The Resilience Responsibility Gap

Resilience research has traditionally focused on individual resilience; however, workplace adaptation is required at the individual, organizational, institutional, state, and societal levels. This paper investigates who is considered responsible for adaptation in institutional documents and whether the demands placed on workers are matched by the resources available to them.We conducted a comparative systematic qualitative document analysis using a document set that included publications from the OECD (n = 9), Eurofound (n = 5), EU-OSHA (n = 2), the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in collaboration with EU-OSHA and Eurofound (n = 1), and the International Labour Organisation (n = 1).

Published between 2021 and 2026, these documents were selected to cover Europe, developing countries, and emerging economies. The documents were coded using a structured codebook and recorded through a page-level audit trail; two researchers conducted the coding independently.The findings show that workers are rarely assigned primary responsibility for adaptation. Workforces are generally viewed either as victims of or stakeholders in systemic change, while the overall balance of responsibility is systemic in 8 documents, shared in 7, organizational in 2, and unclear in 1; no document is individual-dominant.