The Covid-19 pandemic: towards a societally engaged IB perspective

Abstract

Purpose This viewpoint takes up the Covid-19 pandemic as a trigger for a research agenda around societally engaged international business (IB) research. Design/methodology/approach The paper is organized as a viewpoint. First, it provides an overview of Covid-19 research in business and management and IB in particular. Second, it introduces a societally engaged IB perspective, around poverty and human rights as well as trade. Findings The paper offers an annotated introduction to the paper contributions of the special issue with three clusters, “re-reading the crisis”, “crisis protectionism” and “firm strategies during the pandemic”. Research limitations/implications The paper points to future research opportunities in terms of crisis management and societally engaged IB research. Practical implications The Covid-19 crisis poses new questions for research on international business and its related disciplines. In particular, the political, economic and societal disruption which the pandemic has caused highlights the importance of addressing broader societal issues such as climate change, poverty and inequality through a purposeful and forward-looking research agenda. Originality/value The paper and the special issue are some of the first combined research outputs on the Covid-19 pandemic in international business.

Decolonizing international business

“…Details on these workshops can be found here: www.bayes.city.ac.uk/faculties-and-research/ centres/cre/events and www.africaacademyofmanagement.org/africa-academy-managementafam-2021-online-webinar-series 2. In making this call, my paper may also be viewed as adding a voice to the growing chorus of scholars calling upon IB to re-orient itself towards the study of pressing societal problems (Buckley et al 2017;Cairns and Roberts, 2011;Dörrenbächer et al 2021;Kolk, 2016;Roberts and Dörrenbächer, 2014).…”

“…The growing body of IB research focused on issues of corporate social responsibility (for a review, see e.g. Kolk, 2016) and recent calls by mainstream IB scholars to redirect the field towards “grand challenges” (Buckley et al , 2017) are encouraging in that respect, but they are yet to crystallize into a core aspect of IB (see also Dörrenbächer et al , 2021). Importantly, they are yet to engage with the decolonizing project.…”

Working toward the sustainable development goals in earnest – critical international business perspectives on designing and implementing better interventions

“…Wettstein et al , 2019). Additionally, the pandemic exposed vulnerabilities of current systems and arguably “accelerate[d] and amplifie[d] old legacies, uneven structures and deep-seated conflicts in the contemporary world economy” (Dörrenbächer et al , 2021, p. 150). As a result the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of our socio-economic reality has been amplified and progress toward the SDGs slowed (van Zanten and van Tulder, 2020).…”

Community-Level Health Interventions are Crucial in the Post-COVID-19 Era: Lessons from Africa’s Proactive Public Health Policy Interventions

“…For example, when the WHO strongly recommended the nations to ‘test, test, test”, the deputy chief medical officer of England Dr Jenny Harries vehemently argued that the WHO guidelines did not apply to Britain’s “extremely well-developed public health system” …that they were meant more for “low income” countries (Kara and Khan 2020 ). Even in the face of a non-discriminatory virus, these colonial views and attitudes implicitly forced themselves into national policies where lessons cannot be taken from the periphery because knowledge flows strictly and only from the global North to the global South and not vice-versa (Dörrenbächer et al 2021 ). Such hubris and cruel overconfidence came with huge cost, and by April 2020 there was an about turn towards, “testing”, “testing” and more “testing” on the knees before a potent virus which was no respecter of the fictional first world or third world geopolitical binaries.…”