The Systemic and Global Dimension of Business Resilience in a Socio-Technical Perspective

Paulo Garrido
Additional contact information
Paulo Garrido: Algoritmi Research Center, University of Minho, Campus de Azurém, 4804-533 Guimarães, Portugal

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: This paper proposes to augment the concept of a business resilience improving process by enlarging such a process with a dimension of external action that addresses the vaster frame of systemic resilience of our societies. To this aim, I propose to widen the concept of socio-technical system (STS) to human societies, based on the idea that the development and survival of human societies has necessary social and technical factors. I also propose a concept of resilience in terms of dealing with failures of STS. Two particular cases of very large failure avoidance are considered: nuclear war and civilizational collapse, and I propose that such cases should be present in the referred dimension of external action of any business resilience program. Because the action of public governments and their cooperation is crucial for advancing global systemic resilience, I suggest that businesses should analyze and model the decisions of governments in a wider context of naturally occurring cooperating and conflicting human groups.

Keywords: socio-technical systems; resilience; systemic resilience; resilience functions; businesses and public governance; nuclear war; civilization collapse; quality standards for human societies; UN Declaration of Human Rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/209/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/209/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:3:p:209-:d:64536

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().