Journal of Business Research 132 (2021) 586–593

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Business Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusres

Research lines on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business. A text

mining analysis
Patricia Carracedo a, *, Rosa Puertas b, Luisa Marti b
a
Universidad Internacional de Valencia, Área de empresa, c/Pintor Sorolla, 21, Valencia 46022, Spain
b
Universitat Politècnica de València, Departamento de Economía y Ciencias Sociales, Camino de Vera, s/n 46002 Valencia Spain

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: COVID-19 has brought about a marked slowdown in global economic development. Companies have been forced
COVID-19 to adopt new managerial guidelines to adapt to the difficult conditions and to survive in this “new normal”. The
Text mining recent and still scarce literature in this field seeks to provide suitable solutions to prevent irreparable disruption
Cluster
and help strengthen business, but does not apply advanced statistical methods to that end. The aim of this paper
Business
Marketing
is to identify the current research lines developed around COVID-19 and their impact on the business environ­
ment, applying text mining methodology. The analysis, which uses statistical software R, focuses on systematic
review of studies published in prestigious journals of business and marketing areas. In light of the results ob­
tained, three different areas of intervention were identified. The common thread that runs through all of them is
the need to introduce new forms of action to improve citizens’ quality of life.

1. Introduction overcome the sharp drop in orders and the pressure of costs stemming
not only from rent, wages and taxes, but also those associated with the
The rapid spread of COVID-19 meant that in little over three months rise in the price of raw materials given the significant decline in sup­
the whole world was struggling to curb not only the disease but also the pliers (Wen, Wei, & Wang, 2020). Moreover, there have been important
harsh economic consequences of the measures taken to do so. Governing changes in consumption habits, with people attempting to avoid phys­
authorities in almost all countries were forced to limit the free move­ ical contact in order to prevent possible contagion, leading to a pressing
ment of the population both nationally and internationally, bringing the need for a global transformation to take on this new environment
economy to a total standstill (Nicola et al., 2020). This situation has (Sheth, 2020). Responsive systems are required to facilitate the rapid
underscored the fragility of the foundations of the 21st century econ­ adaptation of supply chains to accommodate changing consumer de­
omy, which is characterized by major technological advances and mands (Sjodin, Parida, Kohtamaki, & Wincent, 2020; Gordon, Ramic,
remarkable globalization, centred around globally interconnected pro­ Rohrbeck, & Spaniol, 2020).
duction chains seeking maximum profitability. There has been a rapid emergence of research in this area in an
The lockdown measures led to widespread economic collapse with attempt to find alternative solutions and facilitate the transformation of
significant repercussions on production and employment, and a severe companies aligned with the new scenario, thereby ensuring their sur­
impact all branches of activity due to the sharp decline in consumption. vival under the best conditions. Pantano, Pizzi, Scarpi, and Dennis
The most developed countries have seen their positive economic growth (2020) summarize the challenges faced by retailers, in order to provide
dip into the red with marked rises in unemployment and an increase in guidelines that can enable them to deal with the disruptions caused by
social inequalities. Comparisons are inevitable: some go so far as to the pandemic in both the short and medium term. In this regard, mar­
equate the uncertainty generated by this pandemic with that caused by keting strategies play a key role (Kirk & Rifkin, 2020; Wang, Hong, Li, &
the Great Depression of 1929–33, and far exceeding that associated with Gao, 2020). The current situation should be taken as an opportunity for
the financial crisis of 2008–09. companies to put in place corporate social responsibility, consumer
Companies face an unprecedented challenge. Their survival depends ethics and a marketing philosophy. This would open up more attractive
on the adoption of management strategies that will allow them to strategies for organizations and consumers (He & Harris, 2020;

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Carracedo).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.11.043
Received 24 September 2020; Received in revised form 19 November 2020; Accepted 21 November 2020
Available online 26 November 2020
0148-2963/© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
P. Carracedo et al. Journal of Business Research 132 (2021) 586–593

