Social capital and organisational resilience

Over recent years, natural and man-made crises and disasters have raised an awareness of the need for organisational resilience. Many organisations are now part of complex supply networks, and developing good business relationships can be central to supply network resilience. The aim of the research is to gain a fuller understanding of how organisations can exploit their social capital for building resilience. Although previous research has shown social capital to influence the resilience of place based communities, bringing the constructs together in an organisational or business community context has received little attention. The research has three objectives: 1) Identify ways in which organisations exploit their social capital for resilience; 2) Explore how four emergent ‘enabling conditions’ (time and continuity, interaction, interdependence, and closure and brokerage) help organisations exploit social capital for building resilience; and 3) Develop a reflective framework to help organisations consider how they can exploit their social capital for building resilience. The focus group is a community of construction contractors working in partnership for the UK Highways Agency. Working within the so called Construction Management Framework, a concept very different from traditional ‘aggressive’ frameworks, the research explores how contractors have developed good working relationships, collective behaviours including resource sharing and information exchange underpinned by the community’s espoused values, equal status, and peer pressure. Observed, is the contractor community’s willingness and ability to collaborate in order to improve performance and achieve shared goals. The research identifies many examples of the contractor community maintaining positive adjustment under challenging conditions – resilience