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The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to review net neutrality and the notion that bright light rules are necessary to hold broadband providers from exercising market power. The 2015 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Open Internet Order asserted that broadband providers have the capability and incentive to harm their customers and third-party service providers. It imposed a set of rules to control broadband providers’ offers, prices, and traffic management. The 2017 FCC vacated all but the transparency provisions of the OIO, restoring the oversight of broadband to the FTC.

This paper offers a review of the evidence regarding the effects of net neutrality regulation, including an investigation of the incidence of violations, or lack thereof, during the 2020 pandemic in the United States. It provides a review of the net neutrality literature and the international research on broadband provider behaviour during COVID-19. The paper presents original research conducted with FCC and FTC reports and a survey of news stories. Brief reviews of federal data on network performance and broadband adoption provide additional context. Given the limited incidence of violations that could be uncovered for the period, the paper suggests why broadband providers behaved opposite to regulatory advocates’ predictions. Contrary to many policy assertions, broadband providers did not block or throttle service, nor did they increase prices arbitrarily or decrease quality. Broadband providers appeared to expand availability, lower broadband prices, and make more networks available, frequently without customer charge. The paper suggests how policy could be updated to reflect the actual behaviour of broadband providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly challenging for developing countries because of pre-existing poverty and severe inequality. Governments tended to set public safety as a primary goal, but it could not be their singular goal. Broadband was an important feature of any policy solution. Business lockdowns, school closures, and social distancing led to an unprecedented acceleration in the demand for broadband. But the government restrictions on social and economic interactions made it difficult to maintain and expand broadband networks. Governments might have let markets work out this challenge of escalating demand and increasing costs of supply, but few did. Governments quickly grew to believe that it would need cooperative relationships among multiple government agencies and private businesses to answer what appeared to be a broadband shortage. Regulatory controls over broadband providers were quickly suspended in favour of developing common goals and coordinated efforts. These approaches proved effective, although citizens continued to suffer from the pandemic.

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a ‘change agent’ expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an intervention aimed at supporting the formation of a distinctive new culture in a post‐merger context. The work is informed by social constructionist thinking, complexity theory and draws on a semiotic approach to the understanding of cultures.

The case describes an experiment in the use of social networking and web‐based technology in order to enable and support a sustained, organization‐wide conversation. In particular, it describes the combined use of two virtual platforms: a global 72‐hour, virtual conference that allowed for the participation of all 60,000 employees and a virtual forum (Culture Square) that invited ongoing discussion of the desired culture.

Social networking technologies represent powerful new ways of expanding the possibilities for participation. They can also serve as useful ways of containing the ambiguity and uncertainty associated with mergers. The use of metaphorical representations of legacy cultures can create a helpful platform for generative dialogue and cultural understanding. Legitimating the shadow conversation through the Culture Square accelerated the formation of the emergent culture and powerfully complemented the virtual conference.

The use of an emergent approach to the formation of a new culture calls for high tolerance of ambiguity on the part of organizational leadership. The use of online forums calls for careful facilitation early in the process. Large‐scale virtual conferences present a host of logistical challenges and call for a high level of project management capability as well as skilful local facilitation. Social networking technology enables the formation and effective functioning of virtual teams and participative creation of the new culture at reduced cost.