Woodside, 2020). Other key aspects such as human resource manage­ 2. Data and methods
ment implications (Leung, Sharma, Adithipyangkul, & Hosie, 2020) or
gender equality (Carnevale & Hatak, 2020) in pandemic situations have To carry out the empirical research, a selection must be made of
also been analysed recently. recent studies in the literature that meet the analysis criteria. The new
The European countries that have been hardest hit by death due to measures taken and their direct impact on the business world have
COVID-19, such as, Italy (12,430 deaths at the beginning of April1), brought to light the need for updated management policies to address
Spain (8,189), France (3,523) or the United Kingdom (2,453), among the difficult economic situation, the first signs of which have not taken
others have seen how their tourism sector has experienced a total long to emerge. The journals for the database have been selected ac­
shutdown of activity with a major direct impact on the rest of the cording to the following criteria:
economy. Studies such as that carried out by Sigala (2020) highlight the
effects of the pandemic on the sector, in line with the guidelines set out - Journals indexed in the WoS database. WoS is maintained by the
by Nepal (2020), which call for this situation to be viewed as a reset Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and con­
opportunity and a chance to provide new sustainable services. Many tains more than 21,100 journals dating back to 1990, most of them
more examples can be cited of studies in the literature where researchers written in English with a high impact factor (Reuters, 2019).
have focused on COVID-19 and its consequences for companies (Krish­ - Journals in the Business Management and Accounting area and
namurthy, 2020; Mullins, 2020; Eggers, 2020; Sharma et al., 2020a; Marketing category. These are two business fields that play a key role
Bacq, Geoghegan, Josefy, Stevenson, & Williams, 2020). in ensuring companies’ survival. The development of management
The urgent need to find workable solutions for businesses brings the and marketing measures that facilitate companies’ adaptation to the
discipline of data mining to the fore. The ongoing development of instability of the environment is essential in the process of over­
research on this issue requires a global analysis of textual data in order coming the consequences of the pandemic.
to detect patterns from which conclusions can be drawn, and thus create - Journals ranked in the top quartile (Q1).
the best possible conditions for orienting decision-making. For this - Journals whose topic of interest is exclusively Business. Selecting
reason, the main objective of this paper is to identify the most current these involved reading the titles, aims and scope.
research fields focused on the impact of COVID-19 on business. To that
end, the text summarization technique of text mining was first applied, These are generic criteria that have made it possible to narrow down
in order to identify the most frequently mentioned terms in business the literature under study, so that the application of these filters yielded
research papers that study COVID-19. Next, a text clustering method the following journals: Journal of Business Research, Journal of World
using the statistical software R Core Team (2020) was applied to identify Business, International Business Review and Business Horizons.
groups of most frequent terms or research lines. The subject of the In order to select papers published in these journals whose topic of
analysis was articles published in business journals indexed in the Web interest was coronavirus, a search was conducted for articles containing
of Science (WoS) database. Specifically, 16 papers published in the the words covid, coronavirus or pandemic in their abstract, title or key­
