Knowledge that Transforms

If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that we live in an interdependent world. The pandemic has brought into stark relief three forms of interdependence. First, we see more clearly than ever the interrelationships between human and non-human networks, with human invasion of animal habitats and people’s connectivity via global transportation systems creating the perfect conditions for pandemics. Second, the chains of interdependence linking human and non-human networks are both complex and tightly coupled, such that the employment of an individual or the performance of a company on one continent are not independent of the wildlife that people on the other side of the world come in contact with. Third, we have learned that the response to pandemics hinges on the management of interdependent tasks performed by organizations, industries, nation-states and international institutions, and the resources each deploy over time toward the execution of those tasks; lacking a coordinated response to these interdependencies, global supply chains are disrupted, delaying the production and distribution of vital supplies to communities that need them, and slowing – sometimes fatally – how businesses large and small adapt to shifting market demand and the resources required to meet it. Although interdependence has long been an object of inquiry in both organizational theory – for example, with research on high-reliability organizations (e.g., Perrow, 1984) – and strategy – with work on firms as ecosystems of interdependent choices (e.g., Siggelkow, 2011) – the exceptional scope and intricacy of social and economic reverberations from pandemics recast interdependence as a newly central construct in management studies. Management scholars must, therefore, re-assess the assumptions, theories, methods they draw from to address the unique challenges presented by ubiquitous and multifaceted interdependence in the life of organizations. This is where the network perspective is poised to offer uniquely valuable contributions. While organizational studies tend to assume independence of observations or remove interdependence statistically, social network scholars view the structure of interdependence as the primary focus of their research: from a network perspective, interdependence is the essential lens for understanding organizational behaviour. A network is seen as a system of interdependent units wherein the behaviour and outcomes of an individual node – be it a person, an organization, an industry or even a nation-state – depend on the structural pattern of relationships between that node and other nodes. For example, the probability of an individual being promoted in an organization depends not just on her competence and performance, but also on her ties to high-rank individuals in the organization, as well as the ties that her peers have with influential organization members. To pursue their theoretical interest in interdependence, network scholars develop and adopt special statistical approaches – such as, stochastic actor-oriented models and exponential random graph models – to model the non-independence of network data, both statically and dynamically. In so doing, network scholarship has produced remarkable insights on individual and collective organizational phenomena and their evolution (for reviews, see Borgatti and Foster, 2003; Kilduff and Brass, 2010). Two forms of interdependence evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic have, however, taken a backseat in social network research: first, the interdependence of networks across classes of nodes, known as bimodal, two-mode, or k-partite networks (for example, networks between people and the ecosystems they interact with, the organizations they work for, and the transportation and trade networks that connect the communities they live in); second, the patterns of interaction between nodes over time, or network motifs, which represents the temporal paths of interdependence in a network. Scholarly understanding of these two forms of interdependence stands to greatly advance management studies. Most social network research in management is concerned with one-mode networks, defined as networks that connect only one type of node, such as advice-giving relationships between employees of an organization or strategic alliances between firms. Many networks relevant to management research, however, have a two-mode (or even a multi-mode) nature. A two-mode network – also called a bipartite, two-partite or affiliation network – is one that connects two varieties of nodes. A network of corporate directors and the companies they are affiliated with is an example, as is a network of venture capital firms and the entrepreneurs they fund. Two-mode and multi-node (k-partite) networks are also clearly in operation in a pandemic, with relationships connecting human, animal, biological and technological networks creating interdependencies across multiple classes of nodes. K-partite networks also exist within a single organization and their analysis can yield valuable insight about its functioning. A recent study of a public organization provides a case in point (Ujwary-Gil, 2017). The study considers both human nodes – the members of the organization – and the non-human nodes represented by the knowledge and resources that these employees have or require to carry out assigned tasks. The resulting two-mode network linking people to knowledge, resources and tasks reveals not only who is prominent in the organization by virtue of having many connections – the conventional analytical focus of one-mode network studies – but also for whom this network prominence comes with an overload of knowledge, resources and tasks, which threatens an employee’s productivity and effectiveness – an outcome that the typical study of one-mode advice networks could not uncover. Moving beyond the study of interdependence in one-mode networks to consider more complex forms of interdependence in k-partite networks can thus productively shift the analytical focus of organizational network research. One of its defining characteristics over the past few decades, for example, has been the disproportionate attention devoted to bridging structural holes as a desirable network strategy for both individuals and organizations. Access to and control over non-redundant information are the proposed mechanisms for the advantages of occupying such positions in networks. Yet, pandemics and studies like Ujwary-Gil’s demonstrate that building redundancies in the network structures that social actors rely on to execute tasks – what we might call network buffering – may be as important as network bridging, because it builds robustness to manage complex interdependencies across networks and adapt to disruptions to established intra- and inter-organizational arrangements. This insight opens intriguing research questions ripe for theoretical development. For example: Under what conditions is network bridging versus network buffering the key to a coordinated execution of interdependent tasks performed by organizations, nation-states and international institutions? When do redundant connections across networks facilitate adaptive performance by lowering vulnerability to the failure of nodes in one network? When is the bridging of structural holes across networks an engine of innovation or a source of systemic risk instead? And how can organizations design interventions to elicit two-mode ties – e.g., between individuals and organizational units – in order to manage cross-network interdependencies? All networks – including not only social networks, but also biological, technological (e.g., computer and transportation networks) and economic networks (e.g., trade transactions) – can be represented as graphs, which include a variety of subgraphs. One important local property of networks are