The Stratified And Dialectical Anatomy Of Organizational Resilience

Résumé 0

The term Organizational Resilience (OR) signifies an attempt to organize a concerted and collaborative engagement throughout a heterogeneous, diversified and complex organization, with the purpose of mobilizing a joint coping ability of systemic proaction, denoted resilience. OR is organizationally embedded in activities with other (and different) purposes, and these are dispersed and even fragmented. Still, OR signifies an organized activity and a strategic intent. Maintaining these premises for OR is particularly urgent in “outsourced” industrial contexts. The paper argues that in order to grasp the anatomy of OR, we have to look behind the ”rational facade” (Weick, 2009) of organizations. The paper sketches out some assumptions on the anatomy of resilience on these premises. It does not purport to provide anything more than heuristic, actionable knowledge, and maintains that no more is actually possible. A founding premise for the discussion in the paper is the assumption that resilience will manifest as episodic adaptations comprising clusters of potentially dispersed activities, each of which related to different organizational strata, the relations between strata positioned in a dialectical field of prescription vs practice.