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

Adversity and Resilience

Adversities call resilience into being and can range from everyday challenges and disruptions to full blown crises—an event that “threatens important expectancies of stakeholders and can impact an organization’s performance” (Coombs, 2009, p. 99). Regardless of the type of adversity being faced, resilience is a complex concept that holds promise for understanding how organizations and stakeholders collaboratively make sense of and respond to these challenges.

Past communication research has examined crisis responses in terms of redemption and renewal. Redemption assumes wrongdoing on the part of the organization, and as such, redemptive crisis communication is focused on reducing or eliminating guilt and/or protecting organizational image (Foss, 1984). Similarly, renewal discourse attempts to communicate organizational “growth over issues of blame, responsibility, and liability” (Ulmer & Sellnow, 2002, p. 361) through the use of discourse that is provisional, future-oriented, sees the crisis as opportunity, and is a form of leader-based communication (Ulmer, 2012; Ulmer et al., 2007).

When conceptualizing renewal, Ulmer and Sellnow (2002) discuss organizations that fall within, what we term, a sphere of responsibility during a crisis. They posit that, even despite a lack of intentional wrongdoing and while potentially not the primary party responsible for a crisis, some organizations face questions of “incompetence and irresponsibility” (p. 363). For instance, in the case of the airline industry following 9/11, while airlines/airports were not directly to blame for the terrorist attacks, they still faced “accusations of incompetence” and general scrutiny (p. 362). This unique positioning, where the “assumption of organizational wrongdoing does not arise as the dominant rhetorical imperative,” builds the need and opportunity for a discourse of renewal where organizations “replace a discourse of apology and defense with a more optimistic discourse of rebuilding” (p. 362, emphasis added). In this way organizations engaging in renewal discourse during crisis often exist in a state of liminality – not fully responsible and not fully outside questions of responsibility.

In contrast, resilience is distinct from these other responses given that the organization is not perceived to be at fault or connected to questions of responsibility for the adversity, but rather another victim. Resilience is “the ability of the affected parties to communicate and reorganize across periods of rapid change or chaos” (Chewning et al., 2013, p. 239). As such, resilience exists in relation to an adversity, challenge, or disruption, which can take many forms, such as health issues (Venetis et al., 2020), natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, floods, wildfires) (Chewning et al., 2013; Rice & Jahn, 2020), and organizational crises (Williams et al., 2017). All of these types of adversities can create uncertainty, chaos, and change, which have the potential to impact organizations, stakeholders, and communities alike. However, the discourse surrounding resilience does not seek minimization or absolution of guilt or image repair (see Benoit, 1995) nor does it exist as the result of a moment of intensity requiring immediate response, but rather is collaborative in nature and on-going as the organization and its stakeholders attempt to respond by co-constructing the adversity and perpetuating communicative messages that encourage active engagement in the resilience process.

A Communicative Perspective of Resilience

Bearing in mind this understanding, communication is at the heart of resilience in that it is the communicative process which allows for sensemaking and responding to given adversity (Buzzanell & Houston, 2018). In other words, it is the communicative interactions between affected parties that provide meaning to the given adversity, disruption, or challenge and that informs the corresponding response (e.g., the enactment of resilience). Rice and Jahn (2020) further underscored communication as a conduit of meaning in their examination of the use of memories of past crises and corresponding enactments of resilience as preparation for future challenges. Against this background, the communicative perspective of resilience foregrounds “how resilience is constituted through storytelling, messages, routines, rituals, slogans, networks, and other means” (Buzzanell, 2018b, p. 16).

In addition, these resilience discourses, when viewed from a communication perspective, also draw on identification (see Burke, 1969; 1973). The concept of identification argues that a state of being “consubstantial” occurs when two or more entities and/or people perceive that “their interests are joined” (Burke, 1969, p. 20). As such, identification relies on communicatively highlighting overlapping interests between two or more entities and emphasizing shared purposes/goals. Identification can be constructed through disassociation (e.g., creating a common “other”) and association (e.g., establishing common ground, drawing on unifying symbols, and using the assumed “we”). Creating a sense of identification between a rhetor and a given audience (e.g., stakeholders) is established through communication—including the shared discursive processes that underlie resilience.

