Intersubjective resilience: Sustaining collective life under persistent life-and-death risk

How do organizations sustain collective life when exposure to life-and-death risk becomes a persistent condition of work? Based on an ethnographic study of two elite police units operating under continuous life-and-death risk, we find that organizations sustain coordinated collective life not by reducing fear, resolving contradiction, or restoring stability, but by continuously reorganizing these destabilizing pressures into shared forms of action. This is accomplished through three interrelated forms of organizing. First, aspirational discipline transforms vulnerability into collective moral obligation by aligning individual striving with shared purpose. Second, paradoxical knotting enables members to enact persistent competing demands, such as aggression and restraint or autonomy and obedience, as mutually reinforcing rather than opposing dimensions of practice. Third, routine enactment continually restores coordinated action by embedding disruption within recurring practices of training, reflection, and operational work. Together, these organizing dynamics explain how organizations reproduce coherent and coordinated collective action when danger is an everyday work condition. In doing so, we conceptualize intersubjective resilience as a recursive relational accomplishment which sustains organizing actions under persistent life-and-death risk.