Creating resilient economies: Entrepreneurship, growth and development in uncertain times, edited by Nick Williams and Tim Vorley

《Creating resilient economies: Entrepreneurship, growth and development in uncertain times, edited by Nick Williams and Tim Vorley》

打印

作者: Maija Renko

来源: JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue1,P.138-140

语言: 英文

关键字

作者单位: University of Illinois at Chicago

摘要: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeStories of resilient entrepreneurs, businesses, cities, and regions have always been audience favorites. However, it is only recently that academic interest in the construct of resilience and its applications on multiple levels of analysis has really started to gain steam. The book Creating Resilient Economies: Entrepreneurship, Growth and Development in Uncertain Times, edited by Nick Williams and Tim Vorley, is certain to find an interested audience among sociologists, urban planners, management scholars, and others trying to understand why some suffer under hardship, threat, and uncertainty, whereas others bounce back. This book is an edited collection of 13 chapters that discuss resilience from an admirable variety of perspectives and on different levels of analysis. In addition to the 13 chapters, the book includes an introductory as well as a concluding chapter by the editors. Their common interest in resilience through the lenses of entrepreneurship, innovation, economic geography, and regional development is on display when they summarize the meaning and implications of resilience as discussed in the 13 independent chapters.Most of the authors of this edited book are academics from the United Kingdom, yet the geographic terrain covered by the empirical research contexts of the chapters is wide: entrepreneurs in London and in Greece, cities in Italy and Newfoundland, and companies in the United Kingdom (automotive industry) and Denmark (subject-matter experts). One of the first conclusions from reading this book is that the construct of resilience remains contested, and even the advocates of resilient thinking on various levels recognize the need to further specify and refine the construct. In psychology and, from there, in organizational behavior research, resilience has a somewhat standard meaning. However, once we start to talk about resilient organizations, regions, and cities, the interpretation of resilience depends much on how the author sees it. In this book, the editors define resilience (which they often refer to as economic resilience) as “the ability of an organization, region or nation to accommodate change, withstand systematic discontinuities and to do so without disrupting the wider system” (p. 3). After reading the book, one could further add to this definition that such economic resilience is often on display among entrepreneurs, so the ability for economic resilience seems to also exist in individual entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams, not only in the organizations they run. Furthermore, whether resilience is “only” about accommodating, withstanding, and not disrupting is up for debate as well. Some would say that inherent to resilience is an ability to grow and further prosper after encountering an external shock. This implies moving beyond previous levels of performance and thus beyond accommodating and withstanding.Though many accounts of resilience focus on one level of analysis (individual, organization, or economic system, for example), it is rare to see a collection put together that straddles all different levels of analysis. Creating Resilient Economies fills this important gap. As such, it will be appreciated by those who find their intellectual homes in disciplinary applications of resilience but are looking to understand how their research on this construct relates to other levels and disciplines. Maybe even more important, this collection of chapters will be helpful for those looking to directly engage in interdisciplinary work on the topic of resilience. The order of chapters in the book is intuitive, in that it starts from individual entrepreneurs’ accounts of resilience (chapters 2 and 3) and then moves on to firm (chapters 4 and 5), city (chapters 6 and 7), city-region (chapters 8 and 9), and local economy and larger region (chapters 10–14) as the main level of analysis. In these accounts of resilience, one can observe how the main components of what it means to be a resilient individual have been adopted by larger units. Coutu (2002 Coutu, D. L. (2002). How resilience works. Harvard Business Review, 80(5), 46–56.[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) summarized that individual-level theorizing on resilience in management centered on three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. Though the point about life being meaningful needs some translating into organizational and regional contexts, it is interesting how well the chapters in this book reflect these three components of resilience, even when talking about organizations, cities, and regions instead of individuals.The book challenges policymakers and governments on all levels to think about the consequences that their policies and actions have on the resilient abilities of their respective regions. In a number of chapters, the authors demonstrate how institutional changes and government decisions have prohibited, rather than enabled, entrepreneurs’ and businesses’ adaptation and responsiveness to external shocks. In their conclusions, the editors point to the need for regional strategy to look beyond the extension of existing paths, built on the current core competencies of regions, to the renewal and creation of new entrepreneurial paths. Furthermore, they emphasize the need to ensure that these entrepreneurial responses meaningfully combine, and are premised upon, public- and private-sector action partnerships. What would be interesting to see, as a next step, is an analysis of how such resilience-focused public–private partnerships can be enacted at different levels of government. It seems that in the current political environment in the United States, the different levels of government may not only have different priorities in terms of policy (think of American cities stepping up to fulfill the vacuum that the exit of the United States from the Paris climate accord created), but they may also have very different capabilities to enact partnerships with businesses, especially small and entrepreneurial ones.Without a doubt, Creating Resilient Economies: Entrepreneurship, Growth and Development in Uncertain Times makes a significant contribution to the literature. The book’s key contribution is in the individual authors’ well-thought-out interpretations on what resilience is and can be, where it comes from, and what its consequences are. Even though there is an increasing interest in resilience among economic geographers, urban planners, and management scholars alike, few publications on the topic cover as much terrain as this book does. The book offers a very timely illustration of a construct that has increasing importance in today’s society, where the pace of technological change and increasing economic inequality mean that some individuals, companies, neighborhoods, cities, and regions are facing an almost constant crisis on multiple fronts. To break this cycle, and to move on, requires resilience. This book offers interesting and important ideas on how to build such resilience.ReferenceCoutu, D. L. (2002). How resilience works. Harvard Business Review, 80(5), 46–56. [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]