Social Scientific Perspectives on Resilience

Emily Block

Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
360A Mendoza
Overview: The world in which we live is both tightly coupled and interactively complex; the unexpected is always present and unexpected events can quickly amplify into disaster. Organizational resilience, defined as the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions, such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful, provides insight as to how organization and the individual units of which they are comprised continue to achieve desirable outcomes amidst adversity, strain and significant barriers to adaptation and development (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007). This perspective differs from the engineering resilience literature as instead of focusing on anticipatory approach that avoids error by incorporating it into design, it recognizes the "inherent fallibility of any organizational system and instead attempts to monitor how closely the system is operating relative to its performance limits and manage any deviations as quickly as possible once they emerge," (Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007 p. 3419). In this class we will delve into the ways that social scientists have attempted to theorize, conceptualize and popularize the concept of resilience.

We will read two academic articles and two popular press articles. Please be prepared to answer the following questions:
  1. what are the key differences between the social scientific perspectives and those that you have explored in class previously?
  2. what specific research questions can you apply to your discipline that derives directly from this view of the construct?
  3. is the discourse of resilience in the popular business press sufficient to focus organizations on the substantive elements of resilience, and if not, what should be included in this conversation?
Readings
  1. Boin, Arjen, and Michel JG van Eeten. "The resilient organization." Public Management Review 15.3 (2013): 429-445.
  2. Gilbert, Clark, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N. Foster. "Two routes to resilience." Harvard Business Review 90.12 (2012): 65-73.
  3. Vogus, Timothy J., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. "Organizational resilience: towards a theory and research agenda." Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 2007. ISIC. IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2007.
  4. Hamel, Gary, and Liisa Valikangas. "The quest for resilience." Harvard business review 81.9 (2003): 52-65.
After action report : Please write up and post on the forum what happened with your meeting with Professor Block. I'm particularly interested in knowing in what way his notion of resilience fits into what we've discussed. thanks - reports due on the Tuesday after you meeting.
M.D. Lemmon
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN, USA
Last Updated: August 2015