Digital Resilience as a Process of Relational Resourcing

Digital resilience has become increasingly crucial for organizations and professionals in times of major exogenous shocks and escalating crises. Complementing capability-oriented accounts of digital resilience, we examine how resources are created through evolving relations, offering a process view of digital resilience. Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of Greek primary school teachers, we explore how digital resilience emerges despite limited organizational support through evolving relations. Drawing on a resourcing lens, our study establishes that digital resilience emerges and is sustained when professionals, motivated by value-laden beliefs that make them assume responsibility for turning potential resources into resources-in-use to respond to a shock, engage in a process we call relational resourcing. Our model of relational resourcing shows how resourcing convictions are enacted through processes including appropriating personal digital technologies, enlarging relational functionalities, and routinizing new enactments of resourcing convictions. Our findings expand resourcing theory by showing how resourcing activities entail new ways of relating from which resource value derives. Furthermore, the findings add to the relational view of technology by theorizing how and why entities or professionals learn to relate.