Health-based crisis: how do firms weather the storms using the structural hole-bridging strategy?

Purpose: Drawing on the structural hole-bridging perspective of network theory, this paper aims to examine the adaptation strategies undertaken by housing industry actors following the recent pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative case study was adopted as the research methodology for this research. Data collected through online interviews involving 20 participants was used as primary data, while document analysis (both online and printed documents) was used as secondary data. The interviews were guided by the visual vignette method. Findings: This study's findings indicate that a health-based crisis like COVID-19 triggers housing developers to act outside their comfort zones. They undertake arbitrage and collaborative brokerage strategies to cope with business uncertainties. This study revealed the contextual embedding of the owner-occupier market (consumer market) and the investor market (business market). This study also revealed that firms that aggressively located structural holes and built new relationships in B2C and B2B markets before the COVID-19 pandemic were well-equipped to face turbulent times. Practical implications: The innovative strategies that housing developers adopt are transferable and applicable to other industries and countries. Therefore, awareness of these strategies is essential for industry practitioners, especially those badly hit by health-based crises. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study that combines relationship management, structural holes, the housing market and their implications for crisis adaptation. This study examined the grossly understudied phenomenon of demand for housing, which is a durable good, during a turbulent time. The findings of this study provide beneficial guidance for firms, buyers and policymakers facing COVID-19 and/or other similar crises. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Online Yet More Personal: Professors Respond to COVID-19 Crisis

This article represents a Work in Progress. COVID-19 pandemic has affected the way we conduct our lives across different segments of society. Higher education's organizational activities were rearranged as instructors and students were forced to switch from in-person to online and hybrid class activities. We examine how COVID-19 reshaped teaching at an engineering school in a large, public research university in the U.S. Midwest. In our earlier studies (during the pre-COVID-19 era) we found that faculty culture prioritized research over teaching. We also discovered that students avoided interactions with their instructors for several reasons, including the perception that their professors were too busy. Still, a professor's role at a research university involves teaching one to two courses per semester. With the advent of COVID-19, one of the many emerging crises in higher education was that instructors were largely unprepared to teach online and were left scrambling to adjust. Our most current research revealed that instructors had to develop proficiency quickly in various technologies to enable them to pre-record lectures, offer help sessions remotely, and design and administer exams. The learning curve was steep and led to a significant increase in instructor preparation time. This rearrangement of activities seems to have influenced professors' attitudes since they placed higher emphasis on quality of teaching, devoted more time to interacting with students outside class sessions and were more flexible in terms of students' academic challenges.

Rural Telehealth Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Long-term Infrastructure Commitment May Support Rural Health Care Systems Resilience.

Amid concerns of inadequate medical supplies and staffing anticipated from a surge in COVID-19 cases, many health care systems across the United States (U.S.) began shutting down non-essential patient services in March 2020. These sudden shifts bring up questions about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on already fragile rural health care systems and the ability of rural populations, including farmers and farm workers, to meet their health care needs. To provide alternative and safe access to health care, the Federal government relaxed telehealth regulations, which effectively removed some of the largest regulatory barriers that had limited the adoption of telehealth in the U.S. In this commentary, we draw on the example of the Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS), a large rural health care system in Wisconsin and provide an early assessment of how it adjusted its telehealth services during the early months of COVID-19. While the long-term effects of the pandemic on rural health care systems will not be known for some time, the example of MCHS points to the importance of on-going and sustained investments to support the resilience of health care systems and their ability to weather crises. With early evidence that MCHS patients and practitioners are interested in continuing to use telehealth post-COVID-19, we conclude our commentary by offering three recommendations to remove hurdles and improve quality of telehealth care.