Abstract
With the world facing an ongoing global pandemic, this special section on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) highlights a seminal role for organizational researchers in undertaking applied and impactful research in challenging environments. As an evolving disease, COVID-19 triggers a variety of possibilities on researching change precisely because governments and organizations have been forced to respond to it without previous experience on dealing with a pandemic of this magnitude. In this sense, COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity for real-time, multilevel research on a complex, important phenomenon. It is this possibility of letting this crisis drive our research that we highlight through six commentaries, as a means of promoting more applied research.
COVID-19 as Shock
In 1965, Alvin Toffler coined the term future shock to describe the stress and disorientation that people struggle to deal with in an environment of experiencing too much change in too short a period of time, and as a result, they suffer a (social or personal) shock. With this process, he observed that “the future invades our lives, and [so] it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing, individuals who experience it” (Toffler, 1970, p. 1). It is in this context—this real-time shock—that we promote in building applied organizational insights into COVID-19.
While we are all still trying to understand COVID-19, its origin, how it affects humans, and its management, this much we do know (see https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/events-as-they-happen): The World Health Organization was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown pathogen in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China on December 31, 2019. The epidemic escalated and rapidly spread around the world and was formally declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. The pandemic has led to a massive global public health campaign to slow the spread of the virus and manage its potential deadly effects. Clinical trials and investigations to learn more about the virus, its biology, epidemiology, and management are ongoing as the search for a vaccine progresses. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly represents a massive global health, economic, and social crisis. Daily life for millions has been upended. Workplaces in all sectors and of all types, as well as educational and vocational institutions, have shut down for extended periods of time. Millions have lost their jobs or taken pay and condition cuts. The health sector is facing severe strain with equipment and bed shortages.
These are the impacts that we now are aware of; however, the largest costs are predicted to come to bear over the long term (Kozlowski et al., 2020). Not coincidentally, given the recency of the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, and then decades of work on similar crises (see Reinhart & Rogoff, 2009) while facing a period of unknown length, the economic impact of the pandemic is easier to model (Gourio, 2012) and provide developed possible approaches (Ramelli & Wagner, 2020) and predictions (Zhang et al., 2020) than is its epidemiology and resolution. This visible impact assessment, alongside its accompanying economic catastrophe, has meant that interest and debate is currently clearly captured by obvious “pandemic themes”—money, health and mental health, social distancing, education, travel, and politics. After all, basic psychology (e.g., on anxiety, panic, loss, loneliness) and behavioral economics (e.g., on panic buying, social distancing and adherence to rules, motivation, and bandwagon effects) would suggest that focusing on these effects makes sense because they concentrate on explaining natural responses to something the world has not really experienced since the Spanish flu over a century ago (in 1918). Leading the way in this debate are economists, pharmaceutical scientists, epidemiologists, and government commentators. But it also highlights that given its complexity and that COVID-19 impacts will be long felt and organizationally deep with clear and prolonged effects on work and organizing, the situation needs an organizational lens to “complete the square.”
In this context, COVID-19 represents an opportunity for research and commentary from applied organizational scholars. Previously, we have made sense of crises, disasters, and emergencies as diverse as challenges to the way we research (e.g., Gordon & Howell, 1959), on the shape and consequences of nuclear (e.g., Cotton et al., 2015) and space accidents (e.g., Starbuck & Farjoun, 2005), on institutional effects of crises such as prison riots (e.g., Useem, 1985) and extreme contexts (e.g., Hällgren, Rouleau, & Rond, 2018), on traumatic events such as rape (e.g., Zilber, 2002) and 9/11 (e.g., Bacharach & Bamberger, 2007), on global financial crises (GFC; e.g., Reinhart & Rogoff, 2009), and, of course, disease such as SARS (e.g., Yang & Schwarz, 2016) and AIDS (e.g., Aiken & Sloane, 1997). But this research is often functional in nature, and frequently backward looking, and we have often been sidetracked by the research itself (e.g., how to), the message (e.g., on ethics education and GFC), and become marginalized by subject specialists (e.g., a health crisis promoting commentary by medical specialists). It is precisely this background, however, that provides the opportunity for a more applied and focused research of looking at COVID-19 through an organizational lens.
