Academic Papers

Some people like books and some people like academic papers.  If you’re the former, click on the Books link; if you’re the latter then this page is for you; if you like both, well, I guess you’re in luck!

Below are links to academic papers I’ve read and liked or used.  Some  papers require a subscription or an Athens Login to read them.   If you don’t have either of these, there are often other ways and means.  Try putting the title in quotes and searching for it on Google (not Google Scholar) to see if someone has ‘inadvertently’ posted it for you.  Second, email the author: I’ve not come across one that won’t e-mail it to you if ask nicely.

• How Managers Can Build Organisational Resiliency? (HR Management): “What does a resilient organization look like? Simply stated, a resilient organization can respond and adapt to both sudden shocks and gradual change – the current financial crisis is a perfect test of resiliency. Maximizing performance over the long term, through changes foreseen and disruptions that can’t be predicted, defines a resilient organization. Resilient organizations require resilient individuals, and managers help develop the right culture to build this kind of organization…”

• The Quest for Resilience (Hamel & Valikangas): “Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient. The evidence is all around us. Big companies are failing more frequently. Of the 20 largest U.S. bankruptcies in the past two decades, ten occurred in the last two years…”

• Bonding, Bridging and Linking: How Social Capital Operated in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina (Hawkins & Maurer): “We examine how social capital operated in the lives of 40 families following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. We attempt to understand how residents utilized their social capital to survive the storm, relocate, and rebuild their lives and com- munities. Results indicate residents, especially those with low incomes, relied on, built upon, and collapsed all levels of social capital for individual, family, and community survival…”

• Six Habits of Highly Effective Organisations (Johnston-Lenz): “Most companies live fast and die young. A study in 1983 by Royal Dutch/Shell found only 40 corporations over 100 years old. In contrast, they found that one-third of the Fortune 500s from 1970 were, at that time, already gone…”

• Are You Resilient? (Kanigel): “Remember a few years ago when touchy-feely stress-management workshops were all the rage? Well, say goodbye to group massages and soothing New Age music. The new buzzword in business boardrooms these days is “resilience.”…”

• The Proposed Contagion Effect of Hopeful Leaders on the Resiliency of Employees and Organisations (Norman, Luthens & Luthens): “Hope has often been misunderstood and underestimated as a potentially powerful human capacity. Traditionally, hope has too often been dismissed as a whimsical and abstract concept that could not be well defined, let alone measured, developed, and applied to the workplace. However…”

• Reclaiming resilience and safety: Resilience activation in the critical period of crisis (Powley, 2009): ”This article examines an unexpected organizational crisis (a shooting and standoff in a business school) and presents a model for how resilience becomes activated in such situations. Three social mechanisms describe resilience activation. Liminal suspension describes how crisis temporarily undoes and alters formal relational structures and opens a temporal space for organization members to form and renew relationships. Compassionate witnessing describes how organization members’ interpersonal connections and opportunities for engage- ment respond to individuals’ needs. And relational redundancy describes how organization members’ social capital and connections across organizational and functional boundaries activate relational networks that enable resilience.”

• Resiliency Development of Organisations, Leaders and Employees: Multi-Level Theory Building for Sustained Performance (Youseff & Luthens): [I'd really like this book but it's £62 so google books will have to do!]