A reflection on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Australian businesses: Toward a taxonomy of vulnerabilities

The effect of preference and actual days spent working from home on stress and musculoskeletal pain in older workers

OBJECTIVES

The rapid shift to working from home (WFH) due to the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between preferred and actual days spent working from home on employees musculoskeletal pain (MSP) and stress in older workers.

METHODS

This study uses three waves of data from the Employees Working from Home (EWFH) study collected in May 2021 (n = 451), November 2021 (n = 358) and May 2022 (n = 320) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A generalised mixed-effect model was used to model the relationships between preference and actual days spent WFH, stress and MSP. Exploratory mediation analysis was conducted to further explore significant relationships between actual days WFH and outcomes.

RESULTS

WFH was associated with increasing stress levels in older participants, when the actual number of days WFH increased (B: 0.051, 95% CI: 0.008, 0.094) and when the number of days WFH exceeded their preferences (B: 0.218, 95% CI: 0.087, 0.349). Actual number of days spent WFH and stress in older employees was mediated through their sense of community (Indirect effect: 0.014, 95% CI: 0.003, 0.03; p = 0.006). The relationship between WFH and MSP was variable. For older employees, WFH more than their preferred number of days was associated with a higher likelihood of reporting MSP (OR: 4.070, 95% CI: 1.204, 13.757).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings from this study support the need for flexible policies to support WFH which take into account employees preferences. For older workers, a sense of community was found to be important and proactive attempts to restore this will be important for maintain their health and supporting sustainable employment.

Urban resilience to socioeconomic disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from China

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions have raised the awareness of building pandemic-resilient cities. Prior studies often evaluated the resilience of one type of urban system while lacking a comparison across various urban subsystems. This study fills this gap by measuring and comparing the adaptive resilience to the pandemic of various urban subsystems in Chinese cities. We propose a novel outcome measurement of the pandemic's socioeconomic impacts on cities, i.e., the citizens' complaints data, and use its temporal changes to measure cities' adaptive resilience to the pandemic. We find a wide range of urban subsystems were severely shocked by the pandemic, including the urban economy, construction-and-housing sector, welfare system, and education system. Different urban subsystems exhibit divergent degrees of adaptive resilience to the pandemic. Using cluster analysis, we also identify three types of cities with different patterns of adaptive resilience: cities whose general economies were the least resilient, cities whose construction-and-housing system was the least resilient, and cities that were mostly affected by restriction measures. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the pandemic's socioeconomic costs and help identify the divergent resilience of different urban subsystems so as to develop targeted policy interventions to improve cities' resilience to the pandemic.

Two years of COVID-19 pandemic: Understanding the role of knowledge-based supply chains towards resilience through bibliometric and network analyses

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) catastrophically disrupted most of the global supply chains (SC). Knowledge-based SC can cope with the pandemic disruptions by the efficient use of data, information, knowledge, human intelligence and emerging technologies. This article aims to critically analyse the SC research during the two years of COVID-19 pandemic to understand the role of knowledge-based supply chain towards SC resilience. A review of the 281 shortlisted articles is presented, along with bibliometric and network analyses in order to create an intellectual map of the domain and to identify the emerging knowledge themes. Bibliometric analysis reveals that the knowledge focus during this short span has migrated from COVID-19 pandemic to SC risk management and finally to risk mitigation strategies. The network analysis identifies five emerging knowledge themes, namely impact of COVID-19 on SC; SC risk mitigation and resilience; supply chain viability; sustainable SC strategies; and food SC. This review also elucidates the strategies to mitigate COVID-19 disruptions for incorporating resilience in SC. Future research directions for a knowledge-based sustainable-leagile-resilient (S-leagilient) supply chain have also been propounded.

Covid19/IT the digital side of Covid19: A picture from Italy with clustering and taxonomy

The Covid19 pandemic has significantly impacted on our lives, triggering a strong reaction resulting in vaccines, more effective diagnoses and therapies, policies to contain the pandemic outbreak, to name but a few. A significant contribution to their success comes from the computer science and information technology communities, both in support to other disciplines and as the primary driver of solutions for, e.g., diagnostics, social distancing, and contact tracing. In this work, we surveyed the Italian computer science and engineering community initiatives against the Covid19 pandemic. The 128 responses thus collected document the response of such a community during the first pandemic wave in Italy (February-May 2020), through several initiatives carried out by both single researchers and research groups able to promptly react to Covid19, even remotely. The data obtained by the survey are here reported, discussed and further investigated by Natural Language Processing techniques, to generate semantic clusters based on embedding representations of the surveyed activity descriptions. The resulting clusters have been then used to extend an existing Covid19 taxonomy with the classification of related research activities in computer science and information technology areas, summarizing this work contribution through a reproducible survey-to-taxonomy methodology.

Supply chain disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic: Recognizing potential disruption management strategies

The COVID-19 pandemic has made a significant impact on various supply chains (SCs). All around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic affects different dimensions of SCs, including but not limited to finance, lead time, demand changes, and production performance. There is an urgent need to respond to this grand challenge. The catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted scholars to develop innovative SC disruption management strategies and disseminate them via numerous scientific articles. However, there is still a lack of systematic literature survey studies that aim to identify promising SC disruption management strategies through the bibliometric, network, and thematic analyses. In order to address this drawback, this study presents a set of up-to-date bibliometric, network, and thematic analyses to identify the influential contributors, main research streams, and disruption management strategies related to the SC performance under the COVID-19 settings. The conducted analyses reveal that resilience and sustainability are the primary SC topics. Furthermore, the major research themes are found to be food, health-related SCs, and technology-aided tools (e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), and blockchains). Various disruption management strategies focusing on resilience and sustainability themes are extracted from the most influential studies that were identified as a part of this work. In addition, we draw some managerial insights to ensure a resilient and sustainable supply of critical products in the event of a pandemic, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccines.

Characterizing the Relationship between Growth and Development in the Context of Strategic Management via Systems Thinking: A Systematic Literature Review

The consequence of the complexity of contemporary challenges has a significant impact on the management sphere. Growth and development are two critical stages in the lifecycle of any organization, enterprise, or corporation as a system. The purpose of this study is to conduct an overview of strategic management discourse to characterize the relationship between growth and development processes with the aim of alleviating complexity. In this regard, we conduct a bibliographic analysis in the Web of Science database using a systematic literature review along with a systems thinking approach as a method to synthesize the findings and finally propose a conceptual framework. According to the findings of this study, a lack of attention to the importance of the relationship between growth and development processes is identified. This implies a gap in this research area, emphasizing the importance of more focus on these processes regardless of their attributes. The implications of the findings in this article will provide a holistic perspective for strategic management practitioners, allowing a better understanding of the importance of growth and development convergence. Consequently, this study may provide a path for future research to explore the implications of growth and development process in other disciplines of management.