Brent McKnight

Community resilience to natural disasters: the role of disaster entrepreneurship

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.,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.,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.,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.,Communities should consider how best to harness disaster entrepreneurship in designing their disaster response strategies.,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.

How firm responses to natural disasters strengthen community resilience: a stakeholder-based perspective

Natural disasters challenge a community’s resilience. Prior community resilience research has focused on the responses of public entities, such as emergency services and government agencies. However, for-profit firms are also engaged in responding to natural disasters. This article explores two aspects of how firms participate in building community resilience to natural disasters: First, the article synthesizes research on business continuity management, corporate philanthropy, and emerging evidence that firms engage in the business of disaster response into a coherent typology of for-profit firm responses to natural disasters. Second, the article draws on stakeholder theory to distinguish between firms adopting firm-centric postures (focused inwardly on firm outcomes) versus firms adopting community-centric postures (focused outwardly on stakeholders), with respect to responding to natural disasters. We theorize relationships between firm- versus community-centric postures and different community resilience outcomes. The article concludes by discussing contributions to stakeholder theory and outlines future research directions.

Patterns of firm responses to different types of natural disasters

This article examines the relationships between disaster type and firms’ disaster responses. We draw on a unique dataset of 2,164 press releases related to the occurrence of 206 natural disasters (hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes, and wildfires) over a 10-year period (2005-2014) to analyze how firm responses are shaped by the type of disaster it faces. Firms play an increasingly important role in disaster response. We find that firms engage in more anticipatory responses when the type of disaster a firm faces exhibits even impact dispersion and high expected recurrence, and provides substantial warning. Our study draws a relationship between physical geography, disaster type, and more anticipatory firm responses which can improve how firms and communities respond to the risks posed by different types of natural disasters. The article concludes by outlining an agenda for future research on firm responses to natural disasters.