Introduction: Shock Chains and Parallel Shocks: Towards a Social Science of the Recovery Society

Any one shock is never isolated from other shocks and any one recovery process will be complicated by further related and unrelated shocks and their related recovery processes. This chapter highlights the interactions that occur between shocks that are experienced in parallel or simultaneously and those that occur linearly and take the form of shock chains. These shock processes suggest that there needs to be further social science research on the complexity of shock and related recovery processes, to contribute to academic debate, but also to inform practice, policy development, and implementation. There needs to be a new social science research agenda on characterizing the features of the recovery society. A key issue is that there are many alternative recovery pathways and that each emerges through a set of iterative relationships between people, place, organisations, institutions, and governance processes. These alternatives reflect path dependency and previous decisions and related investments but are complicated by place-based intersectionality that compounds the ways in which parallel shocks and shock chains, and related recovery processes, interact with one another forming highly contextualised shock-related impacts and which then mediate the impacts of recovery processes in practice.