Why the COVID-19 Crisis Is an Ethical Issue for Business: Evidence from the Australian JobKeeper Initiative.

The COVID-19 virus was unveiled to the world as a health crisis and later also as an economic crisis. For some organisations, it has become an ethical crisis. This is certainly the case for large organisations in Australia, where the way many enterprises handled a government wage subsidy called JobKeeper led to a public backlash, media pressure, and a variety of responses ranging from 'We acted legally' to the full return of the subsidy. Some organisations later reported profits, and the public response indicated concern about this behaviour, many considering it immoral despite it being legally compliant. It is, we contend, a question to which stakeholder theory can be applied, examining how organisations view and respond to the public. We use content analysis of mainstream media to provide information about public reactions and information from official sources to confirm corporate action. We show that there is a significant ethical component in the public response to the behaviour of organisations as they respond to the crisis. COVID has been an ethical, health, and financial crisis for these organisations. Public pressure, exerted in and through the media, made the general public a definite stakeholder.

Start-ups' business model changes during the COVID-19 pandemic: Counteracting adversities and pursuing opportunities.

This article investigates how start-ups have been affected by, and have responded to, the COVID-19 pandemic by analysing interview data from 32 Australian start-ups during Australia's second wave of COVID-19. A framework and visualisation were developed, capturing unexplored heterogeneity within these start-ups, depending whether the emphasis was upon opportunities or adversity, and the type and extent of business model changes. Six start-up types were identified: stable beneficiaries, business-as-usual continuers, digital adjusters, adversity survivors, opportunity graspers and lemonade makers. The findings suggest that most start-ups responded to the crisis through business model changes because of crisis-induced opportunities and crisis-induced adversity The anaysis found that the interplay between firm size and crisis influences whether start-ups focus on business model adaptation or business model innovation or a combination of both We thus contribute to the literature on business models, crisis management and a newly emerging field focusing on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for start-ups.