Reflexivity and Practice in COVID-19: Qualitative Analysis of Student Responses to Improvisation in Their Research Methods Course

The improvisations needed to adapt to COVID-19 teaching and learning conditions affected students and faculty alike. This study uses chaos theory and improvisation to examine an undergraduate communication research methods course that was initially delivered synchronously/face-to-face and then transitioned to asynchronous/online in March 2020. Reflective writings were collected at the end of the semester with the 25 students enrolled in the course and follow-up interviews conducted with six students. Thematic analysis revealed that available and attentive student-participant, student-student, and student-instructor communication complemented learner-centered and person-centered goals, but unavailable or inattentive communication, especially with participants and students in the research team, contributed to negative perceptions of learner-centered goals. Implications explore how communication research methods pedagogy may achieve greater available, attentive, and learner/person-oriented goals through modeling, resourcing, reflexivity, and appreciation in online and offline course delivery to enhance shifts in communication pedagogy, whether voluntarily or involuntarily initiated by faculty.

Improvisation as a place of discovery and reinvention in times of pandemic

In this interview, improviser from Minas Gerais Dudude Herrman talks about improvisation, about the Decanto de Danca project and improvising for the screen. The interview was done with the artist via WhatsApp, as we are still experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic. It aimed to understand how the artist and researcher Herrmann understands improvisation and how it was used on canvas. The artist gives us valuable clues in this interview to understand her relationship with improvisation.

Rethinking the improvisation of digital health technology: A niche construction perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shock waves through healthcare organisations and catalysed an impromptu digital shift, creating a demand for telemedicine and other digital health technologies. Under such conditions, improvisation, adaptation, and innovation emerge as core dimensions to an organisation's capacity to generate a response to crisis. This paper integrates a process perspective on the radical improvisation of a digital health technology and investigates how the radical improvisation of a digital health technology emerges and develops during a health crisis. Through a combination of supporting case evidence and literature, a multi-phase conceptual process model anchored in the crisis management cycle and illustrating the radical improvisation of digital health technology is developed and proposed. We conclude with discussion on the long-term implications of radical improvisation and crisis learning, with possible theoretical explanation using niche construction theory, and providing suggestions for future information systems and crisis management research © The Author(s) 2022. (Copyright notice)

Creating community and building connection through play: An improvisational response to the coronavirus pandemic

Responding to the call for 'social distancing' people around the world engaged in play together via the internet. While these activities could be seen as a diversion, they can also be understood as, along with wearing masks , essential to people surviving the pandemic. This qualitative study explores the experiences of people who participated in Creating Connection and Building Community Through Play, a series of five synchronous improvisational play sessions on Zoom. The sessions averaged 83 people with a total of 287 individuals from 29 countries participating in one or more sessions. Analysis revealed that virtual activities focused on relationality, improvisation and play provided people with connection and community in the midst of isolation, and that co-creating these experiences was emotionally healing for many. The findings advance our understanding of the importance of adult play for building and maintaining emotional health, creating community, and responding to ongoing challenges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

La construction de l'action collective solidaire en contexte pandémique

Par son intensité, la pandémie de Covid-19 a révélé la vulnérabilité des organisations tout en témoignant de capacités de réponses collectives imprévues. Cet article montre que le contexte extrême a engendré de multiples ruptures, mais aussi des improvisations collectives, propices à l'expérimentation et à l'apprentissage, portées par des valeurs de solidarité.Alternate :The intensity of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerability of organisations, while at the same time demonstrating unforeseen collective response capacities. This article shows that the extreme context generated multiple disruptions, but also collective improvisations, conducive to experimentation and learning, supported by values of solidarity.

Music Community, Improvisation, and Social Technologies in COVID-Era Música Huasteca.

