‘How to learn to be adaptive?’ An analytical framework for organizational adaptivity and its application to a fish producers organization in Portugal

This paper analyses and illustrates the ways in which organizational adaptivity is important to the resilience of socio-ecological systems (SESs). Resilience and organizational literature are used as theoretical contributions to help understand the nature of adaptive organizations and how changes in external structure and in organizational practices may reinforce each other. Building on this literature review, we elaborate an analytical framework for studying organizational adaptivity. We apply the framework to a case study of the ArtesanalPesca fish producers organization from Sesimbra in Portugal in order to empirically explore the relative weight of the factors contained in the framework and the relations between them. The case outlined contains lessons on how adaptivity may help an organization to move towards a sustainable business model and how it may be an essential part of such a model.