Enacting Resilience in Small and Medium Enterprises Following the Sustainability Path: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This article investigates entrepreneurship literature insights into whether and how changing organizational strategies and processes toward more sustainable ones can allow small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to gain resilience. We deepen the relationship between reorienting SMEs' strategies and processes toward sustainability and gaining resilience by providing a framework and suggesting avenues for future research. Specifically, we cluster the content of 53 articles in five thematic areas using qualitative thematic analysis. These areas are “barriers, contextual factors, and government help,” “entrepreneurial orientation or attitude,” “capabilities and lean thinking,” “means and processes,” and “supply chains, synergies, and collaborations.” The findings suggest that reorienting businesses to more sustainable strategies and processes can also facilitate the shift toward more resilient business models and ecosystems. The article contributes to the literature on SMEs' resilience, binding such literature with the one on sustainable business and SMEs' sustainability, providing a theoretical framework useful for researchers, managers, and policymakers. The novelty of the work consists of emphasizing consciousness of this relationship and suggesting unexplored lines of research.