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The purpose of this paper is to examine what it means to be resilient in the context of environmental turbulence, complexity, and uncertainty, and to suggest how organizations might develop strategic resilience.

Sampling from the theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of resilience within the management and organizational literatures, this conceptual paper presents a model of strategic resilience and theoretical propositions are developed that suggest directions for future research.

It is proposed that strategic resilience is an emergent and dynamic characteristic of organizations whereby organizational legacy is a defining antecedent, top management team future orientation is a fundamental belief system, and problem formulation is a key deliberate process.

Although the conceptual inquiry of strategic resilience offers clarity on a complex phenomenon, empirical evidence is needed to provide a test of the concepts and their relations.

By asserting that the environment is turbulent, complex, and uncertain, this paper opens up new possibilities for the understanding and study of strategic resilience, whereby metamorphosis and innovation are requisites, and entrepreneurship is part and parcel of strategy. As such it highlights the importance of managerial beliefs and behaviors that facilitate proactively and deliberately challenging of the status quo.

The proposed conceptualization of strategic resilience in this paper connotes action rather than just reaction, and in so doing highlights the importance of the synergy between strategic management and entrepreneurship. As such, it proposes factors that may help organizations persist and create value within a context and future that they themselves also shape.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to inquire into the circumstances and mechanisms that drive temporary systems to become permanent organizations.

Methodology/approach – This study is based on a retrospective longitudinal case study (1980–1995) and informed by research on organizational path dependence. Our research object is SEMATECH, the leading global semiconductor manufacturing consortium.

Findings – This longitudinal case study of the research and development consortium SEMATECH shows how and under what conditions a project, once its initial objective had been achieved, managed to turn itself into a permanent organization, that is, it terminated its institutionalized termination. Based on our findings, we argue that the postponing of this specific project's institutionalized termination can be understood by adopting a path dependence perspective that allows for the capturing of self-reinforcing processes to account for the stability of the (once temporary) system.

Originality/value of the paper – In this chapter, we question the certainty put forward in organizational studies of projects concerning the ephemeral nature of projects due to their built-in termination mechanism.

This paper aims to conceptualize what it means to be resilient in the face of our current reality of indisputable turbulence and uncertainty, suggest that continual metamorphosis is key to resilience, demonstrate the role of unlearning in that metamorphosis and suggest that problem formulation is a key deliberate mechanism of driving continual cycles of learning and unlearning.

The paper entails a conceptual analysis.

It is found that both the unlearning and resilience literature streams are stuck in a paradigm whereby organizational behavior entails adaptation to the external environment and reaction to crisis. This paper suggests that, given a world of turbulence and uncertainty, a more useful paradigm is one where organizations take action before action is desperately needed, and that they proactively contribute to enacting their environment via their own continual metamorphosis.

Future research should explore further the factors that can facilitate sensing the early warning signs, and facilitate the cyclical learning–unlearning process of metamorphosis.

The primary practical implication is that to ensure strategic resilience, managers must be able to identify early warning signs and initiate metamorphosis. This means understanding the processes needed to support unlearning, namely, problem formulation.

The originality and value of the present paper lies in that it suggests a shift in paradigm from adaptation and reaction, to action and enactment. Further, it proposes a cyclical process of learning and unlearning that together define periods of metamorphosis, and suggests problem formulation, whereby the mission statement is assessed and revised, as a mechanism in that endeavor.

This article highlights the fact that in an attempt to cope with the turbulence and hostility which characterize their operating environments, many public sector organizations have embarked upon far‐reaching programmes of unsettling strategic change. These programmes often exhibit features of disintegration. Additionally they are frequently formulated by senior managers in isolation from organizational members, who are then expected to implement them without question or consultation. This article argues that such approaches to change management are unlikely to bring about the desired transformation. Rather, using a case study of one public sector organization in the Republic of Ireland, it is argued that organizations are more likely to experience the required metamorphosis where the change commences at the periphery and is led by relatively junior front line staff, with senior management practitioners acting as facilitators of organizational transformation.