This special section on the pandemic as it unfolds is intended to be precisely such a response—a call to arms for more applied work and thinking on the crisis and its parts. The next few months and years will result in more research and more journals providing more depth of coverage on COVID-19. Given its original stated purpose as “to improve the research done in the behavioral sciences and to facilitate its application . . .” (1965, Vol 1, issue 1, p. 2), The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science serves as a prime contributor to getting a different kind of thinking on COVID-19 beyond what we expect to see appear in the near future. In this way, we recognize Toffler’s (1970) observation 50 years ago—future shock from COVID-19 is now—but we know little about the novel organizational and change aspects that the disease represents beyond our established and comfortable researching boundaries.
Phenomenal Research: COVID Applied
Key to this special section, and the debate we hope it sparks, is that COVID-19 provides opportunities for studying emerging phenomena at multiple levels. The pandemic is an example of an overarching phenomena that triggers responses to, and outcomes driven by the virus and its effect (and impact)—across all levels: behavioral, institutional, societal, and global. But given its origins and evolution, it offers conflicting detail that without close attention may skew research interest. For instance, as the pandemic evolves, it has become obvious that simple counts of cases and deaths cannot be trusted because the underlying methodology is so different from country to country. Initially, the number of confirmed cases was reported as a measure of how and where the pandemic was spreading, yet it soon became apparent that this number was fraught with uncertainty as it depended on available test equipment and capacity for testing. Later, the number of deaths was often reported, but again, countries adopted different standards and methods. For instance, some countries reported all deaths that had any connection to the virus, while others initially only counted deaths at hospitals, even though many older people died in institutions. So, as they are reported, numbers may not be trustworthy nor compared in any sensible way. Where does that leave organizational researchers?
We propose that a way forward is to focus on and push organizational scholarship to research the phenomenon rather than focus on an idea or known outcomes. COVID-19 is a primary example of what phenomenon-driven research (Schwarz & Stensaker, 2014; Shani et al., 2020) looks like. Rather than consider an area of interest and then match it to the pandemic, the virus is guiding and shaping research as it occurs, providing the perfect conditions for this way of undertaking research, albeit one that most researchers have not necessarily given thought to or undertaking in an explicit way. COVID-19 therefore pushes organizational researchers to focus from the beginning of a project on the phenomenon.
As a problem-oriented approach to research focused on capturing, documenting, and conceptualizing COVID-19 as it is observed, this phenomenon-based response drives or energizes research. With a goal of building knowledge through observable, discoverable fact or event—something that can be studied—leading with the phenomenon, relies on issues that interest the researcher or what the researcher finds as a project evolves—an approach to researching in organizations that assumes that phenomena produce knowledge. This knowledge-developing assumption is often taken for granted in social science research, leading to assumptions on the inherent place of knowledge in the act of researching. Given the growth of interest in allied, applied research (e.g., evidence based practice; question-driven, problem-based research; explanatory reasoning), there clearly is an established tradition that provides researchers an opportunity to expand our personal repertoires for conducting research on the pandemic in the future. It is this ability to deliver engaging and impactful knowledge that we promote in advancing an applied reading of COVID-19.
In his treatise, Toffler argued that the rate and speed of change have just as much an impact on us as does its directions, and the destinations it takes us to—that the stress and disorientation that occurs during periods of rapid shock needs understanding and tools for applying. And it is in this context that we sought out the commentaries that appear in this special section on COVID-19: on appreciative inquiry (by Ron Fry and David Cooperrider), on leading change (by John Amis and Brian Janz), on metaphor (by Cliff Oswick, David Grant, & Rosie Oswick), on institutional order and change (by Hokyu Hwang and Markus Höllerer), on agile and sustainable organizations (by Chris Worley and Jules Claudy), and on employee communication (by Karin Sanders, Phong Nguyen, Dave Bouckenooghe, Alannah Rafferty, & Gavin Schwarz).
The organizational challenges wrought by COVID-19 present all of us with immense personal challenges. But they also act as an opportunity for how, what, and where we research and what we practice. The crisis requires large-scale behavior change and places significant burdens on individuals, prompting the real need from the social and behavioral sciences to help understand and then align behavior with the projected outcomes and effects. We look forward to your reactions, and the research that follows. Let’s start the conversation.