Journal of Business Research and Business Horizons have been analysed. words. Table 1 shows the business journals with the number of papers
Currently, many researchers are turning their full attention to selected, ordered from highest to lowest impact factor (IF).
COVID-19. Lopez, Vasu, and Gallemore (2020) use natural language It can be seen that the Journal of Business Research has published the
processing, text mining and network analysis to explore the policies greater number of articles on COVID-related research (87.5% of all
implemented to manage the COVID-19 analyzing information trans­ selected papers), followed by Business Horizons (12.5%). Journal of
mitted via Twitter. Cheng, Cao, and Liao (2020) demonstrate that in­ World Business and International Business Review have not published
formation specialists can support health and medical community by any research papers that deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, which
applying text mining technique with latent Dirichlet allocation pro­ highlights a focus of academic attention for business researchers.
cedure to perform an overview of a mass of coronavirus literature. Applying all the above search criteria has yielded a corpus consisting
Similarly, Ulm and Nelson (2020) use text-mining and manual curation of 16 research papers published in two business journals which are
approach to comb and summarize the information from existing clinical indexed in the WoS database. Table 2 shows a summary of each indi­
trials and previous efforts to develop therapies against related betacor­ vidual article, providing the bibliographic citation, objective, keywords
onaviruses. We emphasize that none of them performs a systematic and most important conclusions.
literature review and employs a text clustering method using the sta­ Text analysis, also referred to as text mining, is an interdisciplinary
tistical software R. field of activity that combines elements of data mining, linguistics,
Therefore, it can highlight three novel contributions: (1) text-mining computational statistics, and computer science (Meyer, Hornik, &
has been used in one of the areas most punished by the pandemic, the Feinerer, 2008). The main difference between data mining and text
company, in order to be able to guide the guidelines that allow to solve mining is that data mining usually deals with structured data (stock
the hard consequences caused by the confinement, (2) do a systematic information, geolocation data, etc.) while text mining works with un­
review of business papers of high impact papers indexed in the first structured or semi-structured data (articles, documents, etc.). In recent
quartile of WoS so that the analysis of informative and sometimes years, the latter technique has been a focus of interest because of the
sensationalist texts were avoided, (3) Free statistical software pro­ increasing amount of text data in social networks, web pages, research
gramming language R is proposed as a statistical tool. papers, and other information applications (Aggarwal & Zhai, 2012). Its
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the principal aim is to obtain high-quality information from processing large
database or corpus built from the selected papers, and explains the text volumes of textual data. In this study, the summarization and clustering
summarization technique used to identify the most frequent terms fol­
lowed by the text clustering method used to determine the groups of the
most frequently mentioned terms. Section 3 outlines the main results of Table 1
the research. Finally, Section 4 presents the most important conclusions Business journals in the WoS database.
of the study. Journal Frequency % IF

