Introduction: Resilience as a Perspective for the Analysis of Societal Processes

Abstract

During the past decade the term ‘resilience’ experienced, and still experiences, an ongoing growing reception in several disciplines of the social sciences, particularly in sociological research. This research context includes heterogenic approaches on how to conceptually frame resilience in the light of various theoretical foundations. Common to all these approaches is, however, that resilience becomes topical in the context of analysing phenomena and processes of the ‘resistance’ or the ‘resistibility’ of certain (social) units or actors which are perceived as faced with various constellations of disruptive change—be those social, cultural, political, economic, institutional or organisational disruptions which become relevant in terms of a self-perception and/or a foreign perception and which are identified as threats, hazards, dangers, shocks, catastrophes, risks, crisis etc.