The new business landscape

The past 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic were dramatic, with most sectors of society disrupted. The healthcare sector stretched beyond its capacity. Education went virtual and digitized—at least, for a time. Manufacturing, construction, and retail endured collapsing supply chains. Hospitality and travel struggled amidst massive, extended shutdowns. Software exploded, as demand increased for digital products and services. All of this created significant shifts in the business landscape. Things have changed.

Consider Airbnb, which enjoyed its most productive 2-year period while employees worked from home during COVID-19. Discussing his company’s decision to allow employees to work remotely, permanently, with no pay cut, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said: “We can’t try to hold on to 2019 any more than [we can try to hold on to] 1950. We have to move forward…. I think that the office as we know it, is over.” 1

Alterations in the business landscape reach far beyond remote work arrangements, affecting almost every function within organizations. Given these seismic shifts, business scholars have the opportunity to not only identify and describe what has changed, but also—more importantly—offer evidence-based, theoretically-sound prescriptions, insights, and suggestions for succeeding and thriv-ing in this new reality.

That is where Business Horizons comes in. As stated in the journal’s aims and scope,2 Business Horizons publishes articles that identify important business issues/problems and recommend solutions addressing these. The journal seeks articles that “prompt readers to think about business practice in new and innovative ways” and “that strike a balance between the practical and the academic.” Even though submissions to Business Horizons go through a blind, peer-review process, we work hard to deliver very timely decisions such that fresh ideas and contemporary perspectives can reach an audience as soon as possible. Under this model, great insights do not become stymied or delayed by an overly bureaucratic and administrative process.

Business Horizons has already published quite a few articles on business responses to the pandemic; indeed, the journal’s Best Article Award 2021 went to “Business continuity in the COVID-19 emergency: A framework of actions undertaken by world-leading companies.” 3 However, the next major challenge/opportunity in business scholarship is to not only explore how the world has changed due to long-term pandemic effects, but also specify what business leaders can do to thrive amidst these shifts. The pandemic did not distinguish between different disciplinary spheres such as marketing, operations, management, finance, accounting, human resources, strategy, and technology; as such, insights regarding the impact of the pandemic and ways of thriving beyond it should not be constrained by disciplinary boundaries, either. We must move beyond a disciplinary perspective to examine the cross-disciplinary impact of change and integrate different insights to propose solutions and new ways forward.

The shifts caused by the pandemic also are not happening in a vacuum. They are compounded and exacerbated by additional changes brought on by other global events such as protests and activism to highlight issues of social justice; the war in Ukraine; debates about free speech and fake news; and new technological possibilities arising from artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and other advancements associated with Web3 and beyond.

The world as we knew it in 2019 is not the same as the world today, and our insights about business opportunities and challenges need to account for these shifts. I encourage pragmatic business scholars to take up the challenge of examining what has changed and propose insightful/innovative ways for businesses and business leaders to thrive in this new reality. Such insights should be “grounded in scholarship, yet…presented in a readable, non-technical format such that the content is accessible to a wide business audience.”2 We look forward to receiving your submissions that address this new reality.