Introduction: Special Issue on Emergent Resilience and Organizational Communication

This introduction to the special issue on emergent resilience and organizing explores resilience as a dynamic, communicatively constituted, and context-dependent process that emerges through organizational disruption, crisis, and change. The articles here examine how resilience is negotiated, enacted, resisted, and unevenly experienced across diverse organizational contexts, instead of treating it as a stable outcome or an inherently positive organizational construct or process. Synthesizing contributions from studies of nonprofit networks, family farms, scientific organizations, disaster-preparedness initiatives, informal labor, and workers navigating prolonged uncertainty, the introduction highlights the multiple levels at which resilience operates, including individual, relational, organizational, community, cultural, and political dimensions. The authors demonstrate that resilience is shaped by communication, identity, networks, power relations, and material conditions, while also drawing attention to its potential costs, such as burnout, inequity, invisible labor, and the shifting of responsibility onto vulnerable actors. The article further examines the diverse populations, organizing logics, and methodological approaches represented in the special issue, emphasizing qualitative, process-oriented, and relational analyses. By integrating these contributions, the introduction advances resilience scholarship beyond notions of recovery or adaptation, positioning resilience as an emergent, contested, and consequential process through which individuals and collectivities make sense of disruption, sustain action, and imagine alternative futures under conditions of uncertainty.