Redai dili (Aug 2022)
Dynamic Evolution and Mechanism of Short-Term Economic Resilience from a Structure-Agency Framework: Based on In-Depth Interviews with Dongguan's Manufacturing Enterprises during COVID-19
Abstract
The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which spread all over the world at the beginning of 2020, exerted significant impacts on the substantial economic and social development in China, seriously affecting the production and operation of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As the COVID-19 pandemic was effectively controlled by the central government, China's economy manifested strong economic resilience during the process of recovery. Under these circumstances, it provided a valuable opportunity to examine the dynamic evolution and mechanism of economic resilience over a relatively short period. In economic geography research, structure and agency are the two main influencing factors for regional economic resilience; specifically, structural factors refer to the economic diversity and inherited structure of a regional economy in building resilience capacities, while agency factors focus on the role of agentsin a resilient economic system. However, the existing literature has focused heavily on structural factors, but the effect of agency factors has gained less attention. Based on interviews with 43 manufacturing SMEs in Dongguan in 2020, this study 1) investigates the dynamic evolution and characteristics of short-term economic resilience from an agency perspective and 2) demonstrates the micro-mechanism of reconstructing economic resilience at the enterprise level by constructing a structure-agency framework. The study derives several findings. First, economic resilience is not an inherent attribute of an economic agent. In the short term, the formation of economic resilience can be divided into a three stage process from cognition to adaptation, and then to reconstruction. Each stage manifests different agency characteristics. Second, the reconstruction of economic resilience is strongly influenced by the individual (entrepreneurs) and collective agency (supplies and customers) in the COVID-19 shock. For individual agencies, manufacturing SMEs are sensitive to perceiving and seizing the "opportunity space," which is technologically related to their primary products. For collective agency, many entrepreneurs actively offer financial support to their upper and lower reach enterprises to enhance economic resilience by forming collective networks. Third, structural factors (i.e., industrial structure, institutional arrangement, and infrastructure construction) also influence the formation of economic resilience in a short period. In the case of Dongguan, industrial structure and institutional arrangements contributed to enterprises' return to normal production during the COVID-19 crisis, while the imbalance of infrastructure structures (including basic social and public services) plays a constrained role in economic resilience. Moreover, three theoretical implications are proposed: emphasizing the transformation between short-term adaptation and long-term adaptability, concerning the shaping of structural factors caused by agency, and paying attention to the coupling between agents and external connections.
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