Journal of World Business 0 0.00% 7.28

Journal of Business Research 14 87.50% 7.16
International Business Review 0 0.00% 5.60
Business Horizons 2 12.50% 5.54
1 Total 16 100.00%
Data published by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

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P. Carracedo et al. Journal of Business Research 132 (2021) 586–593

Table 2 Table 2 (continued )

Database: Selected Articles. Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary
Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary
behaviour
Bacq et al. Provide evidence COVID-19 The results of the
(2020) from participants Entrepreneurial event suggest the Krishnamurthy Provide a COVID-19 The university
and mentors hustle concept is (2020) framework to Business school system has been
showcasing the Grand challenges transferable to a understand Digital forced into an
value of the time- Social number of different business schools’ transformation unprecedented
compressed virtual entrepreneurship contexts. worldwide AI-led innovation reshape. Business
idea blitz in Virtual idea blitz Universities can transformation by schools will rise to
accelerating social play a valuable role recognizing the the occasion and
entrepreneurial in linking changes in the will adopt a
action. professionals, university, the leadership role
students, and business world and within the
researchers in the student. university
shared endeavours Leung et al. Research the COVID-19 The importance of
that can achieve (2020) impact of gender Gender equity women’s role in
substantial societal equity on public Human managing public
benefits. health outcomes development health outcomes,
Carnevale and Discuss the Human resource There is little using the ongoing Human with strong
Hatak (2020) implications of management reason to believe its COVID-19 environment positive effects of
COVID-19 for Employee impact on pandemic as its Public health gender equity and
human resource adjustment organizational life research setting expenditure the proportion of
management. Well-being will be short-lived. Public health women in
Crisis Some implications outcomes legislature on
COVID-19 of COVID-19 for public health
employee expenditure, which
adjustment and in turn has a
well-being are significant impact
highlighted. on the number of
Donthu and Introduce special – People have diagnosed and
Gustafsson issue about the become more critical cases.
(2020)1 effects of COVID-19 conservative and Pantano et al. Summarize the Retailing Retailers should
on business and protective after the (2020) challenges that Consumer focus on the
research pandemic retailers are facing behaviour following main
outbreak. during the COVID- COVID-19 areas: rethinking
Countries are 19 emergency, Emergency agile retailing, a
stockpiling things from the Retail strategy new role for
like food, perspective of both Pandemic retailers in society,
equipment and consumers and putting consumers
medicine, or are managers. at the core, digital
preparing to communication
produce them Mullins (2020) Analyse four tools Cash-flow tools Recessions can be
locally. to help any Managing cash an opportune time
Eggers (2020) Conduct a Small firms Small firms face a business owner: (1) Recession to pick up new
literature study on SMEs liability of Sources and uses of Cash-days customers as well
69 manuscripts Crisis smallness, while cash analysis, (2) analysis as new employees.
that studied SMEs Strategy crises create Line-by-line If cash flow is well
in previous crises COVID-19 additional resource margin analysis of managed and
and propose ways availability and the income pockets are full,
to overcome liquidity problems. statement, (3) businesses will be
economic An SME’s potential Cash-days analysis well positioned to
downturns in the for more flexible of the balance do these things and
areas of finance, decision-making sheet, (4) Hidden- to weather the
strategy and the and closeness to its cash analysis. current economic
institutional customer base is storm.
environment beneficial in this Sharma et al. Conduct an COVID-19 This crisis has
regard. (2020a) extensive review of Globalization shown the
He and Harris Examine how the COVID-19 Whatever the the international International importance of
(2020) COVID-19 Corporate social changes, i seems business literature business informational
pandemic can responsibility highly likely that to understand the Risk uncertainty and the
influence the Marketing the ways marketing types of Trade growing role and
development of Consumer ethical has operated in the uncertainty in Uncertainty influence of direct
CSR, consumer decision making past will need to businesses and communication
ethics and Marketing change and will do develop strategies and social media,
marketing philosophy to meet the new to deal with it. with inconsistent
philosophy. Business ethics reality. news and
Kirk and Rifkin Document some of Coronavirus Three phases of communication
(2020) the many unusual COVID-19 consumer from different
consumer Pandemic behaviour is sources causing
behaviour patterns Hoarding addressed: confusion and
that came to Social distancing reacting, coping panic
dominate the early Do-it-yourself and longer-term Sharma et al. Offer strategic COVID-19 Firms are facing
days of the COVID- Digital adapting. (2020b) insights in terms of Supply chain challenges in terms
19 pandemic technology major issues firms Strategic insights of demand–supply
Consumer are facing and Twitter mismatch,
strategic options technology, and
firms are development of a
(continued on next page)

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P. Carracedo et al. Journal of Business Research 132 (2021) 586–593

