Sustainability and Resilience: Toward a Systems Approach

Managing Capabilities for Supply Chain Resilience Through it Integration

“…Resilience concept has been analysed not only in the context of supply chain but at a more general organization level. Fiksel (2007) describes resilience as the capacity of an enterprise to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change. Lengnick-Hall et al (2011) identify the firm ability to effectively absorb and develop situation-specific responses to ultimately engage in transformative activities to capitalize on distributive surprises that potentially threaten organization survival.…”

“…There are different approaches to define and measure resilience in the supply chain. In summary, supply chain resilience defines the ability of the chain to cope with disturbances and maintain their original state (Croxton, 2010;_______________________________________________________________ 2017 / 31 31 Fiksel, 2007;Lengnick-Hall, Beck & Lengnick-Hall, 2011;Zobel & Cook, 2008). However, the resilience concept is still new and under researched.…”

Sustainability as an emerging employment-policy issue? Perspectives from Finland

“…Engineering resilience strives for constancy or stability, and its proponents often describe it as practical, realistic, balanced, and pragmatic (Handmer & Dovers, 1996). However, insights from the emerging field of socioecological resilience suggest that the more traditional and dominant "engineering" approach to sustainability, and its focus on trying to anticipate and resist disruptions, may be vulnerable to unforeseen factors (Fiksel, 2006). In contrast to engineering resilience, the ecologically more sensitive version of resilience thinking thus suggests that the crux of sustainable development is not maximizing constancy, but, more critically, designing interrelations between people and resources that are sustainable in the face of the unexpected (Holling, 1996).…”

Coping with uncertainties via resilient supply chain framework

“…Resilience plays a key role in sustaining dynamic capabilities and maintaining the link between dynamically integrated capabilities and sustainable competitive advantage (Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009). Sustainability is not an end state that we can reach; rather, it is a characteristic of a dynamic, evolving system (Fiksel, 2006). Individual products or enterprises cannot be deemed sustainable in isolation, although they can make important contributions to the fulfilment of specific human needs.…”

“…The SCR framework explained in Figure 2 demonstrates that, to enhance the resilience of a supply chain it should have five basic capabilities viz flexibility, collaboration, visibility, sustainability and information. Flexibility is defined as 'being able to bend easily without breaking' and, as such, has been defined as an inherent part of resilience (Fiksel, 2006). Flexibility entails creating capabilities to respond when needed and designing production systems accommodating multiple products and real time changes (Rice and Caniato, 2003).…”