Board Capital Activation and Crisis Recovery.

Crisis episodes raise governance stakes and shorten decision windows, resulting in limited empirical access to board conduct once crisis conditions prevail. Prior work centres on risk-management systems and crisis communication, with board involvement in resource mobilisation and strategic reconfiguration under shock remaining comparatively under-specified.

Drawing on board capital theory and Bourdieu’s capital conversion logic, the study defines board capital activation as the process through which directors’ latent human and social capital becomes coordinated board action during crisis episodes, and specifies prior crisis knowledge as a conditioning factor shaping activation.

Data derive from semi-structured director key-informant reports from corporate directors, each describing one focal crisis episode spanning multiple crisis types. Recovery was assessed six months post-crisis and was estimated via PLS-SEM with bootstrapped inference. The model tests whether board human and social capital predict capital activation, and whether capital activation predicts recovery, with crisis knowledge conditioning the social-capital-to-activation link.

Results indicate positive links from board human capital and board social capital to capital activation, a strong activation-to-recovery relationship, and an interaction in which crisis knowledge strengthens social-capital activation, but not human-capital activation. These findings show that board influence affects capital activation during the governance of a crisis and extend board capital theory with a reusable measurement approach suited to crisis settings where direct observation of board deliberation is infeasible.