Global Communication for Organizing Sustainability and Resilience

This paper unpacks the communicative constitutions of resilience and sustainability in global communication through research exemplars that address grand challenges for engagement of new generational workforce, better inclusion of professional immigrants, sustainable organizational development and leadership, and infrastructure design for global water supply and safety. Specifically, we discuss how resilience emerges in communicative processes whereby (a) Chinese Post80s workers construct career discourse to contend with changing global and local career dynamics; (b) immigrant professionals in the United States negotiate identities and deal with tensions in everyday work interactions; (c) NGOs in China employ alternative logics to do the needed human service work and promote democratic practices; (d) Chinese Banks actively frame their leadership to contribute to productive action and national resilience; and (e) design team members in Ghana shift expertise and identifications in human-centered design for water safety. Guided by communicative theorizations of resilience (Buzzanell, 2010), this paper contributes to greater understanding and development of sustainability and resilience for self and others, now and in the future, and in local through global contexts