(Social) Resilience as an Emergent Property

Emergence is a concept tied to particular ontological and epistemological assumptions. Here,(social) resilience is presented from a process-relational ontology and what the consequences ofsuch a definition entail for quantitative research processes. On one side, understanding (social)resilience as a process creates demands on methodology to measure the concept as it is dynamicallyunfolding, and on the other, a relational definition invites study of environment and context as co-constitutive together with the individual or group of people. Importantly, taken altogether, resiliencebecomes anemergent phenomenon, a property of an ongoing process that is neither written into itscomponents nor their additive sum. Resilience is thus observable on the basis of when and whichsources are drawn upon while there is some pressure acting to constrain (and potentially end) aspecified functional relation (or relations). This means that while (social) resilience can have adiscipline-spanning definition, it is up to the researcher in their field, for their chosen system andparticular phenomenon, to argue for how resilience can be detected. When it comes to the behaviorof individuals, my suggestion is to analyze the action possibilities within a particular situation forparticular individuals. Relevant action possibilities become indicators of how an individual andtheir environment relate. In turn, this can uncover if any of the possibilities are useful to maintainfunction while under particular pressures, or if wider re-organization of sources is required so as toenable other possibilities. This is exemplified through various subject areas like animal behavior,sports psychology, and feminist theorizing. Lastly, under this definition, resilience becomes a non-normative concept, as the same process can describe systems whose functions are to the detrimentof, as well as those contributing to, for example human survival. This is an advantage, since itallows the focus of a research project to be on discovering which sources may aid in themaintenance of a process, or, which additional pressures that could cause the process to cease.