This article examines two interrelated aspects of Mexican regional music response to the coronavirus crisis in the música huasteca community: the growth of interactive huapango livestreams as a preexisting but newly significant space for informal community gathering and cultural participation at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and the composition of original verses by son huasteco performers addressing the pandemic. Both the livestreams and the newly created coronavirus disease (COVID) verses reflect critical improvisatory approaches to the pandemic in música huasteca. The interactive livestreams signaled an ad hoc community infrastructure facilitated by social media and an emerging community space fostered by Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activists. Improvised COVID-related verses presented resonant local and regional themes as a community response to a global crisis. Digital ethnography conducted since March 2020 revealed a regional burst of musical creativity coupled with DIY intentionality, a leveling of access to virtual community spaces, and enhanced digital intimacies established across a wide cultural diaspora in Mexico and the USA. These responses were musically, poetically, and organizationally improvisational, as was the overall outpouring of the son huasteco music inspired by the coronavirus outbreak. Son huasteco is a folk music tradition from the Huasteca, a geo-cultural region spanning the intersection of six states in central Mexico. This study examines a selection of musical responses by discussing improvisational examples in both Spanish and the indigenous language Nahuatl, and in the virtual musical communities of the Huasteca migrant diaspora in digital events such as "Encuentro Virtual de Tríos Huastecos," the "Huapangos Sin Fronteras" festival and competition, and in the nightly gatherings on social media platforms developed during the pandemic to sustain the Huastecan cultural expression. These phenomena have served as vibrant points of transnational connection and identity in a time where physical gatherings were untenable.

Character-enabled improvisation and the new normal: A paradox perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and exacerbated organizational paradoxes felt by individuals largely because of the nostalgia individuals feel for the "old” normal while facing the need to let go in order to create a "new” normal. We position improvisation as a synthesis-type approach to working through the paradoxes of the pandemic. Furthermore, we look at individual differences that underpin the ability to improvise, and identify that it is the strength of character and character-based judgment of the individual that enables the enactment of a focal context, the choice to improvise, and the act of effectively improvising to work through paradoxes. Linking character to improvisation, and, vice versa, improvisation to the development of character, reveals the importance of dimensions such as courage, humility, temperance, transcendence, humanity, and collaboration in the practice of improvisation. © The Author(s) 2022.

Pandemic, power and paradox: Improvising as the New Normal during the COVID-19 crisis

The global COVID-19 pandemic made salient various paradoxical tensions, such as the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective safety, between short term and long-term consequences of adaptation to the new conditions, the power implications of sameness (COVID-19 was non-discriminatory in that all were affected in one way or another) and difference (yet not all were affected equally due to social differences), whereas most businesses became poorer under lockdown, others flourished;while significant numbers of workers were confined to home, some could not return home;some thrived while working from home as others were challenged by the erosion of barriers between their private and working lives. Rapid improvisational responding and learning at all levels of society presented itself as a naturally occurring research opportunity for improvisation scholars. This improvisation saw the arrival of a ‘New Normal', eventually defined as ‘learning to live with COVID-19'. The five articles in this special issue capture critical aspects of improvisation, paradoxes and power made salient by the COVID-19 pandemic in contexts ranging from higher-education, to leadership, to medical care and virtue ethics. In their own ways, each breaks new ground by contributing novel insights into improvisation scholarship. © The Author(s) 2022.

Power, politics and improvisation: Learning during a prolonged crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has caught most organizations off guard. They have had to adapt their operations rapidly, and with the pandemic persisting, continuously improvise. While such an external jolt to organizations might unsettle operations, it does not remove the fact that organizations are sites of power relations and political activity. In this article, we examine the influence of power and politics on learning from improvisation, through a qualitative longitudinal case study of an Australian university during COVID-19. We trace improvisations with the use of the social media platform WeChat, which was eventually adopted, after several changes in forms of improvisation, as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study contributes to the literature on learning from improvisation, and explains how different forms of improvisation morph into one another under the simultaneous influence of power relations and learning. © The Author(s) 2022.

Jam Session's Digital Transformation: From Improvisation to Collective Composition

In 2020 in Quebec, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation of many musical events. In addition to the concerts, it was also the jam sessions that had to stop. These events usually bring together music lovers for collective improvisation sessions framed by rules that vary depending on the location, the participants, and the genre of music. This article focuses more specifically on a community of electronic music producers and fans who have chosen to transpose into the digital environment the jam event they used to organize. Our research aims to understand what digital transposition does to collective creation and through which technical devices it materializes. In the face of both technical and organizational constraints and limitations, the meaning of the jam is evolving from music played together to music produced and composed collectively. Thus, our research shows that the will to develop a temporary collective, common project encourages participants to negotiate with the potential format of the event.