Genre and a Generic Approach

Genre has been defined as a category of communicative acts which are shared and perpetuated by a given discourse community to achieve a common outcome (Swales, 1990). With this broad conceptualization in mind, two key ideas underlie the term, (1) the discourse community and (2) a shared, goal-oriented purpose. First, a discourse community (i.e., a group of individuals who have shared goals as well as means to interact with one another) is needed for a genre to exist. This component of genre work aligns with current conceptualizations of stakeholders—a “group or individual who is affected by or can affect the achievement of an organization’s objectives” (Freeman, 1984, p. 46). Here, stakeholders are characterized by their relationship with a given organization as well as shared goals, again reflective of genre work. Second, the notion of a shared, goal-oriented purpose and a discourse community’s use of language for a common purpose is central to genre work (Luzón, 2005). As such, genre is inherently task or goal-oriented in that the discourse community uses communication acts to achieve a given outcome.

These central components are visible in current articulations and applications of genre. For instance, Benoit (2016) explained that a genre is “based on the idea that observable, explicable, and predictable rhetorical commonalities occur in groups of discourses as well as in groups of people” (p. 47). This point highlights the role of the discourse community in recognizing and perpetuating the corresponding messages and its shared goals. Luzón’s (2005) work also highlighted the social context—including the discourse community—as she explicated the shared characteristics used to teach technical communication.

A generic approach (Black, 1965) serves as a means to examine a specific type of communicative activity, such as apologies (see Hearit, 1995; 2006; Ware & Linkugel, 1973), presidential addresses (Benoit, 2006; Benoit & Henson, 2009), and eulogies (Kent, 1997). The approach, which is grounded in persuasive rhetoric, uncovers commonalities among communicative acts that show their distinctiveness from other forms of communication. Indeed, genre is ultimately a “concept used to describe what people do in practice, specifically, in their discursive practices” (Levina & Orlikowski, 2009). Thus, genre work is highly contextualized as it uses “speech acts” (see Tavuchis, 1991) to understand how discourse works in a specific context (e.g., during a crisis) to achieve a purpose (see Hearit, 2006). This tradition of contextualization begins to illuminate the practical nature of genre-based work. We continue this research tradition in genre studies as we explore the common discourse and shared communication strategies exhibited in university documents as examples of the discourse of organization-stakeholder resilience.

Through this research project, we will detail the shared communicative strategies used by rhetors as the organizational messages begin to build toward an archetype of resilience discourse. To further guide our inquiry, we pose the following research question: what are the communicative characteristics of organization-stakeholder resilience discourse evidenced in these texts?

The Context: COVID-19 and the Start of an Academic Year

Context is especially important when undertaking a generic study (Black, 1965) as it guides and limits the possible ways that a rhetor could respond to/communicate about a given situation. In this case, the context is an adversity, challenge, or disruption that belies resilience. Although 2020 is a historic year that includes multiple adversities calling for resilience, we limited our analysis to the COVID-19 pandemic and university-created virtual welcome messages for the Fall 2020 semester that communicated about campus reopening decisions. We limited the scope of our research in these ways for a number of reasons. First, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a clear, distinctive, and shared adversity that spanned a multitude of organizations and stakeholders. Second, the university context serves as a common organizational type while still allowing for separate organizations and stakeholder groups across a wide geographic area within the United States. Finally, an examination of university-created messages provides an opportunity to collect texts that were simultaneously targeted to individuals, groups, and the organizational community as a whole, thus our project is one that examines discourses that ultimately demonstrate enactment of and call upon multilevel relationships between stakeholders and the organization. As an additional measure, we limited our search to the 14 universities that comprise the Big 10 academic conference. ¹ Our overarching goal was the selection of a limiting criteria that would still allow for breadth across the included organizational texts. The selection of a university conference meets this goal. This specific grouping afforded in the Big 10 Conference of university organizations presented a large, diverse, and broad-reaching predefined group. Currently, the Big 10 Conference represents 11 states that span from the mid-Atlantic/Northeast to the Midwest regions of the United States and enrolls students from across the US and world. The Big 10 was founded in 1896 and has since developed into a “model for effective and voluntary collaboration among top research universities” (2019). Not only does the Big 10 Conference represent a large geographic area across the U.S., it is also the largest conference in the U.S. with over 900,000 total students enrolled for the Fall 2020 semester and a network of over 6.4 million alumni (Big10, 2019, p. 1). While selecting a group of organizations based on size is not of primary importance, it does provide a sample group with large breadth and reach while still providing a logical limiting delineation. Additionally, the universities within the Big 10 Conference have student populations that are generally as or more diverse than the overall populations of the states in which they exist as well as for the United States as a whole. ² In all, limiting the project given these parameters allowed us to collect texts that provided both foundational similarities across organizational type and distinctive separateness of organizations simultaneously; both of which are goals that genre analyses require.

