particular to small entrepreneurs operating in the retail sector, that compared to large organizations encounter many more obstacles and limits when facing a critical event. Indeed, we will analyze their resilience capacity in the face of two main natural disasters, namely the Emilia’s earthquake in 2012 and the Covid-19 pandemic.
What we want to achieve through the results of the empirical study is to understand what are the main factors influencing organizational resilience and how these have impacted on indicators such as performance and market’s permanence of the companies being interviewed.
The two shocking events - although they both belong to two different categories of natural disasters, geophysical the earthquake, while biological the pandemic - have both led to devastating consequences in terms of economic and business performance of the enterprises taken into account.
After a deep analysis of the semi-structured interviews based on the content analysis methodology, firstly individually and then in an aggregate manner, we will examine the dimensions of organizational resilience implemented and dynamic capabilities used by the sample of small retailers, in order to efficiently deal with the two natural disasters considered.
What the research proposes through the analysis of the responses, of the resilient strategies implemented by small entrepreneurs to these two events, is, in addition, understanding how fundamental the role of the learning effect is.
We will in fact be focused on researching how the entrepreneurs impacted by the earthquake have proved more or less resilient behaviors and results in the face of another disaster (Covid-19), therefore being, in a way, more advantaged or better prepared, compared to those who interfaced for the first time to a natural disaster.
In general, the research work is structured as follows: the first three chapters focuses on the deepening of the concept of resilience in the various fields of application, especially in the field of organizational and management and business’ studies, then going narrow the focus on entrepreneurial resilience and small retailing companies and conclude the purely theoretical part with the third chapter, through the analysis of the disastrous event, causes, direct and indirect consequences and main resilient characteristics that allow the company to develop a fruitful recovery process.
Going forward, from the fourth chapter onwards, empirical research will take place through a qualitative study, based on semi-structured interviews; these latter will then be administered to a sample of small retailers who have been affected by two natural disasters of which will follow in this study related description.
The last part will be devoted to the evaluation of the results obtained from the interviews’ analysis, immediately followed by conclusions.
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