so-called network motifs, defined as recurrent and statistically significant sub-graphs that repeat themselves in a network or even between multiple networks comprising timestamped links between the nodes. Motifs are important because they can reflect how particular functions are achieved efficiently in a network. Moving beyond classic organizational theory – such as, Thompson’s (1967) renowned distinction between pooled, sequential and reciprocal types of interdependence – network motifs identify emergent, varied and complex temporal patterns of interaction that reflect how actors in a network perform their roles. Think about how people in an organization interact to search for and transfer knowledge they require to perform assigned tasks. A motif analysis can surface, for example, how much hierarchical interdependence affects relational behaviour in an organization (e.g., with people moving knowledge up and down vertical paths of authority rather than alternating over time between horizontal knowledge exchanges with peers and vertical interactions with superiors and subordinates). The study of network motifs can identify patterns of interdependence that slow or accelerate knowledge diffusion and task execution, as well as identify opportunities for aligning the formal design of organizations with the functions they are intended to serve. For this reason, motifs are garnering increasing attention as a useful construct to uncover structural design principles of complex networks in organizations. Advancing a research agenda on the temporal structure of interdependence within and between organizations requires theorizing what constitutes a meaningful motif by answering questions such as: What are the theoretical dimensions for a classification of network motifs? How can network scholars classify network motifs based on a theory of the mechanisms – e.g., reciprocity, transitivity, horizontal flows, vertical flows, circular flows, etc. – responsible for their effects on task execution, knowledge transfer, coordination, innovation, and any number of organizational phenomena? Making headway toward such a theory of temporal patterns of interdependence would open fruitful possibilities for management research. Despite their ubiquity of k-partite networks and network motifs within and between organizations, and the analytical possibilities that these patterns of interdependence open for inquiry, such network structures still feature rarely in management studies. In addition to the undeniable challenge of theorizing k-partite networks and motifs, other culprits for this void are methodological. The statistical modelling of these network configurations remains impractical for most researchers, requiring specialized training and constant updating. And although network motifs may provide deep insight into the network's functional abilities, their detection is computationally challenging. Likewise, few specialized techniques for the bimodal analysis of two-mode networks have been developed (Borgatti, 2012). The analytical repertoire has been expanding, however, with researchers developing new statistical approaches – such as, the relational events framework for temporal network data (Butts, 2008) – or extending to two-mode networks tools used to analyse one-mode networks (Everett, 2016; Latapy et al., 2008). The data required to measure two-mode networks and network motifs are also increasingly within reach, with large data sets on email communication, global supply chains, and social media platforms as examples of the new possibilities opened by big data. When the methodological sophistication required by these complex forms of interdependence increases beyond the reach of most management scholars, collaborations with mathematical sociologists and other technical specialists provide a way forward. Expanding the theoretical and analytical focus of organizational network research to include pluralistic patterns of interdependence over time is vital. The social and economic reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the environmental disruptions that underlie it, force management scholars beyond their comfort zone and into the investigation of nuanced forms of interdependence that can invigorate the relevance of management studies in a changing world.

The social embeddedness perspective highlights that socially embedded dyads are more cooperative than dyads that are not embedded by common third parties. Going beyond the traditional emphasis on the number of third parties, our study examines which third parties are more influential in promoting cooperation in interdepartmental dyads. Based on the logic of dependence from interdependence theory, we show that providers are more cooperative to recipients when third‐party friends have more organizational knowledge to offer socio‐emotional support to providers, but this effect is reduced when providers themselves have more organizational knowledge. Third‐party influence is also marginally attenuated when providers have a larger circle of friends. Overall, our findings advance the social embeddedness perspective by instilling a greater appreciation for dyad member’s dependence upon the third party in explaining third‐party influence on cooperation.

This essay is a personal reflection – what Van Maanen (2011) calls a ‘confessional tale’ – about my first experience as an ethnographer. It is a reflection on the four months I spent researching a group of young activists who organized for a political campaign in Mexico City. In particular, it describes how—while observing their everyday lives and work—I came to develop strong feelings of care (affection and concern) for their well‐being and success. I reflect on how these feelings structured my engagement with the work and my role as researcher and the practices of care that I developed for others and myself in order to cope. Departing from the notion that feelings are a natural and important part of doing fieldwork, I ask how we, as situated actors, deal with feelings of affection and concern. How do we cope with the physical and emotional demands of caring while doing our job? And what kinds of roles and strategies should we develop to protect others, ourselves and our research?

Critical to top management’s organizing efforts are the formal rules for how organizational members are to make decisions. However, employees can break top management’s decision‐making rules. Although scholars have investigated rule breaking at the individual and group levels of analysis, research is needed into how members come together as a group to break an organization’s decision‐making rules, and how groups’ rule breaking persists. To address this important research gap, we draw from a real‐time qualitative investigation of both the breaking and following of decision‐making rules to develop a group model that: (1) explains how an individual can trigger his or her group to break decision‐making rules to generate perceived benefits for the group and/or others external to the organization, (2) provides insights into the mechanisms by which rule breaking persists, and (3) highlights the norms of developing and perpetuating groups’ breaking decision‐making rules.

We explore the implications of social cognitive and contact theories as applied to leader effectiveness in a global context. Specifically, we test a multilevel, moderated mediated model using a sample of 755 global leaders and their supervisors from 43 countries. These leaders were drawn from mostly senior executive ranks in large global corporations. Our findings support hypotheses confirming the indirect relationship of intense multicultural life exposure through global mindset in the prediction of global leader effectiveness, as well as the moderating role of home country culture tightness. These findings have implications for the selection and development of leaders in global roles.

