Word from the Guest Editors Crisis and adaptation in International Management

One word keeps coming up in public debate: “crisis”. This word is used in particular to refer to the worldwide pandemic of Covid 19, which has been raging for almost 3 years now, and it is true that this one presents all the characteristics of a crisis, those of an unpredictable, brutal event with serious consequences. Of course, we did not have to wait for such an event to debate about the future of our societies. Populist, nationalist and anti- or alter-globalization movements in particular had already raised many questions about globalization, its dynamics, its actors and beneficiaries. However, the arrival of Covid has exacerbated tensions, fueled concerns and accelerated certain transformations in trade, international management and companies, large and small. Covid has already affected our lifestyles, the vision of our governments, and our relationships with each other, and it is now becoming clear that it will continue to have effects on economies, businesses, and people. Such effects do not of course spare the academic sphere. They raise questions for researchers about the very nature of their activity. Thus, how many colleagues have not at one time or another wondered about the meaning of their work? In light of these events, how can we not question the raison d’être, the usefulness of management research, the place of its institutions in society or its impact on various stakeholders? More pragmatically, how can one continue to practice one’s profession in these new circumstances and rethink one’s activity when the rules of the game change? Indeed, if the crisis affects Management Sciences research, it also requires that its actors adapt, as in the case of the French-speaking Association of International Management (Atlas-AFMI), under the aegis of which this special issue is published. In recent years, the association has had to find new ways to organize the scientific debate in international management. How to create a “community” when the crisis creates physical barriers between the actors of a scientific field? First of all, we had to find new ways to organize conferences at the heart of the association’s activity (online or hybrid conferences). It was also a question of understanding how this crisis could affect the actors of International Management (which was done in particular by organizing a forum on this theme, in partnership with the French Foreign Trade Advisors). As we can see, the unpredictable, massive and brutal nature of the crisis requires adaptation and inventiveness from researchers. However, as T. Kuhn reminds us, crises are not foreign to scientific activity. On the contrary, they are consubstantial to it. To confirm or to bring nuances to the existing is quite natural, and “normal” scientific activity is most often restricted to that, but let us not forget that if science, if knowledge progresses, it is not thanks to additions, confirmations of the existing paradigms (i.e., models accepted as common frameworks of work), but by “revolutions”. At certain moments the “normal” regime of science experiences a failure, a crisis, when the adjustments of the paradigm are no longer sufficient to solve the problems raised. If a scientist tries to progress in knowledge of the world by having faith in the theoretical elements and the tools of his paradigm, this paradigm is not intrinsically true, as shown by the recurrent appearance of anomalies. “Discovery begins with the awareness of an anomaly, that is, the impression that nature, in one way or another, contradicts the results expected within the framework of the paradigm that governs normal science”. These anomalies can appear as a result of chance, of a new method of experimentation, or of a …