Editorial: Fifty Campbell systematic reviews relevant to the policy response to COVID-19

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordNational Institute for Health Research (NIHR

The logic of tact:How decisions happen in situations of crisis

The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how, during such a situation, leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the collective's capacity to act collectively. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through this interplay

Cognitive frames in corporate sustainability: managerial sensemaking with paradoxical and business case frames

Corporate sustainability confronts managers with tensions between complex economic, environmental, and social issues. Drawing on the literature on managerial cognition, corporate sustainability, and strategic paradoxes, we develop a cognitive framing perspective on corporate sustainability. We propose two cognitive frames—a business case frame and a paradoxical frame—and explore how differences between them in cognitive content and structure influence the three stages of the sensemaking process—that is, managerial scanning, interpreting, and responding with regard to sustainability issues. We explain how the two frames lead to differences in the breadth and depth of scanning, differences in issue interpretations in terms of sense of control and issue valence, and different types of responses that managers consider with regard to sustainability issues. By considering alternative cognitive frames, our argument contributes to a better understanding of managerial decision making regarding ambiguous sustainability issues, and it develops the underlying cognitive determinants of the stance that managers adopt on sustainability issues. This argument offers a cognitive explanation for why managers rarely push for radical change when faced with complex and ambiguous issues, such as sustainability, that are characterized by conflicting yet interrelated aspects

Missing the Unhealthy? Examining Empirical Validity of Material Deprivation Indices (MDIs) Using a Partial Criterion Variable

This study investigates the empirical validity of the material deprivation indices (MDIs) using a partial criterion variable, namely UHCNIR (unmet health care need due to inadequate resources). This alternative approach helps to assess absolute validity (Type I and II errors) and sources of error in the measurement of poverty for a specific aspect of poverty (in this case inability to receive adequate health care due to affordability problems). A simple mismatch analysis identifies a sizable group, around 1% of the adult EU population, missed by MDIs despite being in UHCNIR. A majority of this 1% experiences not only UHCNIR but also multiple other deprivations, commonly reports having some difficulties making ends meet, and prevalently has a disability or a chronic health problem. The analysis reveals that MDIs miss specifically those "unhealthy poor" since these measures do not include a relevant item, and thus cannot adjust for different needs and costs in health care and account for the distinct poverty experiences of these people. Therefore, the main methodological assumption of MDIs, identifying the people in poverty with only a limited set of key deprivation indicators is not supported by this empirical analysis

Managing Value Tensions in Collective Social Entrepreneurship:The Role of Temporal, Structural, and Collaborative Compromise

Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members’ participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives (RESCoops). Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members’ relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings

Feasibility and Acceptability of community COVID-19 Testing Strategies (FACTS) in a University setting

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the UK government began a mass SARS-CoV-2 testing programme. This study aimed to determine the feasibility and acceptability of organised regular self-testing for SARS-CoV-2. Methods: This was a mixed methods observational cohort study in asymptomatic students and staff at University of Oxford, who performed SARS-CoV-2 antigen lateral flow self-testing. Data on uptake and adherence, acceptability, and test interpretation were collected via a smartphone app, an online survey, and qualitative interviews. Findings: Across three main sites, 551 participants (25% of those invited) performed 2728 tests during a follow-up of 5.6 weeks. 447 participants (81%) completed at least two, and 340 (62%) completed at least four tests. The survey, completed by 214 participants (39%), found that 98% of people were confident to self-test and believed self-testing to be beneficial. Acceptability of self-testing was high, with 91% of ratings being acceptable or very acceptable. 2711 (99.4%) test results were negative, nine were positive and eight were inconclusive. Results from eighteen qualitative interviews with students and staff revealed that participants valued regular testing, but there were concerns about test accuracy that impacted uptake and adherence. Interpretation: This is the first study to assess feasibility and acceptability of regular SARS-CoV-2 self-testing. It provides evidence to inform recruitment, adherence to, and acceptability of regular SARS-CoV-2 self-testing programmes for asymptomatic individuals using lateral flow tests. We found that self-testing is acceptable and people were able to interpret results accurately.</p

Bowing before Dual Gods: How Structured Flexibility Sustains Organizational Hybridity

Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly