ABSTRACT
This commentary examines the potential impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on firms' organization designs and speculate on how the pandemic may influence organization design research. By organizational design, I mean an organization's optimal levels of differentiation and integration given relevant internal and external contingencies. In this regard, a key distinction is between the short-run, that is, the situation in the aftermath of the decision by a large number of countries, international associations, and other agencies that the health crisis was a pandemic that required drastic measures, and the long run in which the disease is better understood and handled. The temporal frame is likely to crucially matter to the effect of the pandemic on firms' organization designs. The long run may mean everything from a complete reversal to the pre-pandemic situation to a more or less permanent situation of sporadic outbreaks and lock-downs that require more social distancing. Whichever scenario manifests will have important implications for organization design. However, even with a relatively quick reversal to pre-pandemic trading and interaction patterns, there are likely to be permanent traces left on organization design. For organization design scholars the pandemic presents not only a unique test-bed for examining existing principles of organizational design but might also stimulate new theory related to the temporal dimension of organization design and the influence of path-dependence. Thus, reflecting on the pandemic suggests that major external contingencies have different short-term as compared to long-term effects on organizational design, but also that major disturbances are likely to leave 'permanent' traces on the design of organizations - notions that seem absent from extant organization design research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Background: Tracking person-to-person SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the population is important to under-stand the epidemiology of community transmission and may contribute to the containment of SARS-CoV-2. Neither contact tracing nor genomic surveillance alone, however, are typically sufficient to achieve this objective. Aim: We demonstrate the successful appli-cation of the integrated genomic surveillance (IGS) system of the German city of Dusseldorf for tracing SARS-CoV-2 transmission chains in the population as well as detecting and investigating travel-associated SARS-CoV-2 infection clusters. Methods: Genomic sur-veillance, phylogenetic analysis, and structured case interviews were integrated to elucidate two geneti-cally defined clusters of SARS-CoV-2 isolates detected by IGS in Dusseldorf in July 2021. Results: Cluster 1 (n = 67 Dusseldorf cases) and Cluster 2 (n = 36) were detected in a surveillance dataset of 518 high-quality SARS-CoV-2 genomes from Dusseldorf (53% of total cases, sampled mid-June to July 2021). Cluster 1 could be traced back to a complex pattern of transmission in nightlife venues following a putative importation by a SARS-CoV-2-infected return traveller (IP) in late June;28 SARS-CoV-2 cases could be epidemiologically directly linked to IP. Supported by viral genome data from Spain, Cluster 2 was shown to represent multi-ple independent introduction events of a viral strain circulating in Catalonia and other European coun-tries, followed by diffuse community transmission in Dusseldorf.
ABSTRACT
What can strategic management research do to help to make sense of the COVID-19 disruption, and what are the implications of the disruption for the strategy field? I argue that among the streams in strategy research, behavioral strategy is uniquely situated in terms of providing a psychologically based interpretive lens that could lend great insight into decision making in extreme conditions. However, the disruption also points to weakness in current behavioral strategy thinking, notably with respect to the role of models vis-à-vis judgment in strategic decision making, the deeply social (political, institutional) nature of strategy making, and the treatment of fundamental uncertainty.