Crisis, Chaos and Organizations: The Coronavirus and Lessons for Organizational Theory

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an illustration of how chaotic changes to  large systems are caused by small, seemingly insignificant  environmental events such as the initial case(s) of COVID-19 in China.  From this small starting point for the pandemic, there have been (and  continue to be) millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent  trying to alleviate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. World  government and corporate leaders are striving to deal with this  pandemic, but uncertainty is felt across the globe. Unprecedented  strategies (e.g., the United States government’s multi-trillion-dollar  stimulus package (s)) have been used to halt the spread of COVID-19.  These small events cascade throughout larger and larger systems leading  to unforeseeable consequences. Organizations must experiment and make  decisions on how to react. Decisions must be made and implemented to see  what the effects of these decisions are. The chapters in this volume  provide important insights for all organizations during this time of  crisis. The chapters express bottom-up and top-down approaches to a  crisis-initiating environmental change by organizations. The chapters  provide insight into the way organizations perceive the effect of  COVID-19 as 1) a permanent or transitory change in the organization’s  environment; and 2) as a crisis or opportunity. Taken together, the  chapters provide both scientists and practitioners with a starting point  for understanding the impact of COVID-19 on organizational theory and  on management practice for readers.