COVID‐19 Pandemic in the New Era of Big Data Analytics: Methodological Innovations and Future Research Directions

Although scholars in management recognize the value of harnessing big data to understand, predict and respond to future events, there remains little or very limited overview of how various analytics techniques can be harnessed to provide the basis for guiding scholars in studying contemporary management topics and global grand challenges raised by the COVID‐19 pandemic. In this Methodology Corner, we present a review of the methodological innovations in studying big data analytics and how they can be better utilized to examine contemporary organizational issues. We provide insights on methods in descriptive/diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and how they can be leveraged to study ‘black swan' events such as the COVID‐19‐related global crisis and its aftermath's implications for managers and policymakers.

E-Commerce Policy and International Business.

The rise of digitization and information and communication technologies (ICT) is playing a vital role in facilitating global trade and business activities and in overcoming cross-border transaction costs. In so doing, it offers firms significant benefits and opportunities to compete on a global scale, as witnessed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The growth and widespread diffusion of internet-enabled technologies and platforms have created numerous opportunities for firms to provide products and services across both developed and developing markets. Yet, limited research has been conducted in the international business domain to explore the rise of ecommerce and its implications for international business scholarship. In this focused issue, we present an examination of the role played by e-commerce in international business, paying particular attention to the policy aspect of e-commerce and issuing a call for a greater integration of e-commerce policy in international business research.

E-Commerce Policy and International Business

The rise of digitization and information and communication technologies (ICT) is playing a vital role in facilitating global trade and business activities and in overcoming cross-border transaction costs. In so doing, it offers firms significant benefits and opportunities to compete on a global scale, as witnessed during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The growth and widespread diffusion of internet-enabled technologies and platforms have created numerous opportunities for firms to provide products and services across both developed and developing markets. Yet, limited research has been conducted in the international business domain to explore the rise of ecommerce and its implications for international business scholarship. In this focused issue, we present an examination of the role played by e-commerce in international business, paying particular attention to the policy aspect of e-commerce and issuing a call for a greater integration of e-commerce policy in international business research.

A Typology of Emerging Market SMEs’ COVID-19 Response Strategies: The Role of TMTs and Organizational Design

The unique challenges posed by COVID-19 call for new insights into how firms respond to multiheaded and multistage evolving global crises. Whilst prior research acknowledges the potential role flexible organizational designs and top management teams (TMTs) have for crisis management, these bodies of literature have evolved separately with limited cross-fertilization. In this study, we seek to provide a contextualized explanation of research phenomena by drawing upon multiple layers of context ? namely the environment, TMT and organisational context. Our findings provide vital insights into how emerging market Indian SMEs? organizational designs and TMT configurations led to differential COVID-19 crisis response strategies. We develop a typology that identifies four strategic responses and illustrate that not all emerging market SMEs are vulnerable at the time of crisis. Our findings extend knowledge on how emerging market SMEs can navigate external shocks such as those caused by COVID-19. In particular, our research has implications for policymakers and emerging market firms seeking to understand and implement effective organizational designs and policies that can weather the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as future multiheaded and multistage black swan crises.

Reimagining global food value chains through effective resilience to COVID-19 shocks and similar future events: A dynamic capability perspective.

The restructuring of global value/supply chains gained increasing attention as the unprecedented COVID-19 echoed around the world. Yet, the COVID-19 related theory-driven, large scale quantitative, and empirical studies are relatively scarce. This study advances the extant literature by empirically investigating how do firms in the global food value chains (GFVCs) re-imagine their businesses structure in response to the COVID-19-becoming more resilient and competitive to the current pandemic and similar future events. We leverage a unique data of 231 senior managers of the Australian GFVCs and examine their firms' response strategies. Drawing upon key insights from the dynamic capability view, we find that GFVCs' competitiveness is achieved when exposure to COVID-19 shocks elicits dynamic capabilities-readiness, response, recovery-and these capabilities work jointly and sequentially to cultivate resilience. A key finding of this study is that firms with domestic plus global value chain partners are more resilient than those having only global business partners. This finding implies that excessive reliance on offshoring sometimes becomes lethal, especially amid unexpected and prolonged global shocks and, therefore, companies should strike a balance between domestic and global business partners to remain competitive. These findings offer important contributions to theory, practice, and UN sustainable development goals.

COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration.

