Thoughts on Pandemic Research Opportunities

The following information has been posted from Alfred Deakin Professor Mike Ewing, Faculty Executive Dean and Vice President

Dear scholars and research students in FBL,

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, an invincible summer” (Albert Camus)

If pandemics of COVID-19’s nature are once in a century events, it stands to reason that relatively little has been written about them and their implications in our (business, economics, law) journals, because the majority of our journals are <100 years old (i.e. launched after the last such pandemic in 1919). Case in point: the oldest of the 24 UT Dallas top tier business journals appears to be The Accounting Review at 94, and the mean age of these journals is only 49! The oldest of the ‘big 4’ Australian law journals (SLR and MULJ) are only 67 and 63 years old, respectively. Economics is of course older: all of their top five journals were launched before 1919, but the methodological sophistication and data available at that time are a shadow of what is available now.

If one assumes that history continues to repeat itself and that there will be another global pandemic circa 2120, it seems to me that it is beholden on our generation of business, economics, and law academics to create a suitable knowledge base for future generations of politicians, managers, leaders, policymakers, scholars, and students.

As one might imagine, the health journals have gone into overdrive over the last few months. Indeed, on the Google Scholar homepage, a new section called “Articles about COVID-19” has been added, and since Jan 1, >700 papers on COVID-19 have been posted to MedRxiv, a repository for medical-research work that has not yet been peer-reviewed. But as the Australian experience of the last few days is making increasingly clear, COVID-19 won’t just have health implications; it will also have far-reaching effects on business, law, and the economy (!) more generally, both nationally and internationally.

The first special issue calls for papers in a business journal was posted last week; expect many, many more over the next year. The first business journal article on COVID-19 is already ‘in press’ at the Academy of Management Perspectives, and the International Journal of Business Communication published a special issue on crisis communications several days ago. A para-practitioner paper on COVID-19 responses has been published by McKinsey, and quite a confronting commentary has just appeared in Forbes.

I see that a few of our colleagues have also been pro-active. Alex Newman is hosting a webinar on leadership in times of crisis for the Academy of Management and both Nichola Robertson and Michael Callaghan have provided expert commentary to the media on COVID-19 in their respective fields of (marketing) expertise.

Hence, I encourage those of you with the available bandwidth over the coming weeks/months to perhaps begin to think about appropriate research questions in your field(s) of expertise. To reiterate, I say this out of altruism, not opportunism. Many preventable mistakes have been made, are being made and will continue to be made in 2020 – by policymakers, politicians, CEOs, boards, managers, and consumers – and part of this comes down to a relative absence of research-based insights. Since none of us are health workers, conducting research on the COVID-19 crisis represents a tangible way that we can harness our own talents and skills for the greater good.   

Kind regards, Mike Ewing

NB – HDR Students – if you are considering publication on this topic or other research areas, please discuss with your supervisor.

 

 


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