Table 2 (continued ) Step 3. In order to focus the study on the main research topic of the
Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary Adhikary papers analysed, manually remove the reference section and text cita­
tion of each one.
contemplating, resilient supply
using text analytics chain.
Step 4. Convert all terms to lowercase so there are no differences
tools. between the same terms.
Sheth (2020) Examine the COVID Pandemic Digital technology Step 5. Remove punctuation marks.
impact of the Consumer habits which facilitates Step 6. Delete digits.
COVID-19 New regulations work, study and
Step 7. Remove stopwords which are commonly used in a language
pandemic on for shopping consumption will
consumer Customer modify existing but that do not provide information in the text analysis. Some examples
behaviour. experience habits. in English are that, then, the, a, an, and, among others.
Sigala (2020) Critically review Tourism COVID-19 it can be Step 8. Stem the corpus to group related terms under their common
past and emerging COVID-19 seen as a root.
literature to help Impacts transformational
professionals and Recovery
In line with the research objectives, after processing the database, a
opportunity for
researchers alike to Resilience reforming mindsets list of terms was obtained with the number of times each one appeared in
better understand, Crisis in designing and the set of selected papers. The most frequent terms on the list were then
manage and conducting analysed to identify the main research topics of interest in the corpus.
valuate both the research and for
Second, text clustering was applied to the most frequent terms detected.
tourism impacts tourism institutions
and to reset their Clustering is a well-known statistical classification technique used in
transformational standards and exploratory data analysis, which has been applied in a variety of sci­
affordance of metrics for entific disciplines (Täuscher & Laudien, 2018; Han, Zhang, Pirbhulal,
COVID-19. motivating and Wu, & de Albuquerque, 2019; William & Chang, 2019). The main dif­
evaluating the
ference between hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering methods is
purpose, role and
impact of tourism that the number of clusters is not predefined in the former. This study
research. applied a hierarchical cluster analysis, where the number of groups was
objectively determined. Specifically, the analysis was implemented
Wang et al. Develop a typology COVID-19 crisis When a firm is
using the statistical software R Core Team (2020), applying Ward’s
(2020) of the marketing Firms in China exposed to a
innovation Typology greater degree of
minimum variance method with Chi-squared distance. More details
strategies of firms Marketing external impacts, it about the clustering process can be found in Husson, Lê, and Pagès
under crisis innovation is reasonable to (2017).
management in strategies choose the The more terms two papers share, the more similar they are to each
two dimensions: Dynamic responsive strategy
other (Nguyen, 2013). The clustering process is based on maximizing the
motivation for capabilities that requires the
innovations and the Resource firm to have similarity between papers and, consequently, minimizing the Chi-
level of dependence stronger squared distance between them. Chi-squared distance is a Euclidean
collaborative reconfiguration distance but weighted by the inverse of the prevalence of each term in
innovations capabilities and
the whole corpus and controlling for the different lengths of the docu­
independently
optimize existing
ments (Bouchet-Valat & Bastin, 2018). Each resulting cluster has a
business certain within-cluster variance, such that the more similar the papers the
Woodside Apply the “ultimate COVID-19 Coordinated, lower the internal variance.
(2020) broadening of the Intervention major, national In order to choose the number of clusters objectively, four popular
concept of Experiment government
clustering validity indices were used in this study:
marketing” for Marketing actions are
designing and Ultimate necessary to Average silhouette width. A measure that considers how closely related
implementing broadening mitigate and objects are within the cluster and how clusters are separated from each
interventions in eliminate other. The average silhouette width provides clustering validity and is
public laws and pandemics, civil widely used to select the best number of clusters (Rousseeuw, 1987). Its
policy, national rights violations,
and local guns, corruption,
value ranges between 1 and − 1, with a value of 1 indicating a very good
regulations, and extreme income cluster (Yu-Wei, 2015). For more information about this index, see
everyday lives of inequality, Kaufman and Rousseeuw (1990).
individuals misogyny, and Average between clusters. A measure of the average distance between
national disasters.
cluster centres. It is influenced by the geometry of the cluster centres and
1
As this is an introductory article, it does not have any keywords. increases with the number of clusters. The higher the value, the greater
the separation between groups. A more formal and rigorous description
techniques of text mining were applied to a collection of previously of this statistic can be found in Halkidi, Batistakis, and Vazirgiannis
processed papers, representing a collection of text documents in R. In (2001).
this context, a document is a major element of text mining that consti­ Dunn index. High values of this metric indicate compact and well-
tutes a group of discrete textual data within a collection (Acharya, separated clusters where the means of different groups are sufficiently
2018). far apart, taking into account the internal variance of cluster. For more
Given the technical requirements of the method used, the selected detailed information, see Halkidi, Batistakis, and Vazirgiannis (2002)
articles have to be filtered to avoid terms that could distort the results. and Dunn (1974).
Below, we show step-by-step the actions needed to prepare the text Entropy Index. Measures the quantity of disorder (variation) is found
documents for analysis. in clusters. Low values of this index means better clustering. For more
Step 1. Download the papers in pdf format and convert to txt format information, see Meilă (2007).
for processing.
Step 2. Manually analyse hyphenated words. If they are terms 3. Results and discussion
divided at the end of a line, remove the hyphen. If they are hyphenated
words, leave the hyphen in. The functionalities of R have made it possible to create and examine
the corpus formed by the 16 papers. To that end, we built a document

