The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a global crisis which has led to the closure of thousands of businesses, the loss of millions of jobs, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. No sector has been immune to the effects of this pandemic, including management learning and education. As educators, we learned to teach in new modalities with varied technologies, work with new classroom protocols, adjust our expectations about who and where our students would be, adapt to technological solutions and rethink our careers and identities as management educators and scholars(Beech & Anseel, 2020; Brammer & Clark, 2020). Similarly, our students have experienced a different environment of learning and had to adjust their routines and methods to the new reality of content delivery. For some this learning environment has been charged with emotional distress and increased anxiety, but for others it has yielded a more empowering learning experience. Likewise, institutions have had to adapt teaching practices in light of lockdowns and social distancing across the globe, just as most faced financial strain in response to declining student enrollment. For many, perhaps most, students, educators and business schools, the experience has been difficult. However for some, unexpectedly, the shift to virtual learning has brought both practical benefits (e.g. greater access, reduced living costs, greater working flexibility) and pedagogical improvements.

In this special issue, our interest lies in theorizing how management learning and education at the individual, organizational, and institutional levels, adapts to, and learns from, the perils and possibilities that the COVID-19 pandemic affords. After all, learning often occurs when routine habits are disrupted (Dewey, 1992), and little doubt exists that the COVID-19 pandemic marks a major disruption.

Dealing with the crisis necessitated broad, deep and transformative learning. We found ways to manage stress’ effects on individual students and faculty, building on insights from the caring professions (Greenberg & Hibbert, 2020; Rosa, 2020) and exposing issues of diversity and inclusion in the politics of care along the way (Gabster & van Daalen, 2020; Nash & Churchill, 2020; Monahan et al., 2020). We have learned how to embrace technological shifts in the processes of teaching and learning (Lund Dean & Forray, 2020), despite finding transformation during a crisis to be doubly challenging (Wade & Shan, 2020). We have also begun to consider how artificial intelligence may help or hinder rapid developments in knowledge (Balasubramanian, Ye & Xu, 2020) in unstable times.  

The crisis has also stimulated transformations in the shape of the education sector (Mohapatra, 2020), and shifted operational models for business schools, along with organizations in most sectors (Ritter & Pedersen, 2020) and entrepreneurs seeking to establish new ventures (Manalova et al, 2020; Ratten, 2020). These shifts have entailed challenges for leaders (Amis & Janz, 2020; Biddle, 2020) and our approaches to how they are developed (Al Saidi et al., 2020; Fernandez & Shaw, 2020). In response, we have sought to develop our pedagogies and theories to help leaders and managers cope with the unprecedented learning challenges facing organizations (Yang, 2020).

Contributions to this special issue should provide new theoretical understandings, reached through examination of the dynamics of the management learning and education processes, or new ways of organizing business schools, that were mobilized to support change during the COVID-19 crisis. Due to the broad nature of the topic, relevant insights from other disciplines (e.g., social psychology, urban planning, ethics of AI and many others) that can be connected with the theme and the core interests of the journal may be appropriate, in addition to more conventional approaches. Possible areas of research focus are suggested below, but these should be seen as examples rather than a prescriptive list.

Possible areas of research focus

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