Globalization, Disruption and Resilience

The influence of disruptive events (i.e. external events that are unforeseen and/or unwanted) on companies’ global value chains has increased. In this chapter, we discuss how increasing turbulence in the external environment creates different forms of disruption for companies and how these are related to the international organization and geographical dispersion of companies and their value chains. We conclude with reflections on possible strategies and actions companies can adopt to become less vulnerable and more resilient. Overall, resilience denotes a capability that enables the company to operate in a turbulent global business environment. We distinguish resilience into three different phases and strategies that include respectively a pro-active phase with a readiness strategy, an absorptive phase with a response strategy, and a re-active phase with a recovery strategy. Theoretically, we suggest dynamic capabilities theory as a promising perspective to guide future research on global value chain resilience.