The impact of coronavirus on business: Developing service research agenda for a post-coronavirus world

Purpose: The coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a tremendous impact on companies worldwide. However, researchers have no clear idea of the key issues requiring their attention. This paper aims to close this gap by analysing all business-related posts on a coronavirus subreddit ("r/coronavirus") and identifying the main research streams that are guiding the research agenda for a post-coronavirus world. Design/methodology/approach: We use data from reddit, particularly the subreddit "r/coronavirus" to identify posts that reveal the impact of coronavirus on business. Our dataset has more than 200,000 posts. We used an artificial intelligence-based algorithm to scrape the data with business-related search terms, clean it and analyse the discussion topics. Findings: We show the key topics that address the impact of coronavirus on business, combining them into four themes: essential service provision, bricolage service innovation, responsible shopping practices and market shaping amid crisis. We discuss these themes and use them to develop a service research agenda. The results are reported against the backdrop of service research priorities. Originality/value: The study identifies four key themes that have emerged from the impact of coronavirus on business and that require scholarly attention. Our findings can guide service research with unique insights provided immediately after the coronavirus outbreak to conduct research that matters to business and helps people in vulnerable positions in a post-coronavirus world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Survival of the fittest: the multiple paths of entrepreneurial leadership driving adaptive innovation in uncertain environment

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the multiple influence paths or underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) on adaptive innovation from the perspectives of organizational learning and resource management, drawing on complex adaptive system theory.Design/methodology/approachWith a questionnaire survey of 317 senior and middle managers from different firms in China, structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized conceptual model, and bootstrapping method was employed to examine the multiple mediating effects.FindingsResults indicate that EL has a significant and positive effect on adaptive innovation. This relationship is partially mediated through exploitative learning, exploratory learning, resource bricolage and boundary-spanning integration, respectively. The impact of EL on adaptive innovation is also sequentially transmitted through exploitative learning and resource bricolage or exploratory learning and boundary-spanning integration.Originality/valueAdaptive innovation has become a firm competition strategy to cope with dynamic changes in current uncertain environment where EL can play its effectiveness to engage firms in such innovation activities. However, the question of why and how EL drives adaptive innovation has yet to be discussed. This study highlights the innovation effectiveness of EL and the triggering process of adaptive innovation, and contributes to several countermeasures for firms to implement leadership and innovation practices responding to uncertain environment.

Pandemic Makers: How Citizen Groups Mobilized Resources to Meet Local Needs in a Global Health Crisis: ET&P

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.

Analysing the Antecedents of Entrepreneurial Bootstrapping and Bricolage: A Modified Total Interpretive Structural Modelling and MICMAC Approach

This article seeks to systematically identify and model antecedents of entrepreneurial bootstrapping and bricolage to determine and interpret the relationships and hierarchy between them. Entrepreneurial bootstrapping and bricolage are key dynamic capabilities that help entrepreneurs access, accumulate and enhance resources to adapt to scarce business environments. The article employs a modified total interpretive structural modelling analysis to determine hierarchical inter-relationships between the antecedents and a Matrice d' Impacts Croises Multiplication Applique An Classment analysis to understand their driving and dependence powers. The results highlight that founder characteristics and human capital are placed at the lower levels, making them critical driving elements of the model along with environmental hostility and resource constraints. Entrepreneurial orientation, slack, external financial capital and entrepreneurial frugality are dependent variables, with social capital as a linkage variable. This study will guide entrepreneurs trying to implement resourcefulness behaviours to respond to the coronavirus disease-2019 crisis by prioritising driving antecedents to impact the dependent factors further. © 2023 Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India.

The unforgiving work environment of black African women domestic workers in a post-apartheid South Africa

In democratic South Africa, many Black African women are still subjugated by being employed as domestic workers. Increasing evidence emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic revealing unmistakable signs of modern-day slavery among South African Black domestic workers. This paper proposes a clinical model which examines how gender, class, and race intersections affect the ways in which specifically identified change agents offer new, transforming interventions via clinical intervention. Adopting a clinical approach augments identification of a specific social problem from a scientifically systematic applied approach built on applied theory. We report on the conditions facing vulnerable Black African women using a bricolage research approach. The resulting model explicitly identifies systemic inequalities and indicates how to reduce exploitation and protect workers. The bricolage approach aided the secondary qualitative analysis of complex bonded-labour intersections. The problem of Black African women living as bonded domestic labour is augmented by the girl children's primary socialisation, Western patriarchal re-socialisation which sustains apartheid, and race, class, occupational, and gender inequalities.

