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 meta-narratives 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience communication
• fully functioning society
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The videos that were housed on the website and included in the dataset were viewed multiple times by the authors while each took notes independently, but the videos were not transcribed verbatim.