Phronetic improvisation: A virtue ethics perspective

Traditional approaches to organizational improvisation treat it as a merely functional response to environmental constrains and unforeseen disruptions, neglecting its moral dimension, especially the valued ends improvisers aim to achieve. We attempt to address this gap by drawing on virtue ethics. In particular, we explore how phronetic improvisation is accomplished by drawing on the diary of an emergency-room physician, in which she describes her (and colleagues') experience of dealing with Covid-19 in a New York Hospital, during the first spike in March–April 2020. We argue that improvisation is phronetic insofar as practitioners actively care for the valued ends of their practice. In particular, practitioners seek to phronetically fulfil the internal goods of their practice, while complying with institutional demands, in the context of coping with situational exigencies. Phronetic improvisation involves paying attention to what is salient in the situation at hand, while informed by an open-ended commitment to valued ends and constrained by scarce resources, and driven by a willingness to meet what is at stake through adapting general knowledge to situational demands. Such an inventive process may involve reshaping the original internal goods of the practice, in light of important institutional constrains. © The Author(s) 2022.

Sounding the Polyphonic Cacophony of Macbeth with a Young Jozi Ensemble

Digital theatre-making initiatives that had emerged during Covid-19 lockdowns urged an interrogation of the languages of live theatre when, in South Africa, as the public arena reopened and social interaction resumed, reconfigured notions of theatre-making seemed apt. Reformulating and reimagining the operations of the medium, and the processes through which stage productions evolve, not only applied aspects of successful digital theatre but also aligned with the ideological imperatives of decolonisation. The Joburg Theatre Youth Development Programme production of Macbeth (2021) offered an opportunity to explore soundscape through the interplay of spoken word and non-semantic avian and animal calls. As a point of entry to staging the play, ensemble-based improvisation around developing a soundscape led to a more considered mapping of ornithological images, their connotations and theatrical efficacy. Extended play in generating birdcalls was instrumental in building performers' confidence in transposition and spontaneous translation from English to vernacular languages to give this rendition of Macbeth an edgy, contemporary, local tone. This article documents and addresses the rehearsal processes and some outcomes of the approach that was adopted.

Scaling up and scaling down: Improvisational handling of critical work practices during the COVID-19 pandemic

The aim of this article is to explore improvisational handling of critical work practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and interpret these practices from a learning perspective. Based on an interview study with representatives of private, public and intermediary organisations, the study identified three different types of improvisational handling as responses to the pandemic crisis involving 'scaling up' and 'scaling down' critical work practices. By 'scaling up' and 'scaling down', we refer to practices for which, due to the pandemic, it has been imperative to urgently scale up an existing operational process or develop a new process, and alternatively extensively scale down or cease an existing process. The types of improvisational handling differed depending on the discretion of involved actors in terms of the extent to which the tasks, methods and/or results were given beforehand. These types of improvisational handling resulted in temporary solutions that may become permanent after the pandemic. The framework and model proposed in the article can be used as a tool to analyse and learn from the changes in work practices that have been set in motion during the pandemic. Such learning may improve the ability to cope with future extensive crises and other rapid change situations.

Rethinking the improvisation of digital health technology: A niche construction perspective

[...]the use of technology in COVID-19 response efforts has become a major area of research for information systems (IS) and crisis management researchers (Aman et al., 2012;O'Leary, 2020;Pan et al., 2012;Stieglitz et al., 2018). [...]an analysis on the capacities and functions that the use of such technology's avails to a healthcare organisation during a crisis. The potential benefit and eventual use of technology solutions in the monitoring of chronic diseases is a natural progression in the use of technologies such as sensors, wearables, and mobile applications to solve societal problems (Bardhan et al., 2020;Payton et al., 2011). Commonly referred to as digital health technology/telemedicine/telecare emerged in response to operational challenges (ageing populations, increased service demand, and limited staff resources) faced by the healthcare sector.

Corporate social responsibility and frontline employees' service improvisation: The mediating role of self-efficacy.

The uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to frontline employees in tourism enterprises. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fulfillment of corporate social responsibility is of great significance. Based on the social cognitive theory, a conceptual framework was established to investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility and tourism service improvisation, along with the mediating role of self-efficiency. A total of 405 self-administered questionnaires were collected through three times. The results revealed that frontline employees' perception of corporate social responsibility had a significant positive impact on self-efficacy and service improvisation, as well as self-efficacy had a significant positive impact on service improvisation. Meanwhile, self-efficacy played a partial mediating role in the relationship between corporate social responsibility and service improvisation. Theoretical and practical implications, along with limitations and future research directions, were discussed.

