Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Submission deadline

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Submission deadline

Hugo Lam, affiliation required but not provided

Jens Roehrich, affiliation required but not provided

Martin C. Schleper, affiliation required but not provided

Shuang Ren, affiliation required but not provided

Soumyadeb Chowdhury, affiliation required but not provided

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. 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. Climate events often trigger food insecurity that fuels political instability; geopolitical conflict reshapes energy markets and trade flows; and technological breakthrough creates new vulnerabilities even as it may offer new capabilities. 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.

This condition, in which multiple crises occur simultaneously and interact in ways that amplify each other's impacts, is often described as 'polycrisis'. The era of polycrisis poses profound challenges for organisations, supply chains, and wider ecosystems on which they depend. Employees and managers must interpret, prioritise and respond to overlapping crises when navigating competing demands, moral tensions and cognitive overload. At the same time, global supply chains and production networks, long optimised for efficiency and cost, now face non-linear and cross level disruptions that defy traditional risk management approaches. For example, a drought in one region can destabilise agricultural supply chains, which in turn affects consumer markets, labour mobility and political legitimacy elsewhere. Similarly, a cyberattack on a manufacturing firm can reverberate across entire supply chains. The difficulty of addressing one crisis without exacerbating another underscores the need for rich theoretical and empirical research that captures the complexity, simultaneity and systemic nature of these interdependencies.

For scholars of business and management in general, and operations and supply chain management 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. 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. Empirical research has only begun to illuminate how organisations, supply chains and various institutional actors navigate these overlapping crises, reconfigure capabilities and experiment with new forms of coordination and collective action. Understanding these timely and impactful dynamics requires methodological pluralism and empirical depth at a scale commensurate with the phenomena themselves. From a business and management perspective, this calls for a collaborative scholarly effort that integrates insights from multiple management fields including strategy, organisational behaviour, OSCM, entrepreneurship, public policy, information systems, human resource management and sustainability studies to rethink how organisations and supply chains will create value, exercise responsibility, and build continued resilience when polycrisis is no longer an exception but the normal backdrop of managerial decision-making and organising. In this context, existing theoretical frameworks may be limited in their ability to explain organisational and supply chain dynamics in a polycrisis era. Interconnected crises create conditions more akin to far-from-equilibrium systems than to stable or self-correcting environments. Consequently, theories grounded in assumptions of economic equilibrium and linear adjustment offer only limited insights into the complex, non-linear and emergent mechanisms that characterise such contexts.

This Special Joint Initiative spearheaded by the Co-Editors-in-Chief of two leading management journals, the International Journal of Operations & Production Management and the British Journal of Management, 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. The Call for Papers is divided in two distinct, yet interlinked, perspectives: BJM will approach the topic from an organisational point of view, while IJOPM focuses on an inter-organisational/supply chain angle. BJM seeks empirical studies with strong theoretical and practical contributions that examine the polycrisis from an organisational and managerial perspective, including investigations into microfoundations, governance arrangements, leadership processes, innovation and organizational design choices that emerge and adapt in response to polycrisis challenges and opportunities. IJOPM seeks strong empirically grounded research studies that identify and evidence the mechanisms through which interacting shocks unfold through supply chains; the emerging inter-organisational, technological and governance responses; and the implications for OSCM theory, business, policy and society.

Both journals seek empirically-grounded studies that offer clear, original and substantial theoretical contributions capable of shaping the future trajectory of business and management scholarship on polycrisis. All manuscripts submitted to this special joint initiative should advance conceptual clarity, thereby fostering richer scholarly dialogue on major organisational, supply chain and/or societal challenges of our time. Research that not only documents organisational responses, but also develops and challenges concepts, frameworks and mechanisms explaining how climate, geopolitical, economic and technological shocks jointly reshape organisational dynamics is particularly welcome. Submissions must move beyond the examination of a single crisis and instead theorise and empirically investigate interactions among multiple crises. Specifically, papers should address at least two interrelated crises and examine how their simultaneity, sequencing, and mutual reinforcement influence organisational processes, structures, practices, governance, resilience, competitiveness and productivity. 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. 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.

Potential topics

• Leadership, stakeholder, and identity under polycrisis - What leadership, human systems, and micro-foundations are required to navigate entangled crises across levels and time horizons?
• Leadership, stakeholder, and identity under polycrisis - How do organisations and supply chains maintain legitimacy when actions addressing one crisis exacerbate another?
• Leadership, stakeholder, and identity under polycrisis - How does polycrisis reshape (inter-) organisational identity and stakeholder expectations?
• Understanding interacting disruptions/shocks and cascading failures - How do climate, geopolitical, economic and technological crises interact to generate cascading disruptions across global supply chains?
• Understanding interacting disruptions/shocks and cascading failures - What mechanisms explain how a localised shock propagates/ripples through multi tier networks and across sectors and/or regions?
• Understanding interacting disruptions/shocks and cascading failures - How do organisations perceive, prioritise and make sense of simultaneous crises, and how does this shape their operational and strategic responses?
• Rethinking resilience, risk, and adaptation during a polycrisis - How should resilience be operationalised when disruptions are interacting rather than being discrete?
• Rethinking resilience, risk, and adaptation during a polycrisis - What capabilities enable organisations to anticipate and/or mitigate cascading risks?
• Rethinking resilience, risk, and adaptation during a polycrisis - What forms of adaptation prove most effective when crises overlap and/or reinforce one another?
• 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?
• Role of technology, innovation, and societal forces in polycrisis - How do supply chain decisions made under polycrisis conditions shape long term societal resilience and sustainability?
• Role of technology, innovation, and societal forces in polycrisis - What new forms of coordination emerge when organisations, governments and civil society actors confront multi level, multi actor disruptions?

Timeline

• May 1, 2026: Informational webinars for interested authors
• June 27, 2026: EurOMA Conference 2026: Further information on the Special Joint Initiative will be circulated
• July 1, 2026: Submissions portal for proposals open
• September 9, 2026: British Academy of Management Conference 2026: Further information on the Special Joint Initiative will be circulated
• November 1, 2026: Submission portal (BJM and IJOPM) for full manuscripts opens
• January 31, 2027: Closing date for full manuscripts submission