Even before COVID-19 we saw an evolution in team discourse that will continue long after the disease is gone. That said, COVID-19 has been a disruptor that has shifted the trajectory of that evolution, accelerating some trends and introducing others. This is not a story of moving from one state to another, but rather shifting the ongoing arc of change. In this brief we examine the shifts before the pandemic, where COVID-19 has taken us, and implications for future research. Richard Hackman’s definition of a team has been active for decades: a set of individuals who work interdependently toward a common goal and view themselves as a team (Hackman, 2003). While this definition still holds, underlying it are several unstated assumptions that have been under assault for decades – and on which COVID-19 has had a significant effect: While the traditional model assumed a stable set of members for the life of a team, this is rarely the case anymore (Ancona & Bresman, 2007). Now, membership changes frequently as part-time and part-cycle members come and go and as membership moves to include customers, suppliers, and partners (Gambardella et al., 2017). Moreover, as task needs shift and different forms of expertise are needed and as organizations undergo personnel changes, full-time membership moves accordingly (Bakker, 2010). COVID-19, with its push towards people working remotely reduces the costs of switching membership, making it easier for people to join and shift team membership, and accelerating the need to understand the impact of this fluidity. While the Hackman model assumed clear team boundaries, we have increasingly seen contexts in which team membership itself is contested (Mortensen, 2014). For example, knowledge work, with members often working remotely across partial commitments to multiple fluidly-shifting teams that frequently span organizational boundaries, often leaves individuals with differing understandings of who is on the team. COVID-19 has exacerbated this trend, particularly as many organizations have shifted to using more contingent and gig workers to manage market shifts and demand uncertainty – making it even more important that we understand the psychological impact of fuzzy boundaries on things like belonging, coordination, learning, and performance. While the old model of teams assumes a focus on internal composition and dynamics, the importance of boundary spanning and connecting to the external knowledge, work, and political networks is seen as increasingly important. COVID-19 is one more example of an external event that will require more sensemaking, vicarious learning, adaptability, and collaboration both within and across boundaries (Bresman, 2013; Maloney et al., 2016). Research models will need to shift to include both an internal and external lens, as well as a focus on how to effectively blend external outreach with internal cohesion and coordination. While in traditional organizations, employees were assigned to one team at a time, now most employees are balancing multiple memberships (O’Leary et al., 2011). People stretched across many teams face issues of fragmented attention, task switching, conflicting demands, and work overload. These, in turn affect their individual cognitions, behaviors, and performance as well as both learning and productivity at the team and organizational levels (Mortensen and Gardner, 2017). COVID-19 has pushed this trend further as organizations seek higher resource utilization and resilience through cross-staffing. We, therefore, need to continue to study how people can manage multiple commitments, phases, deadlines, and identity matches to make this mode of operating better (Rapp and Mathieu, 2019) and to understand the implications of overlapping – and, therefore, non-independent – teams. The trend toward an increased focus on the use of technology in teams started before COVID-19 (e.g., Glikson and Woolley, 2020) as we witnessed AI as a partner in team decision-making and synchronous feedback. However, the pandemic has accelerated our desire to push more work onto machines and provide feedback and coaching remotely. This forces us to examine whether machines add to the process – no groupthink, self-censorship, or ulterior motives for them – or present us with a cold and unwelcome partner, potentially with biases inextricably designed in. While most early team theorists looked at the organization as the context for teams, as organizations move to greater interaction and collaboration with the broader ecosystem, team activity must follow. Research on multi-team systems has examined the impact of teams collaborating – frequently across organizational boundaries – towards a common overarching goal (Zaccaro et al., 2012) while team scholars have studied rotating leadership across teams from different organizations (Davis and Eisenhardt, 2011). COVID-19 has opened up many more opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration calling for a more research on multi-team collaboration and eco-system outreach. In short, the nice neat world of stable teams with known and set boundaries, an internal focus, and a clear mandate was already on the wane, but with COVID-19 it has almost been obliterated. Now it is time for our models to keep pace and explore the complexities of ever-shifting teams working with new technologies to compete and collaborate across multiple boundaries. While the shifts described above speak of continued evolutionary change, COVID-19 has brought major disruptions too. What are some of the biggest shifts? Remote working and collaborating through mediating technology, rather than face-to-face, is not new (O’Leary et al., 2002), but until recently, it was the domain of a few who were geographically far or chose a different lifestyle. COVID-19-driven lockdowns instantly transformed a massive portion of the population into remote workers. In an instant we went from wondering if we could or should do this to asking if we can ever go back? This raises the question of how do we structure and manage our teams in a way that drives integration, collaboration, and identification across both those in and out of the office and those on aligned versus mis-aligned schedules? How do we use in-person versus remote time most effectively? How should we design tasks to best take advantage of hybridity and its inherent dynamism? How do we maintain equity and fairness across differing access to resources? As such hybrid environments appear to be here to stay, we desperately need to examine how best to manage them and to identify best practices. For decades, scholars have argued that socialization is critical to establishing strong teams, leading us to push for effective on-boarding that helps newcomers to understand their new environments and socialization to reduce misunderstandings and increase the efficiency of interactions. COVID-19 has effectively separated many of us from colleagues, bosses, and our physical