Unfolding the relationship between resilient firms and the region

ABSTRACT

This research explores organizational resilience in four manufacturing firms in four different regions of Norway. While regional resilience has gained attention in research, there have been few studies with a micro-level focus, investigating firms and their distinctive features of resilience. We chose a qualitative multiple-case study approach and employed a critical incident technique to study resilience in selected firms that had experienced external shocks and shifts in regard to changing markets, globalization and advances in technology. Each, however, had managed to continually develop resilience capacity over time. Our framework considered three dimensions of organizational resilience: the cognitive, the behavioural and the contextual. We address how resilience is sustained over time, the evolutionary nature of organizational resilience in firms and how resilient firms relate to the region. We found that all three dimensions of resilience capacity were evident in each firm, but appeared as a complex and unique blend. Furthermore, each dimension was supported by regional ties and affiliations. The findings suggest that organizational resilience is a dynamic capability conditioned by firm–region interactions, which are cultural, social and economic. Regional resilience is built through the contribution of the firm to the economic and social systems of the region.     

“The Story of the Man Who Whitened His Face”: Bernini,Galileo, and the Science of Relief

This essay argues that Bernini orchestrated the relief surfaces of his sculptures through an exacting science of optical perception. It connects his understanding of the relief structure of his sculptural work to Galileo’s contemporaneous discovery of the cratered surface of the moon to contend that art and science shared similar concerns in the visual analysis of relief perceived as patterns of light and shadow. Through a full contextualisation of one of Bernini’s many workshop aphorisms, about a man who whitened his face, it demonstrates the scientific, art-theoretical, and practice-based considerations that informed Bernini’s understanding of optics in the sculptural rendering of facial likeness through the medium of white marble.     

Early Maritime Desert Dwellers in Namaqualand,South Africa: A Holocene Perspective on Pleistocene Peopling

ABSTRACT

South Africa's northern Namaqualand coastal desert is the southern extension of the Namib. Today, this region is semi-desert with patchy subsistence resources and scarce, unpredictable rainfall. Yet this ancient desert landscape possesses residues of human activity stretching back into the Middle Pleistocene, evidenced by heavily weathered surface finds, including handaxes and Victoria West cores. Such old finds in so harsh an environment raise important questions: how do human movements into this area relate to local palaeoenvironmental changes, and how has this relationship changed through time? While no dated Middle Pleistocene sites presently exist to reconstruct the earliest hominin dispersals, several late Pleistocene sites now have chronostratigraphic sequences that can be brought to bear on these questions. This article presents chronological and subsistence-settlement data for one such site, Spitzkloof A Rockshelter in northern Namaqualand's rugged Richtersveld. Humans are shown to have visited the site very sporadically between ～50,000 and 17,000 cal BP. Unlike most of the subcontinent, the most intensive occupations occur during early Marine Isotope Stage 2, when multiple proxies suggest enhanced humidity associated with intensified winter rainfall. We examine these data using the region's better-developed Holocene archaeological record to create predictions about the earliest coastal desert dwellers.