Business, economy, and society: tales from the pandemic days

‘Business, Economy, and Society: Tales from the Pandemic Days’ provides a timely and focused examination of how firms, particularly SMEs, responded to the vicissitudes of the COVID-19 pandemic. It nicely combines overall economic implications with firm-specific issues. Human resource and technological issues are rightly identified as the central ingredient in resolving firm performance. Throughout, though, the nexus of these two ingredients to success are highlighted – they do not stand alone. This point is made in multiple contexts and with pointed examples of how to best proceed. Perhaps the strongest reason to engage with this collection of ‘think pieces’ about how businesses are, could, and should be responding to the world pandemic, is because they collectively offer a powerful reflective tonic. We need to learn through these experiences of crisis, and so we need to be willing to reconsider new ways of doing business; indeed, at times, some of these articles’ subtlety ask the reader to reconsider what business is for.