and social environments. While technology helps, many people have lost their felt experience of work. COVID-19 raises the questions: how can we help people to join and understand their work context when they are not physically in it and have no access to casual interactions at the elevator or coffee bar? How do we create and foster team identities, belonging, and safety in the absence of physical and social cues? Is it even possible? Work-life balance is a well-established body of research, on which we are not experts. However, COVID-19 has brought the blurring of boundaries between home and work into stark relief. As COVID-19 pushes us into more contact with our families, friends and selves, many people are feeling drawn to activities and meaning outside of work. As these centrifugal forces pull us away from work, they can erode the social glue that holds team members together. How do we manage to create the countervailing centripetal force? Or do we need to? Can we create the containers to provide safety, value, meaning, and identity, when members have shifted their primary focus elsewhere? Taken together, these trends may push us to rethink the relationship of teams to the organizations within which they sit – and maybe even those organizations themselves. Consider the example of pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Takeda – fierce competitors before COVID-19 – who now find their two R&D organizations collaborating on new medications to combat the virus, bringing universities, government regulators, labs, and patients into the conversation. Complex, global challenges – of which COVID-19 is a stark example – are increasingly leading us to constitute teams of teams working across organizations, sectors, countries, and specialties not only to do joint work but to rewrite the ground rules of the entire ecosystem. Examples of new organizational forms that essentially constitute dynamically shifting systems of teams increasingly appear in the business press. For practitioners, the promise of this design, often referred to as ‘agile’ or ‘nimble’ (Ancona et al., 2019), is the ability to use distributed, ephemeral, loosely bounded teams in the service of responsiveness and innovation. However, as scholars we may need to consider a new level of analysis, as ‘meta-teams’ – the populations drawn on to dynamically reconstitute such collaborations – may begin to exhibit traits and characteristics of their own. What rules are required to manage such dynamic contexts with directives from all sides? How do individuals balance competing identities and allegiances and do people start to identify with a meta-team itself? How do relationships between and across such dynamic teams change over time through shifting and shared membership? To date, we have surprisingly little empirical evidence to help us understand the questions this new way of organizing raises. Even with such fundamental shifts, however, the team will remain the indispensable agent of action and change and, hence, a critical focus for management scholars.

Organizational learning theory examines how organizations change routine behaviours as a function of their goals and experience (Levitt and March, 1988). Research built on learning theory has assembled much evidence on how organizations adapt to their environments (e.g., Gavetti et al., 2012). Learning acts both as an underlying assumption in other theories and as a theory on its own, and is used in organizational theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. This foundational role means that a reassessment of learning theory is consequential for the wider field of management, not just for scholars specialized in learning theory. The Covid-19 pandemic poses challenges to four branches of learning theory – organizational routines, performance feedback, vicarious learning, and coalitions – and this commentary explains how each challenge could inspire new research in this area. One may argue that pandemics are rare and unworthy of special attention, but this would be wrong in two ways. First, pandemics are not rare. Spanish Flu killed more than 40 million 100 years ago, HIV/AIDS killed 35 million in 40 years, and Ebola, SARS, and MERS are recent pandemics that suddenly halted. Research on each one is important because pandemics cause fundamental changes to organizations and communities, with effects seen decades later (Rao and Greve, 2018). Second, pandemics reveal assumptions behind our theoretical mechanisms that we rarely question, allowing creation of new theory and integration of new evidence. We should therefore examine this pandemic for its theoretical importance and substantive impact. To improve efficiency and increase economies of scale, organizations develop routines ranging from production sequences to foundational practices that flexibly handle rare situations (Pentland and Rueter, 1994). Routines gain endurance from repetition and path-dependence from gradual modification. Research on routines has not examined what happens when work-from-home tears an organization into pieces, making learning disjointed and individualized because the shared observation of routine execution and outcomes no longer happens. With workers separated from the workplace and each other, but joined with their families, their workplace routines are disrupted and replaced with improvisation. Similarly, when work-from-home ends, routines may be re-established, replaced, or altered. We do not know how the work-from-home improvisation will function or what will happen to the workplace routines when work-from-home ends. Research on organizational routines has used qualitative analysis to discover new phenomena and develop theory accordingly (Feldman, 2000), and such work is urgent now. Lessons can be drawn from how organizations have reorganized themselves, and still functioned with some degree of normality. Because research on routines typically makes significant advances through inductive studies of a phenomenon as it develops, the qualitative studies should start immediately. In the long run, we need studies of all methodologies examining the dismantled and reassembled organization. What are the consequences for work, employees, and maintenance of structure, processes, and routines? If the routines are imperfectly reassembled because they are forgotten or because work-from-home was better, does that signal the end of organizations to structure work? After all, the use of routines is an important reason that organizations are a preferred mode of organizing production. Organizations compare performance and aspiration levels on multiple goals, and this performance feedback results in problemistic search for new behaviours (Greve, 2003). Organizations have stable goal structures with generic goals (like ROA) or goals specific to an industry (like aircraft safety), and sometimes the goals conflict with each other. Organizational goals interact in ways that reflect