Designing organisational resilience under prolonged crisis: an integrated resource-change framework for classical music organisations in Beijing

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created a prolonged systemic crisis for classical music organisations because their artistic production depends on in-person collaboration, specialised labour, regular programming, and sustained audience participation. However, organisations operating under broadly similar restrictions followed different trajectories of survival, recovery, and organisational change. This study examines how and why such divergence occurred through comparative case studies of three classical music organisations in Beijing with contrasting governance, funding, employment, artistic, and market structures.

The study develops the Integrated Resource-Change Framework (IRCF) to explain how organisational resilience emerges through the interaction between resource reconfiguration and the institutionalisation of change. Drawing on the Resource-Based View, dynamic capability theory, change-management scholarship, and organisational resilience research, the IRCF conceptualises resilience not as an inherent organisational attribute or a return to the pre-crisis state, but as a cumulative, path-dependent, and potentially designable capability system. It concerns an organisation’s capacity to sense disruption, mobilise and recombine financial, human, technological, relational, and symbolic resources, and subsequently embed effective adaptations within governance structures, routines, roles, decision-making pathways, and reusable process assets.

Using an interpretivist, qualitative comparative case-study design, the study analyses evidence collected from October 2024 to March 2025 concerning organisational experiences during and after the pandemic. The final analytical sample comprises 64 semi-structured interviews across the three cases, supported by organisational documents, policy materials, and public media and platform content. The data were analysed through thematic analysis, within-case process tracing, and cross-case comparison. Ten analytical themes were used to operationalise the IRCF and examine how organisational responses developed over time.

The findings demonstrate that resource availability alone does not guarantee resilience. Durable organisational resilience emerges when rapid resource reconfiguration is combined with consistent leadership, organisational learning, governance coordination, and the institutionalisation of effective crisis responses. Three configurations are identified: a high-resilience configuration characterised by an integrated capability loop and institutionalised adaptation; a constrained-resilience configuration marked by partial integration and structural limitations; and a reactive configuration characterised by strong initial responsiveness but limited cumulative capability development. Governance friction, infrastructural bottlenecks, policy dependence, digital-transition pressures, and weak retention of process assets often prevent temporary improvisations from becoming enduring organisational capabilities. The configurational logic of the IRCF may also inform the analysis of other cultural organisations operating in resource-constrained and policy-intensive institutional environments.