Prison, Material-Organizational Bricolage, and Precarious Frameworks of Normality in an Era of Disruption

Prison scholars have long noted prisoners' improvisation with materials and resources at hand (or bricolage) in ways that defy the prison regime. Yet longstanding scholarly perspectives which cite such bricolage as evidence for themes like "prison culture” or "resistance” have often distracted scholars from accounting for the specific features of organizational materials and operations that prisoners leverage in their bricolage, and distracted from the rather mundane nature of the practices—like grooming, cleaning, and eating—they thus serve. Drawing from interviews with de-incarcerated persons from a U.S. state prison system, and from documents memorializing the disruption of prison routines during COVID-19 pandemic in that same state, this article investigates the specific resources prisoners enlist in bricolage projects related to making and sharing meals. Those resources, I argue, are the material and organizational products and byproducts of the complex prison undertaking. The practices prisoners achieve are precarious, with low degrees of equifinality–there are only so many ways to accomplish them in contexts of comprehensive restriction. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened those delicate arrangements not only through problems in the acquisition of raw food materials, but also through disrupted institutional routines which offer the resources necessary to coordinate, assemble, and transform those materials into meals. This pattern comes into focus when the "prison food system” is approached as a consumption system like any other, though one which operates in a strictly regulated context with minimal materials and deeply curtailed choice. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Together Strong or Falling Apart? Coping with COVID-19 in Smallholder Irrigated Agriculture

Coping, surviving and living with different kinds of crisis is a recurrent challenge to those governing groundwater as a common resource. In this paper, we mobilise ideas about the functioning of the state and of processes of bricolage to explain the functioning of institutions governing groundwater during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on empirical material from one irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe we argue that such institutions show signs both of transformation and degeneration over the course of the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis shows the emergence of temporary and innovative ways of collectively organising around groundwater which ensure improved access to water during the pandemic. Such new ways of doing things draw on different sources of authority and legitimacy in shaping governance arrangements. However, as the pandemic situation becomes the ‘new normal', collective arrangements degenerate into a pre-Covid-19 state, or worse, further restricting access and representation for some people. © 2023 The Author(s).

Bricolage as an effective tool for the survival of owner-managed SMEs during crises

This study analyzes how the resources and capabilities of the owner-manager influence the firm's capacity to survive during crises. We conceptualize that only the deliberate use of available resources (bricolage) can enhance this capacity, and that "making-do" behaviors mediate the influence of the owner's social and human resources on the firm's capacity to survive crises. Based on a sample of 462 Chilean owner-managed small and medium enterprises (SME), we test our hypotheses using a complementary partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set-qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach. The results indicate that when founders deliberatively use their social and cognitive resources, they enhance the firm's capacity to survive in crisis environments. The fsQCA results complement these outcomes by showing that low levels of survival capacity are related to low levels of bricolage and founders' ties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Momentum lost or creating new constellations? Insights from an exercise-at-work project during the COVID-19 pandemic – a mixed methods approach

Exercise-at-work programmes have been identified as venues to decrease inequalities in physical activity and exercise between socioeconomic groups and to improve employees' health and wellbeing. Drawing on a multiple institutional logics perspective and adopting a mixed-methods approach, this paper investigates how employees, exercise-ambassadors and managers at five Danish workplaces experience Covid-19 induced changes to a 1-year exercise-at-work project, and how these changes impacted upon the workplace. Our results suggest that Covid-19 and the altered format of exercise and delivery polarized employees' opportunities for exercise at work. However, the generally positive experiences of exercise-at-work activities and their influence on social environment and collaboration (identified prior to Covid-19 lockdown) remained among those employees who continued with activities. Self-organized adaptions and models of employee exercise which emerged suggest that community logic endured despite the crisis. We show how Covid-19 induced organizational changes led to interplays between institutional logics, with family and state logics becoming more prominent. Specifically, the exercise-at-work programme changed from an aligned model, with complementary logics and minimal conflict, to a model where logics of profession and corporation became dominant at the expense of community logic (exercise-ambassadors activities), but constrained by a state and a family logic. © The Author(s) 2022.