Data Collection

As the basis of this study, we collected the Fall 2020 welcome messages that were communicated to university stakeholders from university leadership (e.g., university presidents, chancellors, or provosts) via searches of each university website individually. The 19 welcome messages, which include both text (n = 14) and corresponding videos (n = 5), were available on the corresponding university websites at the time of data collection, which occurred in late August through mid-September of 2020. The publication dates of the included texts themselves ranged from July 1 to September 4, 2020. Overall, the texts included in this study contained an average of 846 words per written message, with one text under 500 words (at 276 words) and the longest text at 1784 words. The video message texts averaged 3 minutes and 13 seconds, with one message under 2 minutes in length (at 45 seconds) and the longest message at 4 minutes 45 seconds in length. While publicly available on the university websites, many statements indicated that the messages had also been shared originally via email to specific stakeholders. When considering the reach of these messages, even a basic calculation of the initial intended stakeholder group receiving the message, the enrolled students for the Fall 2020 semester, indicates a group of nearly one million. When considering other intended and connected stakeholder groups such as faculty and staff, family of enrolled students, local community members, and potentially alumni, the reach of the included texts in this study is substantial. Given this reach, it is reasonable to expect robust scrutiny of the welcome messages by the organizations before they were shared publicly. In all, these messages were communicated by university leadership, but represented the university or organization as a whole, as they addressed the start of the Fall 2020 semester.

Data Analysis

After archiving the welcome messages (creating PDFs of the written text and saving the video URLs), we started the data analysis process. Here, we took two complementing approaches to analyzing the texts in this study. The first author completed a directed iterative approach (Tracy, 2019) that was guided by the existing resilience communication typology, yet was flexible enough to allow ideas that fell outside the framework to emerge. To do so, the first author initially completed a round of data analysis, becoming familiar with the data. Then, a line-by-line reading/review of each document was conducted, using Buzzanell’s (2010; 2018a) subprocesses of resilience as a framework for the analysis. Separately, the second author completed a general thematic analysis without prior study of or guidance by resilience work, thus allowing for a more inductive review of the texts. Thematic analysis was chosen as the analytical method for this portion of the analysis because of its inherent ability to uncover the overall sentiments of a collections of texts and messages (Owen, 1984; 1985). According to Owen (1984), an idea is counted as a theme when three criteria are met: (1) recurrence, (2) repetition, and (3) forcefulness. Recurrence occurs when the same thought or meaning occurs throughout the text though different words may be used in each reference. Repetition occurs when there is “explicit repeated use of the same wording” (p. 275) with forcefulness referring to the emphasis placed on certain ideas. Through continued reading and re-reading of the analyzed texts in search of recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness of ideas, a number of emergent themes were identified. After the first and second author completed the separate analyses, we then underwent a process of reviewing, problematizing, and reconciling our individual interpretations in order to identify how our findings converged and diverged from one another. For example, we found that each of the messages attempted to affirm identity anchors, one of Buzzanell’s (2010; 2018a) resilience subprocesses. However, the aspects of identity that were featured were those that the organization and stakeholders share, such as member of the campus community (e.g., Boilermaker, Terrapin, Hoosier). Throughout this extended process of analysis, we uncovered three prevailing characteristics of the discourse that exemplify the genre of organization-stakeholder resilience.

Defining a Shared Relationship

The first major characteristic apparent in the university welcome messages was a focus on defining a shared relationship between the organization and its stakeholders. Commonalities were established by crafting a shared adversity that the universities, along with their stakeholders, must address: focusing on markers of a shared identity (see Burke, 1969; 1973) and reframing shared logics to help make sense of the experience and respond to the adversity. In doing so, the discourse emphasized the existing relationship between the organization and its stakeholders in order to facilitate resilience processes.

