Organizing Extreme Contexts

Sign-up for the first Brown bag session related to extreme contexts! [Thursday, April 15th]

Greetings!

We are delighted to share that the first Extreme Context Research Brown Bag Session will be hosted on Thursday, April 15th from 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM EST / 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM GMT / 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM CEST via zoom.

The Extreme Context Research community is large, active and highly experienced community of international researchers from a broad range of theoretical and methodological backgrounds. This session is the first of what we hope will be several brown bag sessions offered by the Extreme Context Research community, providing new opportunities to meet, grow and learn together. The goal of this session is to provide researchers engaged in early-stage projects with the opportunity to receive support, ideas, and feedback from our community (and if this is your first time joining, you are very welcome as well!). For the first session, we have four presenters sharing their early-stage projects with us (please see the end of this note for all presenter information, bios, and abstracts).

We are now inviting you to register as an attendee of the session. Please register at this link to receive the zoom link: https://forms.gle/3TJ2uhz7QbXGht5SA

Key information about the session:

  • During the Brown Bag session each presenter will be given 25 minutes to share their current projects and to engage in discussion with the audience.
  • Presenters have been invited to share materials they wish attendees to view prior to the session. A link to these materials will be made available in advance of the session to all registered attendees.
  • We will manage the chat and use the “hand wave” signal to facilitate the discussions.
  • Following the session, we will circulate a feedback form to gather your thoughts about the brown bag, and to get a sense of the interest in attending/presenting at other ECR brown bag sessions in the future.

Agenda

First 10 minutes: Welcome and set up.

Presentation 1. Adapting Research in Extreme Contexts during COVID-19

Presenter: Virginia Rosales-Orquera (HEC Montréal and Umeå University)

Presentation 2. Innovating in Times of Crisis: Organizational Resilience and Surge Planning in COVID-19 Early Hotspots

Presenter: Valerie Handunge (University of Warwick)

Presentation 3: Mitigating the Impact of Critical Events on firm growth: Evidence from Advertising Industry

Presenter: M Imran Ilyas (Jyväskylä University)

Presentation 4: Coordination in a Healthcare Organization in an Extreme Context: Covid-19 Pandemic in Lebanese Hospital Geitawi (March 2020 – Present)

Presenter: Vanessa Mansour (Paris Nanterre University) – with Professors Eric Pezet, Genevieve Musca, and Silvia Gherardi

Final 10 minutes: Wrap-up and goodbyes.

 

Full Presentation Details

Title: Adapting Research in Extreme Contexts during COVID-19

Presenter: Virginia Rosales-Orquera

Topic: Virginia will present an ongoing ethnography in an emergency department, which has become intermittent due to the changing governmental restrictions imposed by the pandemic. This has meant a continuous adaptation in terms of data collection, research focus, and access. In this session, she would like to discuss ideas around how to adapt our research practices in extreme contexts and how to reframe her research project following the constraints and opportunities afforded by the pandemic.

Virginia Rosales is a postdoctoral fellow in Management at HEC Montréal and an affiliated researcher at Umeå University. Her research examines the informal side of organizing in pluralistic settings. In particular, she is interested in role and routine dynamics, learning, and sensemaking in the context of emergency departments.

Title: Innovating in Times of Crisis: Organizational Resilience and Surge Planning in COVID-19 Early Hotspots