Inspired by burgeoning scholarly interest in the role of digitalization in the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic is driving or constraining the digitalization of businesses around the globe. We contend that COVID-19 is "the great accelerator" in fast-tracking the existing global trend towards embracing modern emerging technologies ushering in transformations in lifestyle, work patterns, and business strategies. Thus, COVID-19 has evolved to be a kind of "catalyst" for the adoption and increasing use of digitalization in work organization and the office, alongside presenting foreseen and unforeseen opportunities, challenges, and costs-leading to negative and positive feedback loops. In this article, we develop and advance a conceptual model by linking the different forces for and against digitalization in response to the pandemic. Our analysis indicates that adoption of emerging technologies may be hindered by vested external interests, nostalgia, and employer opportunism, as well as negative effects on employee well-being that undermine productivity, work-life balance, and future of work. Whilst digitalization may bring new opportunities, the process imparts risks that may be hard to mitigate or prepare for. Finally, we draw out the wider theoretical and practical implications of our analysis.

COVID-19 and business renewal: Lessons and insights from the global airline industry.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the fortunes of multiple companies around the globe. Accordingly, questions are increasingly being asked about how organizations can revitalize during and after a crisis. Yet, we have limited understanding of how organizations renew themselves during crises over time. We explore this question through the lens and examination of two South-Asian airlines: Pakistan International Airlines and Sri Lankan Airlines. The cases offer important insights into the reasons behind underperformance of state-controlled enterprises and renewal activities. We shed light on strategic renewal (SR) in the wake of increasing liberalization and deregulations in the global airline industry. To this end, we propose a four-stage approach towards renewing such underperforming organizations to respond effectively to black swan events and external shocks.

COVID-19 Pandemic in the New Era of Big Data Analytics: Methodological Innovations and Future Research Directions

Although scholars in management recognize the value of harnessing big data to understand, predict and respond to future events, there remains little or very limited overview of how various analytics techniques can be harnessed to provide the basis for guiding scholars in studying contemporary management topics and global grand challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Methodology Corner, we present a review of the methodological innovations in studying big data analytics and how they can be better utilized to examine contemporary organizational issues. We provide insights on methods in descriptive/diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and how they can be leveraged to study 'black swan' events such as the COVID-19-related global crisis and its aftermath's implications for managers and policymakers.

Strategic ambidexterity and its performance implications for emerging economies multinationals

Emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) are attracting significant scholarly attention in the international business and general management domain. The extant research has provided important insights into the EMNEs’ internationalization processes and whether the existing theories adequately explain their outward investment motives. This special issue aims to provide a platform suited to extend the current understanding of the rapid rise of EMNEs and examine the vital role played by strategic ambidexterity and its performance implications for the EMNEs. The current research on EMNEs has failed to adequately leverage strategic ambidexterity and link it with the post-entry performance of EMNEs. We argue that the strategic ambidexterity perspective offers valuable opportunities to understand the post-entry performance of EMNEs as they expand into developed and developing markets. The article also highlights important areas for future research by taking into account the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

Multinational enterprises and the governance of sustainability practices in emerging market supply chains: An agile governance perspective

Advanced economy multinational enterprises (AMNEs) face idiosyncratic challenges related to the governance of their sustainability practices in their emerging market supply chains. One way for AMNEs to address these challenges would be by adopting agile sustainability governance mechanisms. Drawing on the theories of experimentalist governance and deliberation, we propose a processual framework suited to develop agile sustainability governance mechanisms. We explore the challenges to supplier participation and the factors that enable an authentic dialogue in the process. We contribute to the scholarship on transnational governance and strategic agility, and offer practical implications which are also relevant for disruptions like COVID-19.

COVID-19 and business failures: The paradoxes of experience, scale, and scope for theory and practice

In light of growing scholarly works on business failure, across the social science domains, it is surprising that past studies have largely overlooked how extreme environmental shocks and ‘black swan’ events such as those caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and other global crises, can precipitate business failures. Drawing insights from the current literature on business failure and the unfolding event of COVID-19, we highlight the paradoxes posed by novel exogenous shocks (that is, shocks that transcend past experiences) and the implications for SMEs. The pandemic has accelerated the reconfiguration of the relationship between states and markets, increasing the divide between those with political connections and those without, and it may pose new legitimacy challenges for some players even as others seem less concerned by such matters, whilst experiential knowledge resources may be both an advantage and a burden.