More conservative employers might continue to view homeworking, from a pre-COVID perspective, as something that is sub-optimal, best suited to only a few elite workers, and hence may desire to turn back the digital clock rapidly ( Andersen & Kelliher, 2020).įurthermore, whilst potentially enhancing flexibility for employers and employees, and reducing wasted time and energy on long commutes, the digitalization of work has raised concerns about trust, new forms of worker electronic surveillance, and the colonization of leisure time ( Hodder, 2020). At the same time the process has been contested, as exemplified by the UK government’s August 2020 ‘back to work (i.e., the physical office) or lose your job’ campaign ( Faragher, 2020), which seemed to imply that working from home did not constitute ‘real work’ and that job security depended on presenteeism. The pandemic has catapulted the need for change across a host of industries, in addition to fundamentally changing consumer behavior, from store visits to buying online the latter enables much more information to be gathered on consumers, further undermining the position of vendors lacking such detailed insider information and analytics capabilities. In other words, whether traditional firms will be able to recover lost ground through infusing greater digitalization into their business models, or whether this will simply extend the role of the existing internet-enabled platform oligopolies. However, with this has come the question as to whether this will benefit many firms or just a few. One likely consequence of COVID-19 is the accelerated trend towards digitalization of business models coupled with the shift of commercial activities from predominantly offline and brick-and-mortar outlets to online outlets. ![]() Typified by devastating impacts on livelihoods and business performance, the COVID-19 pandemic also highlights the vast digital divide between the poor and rich, between rural and urban areas, and between advanced and developing economies ( Beaunoyer, Dupéré, & Guitton, 2020). ![]() COVID-19 has so far resulted in more than 190 million coronavirus cases and more than 4,101,340 fatalities worldwide, with new strains of virus on the rise ( World Health Organization, 2020, Worldometers, 2021), thus significantly hampering global economic activities. Broadly speaking, this arose on two domains: externally-how firms interface with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders and internally-how firms manage employees and the employer–employee relationships ( Sostero et al., 2020). ![]() The range of measures including local and national lockdowns, social distancing measures, government-led border closures, and quarantines have forced many firms to adapt their business models at short notice (see Sostero, Milasi, Hurley, Fernández-Macías, & Bisello, 2020). In recent times, it has become increasingly evident that the COVID-19 pandemic has not only fundamentally altered the modus operandi of many organizations but has also precipitated the failure of many businesses around the globe (see Amankwah-Amoah, Khan, & Wood, 2020). Finally, we draw out the wider theoretical and practical implications of our analysis. Whilst digitalization may bring new opportunities, the process imparts risks that may be hard to mitigate or prepare for. Our analysis indicates that adoption of emerging technologies may be hindered by vested external interests, nostalgia, and employer opportunism, as well as negative effects on employee well-being that undermine productivity, work–life balance, and future of work. In this article, we develop and advance a conceptual model by linking the different forces for and against digitalization in response to the pandemic. Thus, COVID-19 has evolved to be a kind of “ catalyst” for the adoption and increasing use of digitalization in work organization and the office, alongside presenting foreseen and unforeseen opportunities, challenges, and costs-leading to negative and positive feedback loops. We contend that COVID‐19 is “ the great accelerator” in fast-tracking the existing global trend towards embracing modern emerging technologies ushering in transformations in lifestyle, work patterns, and business strategies. Inspired by burgeoning scholarly interest in the role of digitalization in the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic is driving or constraining the digitalization of businesses around the globe.
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