Business resilience in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era: A conceptual review

Abstract

Amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, the term resilience has gained significant momentum in global news and management studies. Although scholars from different domains have investigated resilience, there is a need to provide clarity on its definitions and assessment (Anderson, 2015). This paper provides a conceptual review on resilience and explores business resilience as a framework to guide sustainability strategy by mitigating social and environmental risks. The study contributes to the literature on resilience and tabulates the key definitions of business resilience covered in a sample of 80 peer-reviewed articles and books (Hillmann & Guenther, 2021; McKnight & Linnenluecke, 2017). We challenge the existing literature on adaptive capacity models that are short in anticipating unprecedented operational disruptions. To build business resilience we argue for the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Given their strategic outlook until 2030, the SDGs offer a framework for corporate sustainability that helps decision-makers within organizations identify social and environmental risks and establish business strategies that build resilience and meet the expectations of a firm’s diverse stakeholders