Strategic Resilience in a Chaotic World : Advanced Managerial Analytics as a Mechanism for Safeguarding Dispersed Specialized Human Assets and Capital

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how knowledge-intensive multinational corporations (MNCs) utilize advanced managerial analytics to safeguard dispersed specialized human assets during global shocks. Contemporary volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments expose the structural vulnerabilities of knowledge-intensive MNCs, where shocks and crises disrupt the embedded tacit knowledge and relational capital, threatening their competitive advantage. This study specializes Eden’s (2024) MNE Vulnerability Framework, mainly by positioning advanced managerial analytics as a dynamic capability for strategic resilience. Applying a qualitative abductive research design, 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted with cross-sector managers, and analyzed via thematic analysis (the Gioia approach). Findings indicate that advanced managerial analytics does facilitate proactive risk anticipation and reactive asset reconfiguration and provide cognitive relief during crisis-induced survival modes. Conversely, profound socio-ethical paradoxical discoveries are also identified, challenging theoretically achievable empathetic human-centric leadership gains by institutional and ethical frictions and norms. Furthermore, technological contextual blindness and organizational silence adds to the surveillance-trust paradoxes, complicating data-driven safeguarding. Socio-ethical governance and human verification are deemed necessary to protect vulnerable absorptive capacity.