Abstract
We explore why and how corporations seek to build community resilience as a strategic response to grand challenges. Based on a comparative case study analysis of four corporations strategically building community resilience in five place-based communities in South Africa, as well as three counterfactual cases, we develop a process model of corporate practices and contingent factors that explain why and how some corporations commit to community resilience building and whether they try to do so directly or indirectly. We thus help explain corporations’ strategic contributions to community resilience, and we emphasise the role of place-specific resources, social-ecological system viability, and limited statehood in motivating such organisational responses to grand challenges.
Highlights
Management scholars have called for increased attention to how organisations respond to “grand challenges” (Ferraro et al 2015; George et al 2016)
Our choice of research setting and of our case study companies was linked to an engaged scholarship initiative in South Africa, in which senior strategy and sustainability managers participate in regular meetings with us as researchers to identify and study issues of both practical and scholarly significance
Our analysis resulted in a model of corporate contributions to community resilience as illustrated in Fig. 1, consisting of three contingent factors, which each motivate or shape three successive corporate practices in community resilience building
Summary
Management scholars have called for increased attention to how organisations respond to “grand challenges” (Ferraro et al 2015; George et al 2016). Despite significant prior scholarly work on corporate social and ecological responsiveness (e.g., Hart 1995; Bansal and Roth 2000; Aguinis and Glavas 2012) and the more recent empirical focus on grand challenges (e.g., Berrone et al 2016; Grodal and O’Mahony 2017; Venkatesh et al 2017; Wright and Nyberg 2017), we still lack understanding of why and how for-profit corporations might seek to address such multifaceted and complex social and ecological challenges as part of their core strategy, as opposed to discretionary contributions to worthy causes We encountered such strategic efforts in some corporations’ efforts in South Africa to systematically contribute to community resilience, that is, to building the capacity of a place-based community to enhance and maintain its members’ livelihoods in the face of both gradual and sudden social-ecological changes.
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