Strategic Responses to Crisis

A Virtual Special Issue edited by Matthias Wenzel, Sarah Stanske, and Marvin Lieberman

Currently, the pandemic crisis is affecting the lives of people and organizations around the world. As the coronavirus continues to spread, more and more governments are implementing strong measures to save people’s lives, such as the prohibition of events, lockdowns, and shutdowns. These measures contribute to slowing down the spread of the coronavirus in order to avoid lethal capacity overloads of national healthcare systems. At the same time, they threaten the survival of firms across all sectors and industries at a global scale—with potentially devastating individual, societal, and economic outcomes, such as massive job losses and social precarity. Therefore, the corona crisis raises important questions about how firms can respond effectively to crises such as the current pandemic.

In this Virtual Special Issue, we gather and discuss key articles published in the journals of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) that shed light on how firms respond to crisis. Our overview focuses on 13 articles that substantially inform our understanding of this issue.

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“Reshaping Demand Landscapes: How Firms Change Customer Preferences to Better Fit their Products.” A Conversation with the Author

by Esther Leibel Vinokurova’s analysis of the development of the MBS market is based on a massive archival database (366 industry documents and periodicals and 13 books from 1960 to 2008), along with 21 semi-structured interviews with industry participants and regulators. Her study reveals that to make MBS more acceptable to investors, issuers pursued two parallel strategies. First, they repositioned MBS to make them look more similar to bonds (for example, by standardizing the MBS documentation and aggregating multiple mortgages to issue securities in larger amounts). Second, and more importantly, they took advantage of the malleability of the customer perceptions … Continue reading “Reshaping Demand Landscapes: How Firms Change Customer Preferences to Better Fit their Products.” A Conversation with the Author