Resource Scarcity and Humanitarian Social Innovation: Observations from Hunger Relief in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Humanitarian social enterprises (HSEs) are facing mounting pressure to incorporate social innovation into their practice. This study thus identifies how HSEs leverage organizational capabilities toward developing social innovation. Specifically, it considers how resource scarcity and operating circumstances affect the capabilities used by HSEs for developing social innovation, using a longitudinal case study approach with qualitative data from 12 hunger-relief HSEs operating in the United States. Based on 59 interviews with 31 managers and directors and related documents, several propositions are posited. The findings suggest that resource availability (i.e., scarcity vs. abundance) leads some HSEs to focus on developing social innovation using their collaborative capabilities, while others leverage their absorptive capacity. Further, HSEs adjust their approach to developing social innovation based on whether they are operating in ordinary circumstances (i.e., before the COVID pandemic) or extraordinary ones (i.e., during the COVID pandemic). Interestingly, the findings suggest that the organizational capabilities used by HSEs are adjusted as these enterprises become more familiar with extraordinary operating circumstances. For example, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, resource-scarce HSEs focused on parallel bricolage to develop social innovation. Subsequently, they focused on selective bricolage. The findings offer novel insights by relating the social innovation of social enterprises to crisis management. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-021-05014-9.

Pandemic sociomaterial bricolage: how vulnerable communities used social media to tackle the COVID-19 crisis

Purpose: This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city. Findings: In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed. Research limitations/implications: Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations. Originality/value: This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Bricolage as an effective tool for the survival of owner-managed SMEs during crises

This study analyzes how the resources and capabilities of the owner-manager influence the firm's capacity to survive during crises. We conceptualize that only the deliberate use of available resources (bricolage) can enhance this capacity, and that "making-do” behaviors mediate the influence of the owner's social and human resources on the firm's capacity to survive crises. Based on a sample of 462 Chilean owner-managed small and medium enterprises (SME), we test our hypotheses using a complementary partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy set-qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach. The results indicate that when founders deliberatively use their social and cognitive resources, they enhance the firm's capacity to survive in crisis environments. The fsQCA results complement these outcomes by showing that low levels of survival capacity are related to low levels of bricolage and founders' ties.

Strategizing in pluralistic organizations: extending theoretical frames to include disrupted contexts

Strategy work in pluralistic organizations has been investigated from different perspectives, including Actor-Network Theory, Conventionalist Theory, and the social practice perspective. However, these perspectives have been used to understand and influence strategy work in "business-as-usual," rather than disrupted contexts. There is a challenge in understanding practices and processes that underpin the strategy work of pluralistic organizations facing disrupted contexts. This paper uses a narrative literature review to suggest the "improvised order" perspective for studying such strategy work by synthesizing and connecting three theoretical concepts: (dis)order, space, and bricolage. The improvised order perspective offers a complementary lens to the literature on strategy work in pluralistic organizations by showing the complexity of navigating between disorder and order, transforming space, and bringing to the fore practices required for strategy work in disrupted contexts. This paper also offers a set of propositions, which can stimulate future research on strategy work in pluralistic organizations facing disrupted contexts.

Pandemic Makers: How Citizen Groups Mobilized Resources to Meet Local Needs in a Global Health Crisis

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms-augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating-that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.

Supply chain resilience and business responses to disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose>At its peak, the COVID-19 pandemic has created disruption to food supply chains in the UK and for the entire world. Although societal changes created some resilience within the supply chains, high volatility in demand creates supply, logistics and distribution issues. This is reflected in the economic instability of businesses and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In this paper, the authors explore factors behind this initial disruption in the supply chains and offer suggestions to businesses based on the established practices and theories.Design/methodology/approach>The authors use mixed methods research. First, the authors conducted an exploratory study by collecting data from published online sources. Then, the authors analysed possible scenarios from the available information using regression. The authors then conducted two interviews with UK retail sector representatives. These scenarios have been compared and contrasted to provide decision-making points to businesses and supply chain players to tackle current and any future potential disruptions.Findings>The findings from the current exploratory study inform the volatility of supply chains. The authors suggested some possible responses from businesses, during and after the pandemic.Originality/value>The regression model provides a decision-making approach to help supply chain businesses during the pandemic outbreak. Once a complete data set of COVID-19 is available, the authors can create a resilience model that can help businesses and supply chains.

A Study From a Psychological Perspective of High Performance to Explore the Relationship Among Resource Bricolage, Social Capital, Entrepreneurial Attitude, and Intention.

COVID-19 caused a serious increase in competition due to limited resources. Obviously, it influenced the entrepreneurs' motivation. The entrepreneurial intention, social capital, and resource bricolage ability of individuals were important issues. Thus, exploring an individual's mindset from a psychological perspective of high performance was the advanced issue to deal with social capital promotion. This study developed an instrument adapted from related scales that consisted of 27 items and four factors: social capital, entrepreneurial attitude, resource bricolage, and entrepreneurial intention. The data was collected through an online survey in China and Taiwan by purposive sampling. A total of 692 valid samples provided data for the statistical process. A multiple regression technique was employed in the data process. The instrument passed the validity and reliability test. Data analysis results showed that social capital can positively predict entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, entrepreneurial attitude will affect entrepreneurial intention dramatically. Yet, resource bricolage ability has no moderating effect on social capital and entrepreneurial intention. In addition, resource bricolage ability plays a moderating role between entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial intention. Moreover, it was found that participants demonstrated a high entrepreneurial intention when there was a high entrepreneurial attitude with high resource bricolage ability when the moderating effect was examined. In this study, some practical suggestions are provided for researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs.

