This issue concludes the Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion Forum on Resilience. The forum received 58 submissions and the new experimental fast-track review process resulted in 16 publications (including 5 in this issue). As I reflect on the collection of resilience commentaries, I am struck by the high variation across countries in their response to the pandemic and the stark conclusion that, with a few exceptions, country institutional foundations and regulatory systems disappointed their populations in their inability to marshal national and local policies as well as the science infrastructure for coping with the pandemic. Although a few countries did unleash a global scientific competition for discovery of vaccines. One key consequence of the pandemic is the revelation of widespread Institutional Decay (Välikangas & Lewin, Reference Välikangas and Lewin2020), which spills over to many areas, underlying the crisis of legitimacy affecting all liberal democracies and greatly amplified in the era of social media (Aral, Reference Aral2020), where ‘confirmation bias’ (Välikangas & Lewin, Reference Välikangas and Lewin2020) is the new normal. This has given voice to extreme anger about systemic failures reflected in the casualization of labor (often attributed to globalization and digitalization), unequal opportunities, the increasing income and wealth gap, a decline of the middle class, discrimination against minorities, global poverty, global warming and pollution, all of which are stoked by various conspiracies that are reaching their tipping point.
The pandemic has also revealed the dark side of global dependence on tightly coupled and interdependent global supply chains and widespread corporate strategies and national policies to counteract such interdependencies. The spillover effects of these efforts are evident at the corporate and industry level to build redundant global supply chains, reshoring of manufacturing, the heated public discussions about negative consequences of globalization, and the fault lines of international treaties and bodies intended to regulate and adjudicate international trade disputes. The failure of the WTO dispute resolution process is one of many examples (e.g., The Economist, 2020, October 8; Sally, Reference Sally2020). Moreover, in a recent essay titled ‘What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization’, Krugman (Reference Krugman2019) writes that he and other mainstream economists ‘missed a crucial part of the story’ in failing to realize that globalization would lead to ‘hyperglobalization’ and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly in the industrial middle class in America. Many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made the ‘major mistake’ in underestimating, Krugman says.
In light of the belated recognition of the consequences of ‘hyperglobalization’, following China access to the WTO in 2001, and the new centrality of the geopolitical and economic issues of de-globalization, I am pleased to announce a new Management and Organization Review Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion Forum on ‘De-Globalization and Global Decoupling: Ramifications for MNE's Strategies and Management’. The first collection of commentaries will appear in MOR 17.1 and will run for three issues. The Senior Guest Editors for this Forum are Michael Witt and Peter Ping Li.
Lastly, this issue of Management and Organization Review also includes four papers, ‘Corporate Strategy and Subsidiary Performance: The Effect of Product and Geographic Diversification’, by Jie Jiao, Yang Liu, Rui Wu, and Jun Xia; ‘When Are Pay Gaps Good or Bad for Firm Performance? Evidence from China’, by Jin-hui Luo, Yuangao Xiang, and Ruichao Zhu; ‘The Impact of Japanese Labels on the Perceived Relevance of Lean Production Practices in a Russian Bank’, by Valery Yakubovich and Daniela Lup; and ‘Wining and Dining Government Officials: What Drives Political Networking in Chinese Private Ventures?’, by Jianjun Zhang, Pei Sun, and Kunyuan Qiao. I wish to express my thanks and deep appreciation to Senior Editors Thomas Hutzschenreuter and Maral Muratbekova-Touron, and past Senior Editors Ray Friedman and Bilian Sullivan, for their editorial developmental guidance and mentoring, an MOR commitment since its founding by Professor Anne Tsui.