Several distinctive features of this approach make it a novel approach to post‐merger integration. The paper is of specific value to organisation development and HR professionals at a technical level and to organisation leaders considering strategies for the cultural integration of mergers.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s path-breaking book After Virtue launched him into a place of prominence in social and moral philosophy. Two central, and still relevant, themes are identifiable in the corpus of MacIntyre’s work. First, advanced modernity is in a perilous state because of the philosophical creation of the emotivist self. Second, virtue must be reclaimed if the crisis in moral philosophy is to be addressed and an institutional world worthy of what we are as human beings is to be built. MacIntyre’s heroic effort in this regard is a new presentation of a Thomistic Aristotelianism but he was not naïve about the chances of his project’s success. Emotivism has made it extremely difficult for a virtue perspective to even gain a hearing. MacIntyre proposed a way forward different from abstract theorising. He felt that at this point we could, and had to, learn how to act from accounts of exemplary lives. This chapter presents the wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden as a contribution to aid in the recovery of virtue. The central claim being made is that it is long overdue that John Wooden should take his rightful place in the virtue tradition in ethics. This work gives John Wooden’s conception of leadership that flows from his understanding of virtue the attention it deserves. The examination of John Wooden’s life undertaken bridges virtue theory and leadership. Several other key elements of MacIntyre’s thought set the structure of the inquiry. The chapter begins with a biographical sketch of Wooden’s life because of the stress that MacIntyre places on tradition and narrative unity. The basis of Wooden’s reflection on virtue, the tradition informing his practical reasoning, is a selected canon of Western civilisation, its great literature and the Bible. The Midwestern values of hard work, honesty, faith, and caring for one’s family are also significant. MacIntyre places great emphasis on the need to understand the story of a life and, in particular, the need to understand how development was aided or hindered in childhood and what kind of apprenticeship into a practice was available. The singular influence John Wooden’s father had on his life is documented. The role that John Wooden’s teachers, coaches and mentors played in initiating him into the practice of coaching is reviewed. The experiential base for Wooden’s derivation of his emotionally healthy definition of success and his well thought out conception of the virtues is thus put in place. MacIntyre summarises the teleological structure of human life and the role of virtue in human flourishing by contrasting man-as-he-happens-to-be with man-as-he-should-be-if-he-realised-his-essential-nature. John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success identifies the combination of personal qualities and values, virtues, that fulfil MacIntyre’s second term, that are intrinsic to reaching one’s potential as a person. The 15 qualities Wooden gives – industriousness, enthusiasm, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, self-control, alertness, initiative, intentness, condition, skill, team spirit, poise, confidence, competitive greatness – are defined and illustrated. The rationale for the qualities and for their placement into a coherent whole is discussed. Basic elements of John Wooden’s leadership genius are then brought out. Leaders need to get the culture right, build cohesive teams, and be guided by a moral topline.

This paper engaged in theory-building from social movement and knowledge management (KM) theories and applied the case study method to explore the role of knowledge complexity in administration–society collaborations on knowledge. Complex knowledge is a kind of knowledge that consists of many interdependent elements, some of which are tacit. Complex knowledge creates challenges when external social groups attempt to transfer their knowledge to public organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the following question: how do social groups acting as knowledge agents transfer their knowledge if it is complex?

A single-case study methodology informs the theory-building in this paper. The paper examined a case of collaboration between the natural childbirthing social movement and state maternity hospitals in Russia and Ukraine. The case was constructed from interviews, primary sources and secondary sources.

Social movement and KM theories were used in a case analysis to formulate theoretical propositions about the complexity of social movement knowledge, why and how movements transfer their knowledge through collaborations with the state, and how administrators assess movement knowledge and its transfer. The case suggests that administrators’ lack of capacity to recognize and deal with complex knowledge results in the underutilization of social groups’ knowledge. In particular, administrators treat complex knowledge as simple, and they misunderstand and underestimate its effects on collaboration.

To the best of this author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt in public administration to engage in theory-building from social movement and KM theories.

Scholars have been conducting serious research on the human, organizational, and cultural aspects of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for 30 years. Yet, over this period, there have only been modest improvements in the M&A success rate. In this chapter, the author examines corporate combinations, describes how human factors contribute to their failure or success, and identifies key research questions whose answers can help to improve the M&A success rate in both financial and human terms. The author proposes research questions for the key phases of a deal, including buying a company and putting companies together. And, reflecting an emerging trend among some frequent acquirers to build an internal competence in M&A execution, the author also proposes research questions for how to accelerate the process of learning from past combinations to better manage future ones.