ABSTRACT
The call for everyone to show “greater resilience” has become a fashionable response to adversity and loss in popular culture. This makes “resilience” a keyword in the social sciences, but one that is inherently slippery and intellectually messy. Resilience can be defined as the successful adaptation to stressful life events and the ability to withstand adversity, recover from disruption and return to previous levels of functioning. In social work the term “resilience” emerged alongside an approach characterized by “the comfort of strangers” and more recently with community empowerment and the “management of risk.” Resilience linked to empowerment can promote critically reflective practice. In this chapter the focus is on sociological factors, and three practice examples illustrate different ways of helping clients regain control, cope with problems, and address issues of disadvantage, inequality and injustice. Resilience has become a crucial construct to help clients cope with adversity and loss and assist social workers to manage their professional lives. Social work is an intellectually and emotionally demanding profession, and promoting resilience is important for the well-being of staff, as well as clients and the wider community. The notion of resilience linked to empowerment will help practitioners create a vision of achieving emancipatory change even in the most daunting circumstances.
