Preface
At a summit held in London in 2019, where there were participants, from high-school students to CEOs. One question drew polarisation: resilience.
Participants were asked about the importance or lack of importance of certain skills. When it came to resilience, the difference in answers depended on age, experience, profession, and gender. Those who valued resilience were mostly, older white males more developed in their careers or leaders in their field. They argued that without resilience your ability to manage change is weakened.
Those who viewed resilience as being negative were younger - women, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, and people starting out in their careers. They perceived that the term resilience placed success in the hand of the individual’s efforts and personal strengths to “suck it up” (as one female secondary student quoted).
This division across fault lines showed starkly. Debates around resilience reflect on broader tensions between the individual and societal factors as the driver of an individual’s success.
This article will not be a guide per se but rather debate the virtue of resilience in its value and application.
The creative professional?
The ‘creative professional’ lies somewhere on a spectrum between the arts and business. This trend to include business beyond the arts sector professional has much to do with what artist and writer Emily Wapnick in her 2015 TED talk, ‘Why some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling’ called the rise of the "multipotentialites”: persons with ‘many interests and creative pursuits and display aptitudes across multiple disciplines’. She argues that these individuals have become central to economic development in a post-Fordist knowledge economy as knowledge is required laterally rather than vertically. An individual’s creative synthesis is required to address a greater variety of problems rather than a singular problem. This change in the urban context has had a profound effect on the workplace, skills, and the nature of work, towards a more business-focused creative professional. Creative professionals are therefore subjected to notions of ‘resilience’ in the multi-faceted contexts they operate.
Definition of resilience for the creative professional
Resilience for the creative professional is the ability to manage, adapt to, and anticipate changes to variables whilst maintaining quality of professional and creative output in a transferrable environment. This occurs without reverting to a dysfunctional state and/or self-exploitation.
The defining factors of resilience include the reintegrative process, its multi-dimensionality, and the elasticity in terminology.
The value of resilience can be structured in three ways, personal embodiment, social interaction context and structural impact, and usage.
Is resilience a good thing?
Personal embodiment of resilience
According to broaden and build theory (Fredrickson), positive emotional responses (such as joy, interest, contentment, hope, and love) “broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources”. These support resilience. Fredrickson found when respondents were under stress, it was not that a resilient person had less anxiety, rather they were able to highlight positive emotional responses such as “interest and enjoyment”. Further, through positive reinforcement resilience can be nurtured, as positive emotional responses both improve resilience processes and are a product of it (that is, result in resilience). Van Hooff and De Pater found reinforcing positive emotional states through engaging in enjoyable activities, led individuals to better recover from work-related stress, and exert greater levels of resilience in the workplace. This research indicated positive benefits of art and creative processes in building “positive emotional responses” which nurture the creative individual through times of challenge. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow in which one can “experience timelessness, loss of self-consciousness, and complete absorption in the task at hand”, indicated the power of the arts in developing mindfulness. This notion of flow created an emotional response that was capable of building an attitude of optimism, supporting a positive state of mind. For creative professionals, creative activities may in and of themselves enhance resilience. Fredrickson, however, also questioned the power of resilient individuals—wittingly or unwittingly—being expert users of the undoing effect of positive emotions. Resilience as the product of creative practice may rather hold a misleading reassurance of resilience. This questions the value of creative practice’s capacity to improve an individual’s resilience.
The ‘therapeutic healing’ conception of the arts can be misconstrued within social and political discourse, to legitimise increased stress, fragmentation, and austerity, leading to the problem of self-exploitation and resilience coming hand in hand with creative practice. The volatility of creative labour due to temporary and flexible work arrangements and a lack of predictability and security, each to which damage coping mechanisms, may in fact mean creative practice actually undermines individual resilience. Moreover, resilience, if coupled with competitiveness, can create an inferiority complex for those who are vulnerable to the inequalities in stress and coping elasticity. This is in part due to work conceptualising resilience as a trait or personal state-like capacity which can create misconceptions of the therapeutic nature of a creative professional’s work.
