Reshaping Organisations and Supply Chains in a Polycrisis Era:
Interdependent Climate, Geopolitical, Economic and Technological Shocks
Special Joint Initiative - British Journal of Management and International Journal of Operations & Production Management
Paper submission window: 01 Nov 2026 - 31 Jan 2027
Guest Editors
Professor Shuang Ren , Queen’s University Belfast, UK
([email protected])
Professor Soumyadeb Chowdhury, TBS Business School, France
([email protected])
Background
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.
This condition, in which multiple crises occur simultaneously and interact in ways that amplify each other’s impacts, is often described as ‘polycrisis’ (e.g. Tooze, 2022; Sorkin et al., 2023). 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 (Nayani et al., 2022). At the same time, global supply chains and production networks, long optimised for efficiency and cost (e.g. Fisher, 1997; Phillips et al., 2022), now face non-linear and cross‑level disruptions that defy traditional risk management approaches (Browning et al., 2023). For example, a drought in one region can destabilise agricultural supply chains, which in turn affects consumer markets, labour mobility and political legitimacy elsewhere (Busse et al., 2026). Similarly, a cyberattack on a manufacturing firm can reverberate across entire supply chains (Martin, 2025; Sodhi et al., 2025). The difficulty of addressing one crisis without exacerbating another under-scores 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 (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). 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, but not limited to, 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 (inter-) 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 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. 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. More specifically, BJM seeks empirical studies with strong theoretical and practical contributions that examine the polycrisis from an organisational and managerial perspective. This includes, for instance, investigations into the 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, for example, 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. We particularly welcome research that not only documents (inter-) organisational responses, but also develops and challenges concepts, frameworks and mechanisms explaining how climate, geopolitical, economic and technological shocks jointly reshape (inter-) organisational dynamics. 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 (e.g. climate and geopolitical, geopolitical and technological, or climate and economic) and examine how their simultaneity, sequencing, and mutual reinforcement influence (inter-) organisational processes, structures, practices, governance, resilience, competitiveness and productivity (to name a few). 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
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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 BJM (Shuang Ren, Soumyadeb Chowdhury) and IJOPM (Hugo Lam, Jens Roehrich, Martin C. Schleper) 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.
- Each author can submit one proposal (and/or full manuscript) only for this special joint initiative (more submissions can be made by the author(s) to the regular issues of both journals). This ensures a fair and focused review process and allows the Editors‑in‑Chief to assess each submission on its full merits.
- 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.
- Dual consideration across both participating journals is not permitted. Submissions that are not successful in one journal cannot be resubmitted to the other special initiative route. Each submitted proposal will be considered once, within the special joint initiative process.
- 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 [email protected] 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. ***
Tentative 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 Sep 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 2026 - 31 Jan 2027: Submission portal (BJM and IJOPM) for full manuscripts is open
Submission Instructions:
We are aiming to publish this Special Issue in the April 2028 issue, with the submission window between 01 Nov 2026 - 31 Jan 2027
Authors should select ‘special issue paper’ as the paper type, answer ‘YES to the question ‘Is this submission for a special issue?’ and enter the title of the special issue (“Polycrisis”) in the box provided.
References
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Browning, T., Kumar, M., Sanders, N., Sodhi, M. S., Thürer, M. and Tortorella, G.L. (2023). From supply chain risk to system-wide disruptions: research opportunities in forecasting, risk management and product design. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 43(12), 1841-1858.
Busse, C., Duensing, S. and Schleper, M.C. (2026). Supply chain (as) risk: A unifying typology. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 46(13), 63-94.
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