Impact of entrepreneurial orientation on the performance of new ventures in China: the roles of entrepreneurial bricolage and opportunity recognition

Purpose>This study aims to examine how entrepreneurial orientation affects new venture performance in a dynamic environment. The authors examine whether entrepreneurial bricolage and opportunity recognition mediate the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on new venture performance and whether environmental dynamics moderate the above effects.Design/methodology/approach>This study uses questionnaires to collect data. The sample includes responses of managers from 274 new Chinese ventures. Regression analysis and bootstrapping are used to test the hypotheses.Findings>Entrepreneurial bricolage and opportunity recognition play mediating roles between entrepreneurial orientation and new venture performance. Environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between opportunity recognition and new venture performance.Practical implications>In a dynamic environment, new ventures should strengthen their entrepreneurial orientation, which would gradually improve their performance by improving their entrepreneurial bricolage and opportunity recognition ability.Originality/value>This study innovatively explains the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new venture performance from the perspectives of “flexible solutions to current problems” and “discovering and grasping potential new opportunities.” It does so by using the concepts of entrepreneurial bricolage and entrepreneurial opportunity identification in the context of a dynamic environment.

EXTRACTION METHOD OF BRICOLAGE ACTIONS FOR TOURISM DURING COVID-19

Tourism activities have positive impact on individual’s emotions and can improve individual’s QOL (Quality of Life). To build sustainable tourism, resilience is required in difficult society such as COVID-19 pandemic era. One of resilience is “Bricolage” described by Levi-Strauss in “La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind)”. In this research, we aim to discover Bricolage’s activities and how humans express their feelings under COVID-19. We classified Bricolage actions into three types: (type 1) Self-closed Bricolage actions, (type 2) One-directional Bricolage actions and (type 3) Mutual Bricolage actions. We implemented the collecting and analyzing system using tweets data in 2020 with the keyword “Tourism”. As a result, keywords of type 1 and type 2 are increasing, especially in conjunction with the first increasing peak of the number of infected people. For keywords of type 3, the increase was linked and was slightly behind in terms of the variation of keywords of type 1 and type 2. In addition, verbs of Bricolage activities were extracted by the 5-gram analysis in terms of the keywords of type 1 and synchronized with the increase trend in the number of infected people. This phenomenon shows social resilience with Bricolage is represented by people during COVID-19. © 2022, ICIC International. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 pandemic as a socio-psychological influence on transformations in religion

This article aims to establish COVID-19’s sociopsychological influence on religion. This interdisciplinary study’s theoretical framework embraces the socialecological systems framework, the concept of deprivation, the theory of religious myth-making, religious individualism and bricolage, as well as the concept of quality of life. A sociological survey was conducted of 4,700 residents of Moscow and the Moscow region. The results revealed that the social sphere of society was relatively stable during the pandemic. Exploring COVID-19’s socio-psychological influence, this study examines transformations in religion that resulted from tactile deprivation. © Creative Commons With Attribution.

New Product Creativity Mediating the Relationship Between Organizational Bricolage and the Competitive Advantage of SMEs

It is well-documented in literature that one major challenge facing Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) is resource constraints. This affects SMEs’ potential for innovation, as innovation is resource-intensive. To survive the competition, it is expedient that SMEs find more creative and innovative ways to operate. This present study sought to ascertain how SMEs could adopt a bricolage strategy to achieve a competitive advantage. The study also sought to determine the mediating role of new product creativity in this relationship, which formed a key contribution. Data was gathered from 334 SMEs using a simple random sampling technique. The data was analyzed using the covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) approach in Amos (v.23). Various validity and reliability tests were run before testing the significance of the various hypotheses of the study. It was concluded that bricolage had a direct positive effect on SMEs’ competitive advantage. Bricolage further had a direct positive impact on new product creativity, whiles new product creativity had a direct positive effect on SMEs’ competitive advantage. It was also realized that creativity had a partial mediating effect on the relationship between bricolage and SMEs’ competitive advantage. Although this study did not directly assess the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on business operations, the data for the study was gathered during the pandemic period, as such, the results of this present study could offer some practical clues on how firms could achieve competitive advantage during the outbreak of pandemics.