Resilience - Social Context
Resilience encourages comradeship. In this argument, resilience is a positive incubator of social change or friendship as it is required both individually and collectively when overcoming challenges. In a ‘chicken and egg’ manner, social capital creates increased resilience through “dispersing the negative responses across a greater number of individuals”. Social capital serves to support the individual when facing adversity whilst also creating an understanding of relativity to the challenges faced. Conversely resilience, as a purposed mechanism for individuals or through comradeship to overcome barriers, may result in neglected social structures. Proponents of resilience neglect the power of social factors in creating a varying degree of barriers for different individuals, or disparity in social capital. This is due to levels of resilience being highly dependent on societal position due to inequality, rather than an individual’s endeavour or innate skill. Moreover, the instilling of resilience in its ecological defined form through policy and education has only served to further inequalities. Key academic in the study of resilience Michael Ungar, saw the discourse surrounding resilience had implications on the implementation of it. He described this as the tension between ‘homogeneity and heterogeneity’, which illustrated the importance of the intersectionality of resilience and the differing experience across class, race, gender, age, and culture, as resilience often ’perpetuates the privileges of existing social relations’ as capital capacity is intrinsically linked with levels of resilience.
Resilience is required unequally. Within the working environment, resilience may be used as a proxy for a measure of performance. If resilience and performance become interwoven, resilience could become an incubator of inequality especially in relation to workplace performance reviews. For example, the more resilient person may be promoted while someone perceived to have less resilience, even with higher levels of performance, may not be. Resilience as a performance indicator would lead to an overestimation of performance amongst those requiring less of it and an underestimation for those who are subjected to higher demand. An understanding of inherent inequalities is paramount in any discussion of resilience as they are relative, not absolute. Levels of resilience change according to social capital, feelings of self-worth, engagement in meaningful activities, social class and life experiences and the challenges faced.
Resilience often has negative connotations in semiotic meaning, therefore It is important when resilience is used it is understood in the context of the listener.
Resilience – Structural impact and usage
Given the fragmentation of societal structures, resilience is both an “inevitability” and necessary in maintaining independence and authority over one’s work. The building of resilience enables independence from institutions and their proclaimed values. This independence is growingly desired by creative professionals. Within the UK “47% of the creative professionals in the sector being self-employed, compared with 15% across the workforce as a whole”. The Creative Industries Federation’s report states creative professionals desire self-employment for five key reasons: “1. To specialist to work for one company full-time 2. Wanting creative control 3. Family 4. Pursuing a creative dream post-retirement 5. Redundancy or external pressures”. Further, increases in businesses’ working with freelance creatives make freelance work more accessible and attainable with ‘pay increasing for the creative professional’.
However, to maintain independence, creative professionals need to be resilient to obstacles. It becomes critical for creative professionals to nurture resilience as a tool to mitigate the challenges of the fragmented, independent labour market. Fundamentally, to reap the fruits of independence through freelance work, creative professionals must embrace resilience to navigate the turbulence independence creates. However, with the arrival of COVID-19, the values of being self-employed have been questioned. It is unclear what the longer-term effect of COVID-19 will be on creative professionals’ preferences towards independent working. It may be that the lack of institutional support and the over-reliance on resilience for the freelance worker has been de-valued, forcing a re-evaluation of support mechanisms for the freelance creative professional.
Regarding power structures, resilience in its defined form gains power in vagueness. As the very malleability and plasticity of the term itself mean it can act as a boundary object or bridging concept but may also be co-opted by different interests. How resilience is defined tends to represent an ideology or role within society and is something applicable for power interests and individuals alike. This ambiguity has led to the term becoming a buzzword for public and private organisations to avoid their societal and systematic responsibilities to the individual. With the example of the Arts Council England’s definition, commentators have argued that the term has been used as a tool of “austerity” and thus emphasises the politicisations and polarity of the term. Andy Pratt discussed the coded austerity within the use of ‘resilience’ arguing the term is “commonly deployed to legitimate a neoliberal strategy of shrinking the state". Suman Gupta expanded on the structural usage of the term as a way of instilling a cultural shift in the value of publicly funded arts, arguing that, cemented in Arts Council England’s 2010 strategy resilience proposed an austerity-driven financial management policy: using public subsidy as a catalyst for securing self-generated and private sector income. The consequences, especially when married with increased self-employment, are that the creative professional is in a battle between decreased support and increased adversity, both counter-productive in building the positive outcomes of resilience.
Resilience makes a positive contribution in that it promotes general wellbeing and self-improvement which support greater personal and professional development. However, its dark side must be understood within its context and usage. Creative professionals by their nature of work and lived life would be often considered resilient psychologically given situational challenges. However, it is this perception that leads to the personal and social discrediting of those who struggle with resilience both internally and externally. Moreover, this perception has been a basis of a disregard for support from institutions that believe austerity is easily attested to the creative industries at the expense of the creative professional, who now require excessive levels of resilience to cope with the fragmentation of their work sphere and the lack of financial support they receive under neo-liberal policy.
