Principled resilience in NGOs: a values-driven conceptual framework for sustaining mission integrity amid paradox and uncertainty

Closing the ESG Act Gap through Service-Dominant Logic and Ethical Leadership

This conceptual study examines the systemic failure of ESG initiatives—the ESG Act Gap—where symbolic reporting substitutes for substantive transformation. Employing systematic conceptual synthesis of institutional theory and Service-Dominant Logic (SDL), the analysis identifies paradigmatic misalignment between Goods-Dominant Logic (GDL) and the relational nature of sustainability as the root cause of persistent decoupling. The article introduces the novel Impact Coupling framework as a process mechanism, enabled by leadership reconceptualized as the Ethical Institutional Architect—a leadership agency that aligns ESG commitments, operational practices, and realized socio-environmental value through stakeholder co-creation and co-validation. This framework carries practical implications for boards, investors, and organizational leaders: evaluating leaders' architectural capacity and the robustness of stakeholder feedback loops becomes a prerequisite for substantive ESG, replacing mere compliance auditing. The study proposes that substantive sustainability requires an ontological shift from managing firm outputs to architecting service ecosystems in which substantive impact becomes inherent to value creation. Ultimately, closing the ESG Act Gap depends on leaders' capacity to enact this SDL-based logic, transforming integrity from a reported outcome into the core process of organizing.

Resilience as becoming: the coherence–complexity framework for organizing in permanent transition

Contemporary organizations increasingly operate under prolonged and overlapping transitions in which routines, identities and coordination arrangements are repeatedly reconfigured. Under such conditions, resilience cannot be adequately understood as recovery to a prior stable state. This paper develops a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes organizational resilience as becoming: the ongoing capacity to sustain viability by modulating and reconfiguring the tension between coherence and complexity. Drawing on contemporary resilience research, process organization, paradox theory and complexity-informed management studies, the paper defines coherence as the integrative dynamics that support shared meaning, coordination and identity, and complexity as the differentiating dynamics that sustain variety, experimentation and distributed agency. The main result is a Coherence–Complexity Framework that distinguishes resilient organizing from three pathological patterns, rigidity, fragmentation and drift/fragility, and clarifies how resilience should be analysed as a temporal and processual accomplishment. The paper contributes an analytical framework for studying organizational resilience in conditions of permanent transition and identifies implications for empirical operationalization and strategic management research.

COGNITIVE RESILIENCE AS A NEW DIMENSION OF EUROPEAN UNION SECURITY: CONCEPTUAL DELIMITATIONS AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

The paper advances the central argument that cognitive resilience has emerged as a distinct analytical and operational category within contemporary European Union security studies. While related to psychological, societal, and informational resilience, cognitive resilience is conceptualised here as a multidimensional capacity aimed at preserving the integrity, adaptability, and coherence of cognitive processes under conditions of manipulation, disinformation, and epistemic destabilisation. Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative, theory-building research design, combining conceptual analysis, systematic review of academic literature and EU strategic documents, and theoretical meta-synthesis across security studies, cognitive warfare doctrine, and cognitive psychology. This interdisciplinary approach enables the clarification of conceptual boundaries and the integration of diverse theoretical perspectives into a coherent analytical framework. The findings demonstrate that cognitive resilience constitutes a necessary extension of the resilience paradigm, addressing a critical gap in both academic literature and EU policy frameworks. Existing approaches remain predominantly focused on regulating information flows and mitigating external threats, while insufficiently addressing the internal cognitive mechanisms that enable manipulation to be effective. In response, the paper proposes an operational definition of cognitive resilience and identifies its core dimensions, cognitive filtering capacity, interpretative coherence, adaptive flexibility, and epistemic trust, thus enabling future empirical measurement and comparative research. The study concludes that the integration of cognitive resilience fundamentally expands the security paradigm, repositioning cognition as a central strategic domain and cognitive autonomy as a key determinant of democratic stability. As such, cognitive resilience emerges not merely as a complementary concept, but as a strategic capability essential for the EU’s capacity to withstand and adapt to the challenges of contemporary cognitive warfare.

From bouncing back to bouncing forward: resilience as strategic and ethical imperative in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper advances the resilience imperative in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), a strategically significant yet underexplored context in international business research, by offering a conceptual point of view. This study aims to conceptually integrate diverse empirical and conceptual contributions from the special issue to clarify how the region’s distinctive institutional, political and social dynamics shape organizational and community resilience. Adopting a multilevel and multistakeholder perspective, this viewpoint synthesizes insights from the special issue’s contributions, including conceptual reviews, qualitative case studies, longitudinal phenomenological research and participatory action research on organizational, community and sectoral resilience in LAC. The discussion organizes these insights into four interrelated analytical dimensions: regional institutional context and value definition; governance architectures and policy alignment; capability development encompassing digital, social and environmental dimensions; and stakeholder embedding and legitimacy. This paper identifies four mutually reinforcing dimensions of resilience in LAC. First, institutional context and value definition are shaped by pendular policy regimes and persistent implementation gaps. Second, governance architectures affect community resilience by allocating decision rights and rents. Third, multidimensional capability development spans digital, social and environmental aspects. Finally, stakeholder embedding and legitimacy reveal a potential dark side of resilience, whereby firm-level adaptation strategies may externalize risks to vulnerable workers and communities. This paper proposes a five-step blueprint to guide multinational enterprises, domestic firms and policymakers in developing context-sensitive resilience strategies for LAC that are effective, competitive and socially inclusive. It reframes resilience as both a strategic and ethical imperative in international business, extending beyond a narrow risk-management perspective. It also advances an agenda for longitudinal, multilevel and comparative research that examines both the enabling and constraining outcomes of resilience across contexts.

IV. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MANAGEMENT AND ORGANISATIONAL RESILIENCE

Circular economy resilience as the governance of system options: specified and general resilience in circular transitions

Circular economy (CE) strategies are increasingly expected to enhance resilience under geopolitical volatility, supply disruption, and critical-material insecurity. Yet CE–resilience research reports heterogeneous findings: circularity may reduce vulnerability, create brittleness, or do both under different conditions. This article argues that these findings become intelligible once specified resilience is distinguished from general resilience. CE strategies can strengthen specified resilience by reducing exposure to identifiable disruptions such as material scarcity, import dependence, or supply-chain interruption. At the same time, efficiency-oriented circularity may weaken general resilience when it narrows response diversity, reduces slack, increases coupling, or creates dependence on specialized recovery infrastructures. We explain this ambiguity by conceptualizing Circular Resilience as the governance of system options: collectively valuable capacities that preserve alternative courses of action under disturbance. Using ordonomics as an analytical lens, the framework connects operational circularity, governance, and legitimation. The article contributes to CE–resilience scholarship by showing how circularity can simultaneously enhance specified resilience and threaten general resilience, and why preserving system options depends on governance and legitimation.