This perspective article highlights some major implications of the recent pandemic (Covid‐19) on global value chains (GVCs) and how the pandemic can accelerate the adoption of digital and Industry 4.0 technologies in GVCs, with attention paid to multinational enterprises and small‐medium enterprises. Particularly, it discusses the potential value of digital technologies in enhancing GVC resilience for better mitigation of disruptions caused by future global shocks. It also proposes useful avenues for future policy considerations to support and direct deployment of digital technologies across key stakeholders in GVCs.

We investigate how small businesses in a very remote island tourist destination are able to cope with shocks and disruptions they face, that is, their resilience. Given their size and resource limitations as well as disadvantages due to lack of accessibility and remoteness, we expect resilience in these types of firms to be underpinned by their close relationships with other local stakeholders. Drawing on concepts from Instrumental Stakeholder Theory (IST), we explore how close relationship capabilities with stakeholders affect small business resilience on the remote tourist destination of St Helena. Through in-depth interviews with the owner-managers of seven case firms on the island we identify how aspects of IST are relevant to resilience, while also uncovering emerging variables of interest. To make sense of these variables we use a Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) approach, capturing respondents' mental models in graphical form.The result supports IST by reinforcing the positive effects of valuable partners and mutually beneficial interaction with valuable partners, as well as a negative impact of the cost of managing relationships. However, negative impacts of logistical costs and, surprisingly, the role of government policy on resilience are also identified. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Drawing on the Diffusion of Innovation Theory, this study explores how emerging digital communication technologies (EDCT) affected SMEs’ resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employed an inductive and qualitative approach to investigate 42 SME operators in a weak institutional developing country—Nigeria. Our findings show that EDCT played a critical role in activating SMEs’ resilience during the crisis through four drivers: facilitating connections and bonding with staff, clients, and suppliers; enabling collaborations; activating process diversification; and enhancing supply chain flexibility. Furthermore, we highlight the distinct ability of Nigerian SMEs to buffer themselves against misinformation arising from the use of EDCT. This study sheds light on an EDCT Diffusion Model for resilience.

Much research on organizational resilience has focused on the intraorganizational capacity that enables positive adjustment to disruption. Yet, when seen as open systems, organizations are highly interdependent and interconnected with many other actors. This raises the question of how interorganizational relationships (IORs) affect organizational resilience. We explore this using a novel inductive two-stage approach incorporating fuzzy cognitive mapping to identify the relational determinants of organizational resilience in the context of Chinese business service firms. Using this technique reveals five relational dimensions, which we label relational competence, innovative assimilation, integrative trustworthiness, identity constraints, and asymmetry. The analysis also shows how these interrelate to either positively or negatively affect organizational resilience. This is a new way of understanding organizational resilience and shows how it is determined by a complex interplay between IOR attributes in the external relational environment of the organization.