their importance to the organization (Gaba and Greve, 2019), with goals drawing attention when performance is below the aspiration level. This research has not examined what happens following the sudden introduction of new and potentially temporary goals, as when a pandemic imposes unknown health and safety concerns. Some organizations give customer safety goals similar priority as profitability goals, and progressive labour laws afford safe working conditions to many, but the pandemic raises questions about how to re-prioritize safety goals and to handle more goals than usual. Even customer safety goals are best known to be important when they are familiar and durable, such as the safe operation of aircraft. Shocks like a pandemic are different because they arrive suddenly and may also halt suddenly, as the SARS pandemic did. Organizations may treat such goals as temporary, making it is unclear how much they will invest to solve shortfalls. How organizations respond to safety and other goals introduced by a pandemic is unknown. If new goals are abruptly introduced and the importance of these goals may change over time, the usual process of handling problems revealed by poor performance to avoid future problems is suddenly in question. Decision-makers learn from the past because they expect the future to be similar. If they think that the future will be the same as the pre-pandemic past, why should they learn from the pandemic? If they think that the future will be the same as the pandemic present, how much of the pre-pandemic learning will they retain? We need to know how organizations respond, for the sake of understanding pandemic responses and because such temporarily important goals may be more frequent than has been acknowledged. Vicarious learning (e.g., observational or indirect learning) is particularly important when seeking to resolve uncertainty about novel and consequential actions, resulting in the diffusion of technological or managerial innovations (Baum et al., 2000). Organizations engaging in vicarious learning assume that uncertainty is shared but early adopters have superior information, and hence, are worth imitating. Shocks like a pandemic overturn this assumption as the ignorance of others becomes common knowledge. Organizations observe a diversity of responses and are unable to use the normal signs of relevance and credibility – proximity, network ties, and status. Other organizations acting early could mean that they are better informed, or misinformed, or risk tolerant. Given these layers of uncertainty, it is unclear whether and how vicarious learning occurs during and after a pandemic. Our knowledge of vicarious learning includes how (1) learning from observation and communication differ, (2) similarity creates reference groups, and (3) network ties direct learning. Although it is hard to imagine vicarious learning disappearing in a high-uncertainty situation such as a pandemic, all three components of vicarious learning theory are in question. We should suspend our prior understanding and examine vicarious learning processes anew. Examining how organizations vicariously learn to take actions to protect workers and maintain production, and how they handle the disruption of the pandemic, will give insights that inform vicarious learning research more generally. Vicarious learning evidence has accumulated in social systems under limited uncertainty and stress, and for that reason it is likely incomplete. The connection between organizational learning and coalition building among managers has seen relatively little empirical attention (Gavetti et al., 2012). The scholarly inattention to this issue is because coalitions are often not highly consequential. Organizations avoid controversy, so building a coalition willing to support unusual actions is difficult unless these actions are already promoted by a social movement or part of a diffusion process. In a pandemic, the limits on the actions that an organization can take are weakened by the extreme environment. Legitimation pressures are weaker because less is taken for granted, and past strategies and structures are less constraining because the pandemic triggers problemistic search. The increased ability to engage in experimental or controversial actions does not mean that many organizations will do so. Some organizations build coalitions supporting actions that are experimental or even contrarian to others. Are these organizations that have leadership teams with lower tenure, greater diversity, or backgrounds that are unconventional in some way? Are they organizations with centralized and secure leadership? As organizations facing the pandemic chooses different paths to solve the problems it brings, researchers can investigate the sources of these differences. Tracing them back to the background and experiences of decision-makers and their coalition building will be the next step forward in research. Though it is difficult to predict when or how the pandemic will recede, it is easy to appreciate that it affords important lessons for organizational learning. Many actions that organizations learn to take in response to a pandemic are meant to save lives of workers, customers, and others, but organizational learning theory does not assume that they result in a steady advance. Scholars should help advance knowledge on how effective actions are discovered by organizations doing problemistic search when facing new goals and are distributed throughout society by organizations learning vicariously from (we hope) the best early responses. The effects of pandemics and other crises can be made milder through organizational learning. Because the most serious pandemics happen rarely, however, we cannot assume that all organizations will retain these lessons. Organizational scholars should document the effective learning patterns, and through our teaching make sure that organizations are ready not just for the everyday organizational learning in the absence of a crisis, but also for the next pandemic. This paper has benefited from a helpful exchange with Gideon Markman, from all co-authors who have shaped my thinking on organizational learning, and from Jim March.

Karl E. Weick’s The Social Psychology of Organizing has been one of the most influential books in organization studies, providing the theoretical underpinnings of several research programs. Importantly, the book is widely credited with initiating the process turn in the field, leading to the ‘gerundizing’ of management and organization studies: the persistent effort to understand organizational phenomena as ongoing accomplishments. The emphasis of the book on organizing (rather than on organizations) and its links with sensemaking have made it the most influential treatise on organizational epistemology. In this introduction, we review Weick’s magnum opus, underline and assess its key themes, and suggest ways in which several of them may be taken forward.

