Community resilience to natural disasters: the role of disaster entrepreneurship
Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy
ISSN: 1750-6204
Article publication date: 13 March 2017
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to examine the conditions under which disaster entrepreneurship contributes to community-level resilience. The authors define disaster entrepreneurship as attempts by the private sector to create or maintain value during and in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster by taking advantage of business opportunities and providing goods and services required by community stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper builds a typology of disaster entrepreneurial responses by drawing on the dimensions of structural expansion and role change. The authors use illustrative case examples to conceptualize how these responses improve community resilience by filling critical resource voids in the aftermath of natural disasters.
Findings
The typology identifies four different disaster entrepreneurship approaches: entrepreneurial business continuity, scaling of organizational response through activating latent structures, improvising and emergence. The authors formulate proposition regarding how each of the approaches is related to community-level resilience.
Practical implications
While disaster entrepreneurship can offer for-profit opportunities for engaging in community-wide disaster response and recovery efforts, firms should carefully consider the financial, legal, reputational and organizational implications of disaster entrepreneurship.
Social implications
Communities should consider how best to harness disaster entrepreneurship in designing their disaster response strategies.
Originality/value
This research offers a novel typology to explore the role that for-profit firms play in disaster contexts and adds to prior research which has mostly focused on government agencies, non-governmental organizations and emergency personnel.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Tom Smith, two anonymous reviewers and participants at the Academy of Management in a session on community resilience for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Citation
Linnenluecke, M.K. and McKnight, B. (2017), "Community resilience to natural disasters: the role of disaster entrepreneurship", Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 166-185. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEC-01-2015-0005
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited