Agentic resilience in tourism: A structuration-based synthesis across individual, organizational, and destination levels

Resilience has become a central concept in tourism research in response to growing environmental, economic, and social disruptions. Despite its increasing prominence, resilience remains conceptualized in diverse and often fragmented ways across different levels of analysis. This paper systematically reviews tourism resilience research published over the past two decades to examine how resilience is understood at the individual, organizational, and destination levels and to identify the conditions that enable or constrain resilient action. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, the review reveals that resilience is commonly associated with adaptation, recovery, and coping, but that these meanings vary across levels and theoretical perspectives. Beyond conceptualization, the findings highlight how resilience is shaped by enabling and constraining conditions related to meaning-making processes, access to resources, and
normative expectations. Synthesizing these insights, the paper develops an agentic structuration model that reframes tourism resilience as a dynamic process shaped by the recursive interplay of agency and structure. By bringing together resilience research within a common theoretical framework, the paper contributes to a more power sensitive and agentic understanding of resilience in tourism and provides avenues for future research.