Resilience and the Rapid Shift to Remote Working at a University: Emerging Questions

ABSTRACT

We describe work-in-progress for a qualitative, interview-based study of organizational resilience at a large research university during the unfolding crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper discusses example data and questions raised by interviews of participants that represent a wide variety of roles, contexts, and challenges. Our ongoing data collection shows participants navigating different ways of enacting resilience in their attempts to weather the rapid changes to their work and organizations brought on by COVID-19. This preliminary work already raises questions about how organizational resilience is enacted, how the boundaries of formal organizations are being redefined, and work activities are being reorganized. These themes lay groundwork for future studies of organizational and system resilience during long-term crises.

Keywords

resilience, CSCW, organizational theory, infrastructure studies, coordination

ABOUT THE AUTHOR/S

Caitie Lustig
University of Washington
celustig@uw.edu (opens in new tab)

Ridley Jones
University of Washington
rajone@uw.edu (opens in new tab)

Josephine Hoy
University of Washington
joeyhoy@uw.edu (opens in new tab)

Negin Alimohammadi
University of Washington
negin@uw.edu (opens in new tab)

Charlotte P. Lee
University of Washington
cplee@uw.edu (opens in new tab)

Josephine Hoy, Caitlin Lustig, Negin Alimohammadi, and Ridley Jones are PhD students in the Computer Supported Collaboration (CSC) Laboratory, which is directed by Prof. Charlotte P. Lee. We conduct empirical research on how people collaborate in everyday practices, in order to develop principled approaches to the design of collaborative systems and organizations. CSC is in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. https://depts.washington.edu/csclab (opens in new tab)

New Future of Work 2020, August 3–5, 2020
© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).