Organizational Resilience and Decision Making at the Intersection of Social, Data, and Infrastructure Systems

About this Research Topic

Background

Organizational resilience is increasingly tested by the complexity and interdependence of modern social, data, information, and infrastructure systems. Organizations today face a diverse range of disruptions, including cyber threats, misinformation, climate-related shocks, and supply chain disruptions. While traditional resilience research has focused on either technical robustness (e.g., infrastructure security and data integrity) or social adaptability (e.g., leadership and crisis communication), there is growing recognition that these dimensions are deeply interconnected. Effective resilience strategies must integrate insights from multiple disciplines, acknowledging how decision-making processes, information flows, and technological infrastructures shape an organization’s ability to respond and adapt. Existing research often falls short in bridging these domains, resulting in fragmented approaches that fail to account for the dynamic and systemic nature of organizational resilience. A more interdisciplinary framework is needed—one that considers not just the structural aspects of resilience but also the cognitive, behavioral, and communicative processes that drive adaptive capacity.

This Research Topic aims to address this gap by examining how the intersection of social systems with data, information, and infrastructure influences human decision-making and, ultimately, organizational resilience. As organizations increasingly rely on data-driven insights, digital communication networks, and complex socio-technical systems, understanding how these elements interact is crucial for building adaptive capacity. Resilience is not solely a function of robust infrastructure but also hinges on how information is processed, shared, and acted upon within organizations. However, studying these challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches that bridge social sciences, engineering, information science, and organizational studies. Thus, this Research Topic seeks to identify and circulate methodological approaches that can be applied across disciplines to analyze resilience more holistically. By integrating insights from communication studies, systems thinking, and resilience theory, this collection will help build a shared methodological foundation for organizational resilience research.

We invite contributions in the form of critical literature reviews, original research, case studies, and methodological manuscripts that explore themes such as:

• bridging social systems and infrastructure through communication: analyzing how communication strategies integrate social systems with technological infrastructures to enhance organizational resilience and resource allocation during the recovery of disrupted infrastructures
• human-centered design in infrastructure resilience: investigating how human-centered communication and design principles can affect decision making and improve infrastructure resilience
• misinformation management: strategies for combating misinformation and ensuring accurate information flows in high-stakes decision-making
• networked governance and coordination: how organizations collaborate and make decisions across sectors and scales to enhance resilience
• interdisciplinary methods for resilience research: innovative approaches that integrate social and technical perspectives to study resilience and decision making.

This collection aims to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue and circulate methodological insights that can advance resilience research and practice in an increasingly complex world.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review

Keywords: interdisciplinary methods, complex systems, institutional adaptation, adaptive decision processes, socio-technical systems, resilient governance systems

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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