Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

l u b i n s C h o o l o f b u s i n e s s Resilience and Social Enterprise: The Case of Aravind Eye Care System Imran Chowdhury The Lubin School of Business, Pace University, New York, NY Introduction The concept of resilience has been much-discussed in recent treatments of organizations. Resilience is something that we can find across societies, in both developed countries and in "developing" nations where institutions are still in the course of development (Rodin, 2014; Nelson, Adger, & Brown, 2007). While the term "resilience" has been used by scholars in a wide range of disciplines, a commonality across scholarly studies, as noted by Folke and colleagues (2005), is that they focus on two primary aspects of the concept: (1) the capacity to absorb shocks and still maintain function; and (2) the capacity for renewal, re-organization and development of organizations and broader organizational systems. Building on these concepts, as well as more recent work in the area of organizational resilience—defined as "an organization's capability to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, and identity" (Ortiz-de-Mandojana & Bansal, 2015)—I focus in this article on illustrating how companies can build systems to survive both short- and long-term environmental disturbances that may impede their functioning. In order to do this, I examine resilience in the context of a noted health care social enterprise, the Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind) in India. Aravind is a world leader in eye care, having pioneered the development of low-cost, large-scale cataract surgeries, and offers important lessons for organizations looking to develop resilient procedures in the health care sector and beyond. Among other attributes, what is unique about Aravind is its ability to maintain a stable core of activities which define its operation while simultaneously developing organizational elements which help it to manage, or even welcome, change and uncertainty. In this sense the organization illustrates well the five processes of "high reliability" which, according to Weick and colleagues, form a foundation for the functioning of resilient organizations: (1) preoccupation with failure; (2) reluctance to simplify assumptions; (3) sensitivity to operations; (4) continuous learning and knowledge-sharing; and (5) under-specification of structures (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2009). I use these processes as a basis for examining Aravind's functioning, and hope that examining this organization will help managers in the social enterprise and health care fields and beyond to understand how resilient organizations might be developed and sustained over time. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. I begin with a brief history of Aravind, including background about its late pioneering founder, the noted social entrepreneur Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy. Subsequently, I examine Aravind's organizational processes using the lens of Weick and colleagues' (2009) "high reliability." I conclude with a discussion of Aravind's relevance for other organizations in terms of their developing resilient organizational processes and systems. 19

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