Organizational Resilience in National Security Bureaucracies: Realistic and Practicable?

Resilience is increasingly highlighted as a necessary organizational property innational security bureaucracies. This article explores the resulting management dilemmas via interviews with Danish executives, who attempt to balance resilience, fiscal austerity and democratic accountability. It concludes that the resilience agenda inspires relevant organizational adjustments, including more external networking and internal resource variety. But austerity limits resilience to budget-neutral forms, and fear of blame games limits the space for innovation to stay abreast with evolving risks. The article calls for a critical reappraisal of how much resilience to expect from public sector organizations and for more research into the boundary conditions of organizational resilience in the public sector.