Resilience as becoming: the coherence–complexity framework for organizing in permanent transition

Abstract

Contemporary organizations increasingly operate under prolonged and overlapping transitions in which routines, identities and coordination arrangements are repeatedly reconfigured. Under such conditions, resilience cannot be adequately understood as recovery to a prior stable state. This paper develops a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes organizational resilience as becoming: the ongoing capacity to sustain viability by modulating and reconfiguring the tension between coherence and complexity. Drawing on contemporary resilience research, process organization, paradox theory and complexity-informed management studies, the paper defines coherence as the integrative dynamics that support shared meaning, coordination and identity, and complexity as the differentiating dynamics that sustain variety, experimentation and distributed agency. The main result is a Coherence–Complexity Framework that distinguishes resilient organizing from three pathological patterns, rigidity, fragmentation and drift/fragility, and clarifies how resilience should be analysed as a temporal and processual accomplishment. The paper contributes an analytical framework for studying organizational resilience in conditions of permanent transition and identifies implications for empirical operationalization and strategic management research.