Rüdiger Wink - Economic Resilience in Regions and Organisations

The papers in this book are based on a conference in November 2019 and an extended call for papers at the beginning of 2020 and were therefore prepared before the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded its full global potential. Nevertheless, some aspects from the early experiences with this crisis could be included and all papers deal with issues, which provide important hints on preconditions for a successful process during and out of the pandemic. Simultaneously, the papers reflect the overall state of research on regional and organizational resilience from different ankles, which ensures their relevance beyond a specific crisis like the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The structure of the book follows three basic questions and challenges in resilience research. Firstly, the role of regional structures is picked out as a central issue in the contributions from Simone Grabner, Ron Martin and Ben Gardiner and Juntao Tan. While Simone Grabner looks at the specific impact of agglomerations, Martin and Gardiner investigate the impact of economic structures on British cities during crises and Juntao Tan analyzes the specific challenges in Chinese resource-based regions. Secondly, the importance of and preconditions for agency and governance mechanisms are central topics of the papers from Marianne Sensier and Elvira Uyarra, Heli Kurikka and Markus Grillitsch and Patrizio Bianchi and Sandrine Labory. Although the three papers deal with experiences in different countries (North England, Finland and Italy), their analyses emphasize the common importance of suitable governance systems between local and central national level, the availability of different forms of change agents and regionally specific objectives and strategies. Thirdly, the five papers by Daniel Zacher and Elvira Gavriljuk, Thomas Urban, Ann-Kathrin Dieterle, Ianina Scheuch and Florian Koch and Marie-Anne Berron reflect on resilience on the meso and microlevel with perspectives on a specific sector (tourism in the paper from Zacher and Gavriljuk), the relationship between entrepreneur, family and organization (Urban), inter-organizational collaborations (Dieterle), intra-organizational teams (Scheuch) and socio-linguistic resilience of young academics (Koch and Berron).