SME resilience - process, pathways, and market shaping introduction and relevance

Organizations are exposed to environmental perturbations that threaten their survival, particularly, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are more vulnerable than their large counterparts. According to literature, resistance to such crises requires capabilities, structure, routines, and processes that orient the firm to remain competitive and withstand crises (Gu et al., 2021; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). Literature also advocates that holding resources such as relational, emotional, cognitive, slack, and structural can play a positive role in fostering resilience (Mahto et al., 2022; Kahn et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2017), however, how to respond to the crisis by processing, integrating and exchanging these resources is indistinct in literature. For example, large companies like Virgin Atlantic, JC Penny, and CMX Cinema failed to survive despite being resourceful, and on the contrary SMEs such as Aldens in the UK and Isinnova in Italy thrived despite being resource-deficient during COVID-19 crisis (Jain, 2021; Murdock, 2020). Thus, understanding the process of resource integration and exchange is important, particularly how resource deployment can help future-proof firms and how it helps gain a competitive advantage through shaping market during a crisis (Kamalahmadi & Parast, 2016; Bak et al., 2020). A study by Kahn et al. (2018) conceptualizes a social process to build firm resilience during a crisis in three pathways: firm ability to integrate resources during crisis (integration); firm inability to integrate resources at all (disavowal), or firm integrating resources late from a crisis (reclamation). Hence, this study aimed at exploring the process and pathways that SMEs choose to build resilience and investigate whether resilience capability among SMEs predict their ability to thrive (by shaping market) during crisis. Choosing an SME context is important due to two reasons. First, SMEs represent 90% of global businesses and 70% of employment and 55% of GDP in the developed world (Arnold, 2019). Second, literature lacks an integerative understanding of how SME resilience is developed and whether SME resilience is an antecedents to market shaping process or not