Locational Contiguity and Business Continuity: Perceived Organizational Resilience of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in U.K. Business Parks

Abstract

As the ability to respond and adapt to crises, we conceptualize and examine organizational resilience through four components (active, temporal, posture, and performance). This multidimensional view of resilience combines the perceptions of senior managers and other indicators including the presence and nature of formal business continuity management. This study examines whether relationships with neighboring firms in a business park substitute wider network relationships. Relationships between locational attributes (locational contiguity within a business park), entrepreneurs’ social networks, and the perceived resilience of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the United Kingdom are examined using data collected from 268 SMEs. Locational attributes are positively associated with organizational resilience (in both aggregated and constituent forms) while revealing an inverse relationship between social networks and perceived resilience. Importantly, the study contributes to a place-based view of resilience to explain why the impact of social networks differs from the positive associations that are found in prior theoretical and empirical work.