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Resilience, Agency and Coping with Hardship: Evidence from Europe during the Great Recession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

HULYA DAGDEVIREN Open the ORCID record for HULYA DAGDEVIREN [Opens in a new window]  and
MATTHEW DONOGHUE
HULYA DAGDEVIREN
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, AL10 9AB email: [email protected]
MATTHEW DONOGHUE
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Social Policy and Intervention, Barnett House, 32 Wellington Square, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UKOX1 2ER email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on resilience by focusing on coping with hardship during the Great Recession, drawing upon primary data gathered through household and key informant interviews in nine European countries. As the resilience approach highlights agency, the paper examines the nature of household responses to hardship during this period on the basis of the ‘structure-agency problem’. An important contribution of this paper is to identify different forms of agency and discuss their implications. More specifically, we conceptualise three different types of agency in coping with hardship: absorptive, adaptive and transformative. Analysis of the findings indicates that structural constraints remain prominent. Most coping mechanisms fall under the category of absorptive and adaptive agency characterised here as burden-bearing actions that ‘conform’ to changing circumstances rather than shaping those circumstances.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 547 - 567
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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