Over the last few months, COVID-19 has entered our own consciousness as a moment of profound disruption, leading in too many cases to misery and death, but also, forcing us more mundanely to reorganize our lives, work and social relations. This unexpected dis-organization of life has revealed our mutual dependency to exist, as one people, literally: pan-demic. At the same time, it has shown how these social relations constitute us as many, different and unequally vulnerable. How does the pandemic interrogate our understandings of power, subjection, oppression and inequality? What can we, as critical Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholars, bring to the table of renewed theorisations of (dis)organizing during and post the pandemic? This disruption invites us to engage more often and more thoroughly with capitalism as constituted through capitalist flows of people, goods, capital, ideas and affect – and, one could add, viruses. As David Harvey has argued, these flows organize the economy and society by increasingly ‘compressing’ space and time to ensure capital valorization, fundamentally shaping the relations that constitute us in work and society more broadly. They render us dependent on each other in specific ways, governing through ‘the modulation of divisions and of differences’ (Lazzarato, 2006, p. 119), ‘frictions’ that generate value for capital (Tsing, 2005) and render us unequally vulnerable. The COVID-19 pandemic thus calls critical MOS to address capitalist flows. Let me illustrate. COVID-19 has made highly visible the global flow of commodities on which the post-1989 global economy has been built. It has brought to the fore the persistent materiality of the commodified goods and services on which all societies, include so called ‘post-industrial’ ones, rely to exist. The flows of some commodities were interrupted, such as medical equipment kept within national borders, vegetables that could not be harvested by seasonal migrant workers, food and beverages unsold in restaurants and cafés, and cultural events cancelled, putting many into misery. Other ones, re-classified as ‘essential’ to our lives, have been kept up, obliging workers in maintenance, logistics and distribution to work, putting them at heightened risk. Yet, in some other cases, new flows have been organized around non-market principles of solidarity, (temporarily) replacing flows of commodities. While flows of ideas have been widely analysed in critical MOS, and flows of capital and people have been increasingly addressed in the wake of the 2008 crisis and on-going migration, respectively, flows of goods remain surprisingly out of our discipline’s sight. Narratives of the ‘knowledge’, ‘service’ and ‘experience’ economy, which reflect our own place in global capitalism, have led to relative neglect of the massive local and global flows of commodities on which our lives depend, with the notable exception of few recent investigations of commoditized food and textile (e.g., Böhm et al., 2020; Levy et al., 2016). Yet, if capitalism is the mode of organizing the economy and society in which wealth manifests itself largely through commodities (Marx, 1976), then these questions should be at the core of critical MOS. The literatures on logistics as a ‘science of circulation’ (Cowen, 2014) and on borders as constitutive of ‘multiplied’ labour (Andrijasevic et al., 2019; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) can be of help to theorize how capitalism operates and valorization is ensured under intensified global competition. Such approaches open up a range of new questions: What kinds of flows are created and maintained to render goods commodities? How are commodities produced, packaged, transported, distributed and consumed and by whom? Under which labour, environmental and other regulatory conditions? What kind of economic, symbolic and affective relations do commodities establish between heterogeneously constituted subjects involved in their flow? Where, in this flow, does value ‘stick’ and what kinds of struggle arise surrounding its distribution? Which kinds of livelihoods do they enable or hamper along their (global) flow? What contradictions become visible in these flows? Under which conditions do alternative flows emerge that de-commodify goods? As many commentators have observed, the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of the human flows through which the biological and social reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies is organized. Forced confinement has drastically reduced human mobility, catapulting care – in the households, families, local communities, schools, hospitals, homes for the elderly, day-cares, refugee shelters, etc. – to the frontstage of public life. Under the spotlight, and against the background of country-specific structural shortages in welfare service provision, care has been recast from subordinate, devalued and unpaid work largely carried out by (racialized) (migrant) women (e.g., nurses, nannies, grand-mothers, au pairs, neighbours) to ‘essential’ work. The spatio-temporal conflation of much of (white-collar) paid work and care in the homes crystallized ‘work-life conflict’ as a systemic contradiction of capitalist society, rather than an individual problem (of women) seeking ‘balance’. This conflation also evidenced how deep inequalities in housing, income and social protection made working-class (racialized) (single-headed) working-class households disproportionately vulnerable to poverty, domestic violence, isolation, and mental health issues, fundamentally undermining their ability to care. The visibility acquired by disrupted flows of care under the pandemic interrogates the conceptualization of waged work in the capitalist firm as a separate and distinct ‘sphere’ constituting the privileged object of critical MOS analysis. It invites to de-centre our perspective to adequately account for the care work and workers on which the capitalist economy is inherently predicated. Capital valorization rests on labour power that is biologically and socially largely (re)produced outside firms and markets, yet without which it cannot be sustained (e.g., Miszczynski, 2019; Zanoni, 2019). Social reproduction theory offers us a particularly powerful conceptual vocabulary to articulate this relation (Bhatthacharya, 2017; Federici, 2012/1975; Vogel, 2013/1983), integrate it into our critique of capitalism, and theorize alternatives to it. In particular, it points to the contradiction between the imperative of capital valorization requiring to keep the cost of labour as low as possible and the necessity to sufficiently finance the reproduction of labour power (through the wage, social contributions and taxes) for future capital valorization. Re-centring critical MOS research towards care work leads to novel research questions: How does capitalism socially mediate the (unwaged) care work on which it rests? What kind of economic, symbolic and affective relations does care work establish between the heterogeneously constituted subjects involved in its flow? What alternative social reproductive arrangements can repair the social by re-connecting people in new ways? How do the ‘community economy’, the ‘provisioning economy’, the ‘fundamental economy’ and, ‘alternative economies’ challenge the constitutive relation between production and social reproduction under capitalism? Through what kind of political work can care be recognized and rewarded? An understanding of capitalism as flows further calls for critical consideration of the role of the state in their governance. