The role of supply chain relationships in supporting Firm's resilience capacity to natural disasters: an empirical analysis

Resilience is a term used in several fieds such as ecology, physics, engineering and organizational. The concept of resilience will be described in the thesis according to the majority of definitions given in these fields of research. Taking into consideration organizational resilience, in general, it is the capability of a firm to recover after an unexpected event and re-establish its equilibrium. This is the common theme of organizational resilience: many authors gave different and particular definitions of resilience. For this reason, a literature review of firm's resilience to natural disaster will be discussed. Moreover, the concept of resilience will be analyzed in its application in supply chains. These are gaining importance in organizations. At the same time, they are connected with the external environment and other actors, so they may be vulnerable in case of disruptions. For this reason, they have to be resilient in order to be able to recover and gain the positive even in negative situations. The thesis will take into consideration an empirical example of disrupting event that is the earthquake that hit Emilia in 2012. A survey was performed administering a structured questionnaire to a sample of manufacturing companies hit by the 2012 Emilia earthquake. Data have been analyzed and the results will be discussed.