Institutional Schisms and Strategic Responses: Understanding the Cascading Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

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We set out to understand how communities, in particular firms within communities, were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic represents an exogenous shock and while (we hope) the next exogenous shock will not be the same in nature, scholars of resilience and disaster have taught us that we can learn from each crisis. In particular, we posed three main research questions. First, we sought to understand how specifically the pandemic generated institutional uncertainty for local communities. Second, our goal was to understand how this uncertainty, and the pandemic itself, caused institutional schisms (or policy misalignments) at multiple levels (e.g., local- state-national). Third, our intention was to understand how firms, as critical stakeholders in communities, both experienced and responded to the schisms. To answer these questions we employed an in-depth, targeted, and intensive interview process. In total, we conducted interviews with 437 individuals across 18 diverse communities nested in 6 New England states within the USA. By using a structured and consistent interview process that was internally validated and created by experts in the fields of strategic management, resilience, and community-based economic development, our robust findings offer a more finely variegated lens through which we can understand the relationship between exogenous shocks, institutional schisms, and firm strategic responses.