Struggling with change: The fragile resilience of collectives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new resilience measure for social collectives, combining robustness and adaptivity, and demonstrates its application through a software developer collective, revealing a resilience life cycle with stages of increase and decrease.

Contribution

It proposes a novel resilience measure for social collectives and models their resilience dynamics, distinguishing short-term and long-term resilience.

Findings

Identified a resilience life cycle with stages of increasing and decreasing resilience

Quantified resilience using data from a software developer collective

Provided a formal model to reproduce observed resilience dynamics

Abstract

Collectives form non-equilibrium social structures characterised by a volatile dynamics. Individuals join or leave. Social relations change quickly. Therefore, differently from engineered or ecological systems, a resilient reference state cannot be defined. We propose a novel resilience measure combining two dimensions: robustness and adaptivity. We demonstrate how they can be quantified using data from a software developer collective. Our analysis reveals a resilience life cycle, i.e., stages of increasing resilience are followed by stages of decreasing resilience. We explain the reasons for these observed dynamics and provide a formal model to reproduce them. The resilience life cycle allows distinguishing between short-term resilience, given by a sequence of resilient states, and long-term resilience, which requires collectives to survive through different cycles.