Not all roads lead to Rome: Reflection on some unfortunate trajectories of resilience

Research on organizational resilience has extensively examined how organizations adapt and survive during crises, yet considerably less attention has been devoted to what happens after disruption subsides. In particular, we still know little about how crisis-induced organization design arrangements evolve over time and how their transformation may shape the post-crisis trajectory of organizational resilience. Building on a process perspective, this study conceptualizes resilience not as a stable organizational capability, but as a temporally unfolding organizing process. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data collected in the Italian hospitality sector between 2020 and 2025–2026, the study investigates how organization design arrangements enacted during the COVID-19 crisis evolved in the years following the emergency phase. Using temporal bracketing, narrative reconstruction, and visual mapping, the analysis identifies four processual trajectories: crisis-activated relational organizing, crisis-legitimated experimentation and service redesign, selective sedimentation of crisis learning, and post-crisis erosion through normalization, fatigue, and control. The findings show that resilience-related arrangements did not evolve uniformly over time. Instead, some arrangements were retained and institutionalized, while others were transformed, managerialized, marginalized, or progressively abandoned. The study contributes to resilience and process research by highlighting the temporal fragility of resilience and the role of post-crisis normalization in progressively undoing the organizational arrangements that initially enabled adaptation.