How being vulnerable can be a good thing

Reminding us of the positive side to vulnerability in today’s uncertain world is the focus of a new book by Professor Melissa Tyler from Essex Business School (EBS).

Challenging traditional views of vulnerability as a weakness, Professor Tyler, from EBS’s Centre for Work, Organisation and Society, argues that rather than a weakness to be overcome, vulnerability is a key aspect of the human condition that should be reimagined as a super strength.

“From the moment we are born to the end of our lives, we are vulnerable because we depend upon one another. Families, kinship networks, communities and societies are built on these connections,” she explained. “Recognising this vulnerability and our shared, but always socially situated inter-dependence could help us to build fairer and more caring ways of living, working and organising together.”

Around the world, many people are facing such difficult situations that their lives are unworkable. Some have been forced to leave their homes. Others struggle to access basic rights, safety or support. At the same time, the world is dealing with major problems such as a climate emergency and ongoing humanitarian crises.

Professor Tyler's book Organizing Vulnerability asks why, even in the midst of these shared global challenges, people often pull apart instead of coming together. Considering themes ranging from breathing to grieving and appearing, each chapter explores how socially situated vulnerability could be the basis for organising our lives in ways that better support relationships, solidarity and networks of care.

While the book examines how, even though vulnerability is something that we share, we are not vulnerable in the same ways or to the same extent. Some people face much greater risks and difficulties because of social and political conditions. Understanding these differences is important if we want to create a fairer society, one that values rather than tries to overcome vulnerability, as the basis of ethics and politics.

• Organizing Vulnerability, by Professor Melissa Tyler, is published by Bristol University Press.