What Resilience Is Not: Uses and Abuses. (original) (raw)
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Resilience: the concept, a literature review and future directions
International Journal of Production …, 2011
In an ever-more interconnected world (social, technological and environmental), no organisation can retain a competitive position and survive disruptions as an independent entity. This article provides a review of resilience literature in its widest context and later its application at an organisational level context. The origins of the concept are reported and consequently, the various fields of research are analysed. The concept is shown to remain essentially constant regardless of its field of enquiry and has much to inform the fields of organisation theory, strategy and operations management. This article identifies a number of areas for advancing resilience research, in particular: the relationship between human and organisational resilience; understanding interfaces between organisational and infrastructural resilience.
Towards Resilient Organisations and Societies? Reflections on the Multifaceted Nature of Resilience
Towards Resilient Organizations and Societies
As the chapters in this volume have shown, resilience is a multifaceted and malleable concept that can be fruitfully applied to a wide range of phenomena at all levels of society. At the same time, there is a distinct danger of concept stretching. In this concluding chapter, we look at both the extensiveness of the concept, reviewing the range of complementary concepts that have been engaged by the authors, and how it can be delimited to maintain conceptual distinctiveness and explanatory value. What is more, we provide some recommendations on how scholars working across disciplinary boundaries may go about unpacking resilience in and for organizations and societies.
Rethinking Resilience: Definition, Context, and Measure
IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2022
A sizeable literature treats "resilience" without defining it. Seeking to promote resilience from ubiquitous buzzword to managerially useful concept, we focus on situations in which human decision is paramount-organizational, community, and personal resilience-and exclude discussion of, e.g., resilience of fixed infrastructure and of unmanaged natural ecosystems. We argue that the word resilience, without modification or context, carries no meaning, but that strategic planning is a context that gives specific and useful meaning to resilience. Bringing in ideas from system theory, we discuss the role of anticipation, showing that resilience is not reactive; and the role of learning, showing that resilience is not a return to the status quo ante. These results provide diagnostic guidance for organizational management and for industry commentators, and a rigorous basis for further advances in resilience theory.
Towards Resilient Organizations and Societies
Resilience has attracted a multitude of scholars from diverse backgrounds and disciplines as it is a desired feature for responding to the adversities that modern societal systems face, not least the Covid-19 pandemic. Existing research displays little convergence on the definition of the concept making a robust theoretical framework and empirical understanding of resilience highly desirable. The aim of this chapter is to provide a more holistic understanding of the complex phenomenon of resilience from a multi-sectorial, cross-national and multidisciplinary perspective by proposing an original approach into the state of the art that might enhance future research. This chapter identifies three organizing principles for a framework of resilience. First, resilience embeds both stability and change which are both required elements. Second, adversities and their novelty profile can be mapped onto a typology of absorptive, adaptive and transformative resilience. Third, resilience has a t...
Organisational resilience: a proposal of an integrated model and research agenda
Tourism & Management Studies, 2019
This theoretical essay seeks to shed light on and synthesise the concept of resilience in relation to employees and organisations and to propose an integrated analysis model. The results include a research agenda embracing methodological aspects and thematic connections, which can contribute to an expanded debate on the construct of resilience that involves differentiated levels of analysis. A historic review of the concept's discussion and its specificities are presented, including the following organisational resilience constructs. The first is the procedural, dynamic and ecosystemic capacity activated by people (i.e. individual resilience) and processes (i.e. systemic resilience) in the face of adversity. The second is the generation of responses that facilitate the recovery of balance. The last construct is healthy adaptation through key elements' activation through subjective (i.e. internal) and objective (i.e. external) plans, which can be reinforced or renewed during the entire process. This approach thus ensures the sustainability of resilience-related results and/or the expansion of individuals and organisations' capacity for resilience. Resumo Este ensaio teórico visa esclarecer e sintetizar os conceitos de resiliência em relação a empregados e organizações, bem como propor um modelo de análise integrado que fundamente uma agenda de pesquisa e contemple aspectos metodológicos e conexões temáticas, podendo contribuir para um debate sobre o construto que envolva níveis diferenciados de análise. Dessa forma, será apresentada uma revisão histórica da discussão do construto e suas especificidades, incluindo os seguintes conceitos de resiliência organizacional: capacidade processual, dinâmica e ecossistêmica ativada por pessoas (resiliência individual) e processos (resiliência sistêmica) diante de adversidades, possibilitando a geração de uma resposta que permita a recuperação do equilíbrio e a realização de uma adaptação saudável por meio da ativação de elementos, nos planos subjetivos ou internos e objetivos ou externos, que poderão ser reforçados ou renovados durante o processo, garantindo a sustentabilidade do resultado resiliente e/ou a expansão da capacidade de resiliência. Palavras-chave: Resiliência, resiliência organizacional, resiliência individual, resiliência sistêmica.
What is Resilience? Ambiguities of a Key Term
BAKS Security Policy Working Paper, 2016
More than any other term, "resilience" has become a buzzword for several disciplines and policy fields in recent years. Climate change, epidemics, terrorist attacks, cyber threats, social inequalities, instability of the financial markets or security of energy supply-resilience appears to be the key to managing even the most complex challenges. But when taking a closer look at the increasingly intense debate about this key term, we notice that there are often disagreement and uncertainty about what exactly "resilience" means. A clearer understanding of this meaning is indispensable for us to be able to translate this concept into practice.
Understanding Resilience Paradigms in Management: Trends and Praxis
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Publications (IJMRAP), Volume 5, Issue 11, pp. 44-49,, 2023
Resilience has become an increasingly important topic in the field of management, as organizations are facing a growing number of challenges, such as natural disasters, economic downturns, and cyberattacks (Hannan et al., 2016; Hart & Schultz, 2017). Resilience in organizations is defined as the ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions in a timely and efficient manner (Hannan et al., 2016). The study of resilience in management has evolved over time to include a broader understanding of the concept, from the traditional reactive approach to more proactive measures. The purpose of this research paper is to explore the resilience paradigms in management, with a focus on both theory and praxis. The paper will review the literature on resilience in management and identify the different resilience paradigms that have been proposed in the literature. The paper will also examine the practical implications of these paradigms, specifically how organizations can apply these paradigms to build resilience. This research will be useful for management practitioners and researchers interested in understanding how organizations can become more resilient in the face of disruption.
This commentary reviews key themes posed by papers in this Special Issue and points to open questions. For example, does resilience in socio-technical systems degrade with use or, like immune systems, is resilience upgraded with use? Similarly, is resilience about responding in the face of the rare event? Or, is it being prepared for the rare event? Is it useful to think about the evolution of resilience? What are the risks posed by models of risk? That is, do models to reduce vulnerability to risk, increase vulnerability? What is the role of reflexivity in the analysis of resilience?