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There is a growing recognition that culture, both that specifically related to entrepreneurship and more generally that underpinning social and community activities, plays a role in facilitating economic development. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extent to which entrepreneurial activities are themselves resilient in the face of economic downturns: in particular, the extent to which entrepreneurial activities, attitudes and culture are supported by community culture at the local level. This study, therefore, seeks to address this issue. Data from localities in Great Britain are used to develop a number of indices based on those elements identified within the existing literature concerning community culture. Overall, it is found that entrepreneurship is only one element of the resources required to develop economic resilience, and may even lessen this resilience if ‘over-indulged’ in isolation. The findings further suggest that there is a link between some aspects of community culture and both economic and entrepreneurial resilience, in particular, a negative influence from social cohesion and adherence to social rules Positively for those localities with less market-driven individualistic perspectives, collective action supports entrepreneurial resilience, which means that such localities should not be handicapped in recovering from negative shocks.

It is argued that urban economic resilience should be seen in terms of the capacity to maintain long-run economic growth pathways and the impacts of sudden and unforeseen shocks on those pathways. It is proposed that resilience is based on the long-run capacities of urban economies to re-invent themselves in the face of external shocks emanating from such phenomena as globalisation and technological change. This hypothesis is investigated by analysing employment change and the development of knowledge based private sector service industries and digital firms in English and Welsh cities from 1911. On the basis of this analysis, it is concluded that those cities with the highest levels of knowledge based employment in 1911 have emerged as the most resilient economies in terms of their long-term employment growth paths. Conversely, those urban economies with the highest levels of low knowledge intensity jobs in 1911 have tended to replicate those types of employment and consequently have suffered from low levels of resilience in the face of the local impacts of globalisation and technological shocks.

In this chapter we will discuss how the mechanisms and drivers of regional economic resilience can be theorised using evolutionary approaches in economic geography. We focus on evolutionary approaches that draw from three main theoretical frameworks: Generalised Darwinism, Complexity Theory, and Path Dependency. We will review each of the three frameworks with regard to their understanding of regional economic resilience, with particular attention to their treatment of the roles of agency, institutions and multi-scalar processes. We conclude that the Path Dependency approach – so far relatively neglected in debates on regional resilience – offers the greatest theoretical insight into these interrelated domains and provides the basis for a more comprehensive evolutionary resilience research agenda.