ABSTRACT

Despite the ambiguity regarding the exact meaning of the term resilience (resistance, exibility, reliability or redundancy; Seville et al., 2008), resilience is a sought-after characteristic of organisations of various sizes and scopes in times of crisis (Bhamra et  al., 2011). Economic crises have been responsible for signicant disruption in the way countries, economies and organisations function. Resilience implies that

6.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 103 6.2 Institutional Perspectives on Integration and the Role of Resilience ........... 106 6.3 The Specic Context: The Institutional Environment of Greece and its

Transformation .............................................................................................. 108 6.4 Capabilities for Resilience and Their Relation to the Adoption of

Forward Integration Strategies in Times of Economic Crisis ...................... 109 6.4.1 Understanding Sectoral Dynamics and Integration.......................... 110 6.4.2 Complexity, Resilience and Integration ............................................ 111 6.4.3 Capability, Path Dependence and Integration .................................. 112 6.4.4 Technology and Forward Integration ............................................... 112

6.5 Methodology ................................................................................................. 113 6.5.1 Research Context .............................................................................. 113 6.5.2 Measures ........................................................................................... 114

6.6 Findings ........................................................................................................ 115 6.7 Conclusions ................................................................................................... 116 6.8 Limitations and Future Research .................................................................. 119 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 119 References .............................................................................................................. 120

organisations have the ability and capability to withstand the shocks of economic crises and continue to operate effectively. Hence, building resilience and ensuring a quick return to equilibrium (Bhamra et al., 2011) has been at the centre of government policy, at the national level and strategic analysis at the rm level. At both levels the aim has been to improve the ability to return swiftly to normality. This has attracted much attention in recent years in national and international newspapers and academic journals. In this chapter, we focus on the impact economic crises have on the rm’s environment and its strategic management and how the latter is modulated by the existence of resilience-related capabilities. More specically, we explore which dimensions of built resilience enable rms to adopt strategies of vertical integration for surviving economic crises.