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, almost overnight, national governments have deployed their power to halt certain flows and redefine the rules in order to exceptionally keep other ones going. In many cases, the procrastination of state intervention, to avoid the disruption of existing capitalist flows, has caused numerous deaths. In other ones, state intervention has taken violent and repressive forms. Despite significant differences across countries, the past months have brought a deep interrogation of the state. The neoliberal imagery of the state as, at best, a mere facilitator of capitalist flows and markets has come into flagrant contradiction with the necessity to organize society differently to safeguard it. The call of 84 super-rich to be taxed more to fund research on a vaccine is the last slap in the face: big capital asks to give more back to society, gesturing the incapacity of the state to control flows of capital. These events are revelatory of the necessity, for critical MOS, to engage more systematically with the state, its (lack of) power, and its critical role both in reproducing, shaping and halting capital. We have been extensively theorizing the neoliberal hegemony and its consequences for contemporary subjectivities, and to some extent, contrasting the widespread idea that neoliberalism rests on the absence of the state. However, often this role is understood as context and background of what we study. We need to make the state again the object of our inquiry (e.g. Chowdury, 2020), and engage with the governance of capitalist flows of people, goods, money, data, etc. through the production and enforcement of the rules that define, fragment and connect us unequally (Dean, 2015; Lazzarato, 2006). The rich critical literature ranging from the classical work of Gramsci, Polanyi, Poulantzas, to the contemporary writings of Bob Jessop, Mariana Mazzucato, Jodi Dean, to mention only a few, can be of inspiration and help. Critical MOS should curate spaces for conversations on the constitutive relations between capital, the state, and civil society, and in particular those initiatives that strife for re-organizing livelihoods through alternative flows (Zanoni, 2020). Attention for the state would stimulate research questions such as: How do trade, labour, environmental and safety norms established by the state make capitalist flows ‘seamless’? How do different public policies intersect to fragment the population and unequally distribute vulnerability to ensure capital valorization? How do national state policies intersect with supra- and infra-national ones and with which effects on the flows shaping the livelihoods of specific subjects? Which forms of struggle are most effective in interrupting state supported capitalist flows? Under which conditions and how does the state promote alternative ones? The disruption of capitalist flows by the pandemic has exacerbated the cleavages and power inequalities. Addressing them can help critical MOS to reconnect the places and times of production and paid work to the circulation and consumption of goods and services and, more broadly, to social reproduction. This is necessary to identify the contradictions at the heart of capitalism, denaturalize it as a mode of organizing the economy and society, and envision more just flows and novel subjectivities. While a permanent ‘state of emergency’ (Jessop, 2015) holds the risk of habituation, it also reaffirms the continued relevance of critical MOS’s intellectual and political project. I thank Daniel Muzio and Christopher Wickert for their useful feedback on an earlier version of this text.

The Covid-19 crisis makes the study of languages in management even more relevant and timely than before the crisis. This ‘black and brown epidemic’, as Joseph Betancourt from Massachusetts General Hospital called it, brings to the fore social divisions and hardship, accelerating and magnifying processes and practices of linguistic inequality with fatal consequences (Goldberg, 2020). Millions of people lack the means and critical information to keep themselves and their families safe. Marginalized groups, in particular, have been disproportionally affected by the pandemic. Morbidity and mortality can be exacerbated because of no or low levels of literacy in the state language, lack of access to technologically mediated communication, as well as struggles to process expert talk and professional languages. We are now witnessing how medical knowledge has become prey for global geopolitical struggles and blame games such as American populist talk about the China virus and vice versa. Some multilingual countries have approached crisis communication through a monolingual approach by relying on their respective state language or English as a lingua franca. In doing so, these societies have often overlooked the needs of minorities or peripheral groups for ‘linguistic first aid’ (Probirskaja, 2017). China is a case in point. The outbreak of the corona virus in Hubei province revealed that the spoken Wuhan dialect and standard Chinese are mutually unintelligible. Chinese authorities gave up the monolingual approach to crisis communication within 48 hours and rapidly brought in a team of linguists to create a ‘Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance’ (Piller, 2020; Translators without Borders, 2020). Critical health information is now communicated in a myriad of local languages and dialects, accentuating the need for translation in the fight against Covid-19 . Thus, Covid-19 has underscored the insight that languages are the arena through which power asymmetries are enacted and articulated, reflecting the global social order between the ‘West’ and ‘the rest’. In this essay, we discuss the implications of the pandemic for the scholarly agenda of languages in management studies. Our starting point is that Covid-19 represents a major disruption, producing discursive voids that need to be bridged. The meeting of languages opens up a whole new arena for political and ideological struggles over meaning that have so far received limited attention from management scholars. We challenge existing assumptions, concepts, and practices and propose directions to guide future scholarship in this area of study. The pandemic and its social and economic reverberations reveal novel research avenues for management scholars studying multilingual settings. First, although the field of management studies engages with language and discourse, it is implicitly monolingual in its orientation and tends to take the use of English for granted. We challenge this assumption by flagging the role of non-global languages and the social and power dynamics involved in using different languages (Vaara et al., 2005). In terms of vocabulary, many new words and phrases have been coined during the pandemic such as ‘social distancing’ with different connotations in various linguistic contexts. We emphasize the role of professional and technical languages because the Covid-19 debate morphs to an ideological struggle between health concerns, political, and economic interests. In this debate, not only are the concerns and arguments expressed differently in different contexts, but also the hegemony of English as the global language of science, economy and finance has a major impact on these discussions. Embracing the multitude of languages and their relationships provides management scholars with ample opportunities for novel theoretical, empirical and methodological work, raising research questions such as: How does the complex interplay between multiple languages, including different expert language(s), unfold and what are the implications for actors’ identities, status or power