This paper aims to theorise digitally enabled resilience in business networks as a multi-level phenomenon. While digital technologies are widely assumed to enhance resilience, existing research has largely focused on firm-level outcomes and has overlooked how digital enablement privileges different resilience logics across firms, relationships and networks.
The paper is conceptual. Drawing on business network theory, the authors develop a multi-level framework that distinguishes firm-, relationship- and network-level approaches to digitally enabled resilience and examines how digital tools operate differently at each level.
The authors show that digital technologies enable resilience through distinct mechanisms: orchestration and control at the firm level, synchronisation and mutual adaptation at the relationship level, and self-organisation and repurposing at the network level. However, digital solutions that enhance resilience at one level may undermine it at others. These cross-level tensions are most clearly evident in underlying data architectures, which embed competing assumptions about governance, access and adaptive capacity.
The paper advances research on digital resilience by reconceptualising it as a multi-level, network-embedded phenomenon. It introduces data architecture as a critical yet underexplored structural dimension that shapes how digitally enabled resilience is realised and contested across business networks.
