Enterprise strategic management under COVID-19: evidence from South Africa

ABSTRACT

In our research, we mainly looked at the questions on how enterprise strategic management is affected during COVID-19 period in South Africa, from the context of stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, and based on organisational culture. For both stakeholder theory and legitimacy theory, as the pandemic continues to unfold, palpable social pressure has pointed to both a shift from short-term to long-term outcome, and renewed importance of CSR. This is due to the short-term impact of this very special pandemic, prior to which, the term 'social distancing' was unheard of. On top of short-term impacts identified in this research, it was also identified that enterprise strategic management that gives focus to stakeholder management are more resilient to major external shocks like COVID-19 pandemic.