relations? What are the long-term ideological and material implications of these identity and power struggles? How does multilingualism serve as a hidden arena for social exclusion and inequality? Second, management scholars increasingly acknowledge the performative and agentic role of communication in organizations and the communicative construction of institutions (Angouri, 2018). We suggest replacing the focus on communication with a focus on translation to emphasize that every act of human communication is an act of translating – of local meaning-making, change and transformation. For example, schools of thought such as the Communicative Construction of Organizations (CCO) (Cooren et al., 2006) and the communicative co-constitution of institutions (Meyer and Vaara, 2020) draw on notions of language and discourse to explain why and how organizations or institutions are created, stabilized and transformed. A shift to Translation Constitutes Organizations (TCO) and institutions as translatorial co-constitution highlights that meaning-making is inherent in all language-based acts. Multilingual settings are characterized by additional layers of complexity because meaning needs to be translated between languages. In line with this thinking, multilingual organizations can be seen as translatorial spaces, where different forms of translation unfold (Koskinen, 2020; Piekkari et al., 2020). This ‘translatorial turn’ also represents a deliberate choice to wrestle with issues of discursive voids and language-based contingencies in new ways. Thus, using the word ‘translation’ instead of ‘communication’ demarcates a desire to change our habitus from a monolingual to a multilingual one and to make this shift symbolically visible, raising novel research questions such as: How are translations used in framing institutional or organizational change for different audiences? What is the role of multilingual practices in processes of (de-)legitimization, silencing, and (de-)institutionalization? How does the use of new, rather than entrenched, vocabularies foster innovation? What role do language practices, especially translation, play in fostering creativity in organizational change? What are the limits of individual and collective agency in these creative processes? Third, the pandemic has also revealed in painful ways the risks associated with delays in translation and the limits of verbal language. This provides opportunities for machine translation as a fast and economic solution as well as multimodal communication strategies (Höllerer et al., 2019) that rely on visual, audio, and video content to convey vital information. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) has relied on graphic designers to produce ‘infographics’ to better reach its audiences. Multimodal texts, however, are not a priori ‘accessible’. Speakers who do not speak majority languages can also be also excluded, or misinformed, by a monolingually-informed design of visual materials. Furthermore, crisis communication often comes digitally mediated, which raises questions regarding fair and equal access to technology. Essential contributions can be made by researching the following questions: What is the role of visual and multimodal communication in multilingual organizations and organizing? Does its role grow when fast understanding is essential? How do multilingual societies use new virtual tools of communication and digital technologies, especially social media, during the pandemic? How do multilingual societies and organizations overcome challenges of digital poverty and digital illiteracy? When developing solutions that rely on machine translation and digital language services, is the standard still a monolingual English speaker? Fourth, the pandemic invites philosophical and methodological reflections about how management scholars produce knowledge in multilingual settings (see, also Karhunen et al., 2018). There are no established conventions as to how to reveal or report the multilingual reality of fieldwork. Although many language and translation decisions tend to permeate the entire research process from conceiving the project to writing it up for publication, these decisions often remain unacknowledged in published accounts. Furthermore, due to challenges in accessing physical research sites during the pandemic, researchers have been pushed to digital spaces, to pick up ‘netspeak’, or to revisit existing data sets. The pandemic has also highlighted recent technological advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning that offer new data sources as well as new data analysis techniques, raising important questions: Do these technological advances enable the production of ‘faster’ knowledge to understand dynamic phenomena such as health crises without losing nuance and meaning? How can ‘thick’ qualitative data collected and stored in non-global languages be combined with big data in English? What new methodologies and data analysis techniques can be used to conduct research in multilingual digital spaces? For example, at present, popular data analysis software such as NVivo cannot accommodate multilingual texts. How do big data, machine learning and new technologies enable, constrain or change multilingual practices in organizations? In times of crises there is an opportunity for new insight and knowledge to emerge, but crises also make communication gaps and voids of social meaning painfully visible. Covid-19 is foregrounding the consequences of what it means (not) to have access to knowledge, safety, justice, and voice – and lack of access is often aggravated, if not produced, by language barriers. Exclusion and inequality grow in the shadows of linguistic dominance and fragmented expert talk. We have highlighted four areas of research for management scholars that demand taking multilingualism seriously. Given the central role of language in our field, these four are but a start, offering promising synergies with other disciplines, notably linguistics. While other, equally severe disasters such as Covid-19 have hit the humankind in history, they have not been written about to the same extent. We believe that because the pandemic has disrupted the Western world so dramatically, we were invited to write this essay. Despite our privileged geopolitical position, our task is to encourage the community of management scholars to stop ‘masking the multilingual by the requirements of clarity, cohesion, transparency’ when aiming to publish their work (Phipps, 2019, p. 6). There are currently two global communicative resources at our disposal: English and translation. As an academic community we have chosen English. As such, embracing translation cannot amend systemic inequalities and injustice, but it can point to critical experiences located at the nexus between words and worlds. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Lawrence S. Welch – a dear colleague and friend – who used to follow with great interest language issues in all walks of life. In one of his last messages to Rebecca, he reported a spike in corona cases in the suburbs of Melbourne with higher concentrations of migrants. These migrants lacked skills in English which was the seed of this essay. We would like to thank Riikka Sarala, Jonathan Doh and Daniel Muzio for their helpful editorial comments. Rebecca Piekkari is also grateful to Sini Wallenius for her research assistance and to the group of MSc students at Aalto University, School of Business who engaged with the initial ideas presented in this essay as part of the CEMS Block seminar ‘Managing multilingual organizations’ taught together with Claudine Gaibrois in August 2020.