Covid-19: Prospering Industries & Oversize Management

With COVID-19, many businesses have failed, while other industries and corporations have seen profits increase, and are likely to continue to do so post-pandemic, in line with the trend of the oversize economy. Coronavirus 2019 has caused a major economic shock, in addition to its tremendous impact on global health, pushing the biggest corporations towards an outburst of the new, basic drivers of global capitalism (Health; Energy; Food; Communication). That is, the pillars of global competition that start from an oversize management in order to fix the competitive landscapes of large corporations.

The Pandemic and Shareholder Value

Shareholder value has driven corporate governance in North America for over a century. In the wake of significant financial crises and growing inequalities, corporate America decided in 2019 to embrace a more egalitarian model, in which all stakeholders matter equally. The brutal pandemic that wreaked havoc in the first half of 2020 exposed a startling disconnect between the real economy and the stock market. This disconnect is due to a gap between explicit and implicit corporate governance. While officially corporate America wants to convert to a new doctrine, the pandemic has shown that shareholder capitalism has remained the default model. Good intentions and official declarations are not enough in a system that has been specifically designed to serve the shareholders. If stakeholder capitalism is to succeed, it needs a clear normative content and perhaps a more radical reform of institutions and regulation.

The Relationship between Crowding and Perceived Health Risk in the COVID-19 Era

The current COVID-19 pandemic, and the related social distancing policies adopted in many countries, are deeply affecting consumers’ perceptions towards crowding. This study tries to understand in particular if the perceived human and spatial crowding might increase consumers’ health risk, with an impact on intentions to buy, and if corporate reputation can reduce such impact. As tourism and hospitality is one the sectors most susceptible to the current COVID-19 health crisis, we focus our empirical study on the cruise industry. The empirical study was conducted on a sample of cruise passengers using a structured questionnaire submitted online. Overall, 447 individuals’ responses were used for understanding such relationships by performing a regression model. The results indicate that both human and spatial crowding seem to influence people’s perceived health risk, while corporate reputation does not seem to reduce such deterring impact. The study presents several managerial implications for different service industries, as in the cruise package the customer can find many different services, from restaurant to shopping. The results, in fact, may be useful for better understanding how to cope with COVID-19.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Reciprocity Relations during Covid-19

This research work opens an interpretative view on corporate social responsibility (CSR) during an unexpected emergency reality and latent environmental collapse as a strategy to survive. The investigation approach follows the lines of a field analysis survey based on 288 consumers before (n=80) and during the spread of Covid-19 (n=208). The study aims to provide paradigms and interpretations of evidence-based CSR as a balanced reciprocity relationship in coping emergencies; this necessarily moved the authors to investigate the relationship transversally, examining the role of budgeting and its repercussions on well-being by hierarchical leadership. Specifically, the authors investigate the existence of possible niches of actions based on cooperative and responsible operations during emergencies.

Ouverture de ‘Covid-19. Management Perspectives’

The COVID-19 pandemic is a complex, disruptive event with many impacts beyond those related to health, national economies and global competition. While many worldwide companies were challenged to survive, the pandemic also presented many development opportunities for the long-term. The digital transformation, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, require new skills (OECD, 2020) informed by greater attention to the applied ethics of responsibility. Moreover, the development of the pandemic has generated an acceleration in a process of change in consumer behavior. Many businesses around the world have become aware of having to reconsider their market relationships starting from marketing channels, the use of marketing channels, from multichannelling, to omnichanneling, to metachannelling.

“Back to Normal” vs. “New Normal”: the Post-Pandemic Recovery of Italian Tourism

Based on one year of intensive interaction with and feedback from practitioners, this paper provides a twofold contribution of a conceptual nature. On the one hand, it attempts to clarify the nature of the crisis in comparison with the past experiences. On the other hand, with reference to the literature on dynamic capabilities, it outlines, in an ideal-typical way, two diverging and co-existing (and therefore conflicting) perspectives of the recovery process that are summarized in – respectively – the “back to normal” and the “new normal” discourses.

Tourism Multiplier in the World Economy: Covid-19 Effects

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on the world order with the force of a tsunami. It is important also to consider the economic aspect. In this context, tourism plays a leading role, being one of the most affected sectors – both in quantitative terms and in terms of the persistence of the negative trend – as well as, finally, for its effects on other sectors. The result of the calculation of the correlation coefficient between the tourism percentage incidence on GDP in 2018 and 2020/2019 GDP percentage loss highlights that the higher the incidence of tourism on a country’s GDP was at the beginning of the pandemic, the greater the percentage loss of GDP was for that country.

An Emerging Conceptual Framework to Assess Expatriates’ Return on Investment

This paper develops a conceptual framework on expatriates’ Return on Investment (eROI) that disentangles the drivers of value creation from expatriation projects and identifies the psychological contract as crucial to overcome the traditional tension between organizational and individual objectives. Mainly designed for traditional medium- and long-term expatriation projects, our framework can also be extended to nascent types of assignments in times of COVID-19 pandemic, e.g. virtual assignments.

The Covid-19 Impact on the Tourism Industry: Short Holidays within National Borders

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily hit international economy giving a particular setback to the tourism sector. Between March and May 2020, during the first lockdown, and between October and December of the same year, during the second lockdown, a questionnaire was administrated in Italy, Greece and Great Britain. Through the questionnaire, people’s feelings and expectations of their desire to take a vacation were collected regarding the period of constraint due to the new coronavirus and the possible end of the pandemic, or the first government approved travel openings. In particular, the question of how long it would take to decide on a holiday, the type and duration, after the period of constriction due to the coronavirus was over, was asked. Both surveys, in the two different lockdown periods, showed the potential desire of tourists to leave relatively quickly, and to take forms of domestic tourism, characterized by small and short-lived trips. The favorite destination being the seaside.

Sustainability and Resilience Assessment in the Pandemic Emergency

The coronavirus pandemic has affected all production and service sectors. The crisis has led to the increased awareness of the fragility and vulnerability of our societies and our lifestyles. The speed at which it spreads has led first to a change of our behavior and our way of life but at the same time, it has also changed the way we consider our buildings and how we live in them. Considering the new visions aimed at sharing spaces, such as those of work with the coworking spaces or frontal lessons in the classroom, they must now be rethought. In tourism and catering, relations with customers are reviewed and public transport is radically rethought. In this context, the concept of resilience plays a key role. How resistant are we and our environment to crises like COVID-19? What is the significance of resilience in sustainability? Is there a link between the assessment of resilience and life cycle assessment? In this paper is represented a general framework to connect resilience and sustainability assessments.