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Summit on Resilience: Securing our future through public-private partnerships

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can use to attenuate the potentially destructive impact of stress on one's individual health and well-being. Such approaches are referred to by Whetten & Cameron (2002) as proactive strategies that "are designed to initiate action that resists the negative effects of stress." Moreover, as discussed by Morrow (2008), "one form of resiliency is referred to as social resiliency, which refers to developing a supportive social network to help moderate the harmful effects of stress." We can see so far that resilience can be related to the state of one's physical health and well-being as well as to the quality and degree of one's social connectedness. More recently, as discussed by Robbins & Coulter (2012), the term resilience has even been applied to a person's ability to maintain or to find new employment in a recession. They state, and one should take note in particular of their definition of resilience, that "the economic recession has prompted a reexamination of resilience, which is an individual's ability to overcome challenges and turn them into opportunities. A recent study by a global consulting firm showed that it is a key factor in keeping a job: A resilient person is likely to be more adaptable, flexible, and goal-focused." One question that emerges from a consideration of these definitional issues, and that is relevant to the material presented in the conference, is when we speak of resilience are we speaking about animate human beings or to inanimate objects, structures, and systems, or perhaps, to complicate the issue further, are we referring to a certain quality of the interaction between the animate and the inanimate? For as things stand now we can easily see how the term resilience can be applied to any or all of the following: In the personal realm, we can apply the term to individuals, to marriages, to families; in the social, sociological, and anthropological realms, we can speak of the resilience of communities, neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations, societies, and cultures; in an organizational context, resilience can be applied to employees, to groups and teams, to departments, to technology, to supply chains, to organizational performance, or to an organization's response to a particular challenge or threat; in sports and in the military, we can refer to the resilience of teams and of armed forces in response to defeat by competing teams or by enemy forces respectively; in times of war, we are concerned with the resilience of the nation; in times of recession or depression, we focus on the resilience of the economy; when suffering an illness or injury, resilience may be the key to recovery; in the face of mourning the death of loved ones, one's resilience may be the key to finding the will to go on. We can also refer to the resilience of the energy grid or to any sort of infrastructure. Ultimately, it seems that we should all be hopeful that we are living on a resilient planet, with resilient oceans, rainforests, species, and ecosystems as well. It is certainly nice to have such a convenient and adaptable word in our language, and clearly desirable for individuals and organizations to be in possession of the characteristic or quality of resilience. However, problems in communication and focus can result when a term is so widely used, and used in so many different ways and in so many different contexts. Particularly when we bring a number of speakers and panelists together for a few hours in the same room, can we really expect that everyone will speak to each other about the same phenomena in a useful and constructive fashion? If a concept can mean so many different things, and can be used in so many different ways or on so many different levels, to refer to so many different kinds of phenomena, does it serve any longer as a useful construct, analytical tool, or objective? Has the notion and concept of resilience become so watered down perhaps that it runs the risk of becoming almost meaningless or useless? In this conference, Pace University's President Stephen J. Friedman seemed to focus on the failures and disappointments in resilience by citing the more than ten years it has already taken to rebuild to World Trade Center site, the chaotic response to the 32

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