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Growing scientific evidence suggests that more frequent and severe weather extremes such as heat waves, hurricanes, flooding and droughts will have an increasing impact on organizations, industries and entire economies. These findings call for the development of theoretical and practical frameworks to strengthen the capacity of organizations to respond to such impacts. Yet despite the need to understand what is required to build anticipatory adaptation and organizational resilience to expected impacts, the organizational theory literature offers only limited insights. This paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework of organizational adaptation and resilience to extreme weather events for addressing the effects of ecological discontinuities in organizational research and strategic decision-making. Implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

Physical impacts from climate change already pose major challenges for organizations, and the trend is rising. Organization theorists, however, have barely begun to systematically consider the organizational impacts of more and increasingly intense storms, fl oods, droughts, fi res, sea level rise or changing growing seasons as part of their domain of study. Eight organizationally relevant dimensions of climate impacts are identifi ed: severity, temporal scale, spatial scale, predictability, mode, immediacy, state change potential and accelerating trend potential. Combined, their scale, scope and systemic uncertainty suggest future conditions of systemic hyperturbulence in organizational environments, defi ned here as 'massive discontinuous change' (MDC). To build a conceptual foundation for organizations to respond and adapt to MDC, the paper examines contributions from literatures on the management of sustainability, crisis, risk, resilience and adaptive organizational change. It highlights gaps for addressing both business challenges and opportunities from MDC, and suggests avenues for future research.

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In this article we reexamine the relationship between time and processes of institutionalization. We argue that pace and stability, two temporal dimensions of institutionalization, depend on the mechanism used by agents to support the institutionalization process. Drawing from the power literature, we develop four types of mechanisms-influence, force, discipline, and domination-and argue that (1) each type will produce a distinctive pattern of pace and stability, and (2) more complex patterns of pace and stability will result from the combined use of multiple mechanisms.