A culture of health within an organization offers benefits such as managing healthcare costs and supporting employees in becoming and staying healthy. This study aims to identify successful organization's strategies utilized to socialize employees into a culture of health.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 19 representatives from organizations recognized for their success in creating a culture of health. Grounded theory analysis of collected data was used to identify themes related to the goals of this study.

New employees are socialized into the culture of health during the recruitment process, at new employee orientation and throughout the early employment period. Existing employees are also continually socialized using a variety of on-going communication strategies. This process is consistent with Jablin's organizational assimilation model, and this study offers the opportunity to use this model to help understand organizational health.

Organizations desiring to create a culture of health can support this culture by incorporating socialization strategies into the recruitment, hiring and new employee on-boarding process.

Though strategies have been shown to be helpful in socializing new employees into organizations, limited research has explored the relationship between socialization and a culture of health. Results from this study offer insight into how organizations that have been recognized for their success in creating a culture of health socialize new and existing employees to create and maintain a culture that supports health and well-being. Also, this study applies socialization theories to health within the workplace, offering new insights both theoretically and practically.

This chapter presents a case study involving a socio-economic Organizational Development (OD) project carried out in a European subsidiary of a large multinational corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This research case study, one of the 1,854 socio-economic interventions undertaken by the ISEOR research center, was chosen for its good illustration of the OD engineering process. It connects the dots between OD and financial performance, between immediate results and the creation of potential. We look at some of the tools and methods, such as overhauling loss and profit accounts and balance sheets with an eye on socio-economic balance, to illustrate socioeconomic tools at work and how they help enhance compatibility between the objectives of all stakeholders, including shareholders. With this case study, we also set out to provide food for thought on the contribution of socio-economic OD to the construction of socially responsible capitalism (Savall et al., 2015).

This paper aims to highlight the potential role of collective mindfulness as a key success factor for organizational resilience. It also outlines the processes and essential contexts that support the cultivation of collective mindfulness capability in organizations.

A review of the relevant articles and current development in the area of organizational resilience and collective mindfulness provided an in-depth understanding and valuable insights into how collective mindfulness can be utilized to engender organizational resilience in the challenging business world.

This paper provides a brief overview over the crucial role of collective mindfulness capability in augmenting organizational resilience. Additionally, the processes of collective mindfulness and the essential contexts for developing and sustaining this capability is also unveiled.

The paper offers practical solutions for the anxiety faced by many organizations around the globe due to the relentless disruptions by highlighting on the potential role of collective mindfulness. It reveals the way that organizations can undertake to wade through the waves imposed by the current volatile environment by leveraging on collective mindfulness capability.

Some studies show that improvisation is a source of change, whereas others show that it is a source of stability. The purpose of this paper is to specify the factors which set the boundary between improvised change and improvised stability.

The paper draws on two published studies and contrasts their findings to analyze the extent to which improvisation leads to organizational change or organizational stability.

The paper suggests that the most innovative instances of improvisation reproduce some features of everyday experience. The extent to which an improvisation is a source of stability or a source of change depends on the dynamics of variation, selection and retention therein.

Future research needs to add empirical flesh to this theoretical skeleton to push research on organizational improvisation beyond the study of its causes and into further research on its consequences.

The paper deals with the paradox of making sense about two apparently opposing streams of research on improvisation.

Two views of organizational change dominate the management literature. The incremental view holds that organizations experience large‐scale strategic changes quite slowly while the revolutionary view proposes that organizations experience long periods of relatively little strategic variation punctuated by short, intense periods of major change. Commonalties among the two change theories provide the basis for a study of 101 businesses over a six year period. The research examines two theoretical implications: change is bimodally and discretely distributed and skewed toward incremental strategic change, and firms undergoing revolutionary strategic change will be more likely to experience simultaneous changes on multiple organizational dimensions than firms undergoing incremental strategic change. Consistent with Proposition 1, it was found that change is skewed toward incremental, but also that change is unimodal and continuously distributed, contrary to Proposition 1. Contrary to Proposition 2, revolutionary change on multiple dimensions was found to be rare.