ORIGINAL PAPER Small business disaster recovery: a research framework Maria I. Marshall • Holly L. Schrank Received: 17 July 2013 / Accepted: 27 December 2013 / Published online: 16 January 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Exogenous, non-normative shocks to small businesses such as natural disasters have been understudied. Moreover, most disaster research on small businesses has focused on business recovery as a dichotomy at one point in time. However, disaster recovery for small businesses is an iterative process set in the context of individual, family/household, and community recovery over time. A new dynamic research framework for small business recovery is proposed which allows for a shared framework and vocabulary. Keywords Disaster Á Recovery process Á Demise Á Survival Á Recovery models Á Small business No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the less… John Donne (1572–1631) 1 Introduction John Donne’s famous poem written centuries ago describes a view of a world in which each part is essential, valuable, and interconnected to the whole. In the event of a disaster, if so small as ‘‘a clod be washed away,’’ the whole is impacted. From a systems’ per- spective, recovery from natural disasters requires many and complex interconnecting decisions to be made by individuals, families, businesses, and communities. The decisions and recovery of one entity impact the decisions and recovery of others. These decisions include rebuilding, replacing, repairing, resuming, and restoring everything from income sources to buildings to social networks to businesses to infrastructure. There is only limited understanding of the recovery phase of the disaster cycle (Chang 2010; Jordan and M. I. Marshall (&) Á H. L. Schrank Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University, 403 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA e-mail: mimarsha@purdue.edu 123 Nat Hazards (2014) 72:597–616 DOI 10.1007/s11069-013-1025-z