Organisational Resilience : Concepts, Integration and Practice

An eternal dilemma for all organizations, and one that a considerable portion of management schools are set up to address, is how to become and stay competitive. Organisational Resilience: Concepts, Integration, and Practice brings together, for the first time, key works that describe the scope and nature of resilience and provides direction to take the field forwards. A response not only to rapidly growing interest in this field, but to the increased importance placed on it, the book presents a broad introduction to research, knowledge, and practice.

The book captures the diversity and depth of current thinking about research on organizational-related resilience. The book explains fundamental concepts and clarifies some underlying ideas from diverse fields of resilience-related research. It examines how some of these concepts and ideas have been integrated into specific research activity and used to further develop their respective fields of enquiry. The connecting of concepts and ideas to existing readily helps to progress the development of theory. The book then focuses on aspects of real World practice and experience.

However, the central theme about resilience as a concept is that it is not merely concerned with survival pure and simple, but that this survival involves transformation more often than not. Examining resilience at the organizational level, this book clarifies the commonality of concepts and practice that exists among disparate research disciplines and establishes a singular ‘go-to’ work that can be used to develop operational and strategic practices.

Dr. Ran Bhamra is presently a Senior Lecturer in the Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Loughborough University, UK. He is Chartered Engineer (CEng) and a Member of the Institution of Engineering & Technology (MIET). He has a PhD in Resource-based Strategy from Cranfield University. Dr Bhamra joined the School in 2008, prior to which much of his career was spent in a variety of industrial organisations and consultancy that includes process improvement, project and operations management. Key research interests include organisational resilience, competence and resource-based theory, sustainable manufacturing strategy, and also product-service operations. Dr Bhamra is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at the University of Hong Kong.