Conceptualizing and Measuring Organizational and Community Resilience: Lessons from the Emergency Response Following the September 11,2001 Attack

Resilience is a property of physical and social systems that enables them to reduce the probability of disaster-induced loss of functionality, respond appropriately when damage and disruption occur, and recover in a timely manner. Resilience can further be conceptualized as consisting of four dimensions: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity. It can be further seen as consisting of technical, organizational, social, and economic elements. This analysis focuses on resourcefulness as an organizational and social phenomenon In responding to the World Trade Center disaster, organizations exhibited considerable resourcefulness, as indicated by the capacity to manage convergence and emergence; by the network forms of organization that developed to cope with disaster-related problems; and by the ability to address response-related chdenges through improvisation. Since resourcefulness can be viewed as both collective sensemaking and collective action, it is ultimately rooted in the same kinds of social conditions and processes that make those activities possible. 1