Detailing Steps to Regain a Sense of Normalcy

The second shared characteristic of resilience discourse evidenced in the organizational texts was a focus on steps necessary to regain a sense of normalcy. The emphasis on the shared relationship discussed previously supports this process of collaborative solutions that include both the organization and the stakeholders. Here, the organization puts forth shared action items or steps that will help the campus community overcome the organizationally-defined, common adversity and, as such, enact resilience. These steps toward regaining a sense of normalcy were most clearly visible through calls to participation in both action and attitude and through efforts at crafting a new normal.

Describing the Outcomes of Enacting Resilience

The final shared characteristic of resilience discourse evidenced in the organizational texts was the use of the welcome statements to describe the outcomes that would result from the enactment of the aforementioned steps to co-construct a new normalcy. These sentiments focused on future outcomes which forecasted the defeat of the common adversity and, as such, were forward looking in nature. Here, the notion of “bouncing forward”— the idea that the organizations and their stakeholders would eventually be even better/stronger—rather than “bouncing back” was expressed. In this way, the outcomes reflected the adaption-transformation dialectic (see Buzzanell, 2018a; Wilson et al., 2021) that emphasized the need for adaptations (e.g., actions) in order to achieve transformation (e.g., growth, improvement).

Significance of the Organization-Stakeholder Resilience Genre

Most notably, this research begins to delineate redemption, renewal, and resilience. We argue that the terms are both distinctive and at times overlap—existing on a continuum of responsibility where the endpoints span from being directly at fault for the crisis (e.g., redemption) to being a victim that must respond to the adversity at hand (resilience) and where a middle ground points to organizations not necessarily at fault but perceived to be located within the sphere of responsibility for the crisis (e.g., renewal). Resilience is further differentiated from these other forms of crisis responses through its focus on stakeholder relationships and calls for collaboration—thus serving as a less organization-centric crisis response. The unique characteristics of OSR discourse inform our theoretical and practical implications as they complement and extend communicative conceptual frameworks.

Organization-stakeholder resilience, as a genre, also highlights a participatory form of communication that occurs when organizations encourage stakeholders to participate in the process of resilience through both action and attitude. To do so, the organizations highlighted existing relationships as they emphasized the commonalities between themselves and their stakeholders—shared adversity/ies, shared others or outsiders, and shared identity anchors. These discursive strategies reflect Burke’s (1969; 1973) and Cheney’s (1983) work on identification—in that they demonstrate the rhetor, in this case the organization, communicating “consubstantiality” or “oneness” with its stakeholders. The commonalities that emerged in the resilience messages mirror identification strategies, including communicative construction of a common “other,” establishing common ground, drawing on unifying symbols, and using the assumed “we.” The organizational discourse also positions the stakeholder as having shared goals and, in doing so, encourages action.

However, it is important to note that the organizations did not address some adversities that were likely important to certain stakeholder groups. For instance, the additional costs associated with buying personal protective equipment (PPE) for community members and the uncertainty international students faced about traveling to/from the U.S. were not addressed in the university messages. The shared adversities that the universities did choose to address in their messages prioritize the challenges of dominant stakeholder groups, such as traditional, domestic students, while ignoring or obscuring those of less visible, powerful stakeholder groups, such as non-traditional and international students. This prioritization of the adversities was also demonstrated in the inclusion of references to racial justice that appeared in some of the welcome messages but not others. Although there was an acknowledgement of the racial reckoning in a few university statements, even then, the challenge was not developed in the same way that the pandemic was—a shared definition was not put forth, action steps were not detailed, and outcomes of responding were not described. These examples further underscore the power universities hold in determining which common adversity is selected and thus which adversity calls organizational-stakeholder resilience responses into being.

The emphasis on existing, ongoing relationships and the communication between the organization and its stakeholders is the place where organizational communication and public relations scholarship intersect given that the formation and maintenance of relationships is at the heart of public relations. Indeed, resilience discourse appears to be more outwardly focused as it calls for organizational and stakeholder collaboration in facing an adversity together as they co-construct resilience. In doing so, we argue that organization-stakeholder resilience discourse appears to take a less organizational-centric approach in responding to crises.

