The global business environment faces ongoing disruption from numerous unprecedented crises. These crises – including the aftermath of COVID-19, Mpox, Brexit, climate change, American trade tariffs and war in Europe and the Middle East – have created complex challenges for business, where the development of resilience has become essential. Existing research identifies bricolage as a key behaviour for supporting business resilience; however, enablers of bricolage are poorly understood. Thus, the purpose of this research is to evaluate the enablers of bricolage behaviour as a form of resilience to unprecedented crises.
This research deploys a qualitative methodology where semi-structured interviews form the research instrument. Maximum variation sampling achieved a response rate of 20 interviews from retail micro small and medium-sized enterprise (micro-SME) owner-managers. The data collected were analysed using Braun and Clarke's (2006, 2021) reflexive thematic analysis method, where a thematic map was subsequently developed.
This research identified three outcomes of bricolage across the retail micro-SMEs that participated in this study. These outcomes are presented as businesses that failed, survived or thrived as a result of the crisis. It was identified that the most resilient were able to enable bricolage by leveraging business support, business experience and business age.
This study contributes to existing bricolage research by extending understandings of how bricolage can be successfully deployed in practice. While previous research has simply identified resource bricolage behaviour as a form of resilience, this research presents three bricolage enablers which support its deployment under crisis conditions.
