Abstract
It becomes progressively understood that the health crisis (and the deriving socioeconomic crisis) of COVID-19 drives the global system towards radical transformations. The successful adaptation of the various socioeconomic actors in this emerging reality probably constitutes the most significant challenge ahead. This chapter suggests a restructured theorization of socioeconomic development for the post-COVID-19 era, focused on the prerequisite organizational adaptation. This conceptual research examines fundamental evidence concerning current developments globally, arriving at a repositioning in evolutionary and interdisciplinary terms by adopting the strategy-technology-management synthesis to change management and innovation (Stra.Tech.Man).
TopIntroduction
COVID-19, according to several analysts, drives the acceleration of the ongoing fourth industrial revolution; hence, past central occupations in traditional industries are rapidly decaying, and others are emerging (Bonilla-Molina, 2020; Bragazzi, 2020; Czifra & Molnár, 2020). In the interregnum, based on the experience from the earlier three industrial revolutions, social unrest, rise in absolute poverty, and economic inequality seem inevitable consequences (Schwab & Malleret, 2020). Thereby, in this crisis of globalization, symptoms such as neo-Luddism (McKay, 2020), political extremism (Cox, 2017), and intolerance might appear as the new normal, at least until the advent of a sufficiently stabilizing new phase of global development (Vlados, 2019b).
COVID-19 arrived at a moment when the global system was already within a fundamental readjustment and restructuring. The earlier global capitalism crisis, which manifested across all socioeconomic systems in a ripple effect fashion, was outbroken due to unsustainable financial derivatives that “polluted” the entire world economy (Andrikopoulos & Nastopoulos, 2015; Gup, 2010). However, this external cause of the crisis internally carries—and from an Engelian perspective (Engels, 1873)—a quantitative accumulation in generic socioeconomic terms that inevitably led the global system to a profound qualitative change. This crucial qualitative transformation was the springboard for socioeconomic, institutional, and political alterations altogether. One of the most significant restructuring forces was (and still is) BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), which increasingly challenges the Western-inspired institutions (Vlados, 2020b).
Specific past analyses that shed light on the global system’s evolutionary development help examine global capitalism’s future. According to the neo-Schumpeterian research of C. Perez (1983), the world economy moves forward with specific techno-economic paradigm shifts that require five to six decades each time, spurred by waves of infrastructure investment that induce the attainment of full growth potential because the paradigm becomes generalized and diffused in institutional and structural terms. It can be said that Perez’s theory interprets today’s call for digital transformation, which is an ongoing goal that governments and firms alike strive to accomplish in the post-COVID-19 era (European Council, 2020; Soto-Acosta, 2020; Winarsih et al., 2021). In K. Schwab’s point of view (Schwab, 2016), the world has entered the fourth industrial revolution that refers to the fusion of technologies that blurs the physical, digital, and biological spheres. This blurring that is called diffusion of “cyber-physical” systems in the fourth industrial revolution terminology appears to be accelerating in the post-COVID-19 era based on the spread of digital means to conduct business, education, and other daily tasks in a vast and growing array of industries (Mhlanga & Moloi, 2020; Savić, 2020).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Fourth Industrial Revolution: The fourth industrial revolution refers to the historical phase of global capitalism where radical transformations occur at institutional and socioeconomic levels due to the diffusion of “cyber-physical” systems.
Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity involves understanding all socioeconomic phenomena by examining contributions from all scientific fields that concern the specific case under investigation.
Change Management: Change management is the specific management approach that investigates how socioeconomic organizations manage to overcome resistance to change that irreversibly appears in their internal environment and adapt to the external environment’s transformations.
Evolutionary Management: Evolutionary management is the specific approach to managing resources where the various socioeconomic systems are examined as complex entities that adapt themselves to their external environment evolutionarily via adaptation and innovation actions.
Innovation: Innovation is the dynamic phenomenon that produces new and more effective solutions than in the past in both newer and older problems, leading to performance improvement in all or parts of organizational aspects.
Socioeconomic Development: Socioeconomic development is the progressive reinforcement of a socioeconomic organization’s quantitative and qualitative dimensions towards a higher level of efficiency, well-being, justice, and democracy at all levels.
Adaptability: The adaptability concept refers to socioeconomic organizations’ ability to transform their internal environment by building upon their comparatively competitive advantages to insert themselves into their co-evolving external environment.
Economic Growth: Economic growth means the increase in one or more quantitative dimensions of a socioeconomic organization.
Post-COVID-19 Era: Post-COVID-19 era signals the epoch that arises after the global health and socioeconomic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic that accelerates the developments towards the fourth industrial revolution.
Stra.Tech.Man Approach (Strategy-Technology-Management Synthesis): The Stra.Tech.Man approach is about how all socioeconomic organizations synthesize their internal physiological spheres of strategy, technology, and management to innovate, survive, and develop.