Reshaping Organisations and Supply Chains in a Polycrisis Era: Interdependent Climate, Geopolitical, Economic and Technological Shocks
Over the last decade, managers, policymakers, scholars, and society at large have grappled with an escalating series of interconnected shocks: climate emergencies, geopolitical tensions, economic volatility and rapid technological disruption (Cumming, 2022; Browning et al., 2023). What distinguishes the current era is not simply the frequency or severity of these shocks, but their deep interdependence, which is likely to prolong their effects for decades (Tooze, 2022). Climate events often trigger food insecurity that fuels political instability (Hadley et al., 2023); geopolitical conflict reshapes energy markets and trade flows (Bednarski et al., 2025); and technological breakthrough creates new vulnerabilities (c.f. Ren & Chowdhury, 2025) even as it may offer new capabilities (Chowdhury et al., 2024; Jazairy et al., 2025; Ren & Chowdhury, 2026). These dynamics do not unfold in isolation, but very often interact, amplify one another, and cascade across organisational boundaries and supply chains to impact sectors, regions and continents.
For scholars of business and management in general, and operations and supply chain management (OSCM) in specific, the polycrisis presents both an intellectual challenge and an opportunity. Existing theories of resilience, adaptation, governance and organisational design were not built for a world in which shocks are interacting rather than discrete, and in which cascading failures propagate through tightly coupled global systems (e.g. Dolgui et al., 2018). Likewise, OSCM research mainly focused on focal organisations and their upstream supply chains as the unit of analysis, while other actors and contextual factors have been largely neglected (Schleper et al., 2024). Empirical research has only begun to illuminate how organisations, supply chains and various institutional actors (private, public, not-for-profit) navigate these overlapping crises, reconfigure capabilities and experiment with new forms of coordination and collective action (George et al., 2016; Drori et al., 2025).
This Special Joint Initiative spearheaded by the Co-Editors-in-Chief by two leading management journals (the International Journal of Operations & Production Management (IJOPM) and the British Journal of Management (BJM)), seeks to showcase pathbreaking research that advances our understanding of how the polycrisis is impacting managers, policymakers and other stakeholders, as well as reshaping organisations and supply chains.
Authors should clearly justify why the selected set of crises is analytically meaningful and theoretically consequential, demonstrate how their interdependencies unfold within and across organisational contexts and explain how this multi-crisis perspective advances (theoretical and practical) understanding beyond ‘single crisis’ approaches. Methodological rigour and data transparency are essential. Manuscripts should provide clear accounts of data sources, sampling strategies and research designs, along with justification for their suitability in capturing polycrisis complexity, interdependencies and/or temporal dynamics. Finally, authors should acknowledge the limitations of their study and empirical data and ensure transparency in their analytical procedures to support replication and cumulative knowledge-building on how organisations and supply chains interpret, navigate and reshape systems under conditions of entangled crises.
Example topic areas of interest and guiding research questions
1. Leadership, stakeholder, and identity under polycrisis
- What leadership, human systems, and micro-foundations are required to navigate entangled crises across levels and time horizons?
- How do organisations and supply chains maintain legitimacy when actions addressing one crisis exacerbate another?
- How does polycrisis reshape (inter-) organisational identity and stakeholder expectations?
2. Understanding interacting disruptions/shocks and cascading failures
- How do climate, geopolitical, economic and technological crises interact to generate cascading disruptions across global supply chains?
- What mechanisms explain how a localised shock (e.g. drought, cyberattack, port closure) propagates/ripples through multi tier networks and across sectors and/or regions?
- How do organisations perceive, prioritise and make sense of simultaneous crises, and how does this shape their operational and strategic responses?
3. Rethinking resilience, risk, and adaptation during a polycrisis
- How should resilience be operationalised when disruptions are interacting rather than being discrete?
- What capabilities (e.g. sensing, scenario planning, digital twins, cross sector coordination) enable organisations to anticipate and/or mitigate cascading risks?
- What forms of adaptation (e.g. structural, technological, relational, contractual) prove most effective when crises overlap and/or reinforce one another?
4. Role of technology, innovation, and societal forces in polycrisis
- How do organisations leverage technological innovation to simultaneously pursue climate resilience, social justice and economic viability under overlapping crises?
- How do supply chain decisions made under polycrisis conditions shape long term societal resilience and sustainability?
- What new forms of coordination emerge when organisations, governments and civil society actors confront multi level, multi actor disruptions?
Operationalisation and procedures
This special joint initiative is edited by the five Co-Editors-in-Chief of IJOPM (Hugo Lam, Jens Roehrich, Martin C. Schleper) and BJM (Shuang Ren, Soumyadeb Chowdhury) and only targets empirical submissions.
- Submissions should follow the author guidelines outlined in the respective journal authors select to submit (either BJM or IJOPM). Manuscripts must comply with, for instance, the respective journal’s word limits, formatting requirements, and referencing style.
- Authors are responsible for ensuring that their manuscript fits the aims and scope of the selected journal (and the journal requirements outlined in the special joint initiative). Manuscripts deemed out of scope will be desk-rejected.
- Submissions that are not successful in one journal cannot be submitted to the other participating journal. Dual consideration across both journals is not permitted.
- Author(s) can submit only one manuscript to one journal (either IJOPM or BJM) under this special joint initiative. Multiple submissions by the same author to either (or both) of the participating journals will not be considered.
- All submissions will undergo the targeted journal’s standard double-blind peer review process.
In the first instance, authors should submit proposals of no more than 1,000 words, accompanied by brief authors’ biographies (outside the word limit, and not more than 100 words for each individual author). Proposals should clearly articulate the central research question(s), theoretical framing, empirical foundations, and the anticipated theoretical contributions and practical/policy/societal insights. Proposals should be submitted via email to jointsipoly@gmail.com between 1 July and 30 September 2026. We will ensure a timely turnaround in about 4 weeks with some guiding comments to the author(s).
*** Please note: Submitting a proposal does not guarantee that a subsequent manuscript will undergo full peer review, and not submitting a proposal does not prevent you from submitting a full manuscript to this joint special issue. ***
Key dates and activities
- May-June 2026: Informational webinars for interested authors.
- 27 June – 02 July 2026: EurOMA Conference 2026: Further information on the Special Joint Initiative will be circulated
- 01 July – 30 Sept 2026: Submissions portal for proposals open
- 09 – 11 Sep 2026: British Academy of Management Conference 2026: Further information on the Special Joint Initiative will be circulated
- 01 Nov – 31 Jan 2027: Submission portal (BJM and IJOPM) for full manuscripts is open
IJOPM submissions information
Submissions to IJOPM are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st November 2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31st January 2027
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q1, H-Index 177
For more details refer here
