Abstract
How can be crises classified? What does the term “corporate crisis” mean? Corporate crises have always been a topic of tremendous interest for both the research in and practice of strategic management at an international level. Attention has been given to elaborating appropriate interpretative conceptualizations, together with implementing effective and efficient predicting and countervailing models. To date, scholars have seemingly reached consensus as to the meaning of crises. Conversely, identifying determinants and temporal dynamics still seems to be a lively question to address. This is why in this article we critically review the state of the art on the topic, from which we derive some important implications for the present and future research and practice in the strategic management field.
Highlights
How can be crises classified? What does the term “corporate crisis” mean? During the 20th century, the literature about corporate crises substantially witnesses the development of two analytical, and partially intertwined, approaches (Bibeault, 2017): the first is composed of those studies looking at the crisis of entire socio-economic systems, or industries; the second, instead, is composed of those management perspectives looking at the crisis of single firms
The evolving literature about crises has, seemingly produced a jungle (Koontz & Weihrich, 2017) of approaches, perspectives, and methodologies. This is why this article aims at providing readers with an updated, critical review of the “corporate crisis” phenomenon from the strategic management perspective
To date the strategic management perspective still evidences the absence of a unique statement precisely defining the concept of “corporate crisis”; a final, but probably exhaustive, idea of this can emerge if we consider the various terms, such as death, bankruptcy, exit, or failure, over time associated with this concept by the literature (Mellahi & Wilkinson, 2010)
Summary
The first approach primarily comes to light as the consequence of all those (negative) events which, since the second half of the 20th century, become protagonists of the overall functioning of the most relevant international economies (Tedeschi Toschi, 1993; De Ruysscher, 2017) In this regard, for example, at the end of the 1980s, the European automobile industry witnesses the substantial shift from the “first motorization” demand, characterized by most customers buying an automobile for the first time, to the “substitution” demand, instead characterized by most of the customers (e.g. families) already having one automobile (Volpato, 2009; Maielli, 2017). The latter kind of literature, which represents the core of this contribution, develops in the 1980s, fostered by the number of corporate collapses that occur at an international level (Barker & Schmitt, 2017)
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