PRIO researchers have contributed to a survey of seven cities around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic. This survey offers clues to how businesses handle crises, and the results are summed up in an article in Harvard Business Review.
Many of the biggest challenges that firms face under crisis are sociopolitical in nature, not financial. This conclusion follows an analysis of responses from 78,000 people in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia; Beirut, Lebanon; Cape Town, South Africa; Caracas, Venezuela; San Pedro Sula, Honduras; and San Salvador, El Salvador.
As such, these challenges are complex, systemic, and hard to quantify. They also scare managers operating in these contexts, especially in cities where extortion and business violence are pervasive. In such settings, firms benefit from community embeddedness and a recognition that they are both influenced by and able to shape the systems around them — positively or negatively.
The authors belong to the Working Through Violence research team, a cross-institutional and international team, which includes PRIO researchers as well as important parts of the larger PRIO network. The project is hosted at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo.
