Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the formative dimensions of organizational resilience – namely dynamic capabilities (DCs) and social capital – displayed by retail entrepreneurs in the face of natural disasters (i.e. the 2012 Emilia earthquake). The paper evaluates social capital and the various types of DCs that support small entrepreneurs’ resilience during three temporal units of analysis: before the earthquake, during the emergency period, and during the recovery process. Design/methodology/approach The study was performed by applying a qualitative approach based on two focus groups and a double set of semi-structured interviews administered to a sample of eight small retail entrepreneurs hit by the 2012 Emilia earthquake. Content analysis was then applied. Findings The findings show that DCs and social capital are instrumental to enhancing organizational resilience; moreover the contribution of each category of DCs (reconfiguration, leveraging, sensing and interpreting, learning and knowledge integration) and social capital to entrepreneurs’ resilience changes according to the temporal phase of the natural disaster under analysis. Research limitations/implications This study will provide small retailer entrepreneurs and public authorities with useful insights on how DCs and social capital can practically support recovery paths at different times in the occurrence of a natural disaster. Originality/value This study contributes to the scientific debate on organizational resilience in disaster management, studying it through the lens of DCs and social capital, and analyzing the role of different types of DCs in developing entrepreneurs’ resilience during the various periods of a natural disaster. Moreover, it contributes by applying the concepts of resilience and DCs to a poorly investigated entrepreneurial context such as the retail one.

Women entrepreneurs have long been an understudied topic in business history. This paper contributes to fill this gap by analyzing Italian women's entrepreneurship from the mid-20 th century to 2016. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of the 80 women who were successful entrepreneurs and became Cavalieri del Lavoro (Knights of Labour), i.e., they were decorated with the Ordine al "Merito del Lavoro" (Order of Merit for Labour), the highest recognition for achievements in the world of business in Italy. The dataset also includes a comparable balanced sample of men who obtained the same award to single out the main similarities and differences between men and women entrepreneurs. This paper employs a quantitative prosopographic approach: after presenting some descriptive statistics and some exemplary cases of women entrepreneurs, it uses cluster analysis to identify typological groups of women versus men entrepreneurs. This paper show that the institutional context and gender stereotypes slowed down the development of Italian women's entrepreneurial abilities. Women entrepreneurs tend to cluster in family firms and to have become entrepreneurs by inheritance, whereas they have been handicapped in all other fields relevant to entrepreneurial success: access to education (especially STEM), managerial career and experience abroad. Nonetheless, women entrepreneurs operated beyond women's niches tied to the traditional ideology of femininity, e.g., textiles, garment and services. Several women operated in sectors such as chemicals and engineering in which many Italian industrial districts are specialized.

The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research Bouncing Back from a sudden-onset extreme event: exploring retail enterprises' resilience capacity.A feature of recent decades has been the sudden and unexpected occurrence of catastrophic events seriously affecting people and territories. From an economic viewpoint, this has led scholars to pay increasing attention to factors and determinants taking enterprises face-to-face with extreme and catastrophic events, through the resilience lens. In this context, this study aims to contribute to the literature on resilience to natural disasters which is currently still limited in the business and management fields, both theoretically and empirically. This is particularly true as regards retailing, despite the key role played by retail in the aftermath and recovery periods following on from sudden-onset extreme events such as earthquakes.The 2012 Emilia earthquake is a case in point with which to explore small retail enterprises' resilience to sudden-onset disasters. Specifically, our empirical research consisted of administering a structured questionnaire to a sample of small retail enterprises experiencing an earthquake. The unit of analysis adopted was retail enterprise. Data was processed applying Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM). The structural model aims to verify the impact of sales capabilities, market orientation and networking capabilities on the resilience capacity of retail enterprises affected by an extreme event, controlling for certain financial indicators such as suppliers' payment timeframes and the use of debt capital, as well as respondent age and gender. The findings show that all the antecedents analysed exert a significant and positive effect on small retail enterprises' resilience capacity and ability to bounce back from natural disasters. Moreover, suppliers' payment timeframes showed a direct relationship with retail enterprises' resilience capacity, with lower use of debt capital equalling higher retail business resilience. Age and gender do not exert any significant effect. Scientific, managerial and public policy implications are derived.

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