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term matrix of dimension nxt where n is the number of research papers Table 3
(rows) and t the number of unique terms (columns). Each cell represents Most frequent terms in the corpus.
the absolute frequency of a term in a document. Term Frequency Term Frequency Term Frequency
Fig. 1 shows the output of the document term matrix. It can be seen
covid 571 strategi 241 develop 163
that the corpus contains 4,743 different terms in the 16 business crisi 407 impact 238 financi 152
research papers. The non–/sparse entries are necessary to obtain the firm 400 time 221 suppli 151
sparsity measure, which represents the frequency of the terms in the consum 369 manag 211 respons 151
corpus. A high sparsity value means terms are not repeated often among busi 335 health 201 custom 150
research 299 organ 196 public 150
the different documents (Dinov, 2018) which implies that the docu­ market 279 innov 193 experi 149
ments that make up the corpus are not very similar. The longest terms, pandem 273 chang 184 provid 147
with 17 characters, are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. social 261 effect 184 technolog 142
For the sake of brevity, Table 3 shows the 31 most frequent terms in tourism 246 work 181
new 245 global 179
the 16 papers. It should be noted that the name of each term indicates
the root obtained in the stemming process (step 8). Terms that appear at
least 135 times in the corpus were considered the most frequent; in the
papers analysed, covid (571), crisi (407) and firm (400) were the most Table 4
commonly mentioned terms. Selection of the number of clusters.
Once the most frequent terms had been detected, a hierarchical Number of Average silhouette Average Dunn Entropy
cluster analysis was applied, in which the number of groups was clusters width between Index Index
determined objectively. Table 4 shows the result of validation statistics 2 0.34 2.70 1.50 0.35
for the maximum number of clusters, 15. The best number of clusters 3 0.30 2.70 1.50 0.40
will be the one with the highest value in the average silhouette width, 4 0.16 2.30 1.00 0.92
5 0.14 2.10 0.93 1.20
average between and Dunn index measures, and the lowest in the en­
6 0.16 2.10 1.10 1.40
tropy index. It can be seen that the best results are registered by 2 and 3 7 0.14 2.00 0.95 1.70
clusters. Although the results are very similar for both, we opted for 3 8 0.12 2.00 0.91 1.90
clusters to facilitate the interpretation of the groups. 9 0.12 2.00 0.93 2.00
10 0.10 2.00 1.10 2.10
Table 5 below shows the composition of each cluster into which
11 0.10 2.00 1.20 2.20
similar papers have been grouped on the basis of the most frequent terms 12 0.10 1.90 1.00 2.40
they share. The columns present the number of the cluster; the within- 13 0.09 1.90 1.30 2.50
cluster variance; the Chi-squared distance to the cluster centroid, on 14 0.05 1.90 1.10 2.60
the basis of which each paper is assigned to the closest cluster; document 15 0.04 1.90 1.10 2.70
clustering; and finally, term clustering. Document clustering groups
papers with the smallest Chi-squared distance to the average vocabulary make up this cluster are health, public, develop, effect and impact. The
of the cluster. Term clustering groups terms whose observed frequency terms health and public have a high frequency in this cluster relative to
in the document has a probability below 10% under a hypergeometric the total for the corpus. This indicates that they are the most discrimi­
distribution, based on their overall frequencies in the corpus and on the nant terms of the cluster; as such, they lie far from the origin in Fig. 2.
number of occurrences of all terms in the considered cluster (Bouchet- Develop, impact and effect have a lower frequency, but are closer to one
Valat & Bastin, 2018). The terms respons, provid, experi and custom are other, reflecting the high similarity between them. It should be noted
not shown because they are not significant (p-values ≥ 0.10) for that the term gender does not appear in this cluster because its frequency
clustering. relative to the total for the corpus is very low.
Clusters are comprised of similar papers with common terms. Fig. 2 Leung et al. (2020) show that gender equity and development have a
represents the 3 obtained clusters with the terms that make up each one positive impact on women’s representation in the legislature and are
on a two-dimensional plane. Each term is represented by a point, with consequently positively correlated with public health spending.
the distance to the closest one indicating the similarity between them Furthermore, this expenditure significantly influences the volume of
(Lancia, 2008). The distance between terms and the origin (0,0) mea­ diagnosed cases and the treatment of critical cases, with the urban
sures the quality of the terms on the two-dimensional plane. The terms population having a positive influence on the number of tests and
that lie farther from the origin will be more discriminatory and well COVID-related deaths. All of this underscores the importance of
represented on map cluster (Kassambara, 2017). The clustering of these continuing the struggle for gender equality and of women holding
terms highlights the most pressing concern surrounding the pandemic, decision-making positions. In extreme situations such as those experi­
revealing patterns that could guide companies in implementing mea­ enced during the pandemic, there is a need to combine the characteristic
sures to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic. features of both genders, toning down the riskier positions more typical
of the male gender (Ertac & Gurdal, 2012).
3.1. Cluster 1: Impact on the public health management model This pandemic has meant the quality of public health systems being
called into question in all affected countries. The emerging new scenario
The first cluster consists of a single research paper; that is, 6.25% of is encouraging a shift from public policymakers towards fostering
the papers analysed. It differs from the other documents in the sample in women’s access to leadership positions, which has been shown to be a
that it approaches COVID-19 as a scenario for studying gender equity in positive factor in ensuring the quality of public services provided (WHO,
public systems, specifically in health organizations. The key terms that

