Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

2. Resilience Exploring the Concept and Its Meanings

13 2 Resilience Exploring the Concept and Its Meanings Mark de Bruijne, Arjen Boin, and Michel van Eeten The term resilience has many meanings in academic discourse. It is derived from the Latin word resilio, meaning “to jump back” (Klein, Nicholls, and Thomalla 2003, 35; Manyena 2006, 433). In physics and engineering, resilience refers to “the ability of a material to return to its former shape after a deformation” (Arsenault and Sood 2007, 90; O’Rourke 2007, 25; Sheffi 2007, 33) and is considered more or less synonymous with adaptability or flexibility (e.g., Redman and Kinzig 2003; Woods 2006, 21). When applied to social entities such as societies or organizations, resilience refers to “the ability to resist disorder” (Fiksel 2003, 5332), to an organization ’s capacity “to continue its existence, or to remain more or less stable, in the face of surprise, either a deprivation of resources or a physical threat” (Longstaff 2005, 27). Resilience can then be considered “the flip side of vulnerability,” as it emphasizes the ability of systems or persons to cope with hazards and provides insights on what makes a system more or less vulnerable (cf. Handmer and Dovers 1996, 487; Manyena 2006, 439–43).1 In the past decades, research on resilience has been conducted at various levels of analysis—the individual level, the group level, and the organizational or community level (cf. Longstaff 2005; Vogus and Welbourne 2003)—in a wide variety of disciplines including psychology (e.g., Jacelon 1997; Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker 2000; Luthar, Sawyer, and Brown 2006; Masten and Powell 2007; Olsson et al. 2003), ecology (e.g., Fiksel 2003; Gunderson et al. 2002), organization and management sciences (e.g., Carroll 1998; Crossan et al. 2005; Greenley and Oktemgil 1998; Sheffi 2005; Weick and Sutcliffe 2001), group/team literature (e.g., Bunderson 14 de Bruijne, Boin, and van Eeten and Sutcliffe 2002; Edmondson 2003), and safety management (e.g., Cook and Woods 1994; Hollnagel, Woods, and Leveson 2006; Krieger 2005). In recent years, resilience has emerged as a key concept in various academic disciplines that have taken an interest in the capacity of social systems to “resist” adversity and deal with uncertainty and change (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, 64). As a result, resilience has become a multifaceted concept “full of contestations, especially regarding its affinity with and lucid usage by a multiplicity of disciplines” (Folke 2006; Gallopin 2006; Klein, Nicholls, and Thomalla 2003, 40; Manyena 2006, 433). Some even argue that “both conceptual clarity and practical relevance are critically in danger” (Brand and Jax 2007). An examination of the various disciplines that have used and researched resilience should allow us to evaluate the overall worth of the concept itself. Psychology and the Resilient Individual Arguably the first discipline to study resilience (mostly in children) was psychology (cf. Luthar 2007; Schoon 2006). Studies in the 1940s and 1950s aimed to distinguish how individual competence influenced the history and prognosis of children with mental disorders. Many kids with high-risk parents did not develop mental disorders, and research in the 1970s aimed to investigate the underlying conditions that facilitated children “developing well despite their risk status or their exposure to adversity” (Masten and Powell 2007, 2; Olsson et al. 2003, 2). Researchers set out to identify what caused this remarkable adaptation and identified a range of “potential assets or protective factors associated with resilience” (Masten and Obradovic 2006, 14; Olsson et al. 2003). Two specific strands of research developed from this study. Research initially focused on the individual competences that may have suffered from such exposure, such as intelligence and high self-esteem. Scholars focused on factors that sought to explain the “amazing stories” that involved children overcoming hardships and “succeeding” in life—the epitome of the American dream.2 This focus on resilience as a “personality trait” unearthed characteristics that enable individuals to overcome hardship: “correlates or predictors of positive adaptation against a background of risk or adversity” (Wright and Masten 2005, 22). This school of thought is also known under the heading “resiliency” (Coutu 2002; Luthar and Cicchetti 2000; Luthar, Cicchetti, and Becker 2000; Tarter and Vanyukov 1999). A second approach found that resilience derives from factors external to the child (i.e., aspects of families and wider social environments). This has Resilience 15 led psychologists to conclude that resilience is not so much an individual trait, but should be considered a process (Jacelon 1997; Luthar, Cicchetti...