The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster

Editors: Amir, Sulfikar (Ed.)

This book considers the concept of resilience in a global society where coping with the consequence and long term impact of crisis and disaster challenges the capacity of communities to bounce back in the event of severe disruption. Catastrophic events such as the 9.11 terrorist attack, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the volcano eruption in Central Java entailed massive devastation on physical infrastructures, and caused significant social and economic damage.
This book considers how the modern sociotechnological system facilitating human activity defines how societies survive and whether a crisis will be short-lived or prolonged. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical resilience, this book closely examines a range of events North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. By presenting the successes and failures of sociotechnical resilience, it offers important insights and practical lessons to build better and comprehensive understandings of resilience in a real-world setting, significantly contributing to the study of disaster resilience.  

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Sociotechnical Resilience: A Preliminary Concept

Sulfikar Amir and Vivek Kant (2018) Risk Analysis, 38(1), pp.8-16.

This article presents the concept of sociotechnical resilience by employing an interdisciplinary perspective derived from the fields of science and technology studies, human factors, safety science, organizational studies, and systems engineering. Highlighting the hybrid nature of sociotechnical systems, we identify three main constituents that characterize sociotechnical resilience: informational relations, sociomaterial structures, and anticipatory practices. Further, we frame sociotechnical resilience as undergirded by the notion of transformability with an emphasis on intentional activities, focusing on the ability of sociotechnical systems to shift from one form to another in the aftermath of shock and disturbance. We propose that the triad of relations, structures, and practices are fundamental aspects required to comprehend the resilience of sociotechnical systems during times of crisis. 

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Modeling a Simulation for Sociotechnical Resilience

Fredy Tantri and Sulfikar Amir (2019) Complexity, Volume 2019 |Article ID 7950629

This paper proposes a conceptual model to simulate the response of sociotechnical systems to crisis. The model draws on a concept of “sociotechnical resilience” as the theoretical framework, which underscores the hybrid nature of sociotechnical systems.
Revolving around the notion of transformability, the concept considers sociotechnical resilience to be constitutive of three fundamental attributes, namely, informational relations, sociomaterial structures, and anticipatory practices. Our model aims to capture the complex interactions within a sociotechnical system during a recovery process by incorporating these core attributes in the operational units embedded in a multilevel directed acyclic graph, information networks, and recovery strategies. Furthermore, the model emphasizes specifically the role of informational configuration during a disruption. We introduce two recovery strategies in our simulation, namely, random recovery and informed recovery. The former represents the unprepared responses to crisis, while the latter incorporates the reporting process to support the command centre in making optimum decisions.
The simulation results suggest the importance of system flexibility to allow structural reconfiguration at the organizational level. Our proposed model complements the theoretical principles of sociotechnical resilience while laying a practical foundation of sociotechnical modeling for resilience enhancement in real-world settings.  

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A multilevel framework to enhance organizational resilience

Justyna Tasic, Sulfikar Amir, Jethro Tan, Majeed Khader (2019) Journal of Risk Research

Organizational resilience is a capacity that emerges at multiple levels. Although the multilevel character of organizations has been generally acknowledged in existing organizational studies, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical studies that address how it affects organizational resilience. To address this gap, this article offers a multilevel framework applicable to enhance organizational resilience and presents an empirical study to probe the impact of multilevel elements on organization’s capacity for responding to critical situations.

More specifically, the new framework will help an organization to enhance its resilience through a process of self-assessment on crisis preparedness and response capacity. This process will allow the organization to identify and remedy potential vulnerabilities in the interaction between its organs as well as environment. We argue that crisis management and organizational resilience are mutually shaped across multiple levels, from individual, organizational, to environmental. These multiple levels are operationalized operationalization in four phases: (1) reviewing and monitoring context, (2) testing preparedness, (3) analysing and assessing responses, and (4) strengthening capabilities. In these phases, we underline that resilience management requires continuous embracing of the dynamic processes within an organizational system and its environment. To validate the framework, we present an empirical study on a security organization, and describe the results to demonstrate how to utilize the tool in practice. In conclusion, we discuss how the multilevel framework can be further applied towards building stronger resilience management.  

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