Learned Resourcefulness and Self-Organizing
The concept of resourcefulness refers to learned repertoires for
coordinating with others to solve novel problems and initiate new
projects in conditions marked by resource constraints and institutional
instability (Bradley, 2015; Corbett & Katz, 2013; Welter et al., 2018).
In the context of crisis entrepreneurship, compassion organizing refers
to collective responses to mobilizing human compassion in aid of
suffering people (Dutton et al., 2006). Common compassion organizing
activities include coordinating resources, improvising to increase
efficacy, developing routines and processes within organizations,
activating networks outside of an organization, and modeling
compassionate behavior in public (Dutton et al., 2006). In this study,
we emphasize the unfolding process of self-organizing for compassion,
whereby people adjust roles, interactions and systems without formal
direction (Madden et al., 2012).
Crises are collective action problems that create opportunities for
social learning (Chamlee-Wright, 2010). Scholars increasingly argue that
social infrastructure is as important as – perhaps more important than
– physical infrastructure in crisis recovery (D. P. Aldrich, 2012a). As
a social process, learning is critical to the feedback loop between
crisis response efforts and adjustments needed to sustain the effort,
with a failure to learn weakening resilience and triggering ineffective
use of resources and negative outcomes (Williams et al., 2017).