Resilience in Entrepreneurship Research: Moving the Field Forward

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Introduction

In today’s world, recurrent crises driven by political tensions, economic downturns, disease outbreaks, natural disasters and climate change create challenging conditions for the success of entrepreneurial initiatives (Newman, Obschonka, & Block, 2022; Sharma, Kraus, Liguori, Bamel, & Chopra, 2022). In that context, resilience has become a focal point in entrepreneurship research to understand how several entrepreneurial actors (e.g., individual, organization, or community) can prepare for, deal with and learn from turbulent and complex situations to turn major crisis events into a successful survival story (DiBella, Forrest, Burch, Rao‐Williams, Ninomiya, & Hermelingmeier, 2023; Hartmann, Backmann, Newman, Brykman, & Pidduck, 2022; Nautiyal & Pathak, 2023).

Generally, entrepreneurship scholars broadly define resilience as a positive adjustment to adversity (Yilmaz, Raetze, de Groote, & Kammerlander, forthcoming), implying that entrepreneurial actors maintain effective functioning prior to, during, and following disruptive events (Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepherd, & Zhao, 2017). Being resilient therefore means proactively identifying potential hazards, setting up innovative solutions, and searching for new opportunities to prevent damage from adverse situations (Raetze, Duchek, Maynard, & Wohlgemuth, 2022). The current conversation of resilience in entrepreneurship has been conducted through three different levels of analysis: micro-level (individuals), meso-level (firms), and macro-level (socioeconomic systems) (Korber & McNaughton, 2018). In their literature review, Korber and McNaughton (2018) deepen in these levels and classify the entrepreneurial resilience according to its role as an antecedent of different outcomes such as entrepreneurial intentions and overconfidence (Monllor & Murphy, 2017); as an outcome of various factors such as entrepreneurial behavior and failure (Hayward, Forster, Sarasvathy & Fredrickson, 2010); or even as a process such as creativity recovery, transformation and learning in macro-level entities (Dewald & Bowen, 2010). 

However, prior research has barely incorporated the idiosyncratic nature of each entrepreneurial level and actor in their reflection. This fact could justify a focus on entrepreneurial resilience in specific types of individuals, organizational contexts and socio-economic systems. Building on this ongoing debate, we invite scholars to submit papers for this special issue on resilience in entrepreneurial contexts to advance our understanding of how individuals, organizations and communities navigate adversity to foster entrepreneurial success in the long run.

List of topic areas

We encourage contributions that are focused on, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Antecedents of and relationships among multiple and diverse entrepreneurial actors and resilience;
• Multi-level determinants of entrepreneurial actors and their implications for firms’ resilience and success;
• Processes and mechanisms through which organizations develop entrepreneurial resilience;
• Implications of entrepreneurial actors for different types of firm outcomes and different resilience mechanisms;
• Studies about successful and unsuccessful organizations and their resilience mechanisms;
• Time and temporal considerations in entrepreneurial resilience (e.g., short-term and long-term, temporal evolution, timing and sequencing of resilient behaviors, environmental jolts and external/internal crises, etc.);
• Impact of different entrepreneurial actors on firm resilience behavior and outcomes, in areas such as human resource management, internationalization, diversification, professionalization, alliances, etc.;
• Established concepts related to entrepreneurial resilience such as family business or sustainability;
• Multi- and cross-disciplinary perspectives on entrepreneurial resilience (e.g., psychology, sociology, politics, economics);
• Cross-cultural differences in entrepreneurial resilience formulation processes;
• Entrepreneurial resilience in organization and management theories (e.g., organizational theory, agency theory, resource-based view, behavioral theories, stakeholder theory).

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijebr

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ijebr#jlp_author_guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscript submissions: 1 April 2025
Closing date for manuscript submissions: 1 December 2025

References

• Dewald, J., & Bowen, F. (2010). Storm clouds and silver linings: Responding to disruptive innovations through cognitive resilience. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 34(1), 197-218.
• DiBella, J., Forrest, N., Burch, S., Rao‐Williams, J., Ninomiya, S. M., Hermelingmeier, V., & Chisholm, K. (2023). Exploring the potential of SMEs to build individual, organizational, and community resilience through sustainability‐oriented business practices. Business Strategy and the Environment, 32(1), 721-735.
• Hartmann, S., Backmann, J., Newman, A., Brykman, K. M., & Pidduck, R. J. (2022). Psychological resilience of entrepreneurs: A review and agenda for future research. Journal of Small Business Management, 60(5), 1041-1079.
• Hayward, M. L., Forster, W. R., Sarasvathy, S. D., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2010). Beyond hubris: How highly confident entrepreneurs rebound to venture again. Journal of Business Venturing, 25(6), 569-578.
• Korber, S., & McNaughton, R. B. (2017). Resilience and entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 24(7), 1129-1154.
• Monllor, J., & Murphy, P. J. (2017). Natural disasters, entrepreneurship, and creation after destruction: A conceptual approach. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 23(4), 618-637.
• Nautiyal, S., & Pathak, P. (2023). Resilience through the lens of entrepreneurship: a bibliometric analysis and network mapping of the emerging research field. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-12-2022-3540.
• Newman, A., Obschonka, M., & Block, J. (2022). Small businesses and entrepreneurship in times of crises: the renaissance of entrepreneur-focused micro perspectives. International Small Business Journal, 40(2), 119-129.
• Raetze, S., Duchek, S., Maynard, M. T., & Wohlgemuth, M. (2022). Resilience in organization-related research: An integrative conceptual review across disciplines and levels of analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(6), 867–897.
• Sharma, G. D., Kraus, S., Liguori, E., Bamel, U. K., & Chopra, R. (2022). Entrepreneurial challenges of COVID-19: Re-thinking entrepreneurship after the crisis. Journal of Small Business Management, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472778.2022.2089676.
• Williams, T. A., Gruber, D. A., Sutcliffe, K. M., Shepherd, D. A., & Zhao, E. Y. (2017). Organizational response to adversity: Fusing crisis management and resilience research streams. Academy of Management Annals, 11(2), 733-769.
• Yilmaz, Y., Raetze, S., Groote, J. D., & Kammerlander, N. (2024). Resilience in Family Businesses: A Systematic Literature Review. Family Business Review, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/08944865231223372