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Owing to the climate change, the number of flood hazards and communities at risk is expected to rise. The increasing flood risk exposure is paralleled with an understanding that hard flood defense measures should be complemented with soft sociotechnical approaches to flood management. Among other things, this involves development of a dialogue between professionals and flood-prone communities to ensure that the decisions made correspond to the peculiarities of local socioenvironmental contexts. However, in practice, establishment of such a dialogue proves to be challenging. Flood-prone communities are often treated as mere recipients of professional knowledge and their local knowledge remains underrated. Building on an illustrative case study of one rural settlement in North-West Russia, we examine how at-risk communities develop their local knowledge and put it to use as they struggle with adverse impacts of flooding, when the existing flood protection means are insufficient. Our findings showcase that local knowledge of Russian flood-prone communities is axiomatic and tacit, acquired performatively through daily interaction of local residents with their natural and sociotechnical environments. Even if unacknowledged by both the local residents and flood management professionals as a valuable asset for long-term flood management, it is local knowledge that informs local communities' practices and enables their coexistence with the treacherous waters.

The GrubHub Inc, started as a small food ordering service in Chicago in 2004, and has developed into an e-commerce food delivery giant worth over $3 billion. Since its merger with Seamless in 2013, GrubHub has experienced 53% year-over-year growth in revenue. While online food ordering commerce has been expanding over the years, due to the COVID-19, the industry is experiencing an economic shock. Consumers have begun to isolate themselves from outside as much as possible and local shops have been started to close one by one. As a result, demand has been shrinking to services such as GrubHub, even though otherwise would be expected. In order to survive, the company has to employ new measures and devise new ways of conducting business to protect its competitiveness through catering recently changed needs of community due to the pandemic. This case study explains and demonstrates the set of steps that are taken by GrubHub and their effects on its customers, key business partners, shareholder, and stakeholders.

The Day the World Stopped is a science fiction film that narrates the days of mankind amid an alien invasion headed to avoid the climate change. We made the decision to use a similar title to narrate the facts that precede the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and its immediate effects on the industry of tourism. Over years, scholars cited John Urry and his insight over the tourist gaze as well as the importance of tourism as a social institution. Of course, Urry never imagined that one day this global world would end. This chapter centers on the needs of discussing the concept of the wicked gaze, which exhibits the end of hospitality, a tendency emerged after 9/11. This chapter punctuates on the decline of hospitality—at least as it was imagined by ancient philosophers—in a way that the tourist gaze sets the pace to a wicked gaze. Whether hospitality and free transit were the foundational values of West, COVID-19, and the resulted state of emergency reveals a new unknown process of feudalization which comes to stay. The chapter is framed based on long-dormant philosophical debates, but given the complexity of this issue, the efforts deserve our attention.

Until recently, the business environment was characterized by a world in which nations were more connected than ever before. Unfortunately, the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has virtually ended the borderless and globalized world we were accustomed to. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic at a news conference in Geneva on March 11, 2020. The multifaceted nature of this invisible virus is impacting the world at many levels, and this unprecedented pandemic may best be characterized as an economic and health war against humanity. More international cooperation is crucial for effectively dealing with the present pandemic (and future pandemics) because all nations are vulnerable, and it is highly unlikely that any pandemic would affect only one country. Therefore, this case study takes a sociological approach, examining various social institutions and cultural facets (i.e., government, press freedom, information technology [IT] infrastructure, healthcare systems, and institutional collectivism) to understand how South Korea is handling the crisis while drawing important implications for other countries. All aspects of how Korea is handling COVID-19 may not be applicable to other countries, such as those with fewer IT infrastructures and less institutional collectivism. However, its methods still offer profound insights into how countries espousing democratic values rooted in openness and transparency to both domestic and worldwide communities can help overcome the current challenge. As such, the authors believe that Korea's innovative approach and experience can inform other nations dealing with COVD-19, while also leading to greater international collaboration for better preparedness when such pandemics occur in the future. This case study also considers implications for both public policy and organization, and the authors pose critical questions and offer practical solutions for dealing with the current pandemic.

Telehealth has been playing a progressively significant role in the management of the COVID-19 crisis. The enforcement of social distancing measures has had the consequence of reduced technology distance in almost every walk of life. In this chapter, based primarily on the still-unfolding experiences of deploying it during the current situation, we argue that telehealth has finally come of age and that it is time to move it from the peripheries to the center of the twenty-first-century healthcare. To provide a live context to the discussion, several instances of how telehealth strengthened our healthcare systems during the COVID-19 crisis are presented.