Fig. 1. Summary of document term matrix.

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P. Carracedo et al. Journal of Business Research 132 (2021) 586–593

Table 5 3.2. Cluster 2: Changes in society’s consumption habits

Summary of hierarchical cluster analysis of 16 research papers.
Cluster Within- Chi2 Document Terms clustering This cluster includes 18.7% of the articles analysed, and the key
cluster distance clustering theme centres around consumption, technology, pandemic, time, social,
variance new, change and research. The terms consumption and technology have a
1 0.00 0.00 Leung et al. public, health, develop, high frequency in the cluster relative to the total for the corpus, and it is
(2020) effect, impact these terms are the most discriminating in the cluster. There is a strong
2 0.91 0.18 Kirk and Rifkin consum, technolog, time, connection between the terms research, change, pandemic, social, new and
(2020) pandem, social, new,
2 0.21 Sheth (2020) chang, research
time which highlights the usefulness of focusing studies on the social
2 0.33 Pantano et al. changes arising from the new situation that emerged during the
(2020) pandemic (Fig. 2).
3 3.1 0.31 Donthu and firm, tourism, financi, The research carried out and grouped in this cluster has placed great
Gustafsson (2020) strategi, organ, busi,
importance on the rapid spread of the disease and the new societal
3 0.89 Sharma et al. crisi, market, innov,
(2020b) suppli, manag, global, habits established in response. In just under five months this infectious
3 0.92 Woodside (2020) work, covid disease has affected all the countries of the world, forcing all the agents
3 0.93 Krishnamurthy in the economy to adapt. Nevertheless, countries’ reactions to the un­
(2020) controlled spread of the virus have not been homogeneous. The vast
3 0.98 He and Harris
majority have opted for public lockdowns, imposing strong restrictions
(2020)
3 1.08 Wang et al. (2020) on the national and international mobility of people and products. Social
3 1.56 Sigala (2020) distancing rules are forcing companies to adapt their distribution
3 1.91 Eggers (2020) channels in order to reach consumers, who have had to adapt very
3 2.01 Bacq et al. (2020)
quickly to this new scenario.
3 3.20 Mullins (2020)
3 3.31 Carnevale and All this has led to a reorientation of research, with analyses focused
Hatak (2020) on trying to explain the unusual needs emerging in the markets. The
3 3.92 Sharma et al. “new normal” requires changes that are revolutionizing previous cus­
(2020a) toms and life as we knew it before the pandemic (Kirk & Rifkin, 2020).
The use of emerging technologies is now an imperative; society is
2017; Mayer & Oosthuizen, 2020). Efforts must be made to ensure the incorporating them into daily life at a dizzying pace, prompting new
excellence of the management of health systems, with clear policies and patterns of behaviour, which in turn are having a major impact on
priorities set to benefit the population. In addition, it is necessary to consumption habits. This calls for a realignment of business strategies to
ensure correspondence between the effects of the coronavirus pandemic adapt to this new globalized market. It is thus essential to establish good
and national development, where access to public health should be a management practices to bring supply in line with consumer demand
universal right. (Pantano et al., 2020).

