Resilient Responding to Social Disapproval in the Digital Panarchy: Containing, Sensing, Steering and Attenuating (Georg Von Krogh, Patrick Tinguely & Yash Raj Shrestha)
This study reveals how organizations succeeded or failed responding to strong social disapproval against them expressed by Black Lives Matter activists on social media. We contribute to the nascent stream of theory and research on organizational resilience, focusing on organizations’ resilient responding to disruptions that threaten their existence and functioning. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data on the interactions between activists and organizations, we inductively develop a process model depicting how organizations respond resiliently to social disapproval spreading on a digital landscape. Such social disapproval results from collective claims against targeted organizations made by a multifaceted set of digital activists. Our model shows how social media platforms give rise to digital panarchy—a layered landscape in which activists and organizations cyclically interact. We explain how organizations (fail to) respond resiliently to social disapproval on those platforms through the dynamic commitment of resources. Against expectations, we find that resilient responding does not necessarily involve high resource commitment by targeted organizations, yet requires careful consideration of both temporal and cross-scale effects in the digital landscape.