The essence of resilience is the intrinsic systems ability to dynamically maintaining or regaining their equilibrium, preserving their viability after a major mishap and in the presence of continuous stress. Differently, resistance is the systems¿ ability to resist to damage remaining substantially unchanged until it breaks. Resistance does not ensure the systems access to alternative resources, nor the recovery of its essential functions. Thus, the more a system strengthens its boundaries, the higher the risk it becomes rigid, the lesser it absorbs change, the greater the speed with which this loss occurs in a feedback towards vulnerability. Starting from the literature review on resilience, the research aims at deepening complex socio-organizational systems and the variety of behavioral responses they elaborate under uncertainty, along the resilience-vulnerability range. Then, the project will investigate how complex socio-organizational systems - specifically PAs - govern this non-linearity.
Methods.
- "On field" data collection and analysis;
- Modelling and conclusion.
Research on the field.
A survey in complex socio-organizational contexts institutionally devoted to governing uncertainty (e.g. PAs), where is particularly evident in the balance between change and institutional goals, particularly if rigidly codified. Reference will be made to a significant sample of public institutions. This phase will focus on in-depth "face to face" interviews and focus groups. After data collection, the research will examine the data to find links between research objectives and findings (using data triangulation).
Modelling. Based on literature review and on empirical results, an original model of resilient response in PAs will be elaborated.
Originality/implications.
The project investigates how complex socio-organizational systems govern the non-linear tension between adaptability and transformability, along the resilience - resistance - vulnerability range.
From psychology to ecology, from engineering to physics, from biology to social sciences, the resilience issue has been thoroughly investigated and considered to be vital in ensuring effective systems responses to major changes (whether expected or unexpected), without running into dangerous periods of crisis or recession. Resilience was then further studied by organizational scholars as the "capability to survive", balancing technical rationality and variety, creating order and making "sense" out of chaos, facing disruptive threats and challenges. Thus, resilience is certainly a useful concept to face the new, emerging worldview, fundamentally unpredictable and intimately far from equilibrium.
Despite the growing attention and the increasing need to develop resilience as both individual and systems dynamic capability, there are several issues that seem neglected or, at least, not taken into the right consideration.
The first issue refers to the defining aspects of the concept of resilience itself. As is well known, in fact, many disciplines have employed the concept and defined its precise perimeter. However, a common and transversal path that keeps together its different souls is now more than ever needed. Resilience has, in fact, a systemic nature.
Relating to these previous issues, the second question has a more specific nature. It refers to the tension between socio-organizational systems change and the normative system (whether of a formal or informal nature). Given the growing environmental complexity, locus of their viability, socio-organizational systems evolve through the interpretation and the incessant response to economic, social and environmental stimuli, breaks and pressures. The code through which this interaction takes place is necessarily recombinatorial, aimed at the constant search for new development paths, new ways of employing resources, vicar paths of evolution. In this direction, the inevitable tension with the normative system, proceduralized and institutionalized, can trigger emerging processes of decupling, lock-in and path dependence (Barnard, 1938; Gouldner, 1954; Crozier, 1963; 1971; Bromley and Powell, 2012; Dick, 2015). This ambiguity is particularly evident in the balance with institutional goals, particularly if rigidly codified, of the Public Administration (PA). Public Administration, in fact, inspired by the Weberian culture of protocol and made up of consolidated and self-reinforcing norms, is normally devoid of the variety necessary to understand and govern the complex variety of the socio-organizational systems whose evolution is, as mentioned, constant and non-linear. What role does resilience have in such a balance?
Moreover, by shifting the attention from the governance of physiological questions to jolts and shocks, the issue assumes an even greater centrality. It is, therefore, legitimate to ask through which levers resilience in complex socio-organizational systems can be designed and how public organizations which are institutionally suited to govern non-linearity create balance under uncertainty, along a resilience - resistance - vulnerability range.
The project aims to fill this gap by investigating how complex socio-organizational systems - specifically PAs - govern this non-linearity. Eventually, a new model proposal for framing PAs resilience will be developed.