Conference Agenda

Resilience has attracted growing attention in both academia and industry. Despite the increasing focus and the growing body of literature dedicated to protective disciplines, a lack of conceptual clarity persists, regarding which elements constitute resilience and which factors are most critical for its effectiveness, particularly in industry. While organizations face numerous barriers to implementing resilience, academic research has paid limited attention to these barriers in a comprehensive and systematic manner.

This paper is based on the author’s ongoing doctoral research on resilience in industrial organizations. Resilience is conceptualized as being shaped by four interacting forces within a “resilience nexus” model: resilience constituents, IT and digital technologies as enabling factors, and internal and external barriers. Based on an extensive literature review and validation through expert interviews and focus groups, resilience constituents and barriers have been identified, described, and assessed. This paper presents a proposed functional classification of resilience constituents based on their role in building, maintaining, and executing resilience, and illustrates a new framework that extends prior temporal models by integrating a functional perspective that considers not only when resilience constituents become relevant during a disruption, but also how they contribute to resilience. This approach contributes to a more structured and holistic understanding of resilience across disruption phases.

Furthermore, the paper presents the framework developed for classifying resilience barriers, a four-cluster matrix generated by combining the categorization across two dimensions: attitudinal versus implementation barriers, and internal versus external barriers. Attitudinal barriers refer to how resilience is perceived, understood, and prioritized, whereas implementation barriers hinder the deployment of resources, tools, strategies, and processes for resilience. A total of 36 identified constraints were evaluated by a panel of experts, who largely confirmed both the categorization framework and the relevance of the identified barriers.

The findings address an important research gap by providing a more systematic and integrated perspective on resilience constituents and implementation barriers. In addition, the proposed frameworks may provide practical guidance for organizations seeking to strengthen resilience, particularly in industrial environments.