Communicating stakeholder resilience: understanding how resilience discourse can build a fully functioning society

Abstract

Resilience is an ongoing sensemaking process that relies on communicative interactions -including those that occur between stakeholders and organizations -in order to understand and respond to a given adversity. Resilience communication is enacted through discursive processes that align with the tenets of fully functioning society theory (FFS). In order to integrate these two theoretical frameworks, we completed a qualitative content analysis of AARP's #DisruptAging campaign. In doing so, we found that the campaign provided information about age/aging in a way that countered commonly held stereotypes about older adults at multiple-levels (e.g., individual, organizational, societal). The processes of resilience were reflected in the organizational discourse, as was a new strategy -acceptance/appreciation. These findings illuminate the societal role of organizational discourse by showing how inclusive organizational-public communication can disrupt metanarratives and enrich the marketplace of ideas, and thus contribute to the building of a fully functioning society through (re)constructing the meanings of resilience on individual, organizational, and societal levels.

Facing Adversity Together: Toward a Genre of Organization- Stakeholder Resilience Discourse

“…Instead, OSR has the potential to be more dialogic (see Kent & Taylor, 2002) given its focus on the shared experience of adversity between the organization and stakeholders as well as the emphasis on the corresponding community (see Du Plessis, 2018) that is constructed through the resilience discourse. Prior research has also proposed that organizational resilience has the promise to contribute to a fully functioning society given the focus on community—rather than organization’s reputation (Anderson & Guo, 2020).…”