Abstract
ABSTRACT
Organizational resiliency, the ability to recover from significant adversity, has become an important and urgent context of study for organizational researchers and practitioners alike in the wake of the global pandemic. Research of the resiliency of organizations as a science remains nascent, benefitting from inquiries into social networks, the social capital derived from those networks, and the resulting access to community resources. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a research context, we study the relationship between the group social capital of small businesses and resiliency in times of crisis. In our paper, we analyze the triple resource constraints of small businesses, within a rural setting, subject to an economic downturn. We pair these conditions with rural community-at-large reactions to struggling small businesses: the shift of consumer behavior to be more conscious and adapting by buying locally (Khayru, 2021), as an example. Demographic, cultural, social network structure, industry type, and embeddedness considerations are analyzed as structural components of social capital access and fail to link to pandemic-caused economic shock resiliency. This multidimensional assessment of resiliency via the mobilization of group social capital in a community benefits both researchers and practitioners by addressing the pressing and urgent grand challenge of COVID-19 (Howard-Grenville, 2021).
Keywords: COVID-19, organizational resiliency, rural small business, social capital, network theory, resource-based view