Dennis Schoeneborn, Professor of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School, and Visiting Professor of Organization Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, discusses our use of metaphors when discussing the Covid-19 pandemic. He argues that the “current crisis situation is also a crisis of collective imagination and sensemaking”. Check out the full blog post at the Business of Society blog.
The “Talking About Organizations” podcast is always worth listening to. It does what it promises to do: engaging in conversations about management and organization studies, usually on the basis of foundational publications and theories, but then veering into their contemporary relevance. In it’s most recent episode, it discusses the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a 17th century trading firm which faced multiple pandemics during its early existence. Based on two publications – O’Leary, Orlikowski, and Yates’ 2002 chapter titled Distributed work over the centuries: Trust and control in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1826” and Hackett’s Averting disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries published in 2004 in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine – it discusses parallels to today’s pandemic.
In this video, Saïd Business School (University of Oxford) professors Andrew Stephen, Anette Mikes and Marc Ventresca reflect on the challenges involved in situations rife with technical complexity, public anxiety and political issues, using evidence from the Chilean Mining Rescue and the Kursk submarine disaster, and discuss ways in which crisis can give way to innovation.
Linking to our session on inequality, organisations and COVID19, Hari Bapuji and his colleagues (2020) recently published a research paper on how inequality links to the COVID19 pandemic. Please find the paper “Corona crisis and inequality: Why management research needs a societal turn” here: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6552/
We welcome our first guest lecturer, Professor Markus Reihlen from the Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. Professor Reihlen has recorded a lecture on crisis management for his Strategic Management class at Leuphana, which of course also had to be digitalized this term. He kindly shared his recording, which is a great complement to our classes because it gives a basic introduction into different kinds of crises and also an outlook on the strategic management of crisis. You find the lecture on our Youtube channel here.
In a special issue forthcoming in the British Journal of Sociology compiled shortly before the Covid19 outbreak, an interdisciplinary group of scholars around Noortje Marres and David Stark examine the role of testing in society which, as the authors show, clearly reaches far beyond medical tests. Each article is briefly introduced in short videos here and put in relation to the current Covid19 crisis, which is putting us all to test in various way – us as people, our social relations, our organizations, and our institutions. What a great complementary source to our course material!
Leider nur auf Deutsch verfügbar, aber ein tolles neues Format der Wissenschaftskommunikation: JKU Rektor Meinhard Lukas hat Anfang April den JKU Corona Update gestartet, eine Serie von Zoom-Videointerviews mit Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern der JKU und dazugeladenen Gastrednern. Rektor Lukas stellte aktuelle Thesen und Entwicklungen in Form von kritischen Fragen an die Kolleginnen und Kollegen zu Diskussion und die Ergebnisse über einen Youtube-Kanal der breiten Öffentlichkeit zur Verfügung. Ich selbst wurde dazu befragt, inwieweit die Krise eine Chance für nachhaltige Entwicklung in verschiedenen Bereichen, beispielsweise nachhaltige Wertschöpfungsketten oder dem Klimawandel, bieten kann.
Business sustainability researchers provide insights, evidence-based solutions, and research suggestions for the Covid-19 pandemic and for other natural environmental disasters and stressors. On this blog, they are sharing their thoughts on the current crisis in relation to business and management research. A summary and six key takeaways can be found here.
In case you want to read more widely about the cornavirus crisis, learning about the history of pandemics or gaining deeper insights into virology research, there are now several interesting sources of information available.
JSTOR, for instance, provides openly available access to a collection of essays and articles from different disciplines published over the last five years that provide “historical, scientific, and cultural context for this unprecedented situation”. The list is updated regularly with new insights.
A team around publicist, writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov, supported by artificial intelligence and algorithms, is providing curated syllabi on different topics each week, “featuring pieces that cut across text, video and audio”. It has a regular special edition on Covid-19.
As of today, we proudly present version 1.0 of the standard course syllabus as well as all readings and assignments for the twelve classes of the course. Of course, we expect and encourage instructors who teach the course to tailor the course syllabus and assignments to their individual needs. So take the syllabus as one potential way of teaching the course.
Videos of the mini lectures will follow over the course of the next two weeks, so stay tuned.
Organizing in Times of Crisis 