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).