Resilience - Moving Forward (Creative Professional recommendations)
Resilience in its current application can be unpacked and re-purposed by creative professionals in four recommended areas:
1. Learning as resilience.
Do not just be adaptable, create adaptability strategies. As Cecilia Pasquinelli argues, “learn skills that enable strategic adaptability”. Consultancy Korn Ferry stated that through learning to be agile, one can increase the ability to navigate the demands of flexibility through continual learning of new skills and creative endeavours. Ultimately learning will support adaptation in the face of adversity, which decreases one’s reliance on resilience.
2. Join or create social networks and collective environments.
Create and nurture support networks of independents in overcoming challenges. Understanding your relative position builds resilience. We naturally find ‘strength in the community’. Through collective responsibility each individual shares resilience. Furthermore, helping others, in turn, brings positive stimulus, which decreases stress, and improves a state of mind.
3. Own your environment.
Creative professionals must create their brand, workload, and expectation, due to the individualisation of labour. Having a greater awareness of the self will ultimately decrease self-exploitation and therefore the reliance on resilience. Creative professionals should actively build their environment, setting their terms of work externally and internally and structuring their operations. Through personal organisation, one can decrease anxieties and be better positioned to challenge adversity.
4. Be the activist.
Creatives create new social forms that challenge institutional change. Those who have resilience to give could help support those unequally reliant on resilience to ‘just get by'. Activism for social justice can alter unequal balances of power. A reliance on resilience is a product of inequalities and understanding that will help build support networks and purpose for creative professionals. Furthermore, people must challenge performative uses of resilience. This would hopefully decrease misconceptions and lobby for change to better purpose the term.
“A willingness to accept unpaid work figure prominently in accounts of self-serving, exclusionary and debilitating practices that undermine professional solidarity and perpetuate precarious working conditions” (Martin Beirne 2018)
A future for resilience – A societal perspective (Management/Policy recommendations)
Societal understanding of resilience is subjective. For creative professionals, it must be understood that as in the words of the Audience Agency “it is essential they (creative professionals) are supported – and support one another – to ensure that the arts and culture can flourish and thrive, rather than simply survive”. Furthermore, resilience research has predominantly defined ‘positive adaptation from a Western psychological discourse’ and therefore to mitigate this “individual functions must be considered when examining competence.”.
Resilience as survivalism is our norm. When resilience is ever-present in our lives, we see the bottom of the barrel. It is used when we cannot sustain growth through any other means. Why resilience is seen so highly in none life-threatening situations as a virtue is peculiar. Arguably a successful functioning society should require and aspire to the reduction of resilience in the working environment not to perpetuate it. It is this vision of resilience - reduction through systematic change - that we should be aspiring to create through policy and educational changes.
Each engagement with resilience varies culturally and research on resilience must be understood within its context and culture, as “Resilience has global as well as culturally and contextually specific aspects”. Creative individuals each displays resilience, but also are subjugated to tensions between cultural practices of resilience. This further exemplifies the subjectivity of resilience and the importance of understanding resilience is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy or value. Leaders should be respectful of the difference in their understanding of the term.
Michael Ungar makes four recommendations that could be applied and adapted to the creative and arts professional. These include:
1. “Privilege local/ community-based knowledge”, which can be achieved through co-design practices.
2. “Evaluate the influence of each aspect of resilience”. Review and evaluate health and well-being outcomes of policy relating to resilience, taking into consideration minority groups and adjust accordingly.
3. “Acknowledge the ecological nature in how youth experience resilience”. Ultimately maintain an understanding of the subjectivity of resilience. Do not subject the individual to an unattainable definition of resilience.
4. “Early Interventions that help navigate to health resources and negotiate for what they need to resolve these tensions”. Increase awareness of resilience amongst individuals, enabling them to define resilience in their own terms.
Finally, management has the responsibility within working environments that resilience is not a measure of one’s contentment at work as perceptually “resilience is positively related to employees’ satisfaction in their jobs and career” thus misconstruing wellbeing for one’s perceived resilience.
Is resilience a good thing? Yes, in most instances, but only with the depth of understanding of its personal, political, economic, historical, and social constructs. As Maya Angelou wrote,
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
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Image source: https://toggl.com/blog/resilience-in-the-workplace