Presenter: Valerie Handunge

Topic: Organizational resilience is the ability to adapt and develop competence under severe adversity without introducing an extended period of regressive response that may compromise operations (Horne and Orr 1998; Egeland et al 1993; Hamel and Valikangas 2003). The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has put unprecedented pressure on healthcare facilities and its workforce, testing the resilience of hospitals as organizations and threatening to close its doors to patients in a dire time of need. Amid the chaos, clinical and operational leaders were rushing to develop novel solutions to the most quintessential challenges in healthcare – patient capacity management – now in the face of a little-understood contagion. In this article, we ask the question: what can the extraordinary case of crisis – the first COVID-19 surge – teach us about innovating under extreme conditions? Using the experience of one hospital, Mountainside Medical Center, located in the early hotspot of the New York suburbs, we study the nature of organization resilience that enabled rapid innovation that would have taken months or even years to implement. Specifically, we examine the implementation of a temporary closed surveillance tele-ICU that connected patients and bedside teams in New Jersey with critical care specialists working remotely over 1000 miles away at off-site command centers – their home offices – in the Midwest. We examine the qualities of organizational resilience that underpinned the process of innovating – (1) collaborative leadership, (2) a systemness mindset, and (3) operationalizing emotional wellbeing. Finally, we close with our thoughts on locking in crisis triggered innovation. Valerie looks forward to presenting initial findings from virtual ethnography with a US hospital during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Data collection and analysis is complete, Valerie is seeking a theoretical angel.

Valerie Handunge is a 4th year PhD student at the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick

Title: Mitigating the Impact of Critical Events on firm growth: Evidence from Advertising Industry

Presenter: Imran Ilyas

Topic: In industries that are undergoing disruption, critical events such as covid-19 pandemic creates highly uncertain environmental conditions and organizations need to respond/ act wisely to survive and remain competitive. Exiting research has analyzed strategic response of organizations in multiple dimensions. However, the effect of startup vs incumbent firms, creativity of firm, and business model composition, is yet to be studied. Furthermore, the temporal dynamics in strategic response to crisis is not explored in existing research (Wenzel, Stanske, and Lieberman, 2020). So, research question of the study is: How firm’s newness, creativity, and business model composition can affect the impact of critical events on firm growth over the period of time? In the study, it is proposed that critical events adversely affect the firm growth. However, the negative impact of critical events on firm growth mitigates over time. Furthermore, firms that are startups, are high in creativity, and have disruptive business model, manage to offset the negative impact of critical events on firm growth in relatively shorter time, thus elaborating the effectiveness of adaptation in crisis. To test the hypothesis, quantitative longitudinal data (year 1998-2017) is used from advertising industry that is currently undergoing disruption due to digitization. The study will analyze the impact of two critical events: 9/11 attacks and financial crisis of 2007-2008 on growth of advertising agencies in United States. The study is intending to contribute to strategic management of critical events. Imran will present an initial draft with some findings and has questions about the positioning of the study (What theoretical lens would be more appropriate for it? How can I make it relevant for scholars working in the field of extreme events/ highly uncertain environment?)

M Imran Ilyas is working as Post-doc researcher at Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics

Title: Coordination in a Healthcare Organization in an Extreme Context: Covid-19 Pandemic in Lebanese Hospital Geitawi (March 2020 – Present)

Presenter: Vanessa Mansour (with Professors Eric Pezet, Genevieve Musca, and Silvia Gherardi)

Topic: We are developing, within the Center for Studies and Research on Organizations and Strategy (CEROS) laboratory of Paris Nanterre University, a research project on health management in extreme contexts and, in particular, in a pandemic context. In this paper, we focus on the aspect of coordination, a hospital in Beirut facing the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated in August 2020 by the Beirut explosion. The aim of this study is to explore the reorganizing process to face this crises. A qualitative methodology is implemented with the selection of a multidisciplinary healthcare team. It is a longitudinal case study. We chose the Lebanese Hospital Geitawi – UMC as a study site for several important reasons: first, the hospital is recognized as one of the largest university hospitals in the Beirut. Second, it was one of the three hospitals rendered non-functional after the blast, and despite all the damages, the hospital received injured people and treated them on the spot. Third, due to the professional experience as a quality consultant in this setting of one of our research team we have the privilege of access to the hospital and it’s employees. Vanessa would like a feedback about the methodology from this community session.

Vanessa Mansour is PhD student in Management, under the supervision of Professor Eric Pezet, within the CEROS Laboratory at Paris Nanterre University, France

Organizers: 

 

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