Beyond Bouncing Back: The ‘Cruel Optimism’ of Resilient Selfhood in Women’s Recovery from Depression

Academic debates surrounding the notion of resilience still face dissent about definitions, contexts, and managerial implications. By summarizing recent literature on resilience, this paper reveals two dominating paradigms, which I label the Plan to Resist Approach and the Containing Crisis Approach. By pinpointing and challenging the underlying assumptions of both approaches, I elucidate their potential shortcomings. To overcome these limitations, I develop an integral, capability-based concept of organizational resilience, which builds on a temporal perspective on crises. Thereby it highlights the importance of enacting different yet specific capabilities at different phases of crises. This concept allows integrating the insights of the reviewed literature and sheds light on the recovery phase as being a so far neglected aspect in resilience research.