Bouncing forward in times of shocks and...

Environmental shocks like economic, financial or natural crises but also slow moving declines put enormous pressures on governments to cut back expenditures, restructure service delivery strategies and reset priorities while simultaneously forcing them to take a leading role in regional or local economic recovery and growth. Research on austerity policies as well as decline and cutback management strategies, which are now being implemented in different European countries, also highlights the need for a strategic perspective, and scholars (Pandey 2010; Pollitt 2010) emphasize that it is crucial not to limit cutback management to short-term budget cuts, but to handle it as the management of the organizational resources in the long term. In this context, the evolutionary concept of organizational resilience drawing on the logic of adaptive cycles is increasingly seen a useful heuristic framework to integrate and operationalize relevant concepts from generic streams of organizational and strategic management theories.