@phdthesis{Dieterle2025, author = {Dieterle, Ann-Kathrin}, title = {The role of inter-organizational cooperation for resilience : an analysis of organizational processes, strategies, practices, and sources}, doi = {10.26127/BTUOpen-7157}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:co1-opus4-71571}, school = {BTU Cottbus - Senftenberg}, year = {2025}, abstract = {This dissertation examines the influences of inter-organizational cooperation on resilience and its implementation. Recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war have underscored the importance of organizational resilience. Yet there is still a need in organizational resilience research for multifaceted and empirical studies on the relationships between the resilience process, resilience capabilities and resources, other related sources of resilience, and the various resilience outcomes. In particular, research on the proactive phase of the resilience process - also known as strategic resilience - is still in its early stages. Inter-organizational cooperation, which spans multiple levels of analysis, offers a promising approach to filling these gaps, even though its role for resilience remains underexplored. Furthermore, from a practical perspective, it is known that firms form alliances in times of crisis as well as innovation-related partnerships during renewal processes. To address these issues and to provide a holistic and interdisciplinary approach for explaining the building and implementation of resilience, this thesis employed both theoretical and practical methods within its research design. It begins with a narrative literature review that conceptualizes inter-organizational resilience as outlined in the first publication, drawing on interdisciplinary scientific scholars. This is followed by a desk research method in the second publication, to deepen the understanding and practical relevance of aforementioned conceptualizations. Furthermore, this thesis examined the subject through case studies, including 22 in-depth narrative interviews and various secondary data sources, with two different foci in the third and fourth publications. The findings contribute to resilience research by developing a conceptual multi-level resilience framework that illustrates the dynamics of inter-organizational cooperation across the phases of anticipation, coping, and adaptation, highlighting the importance of capabilities and resources as key resilience sources. Second, it identifies interorganizational cooperation as a crucial strategy during crises, highlighting specific outcome trajectories. Third, it links proactive resilience to a holistic innovation strategy mix, showing how inter-organizational diversity, intra-organizational participation, and integrative learning processes contribute to building proactive resilience resources and capabilities. Fourth, the thesis demonstrates how cooperation projects between established firms and start-ups are implemented as practical measures to enhance proactive resilience, emphasizing the critical role of relationship quality. Collectively, these contributions provided insights into how inter-organizational cooperation strengthens resilience processes, capabilities, and resources, offering strategies and practices for achieving resilience outcomes.}, subject = {Organizational resilience; Inter-organizational cooperation; Resilience capabilities; Innovation strategy; Organisationale Resilienz; Organisations{\"u}bergreifende Zusammenarbeit; Resilienzf{\"a}higkeiten; Innovationsstrategie; Organisationsentwicklung; Resilienz; Kooperation; Innovation}, language = {en} }