Resilient Users and Emerging Infrastructural Relations: The Making of Digital Resilience

Abstract

Exogenous shocks propel organizations to pursue resilience to absorb strain, adapt to disruption, and continue performing their work. While prior research has offered insights into how resilience is activated to bounce back in the light of a shock, we turn our attention to digital resilience: the sociotechnical processes through which organizations cope with adversity, maintain operations, and ultimately pursue transformative activities by deploying and engaging with digital technologies. The absence of significant prior digital transformations leaves many organizations scrambling to build resilience during a shock, such as the pandemic, and opens an opportunity for theorizing the process and implications for digital infrastructure. Through a 2-years longitudinal qualitative study of how Greek primary school teachers practiced digital resilience in the face of COVID-19, we identify three distinct mechanisms of digital resilience and develop a grounded model on how these mechanisms cultivate the emergence of settled or contested infrastructural relations. Our study extends theory on the emerging field of digital resilience by highlighting its processual, sociotechnical, and generative nature and offers a relational view on digital infrastructure evolution.