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The chapter summarizes key literature, including emerging ideas, that is pertinent to the question of how organizations and their leadership deal with and are resilient through crises – highlighting what works in surviving unexpected crises. The chapter presents an illustration of organizational response; it concludes with an analysis of what is missing from the literature and recommends a path forward to expanding actionable knowledge in this area. Multiple, interdependent factors that foster resilience are identified including (1) being sensitive to possible threats – even seemingly small failures, (2) not relying on simple interpretations of events but rather seeking diversity to create a complete view of the environment, (3) leadership that embraces communication, transparency, and continuous learning, (4) valuing expertise and allowing expert staff to make decisions during a crisis, and (5) a cultural commitment to a resiliency mindset that accepts failures as opportunities to learn and improve. Emerging concepts that may foster resilience but require more research include managing paradox, emotional ambivalence and diversity. Additional areas for fruitful research include: the impact of short-term versus long-term, or successive, crises; external versus internal shocks and the framing of the source of shocks; how crisis affect the pace of innovation and change; the role of diversity in organizational responses to crises; and a set of methodological opportunities to leverage natural experiments or simulations in ways that allow for longitudinal data illuminating the full cycle of crises across organizations from anticipation, to response, to longer-term adaptation to the new normal.

This opening chapter sets a frame for the chapters of this volume, dealing with how the dynamic dialectic interplay between forceful global societal forces and context shape humanity’s education response in various parts of the world. “Context” as a perennial threshold concept in Comparative and International Education is explicated. It will then be explained how, during its long historical evolution, scholars in the field each time had to contend new contexts, or reconceived the notion of “context” in a new way. Subsequently the problems of an overly fixation on the historical and the present, to the detriment of the future, and inertia are extant in the field, will be explained. The unprecedented, seismic changes currently impacting on the societal context worldwide, will then be enumerated. These changes can be subsumed under the collective name of globalization. The concept globalization is then clarified, and the take of the scholarly community on the impact of globalization on education is then mapped and interrogated. The authors’ stance on this is stated, namely that a dynamic interplay between global focus and contextual realities shape education in various parts of the world. It is in this theoretical frame that the remainder of the chapters of the volume is presented, combing out the main features of education development in each part of the world, as a dialectic between global forces and contextual imperatives.