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

Abstract

Organizations, such as universities, face a variety of adversities, challenges, or disruptions that call for resilience to be enacted. Resilience is an important communicative process that relies on organizations and their stakeholders to collaboratively make sense of and respond to a given adversity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to identify the shared characteristics that organizations use in their communication surrounding adversity, we completed a genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year. Through our analysis we uncovered commonalities that make organization-stakeholder resilience discourse distinct—(1) defining a shared relationship, (2) detailing steps to regain a sense of normalcy, and (3) describing the outcome of enacting resilience. Based on these findings, we propose a genre of organization-stakeholder resilience by highlighting the role of communication in cultivating resilience through the emphasis on discursive relationships that exist between organizations and stakeholders.