The social construction and reciprocity of resilience: enacting resilience interactionally through affirmative sensemaking and critical co-reflexivity

This research examines how organizational members communicatively construct and enact employee resilience within the challenging context of public education. Using one-on-one interviews with 28 educators and drawing from asset-based community development (ABCD) approaches, this study investigates how resilience emerges through communicative practices. The purpose is: (1) to understand how organizational members construct and enact employee resilience through their talk and stories, and (2) to extend the Communication Theory of Resilience through an empirical investigation of an organizational context. An iterative, thematic analysis revealed that employee resilience emerges through two novel communicative processes: 1) affirmative sensemaking – whereby organizational members transform past adversity into present resilience resources through positive retrospective framing and storytelling and 2) critical co-reflexivity – a collaborative process that moves beyond individual reflection to collective meaning-making through ongoing dialogue, transforming individual understanding into collective capacity. These processes operate within a continuous communicative loop where individual stories become collective resources. This study makes three significant theoretical contributions to the Communication Theory of Resilience: identifying affirmative sensemaking as a distinct communicative process, introducing critical co-reflexivity as a novel form of collaborative reflection, and revealing how these processes operate within a communicative loop.