Transformative rare events: Leveraging digital affordance actualisation

ABSTRACT

This paper conceptualises the COVID-19 pandemic as a “rare event.” Rare events channel managerial attention to magnified issues and foster resource mobilisation and learning. We draw on a case study of a US consumer lender to develop a model explaining how organisations actualise digital affordances as part of their rare event response and, in doing so, leverage the transformative experience towards establishing a “new normal.” The model and its instantiation contribute conceptual understanding and advice for how IS managers may effectively address rare events and, in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic, including the aftermath of its lockdown and the transition to the new business status quo. The model emphasises the importance of understanding the evolution of digital affordances as possessing teleological paths where affordances are developed in steps corresponding to where an organisation focuses its managerial attention, with indirect consequences of possibilities to attend to other objectives enabled by digital technologies. Overall, the model contributes to theory by explaining the role of rare events in the evolution of affordances, including some that can be transformative and introducing the rare events literature into the IS discipline.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Pär Ågerfalk, Kieran Conboy and Michael Myers

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• rare event
• affordance
• attention
• case study

Acknowledgements

We want to thank OneMain Financial and the individuals who gracefully contributed their time to allow us to study the response to the COVID-19 lockdown. While we have done our outmost to verify the factual circumstances, this article does not represent the official position of OneMain Financial, but is the individual authors’ interpretations of events, actions and implications. We also want to thank Special Communications editors Michael Myers, Kieran Conboy and Pär Ågerfalk for enabling this opportunity to publish research related to COVID-19, and the anonymous associate editor and reviewer for providing valuable constructive feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.