The prioritization of relationships in OSR also extends Buzzanell’s (2010; 2018a) work on resilience by highlighting the interplay of the multiple levels where resilience discourse occurs (e.g., organization, individual, community; see Buzzanell & Houston, 2018) as well as underscoring the call for stakeholder participation in the construction of resilience discourse. This emphasis on the organization-stakeholder relationships demonstrated the Information-Community-Action Framework (see Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012) given that our findings illuminate the ways shared action is presented in the resilience messaging through reliance on information sharing and the communicative construction of community. Here, one form of messaging called upon collaborative participation, that is the shared action or required behaviors needed to overcome the shared adversity. The other form of messaging urged participation through a shared attitude, which requires only the mental work and commitment of stakeholders. Though only requiring a mental response, it is nonetheless a foundational component of OSR discourse as seen in these analyzed texts. Although the notion of collaboration post-crisis is not unique (see Houston, 2015; Ulmer et al., 2007), the call for a collaborative response in the midst of a common adversity is a distinctive characteristic of OSR that serves to delineate it from other forms of communication.

Given these foundational characteristics, the development of the OSR genre has implications for scholarship and practice in that it communicatively constructs a shared community that can work together to overcome the adversity and enact resilience. In this way, OSR could serve as an avenue for a more dialogic approach to organizational communication—one that also highlights relationships and community (Kent & Taylor, 2002). Indeed, the construction of a common adversity and the process of responding to the said challenge, may provide an opportunity to strengthen existing relationships as well as develop new communicative practices between organizations as well as stakeholders (Doerfel et al., 2010).

Organization-stakeholder resilience also extends the conceptualization of organization-centric responses to adversities that take the form of crises. Here, OSR discourse moves beyond organizational reputation and/or image repair discourse and the subsequent strategic goals of redemption and renewal as forms of communication (Foss, 1984; Ulmer & Sellnow, 2002). 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).

Although organizations still play a crucial role in the resilience process, stakeholders and corresponding communities are not simply passive recipients of the discourse but are invited to be active participants in the resilience process. The collaboration or participatory call to enact resilience, as evidenced in the findings of this work, follows the outlined action items in order to overcome the adversity and “bounce forward”—or become better/stronger versions of the self (organization and stakeholders) than before the adversity struck (see Doerfel et al., 2010; Houston, 2015).

In addition, the communicatively constructed community and feelings of identification serve as persuasive mechanisms as the organization encourages stakeholders to recognize the adversity, respond by engaging in the outlined action items, and envision the potential outcomes for enacting resilience. The persuasion here relies on identification with the organization and community. As such individual stakeholders are situated in conversations at multiple levels—micro, meso and macro (Buzzanell & Houston, 2018). In other words, stakeholders do not make sense of adversities, challenges and disruptions in a vacuum, but rather engage in ongoing communicative activities with organizations and others to define adversities and discursively enact resilience.

Future Research

First, while the examination of texts included in this manuscript provide a solid foundation for the proposal of organization-stakeholder resilience, there are many other areas of focus that would be fruitful in further developing a genre of OSR. To begin, the findings illuminate the need for multi-level interaction given the collaborative calls for resilience that were uncovered though the organizational statements. However, our data did not include texts from multiple levels and, as such, we were unable to capture how the calls for collaboration were received by stakeholders. In consideration of the foregoing, future research efforts could explore a fully, multi-level approach—gathering resilience discourse from organizations and stakeholders—to more directly examine the relationship and co-construction of resilience.

Second, given the ongoing and interactive processes that underlie resilience, future research should examine how organizations construct messages that reinforce the continued or ongoing action/participation that is needed to overcome adversity and enact resilience at multiple levels. The messages analyzed in this project were a foundational snapshot of an ongoing communicative effort and, although these initial welcome messages allowed us to uncover commonalities in the discourse, future research could examine how organizations construct messages that reinforce resilience over time. As such, we believe that the analysis of full communication campaigns tracing resilience discourse could produce needed insights to account for the processual nature of resilience and the continued development of the genre.

Additionally, future research should look at contexts outside the university setting to examine how the characteristics of the OSR genre are/are not reflected in other organization resilience discourse. For example, exploring how organizations and their stakeholders responded to political and civil unrest during 2020 or how other types of organizations, such as for-profit or perhaps local civic groups or religious organizations, responded to the pandemic could provide insights into the appropriateness and effectives of resilience-based messaging and further delineate this genre. In addition, communication scholars should explore how stakeholders perceived and responded to the call for collaborative resilience—potentially uncovering what happens when stakeholders do not join an organization’s outlined steps to enact resilience.