Intersubjective resilience: Sustaining collective life under persistent life-and-death risk

How do organizations sustain collective life when exposure to life-and-death risk becomes a persistent condition of work? Based on an ethnographic study of two elite police units operating under continuous life-and-death risk, we find that organizations sustain coordinated collective life not by eliminating fear, resolving contradictions, or restoring stability, but by continually reorganizing these pressures into shared forms of action. We identify three interrelated organizing mechanisms. First, aspirational discipline transforms vulnerability into collective moral obligation by aligning individual striving with shared purpose. Second, paradoxical knotting enables members to act through enduring tensions, such as aggression and restraint or autonomy and obedience, without having to resolve them. Third, routine enactment restores coordinated action through recurring practices of training, reflection, and operational work. Together, these mechanisms explain how organizations maintain coherent and coordinated action when danger is an everyday condition of work. We conceptualize this capacity as intersubjective resilience : the collective accomplishment through which members repeatedly transform fear, contradiction, and disruption into coordinated action under persistent life-and-death risk.