The COVID carnival: Coping and recovering from the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic

Masamba Samba School is an Irish community music collective, working with disadvantaged communities through percussion and dance. This report looks at how an Irish community music project, Masamba Samba School, reacted to the demands of COVID-19 across a number of arenas – rehearsal, performance, teaching and research. By casting the virus as an uninvited stakeholder in our projects, we began to investigate what the ‘needs’ of the virus were, and whether we could accommodate them and still deliver meaningful work with our clients. Masamba Samba School’s story is somewhat unique in that it continued to operate throughout the lockdowns, first by concentrating on online and offline activities, and then by slowly moving back into the ‘in-person’ teaching space. This article begins with a brief description of how our projects operated pre-COVID-19 and then describes the immediate response to the pandemic (largely a shut-down), recounting how COVID-19 affected school operations in different ways, detailing the practical steps Masamba Samba School took to resume the teaching and research arms of its work and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these strategies. The final section speculates about the future for the organization and whether Masamba Samba School can return to the way it was. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

Shared space and between space: Considering Jewishness and race through interspecies dancing1

This autoethnographic text describes a dance and personal historical research process during COVID-19 quarantine and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As implications of a changing planet and unequal cross-cultural impacts and responsibilities become ever more clear, this research explores assimilation into Whiteness in Ashkenazi Jewish American lineage and how that relates to interspecies dancing. What is lost in this story of assimilation? What might interspecies collaborations teach us about relating cross-culturally? Whiteness and Jewishness are considered through histories of speaking and losing Yiddish and the role of Jewish dancers in early modern dance in New York. Interviews about Yiddish and assimilation are in dialogue with an improvisational dance practice with a border collie dog (whose ancestors helped colonize the United States). This interspecies movement practice and others (including complex evolutionary histories) connect to biologist Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing for insights about collaboration across differences. In thematically bringing Jewishness into performance practice, this research unravels layers of resistance, privilege and present racial inequities. The text looks to Audre Lorde and civil rights activist Eric K. Ward for coalition building practices: finding connection and finding ourselves are to be changed by our encounters without losing ourselves in the process. © 2022 Intellect Ltd.

Capabilities for enhancing supply chain resilience and responsiveness in the COVID-19 pandemic: exploring the role of improvisation, anticipation, and data analytics capabilities

Purpose This study aims to identify critical capabilities to address unforeseen and novel disruptions, such as those instigated by COVID-19, and explore their role as essential enablers of supply chain resilience and responsiveness, leading to improved performance. Design/methodology/approach The structural equation modeling technique was employed for analyzing the proposed associations using survey data from 206 manufacturers operating during the COVID-19 pandemic in a developing country, Pakistan. Findings Key findings show how improvisation and anticipation act distinctly yet jointly to facilitate supply chain resilience and responsiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, data analytics capability positively affects anticipation and improvisation, which mediate the effect of data analytics on supply chain resilience and responsiveness. Research limitations/implications The findings contribute to the theoretical and empirical understanding of the existing literature, suggesting that a combination of improvisation, anticipation and data analytics capabilities is highly imperative for enhancing supply chain resilience and responsiveness in novel and unexpected disruptions. Originality/value This is the first study to examine the impact of data analytics on improvisation and anticipation and the latter as complementary capabilities to enhance supply chain resilience and responsiveness. The empirical investigation explores the interplay among data analytics, improvisation, and anticipation capabilities for enhancing supply chain resilience, responsiveness, and performance during the unforeseen and novel disruptions, such as brought to bear by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lessons on small business resilience

Entrepreneurship researchers have studied resilience across various contexts, including at the micro (that is, owner/business) and macro (that is, cluster/ecosystem/region) levels, by drawing from a myriad of academic disciplines. This Special Issue (SI) provides an opportunity to link resilience at the micro- and macro-level since collective small business owner resilience is foundational to macro-level resilience within clusters, ecosystems and regions. This point has become evident as businesses worldwide face similar challenges and economic adversities due to the lockdowns during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The collection of papers on small business resilience in this SI indicates the psychological, organizational, and economic responses undertaken by small businesses to overcome challenges faced, where they promoted their human, social, and financial capital while finding other responses less helpful. We hope the research and questions uncovered as a result of this SI provide continued food for thought and grounds for future research in small business resilience.