This issue of Management and Organization Review is special in two ways. It features the Special Issue on Informal Networks: Dark Sides, Bright Sides, and Unexplored Dimensions, co-edited by Sven Horak, Fida Afiouni, Yanjie Bian, Alena Ledeneva, Maral Muratbekova-Touron, and Deputy Editor Carl F. Fey, and the Forum on Resilience under the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion editorial area.
I am especially indebted to the guest editors of The Dark and Bright Side special issue because of their determination to legitimate and direct attention to a largely undeveloped research area on informal networks. Informal ties such as guanxi (China), blat (Russia), clannism (Kazakhstan), wasta (Arabic-speaking countries), yongo (South Korea), aidagara (Japan), vitamin B (Germany), and protecteczia (Israel) are prevalent and accepted in every culture. However, there is a wide opportunity for studies that relate the role of informal networks and the performance of formal institutional configuration and social networks in the context of transforming economies as distinct from an extensive literature underlying established western theories and models. It is my hope that this special issue will be the stimulus for unleashing research on informal networks’ dark sides or otherwise in the context of transforming economies. I would also like to take this opportunity and express my deep appreciation to Deputy Editor Carl Fey, who guided the editorial team to apply the reviewing standards of MOR relating to falsifiability and transparency in the context of literature review, theory development, and discussion of empirical findings.
This issue of MOR leads off with a Forum on resilience, especially of country resilience, as a consequence of the world experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. This forum was given voice in my previous Letter from the Editor (https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2020.18), which unleashed the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion in this issue on how societies manifest resilience in the context of a major crisis, and why some societies are more resilient than others.
The Forum has attracted over 40 commentaries, essays, and case studies, which are being evaluated through a fast-track process for possible publication in the September and December 2020 issues. This leadoff Forum features an introductory essay (co-authored by Deputy Editor Liisa Välikangas and me). The essay decomposes the consideration of resilience to three stages – before the crisis, during the crisis, and post crisis when the focus is on recovery and rebuilding to a new lingering normal, beyond the pre-crisis conditions.
In the four essays that follow Professor Xueguang Zhou reflects on lessons learned from the natural experiment of how the Chinese bureaucracy (Central and local governments) responded to this unexpected (though perhaps predictable) dramatic episode. Professor Gordon Redding compares China and Japan's resilience in terms of China's ability to scale up a super linear lock down of Wuhan's eleven million population, whereas Japan can count on and benefit from a variant of social cohesion built around the idea of a living community and unique Japanese way of social bonding. Professor Anna Grandori considers generative resilience in the context of Black Swan type events and the challenge of the impossibility of a return to the past because the fragilities of the past order are the very causes of the catastrophe. Professor Peter Ping Li's essay explores the consequences of the current pandemic in the context of tightly coupled interdependence in global supply chains, and advances a post-pandemic balance between global integration and local differentiation with the core features of loosely coupled configuration in global supply chains.
The new normal, to emerge in the course of the post crisis stage, is likely to be characterized and shaped by the new reality involving explosive growth of improvisation, volatility of social media that have reshaped how individuals and groups communicate, interact, form new beliefs, find work, relate to others and form their identities. While these social media platforms serve to amplify available information, enable new relationships and lifestyles, they also greatly amplify volatility and have also become powerful means for disseminating and amplifying disinformation, cyber warfare and ideological hate speech, further fragmenting societies. One perilous consequence is greater disorder in coming together and coalescing on any new normal with a degree of stability and predictability. This also highlights the imperative for research and the emergence of new Responsible Leadership, a parallel MOR initiative [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/management-and-organization-review/call-for-papers/active-call-2].
