Mitigating the Crisis (Asynchronous Session)
Covid-19 - Strategies for Containing the Crisis and Mitigating Its Impact: Normal Accident Theory, High Reliability Organization Theory, and Crisis Compliance Perspectives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Lally
The research addresses three major research perspectives on Crises: Normal Accident Theory, High Reliability Organization Theory, and Crisis Compliance, to gain insight into how a society can contain the impacts of a pandemic. Normal Accident Theory (NAT) was developed in organizational settings and addresses how organizations need to be aware of how "incidents," minor problems, can propagate into system wide or even global disasters. NAT characterizes disaster prone organizations as having complex, tightly coupled, poorly controlled environments. High Reliability Organization Theory addresses how organizations can deal pragmatically with the reality of complex, tightly coupled systems to create reliable systems. Crisis Compliance seeks to establish guidelines for the appropriate use of technology and available methodologies, before, during and after crisis to prevent crises from occurring, mitigate the impact of the crisis and create a more positive post-crisis world. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, a wave of lawsuits are anticipated. Crisis Compliance argues that if its guidelines are followed, managers and government leaders should be able to limit their liability for damages. Citizens should also be better informed of the potential risks of pandemics and craft better risks aversion and mitigation strategies for themselves, as well as having the ability to choose leaders who can cope effectively with pandemic disasters. These three theories inform an analysis of Covid-19 and the current strategies being used to combat it.
Fintech the ‘Sunrise Sector’ of India: Opportunities during Covid View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirti Sharma
The advent of COVID modified the way businesses are being conducted. Though even before COVID arrived, the Indian economy was battling with economic jolts which were triggered by major banking frauds which perturbed the financial system in the country. A weakened investor sentiment was furthered deepened when the countrywide lockdown gave a final shock to the economy. Fortunately as the ‘new normal’ stabilizes, businesses are becoming innovative and new ways to run businesses are being created. A major change has been noticed in the financial sector where FINTECH companies were already active from the past few years but the pandemic provided impetus to their growth. Be it payments, lending, accounts and savings trade and investment, insurance, technology or support, fintech registered a boost in all these sectors. For instance as cashless economy became a necessity rather than an option, e-wallets saw a surge in their usage like never before. The market size grew and customer trust enhanced. On the flip side, like any other developing sector, fintech has its share of problems for companies ranging from trust, reliability, vulnerability to frauds and ‘struggle for existence and survival of the fittest’. This paper tries to analyse how fintech proved to be a savior for the country’s financial system offering growth amidst the sluggish economy during the COVID era. It also tries to reason out why the sector has strong prospects despite the challenges which it is currently facing.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Organizational Knowledge Management: Proposal for Exploratory Research View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maayan Nakash, Dan Bouhnik
In this paper, we present our proposal for an exploratory research study. The goal of the research is to deepen the understanding of the effects and ramifications of the COVID-19 crisis on knowledge management (KM) in knowledge-intensive organizations. To this end, we formulated a quantitative questionnaire, based on the testimonies from 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with KM professionals. The questionnaire aims to examine if the pandemic crisis had an effect on organizational KM, whether positive or negative. We propose to expand the research to a correlation study, as part of a quantitative-positivistic paradigm. Dependent variables (relating to various aspects of KM) and independent variables (such as, demographic data, organizational affiliation and work place – office/home/hybrid) will serve as the basis for the scrutiny of cause and affect relationships. We plan to distribute the questionnaire among managers and employees in large corporations in the public sector. In this aspect, the public sector will serve as a case study for knowledge-intensive organizations. The data will then be analyzed using acceptable statistical models. To the best of our knowledge, no such study has yet been conducted. We anticipate that we will be able to offer practical suggestions relating to the improvement of work processes, especially in times of crisis. Moreover, we hope the results will help increase awareness among managers and employees, as to the two facets of organizational KM; opportunities for growth and improvement as an outcome of optimal KM, and the acute dangers of non-existent or substandard KM.
Learning with the Microscopic: Alternative Narratives View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jayson Cooper
Scientific learning in the early years has been problematised by the microscopic generating macroscopic tensions in living. These lived tensions between the material and digital blur and hybridise in different ways—‘together-apart’ (Barad, 2014). Teaching the environmental sciences within social isolation and the restraints of a pandemic demands radical pedagogies that move with the shifting sands of the twenty-first century. Pedagogies of connectedness, flexibility, and relationality open otherworldly possibilities as authentic alternatives to traditional science education as we knew it. The ways science is conceptualised largely depends on the culture in which it is produced and enacted. The microscopic has opened macroscopic pedagogical space for early years science, art and technologies to be inclusive and invite diffractive articulations of cultural ways of knowing, being and doing, across complex learning environments and contexts. This pedagogical stance invites multimodal geographies, ecologies, imaginaries and stories to be rhizomatic and essential wayfarers in traversing messy hybrid landscapes and tensions. Place and a relational pedagogy of Place become an anchor for students to decolonise and come alongside Indigenous Worldviews in their lives and learning. For non-Indigenous educators Country is not far off in some distant time but rather always already here. Amongst the demise of late capitalism and with the acceleration of environmental catastrophe the microscopic may just have given us a clearer vision of what capabilities are needed for surviving the twenty-first century.
The Evaluation of Mobile Technology Adoption as a Employee Training Tool between Pre-COVID and COVID View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anastasia Tracy Biggs
The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore why and how corporate training managers can adopt mobile technology for employee training. The case study method explored the learning processes to determine if a learning model is appropriate for the use of mobile technology as a training tool (De Zan, De Toni, Fornasier, and Battistella, 2015, p. 341). This qualitative case study utilized interviews to explore how the use of mobile technology can be adopted to train employees. The use of interviews examined the degree of employee growth from mobile training (Alberghini, Cricelli, and Grimaldi, 2014, p. 260). Case study methodology answered how mobile technology through cause-effect relationships explored the lack of mobile technology adoption interventions between corporate managers and the organization (De Zan et al, 2015, p. 335) (Tsang, 2013, p. 197).
Remote Language Revitalization Efforts During COVID-19: A Digital Decolonization Approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher Buttimer, Garron Hillaire
As schools shift to online instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to support disenfranchised populations and keep issues of equity at the center of our response. In this study, we focus on supporting one of the few urban-based Indigenous language schools in the United States because language revitalization (reversing the decline of a language) is critical for Native American communities. We explore the extent to which two remote instruction approaches, videoconferencing and flipped classrooms, support the development of a community of speakers. The study focuses on a single classroom of 16 students in 1st through 3rd grade. We use a digital decolonization framework focused on empowering local communities in conjunction with design based research methodology to explore contextualized remote instruction solutions. We report on results that identify the extent to which educational technology supports the development of a community of speakers considering the two aforementioned remote instruction modalities. We report on benefits for the development of a community of speakers from remote instruction that come with costs in reduced efficacy of language learning. Finally, we distill those results into preliminary design principles for pivoted language revitalization lessons.