3.3. Cluster 3: Economic effects of covid-19 on business organizations

Of all the papers that make up the corpus, 75.05% analyse the

Fig. 2. Hierarchical clustering of most frequent terms in the corpus.

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economic effects of coronavirus from different perspectives, but the prepared—without neglecting issues such as gender equality and human
common thread running through them is the economic and social im­ rights. This is an opportunity for renewal that must be seized in order to
plications for production networks as a result of the measures taken to promote the sustainability of organizations, regardless of their profit-
curb the contagion. In this respect, the most commonly used terms were making purpose. As is well known, the pandemic has caused the
firm, tourism, business, crisis, strategies, financial, organization, market, largest drop in CO2 emissions in history. Therefore, the time is right to
innovation, supply, management, global, covid and work, with firm, tourism introduce management models that address climate change, which is
and, financial being the most significant. The proximity of all these terms becoming an international urgency at all levels.
indicates the strong correlation between them (Fig. 2). The whole world is experiencing an unprecedented situation that
Globalization and the interconnectedness of countries has been the requires additional analysis and efforts in all economic sectors. The re­
main trigger for the worldwide spread of COVID-19. The closure of searches of the last few months is aimed at providing solutions to
national borders and the restricted mobility of the population even problems that have not ceased to arise, and which will continue until the
within their own territory has resulted in economic disruption compa­ pandemic is brought under control so as to avoid affecting the economy.
rable only to the Great Recession. The resulting global crisis is expected It is essential to implement a joint effort between researchers and those
to be unprecedented; the paralysis of the entire productive sector has led responsible for economic and business guidelines with the aim of
to a supply and demand shock, with the consequent collapse of inter­ combining contributions that will allow them to move into the profes­
national financial markets. All economic sectors have been affected, sional field to optimise the solutions found.
with the impact being especially intense in countries that are heavily The main limitation of this research is the volume of the corpus.
dependent on tourism. Specifically, 16 works published at the time of the empirical analysis
Faced with this new situation, there are only two real alternatives: to have been analyzed, which met the criteria defined in the Section 2.
try to get back to the normality we knew before the pandemic, in order Therefore, the natural extension of this paper is to expand the database
to avoid the social impact of high levels of unemployment; or to consider in order to be able to establish more specific measures, tailored to each
this new scenario as a turning point, marking the start of new ways of scenario and country. Once the new database has been processed using
working. International bodies and authorities responsible for setting the programming language provided in R, the methodology presented in
national policy should focus their efforts on helping companies to this article could easily be replicated.
introduce technological and social innovation to enable them to recover
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Patricia Carracedo is graduated in Actuarial and Financial Sciences (2007) and Business
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Studies (2004) at the Universitat de València and has a Master’s Degree in data analysis
Elsevier Inc.
engineering (2013) at the Universitat Politècnica of València (UPV). PhD in Statistics and
Pantano, E., Pizzi, G., Scarpi, D., & Dennis, C. (2020). Competing during a pandemic?
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and Management and Economics at the Valencian International University and since 2014,
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lecturer of Statistics and Econometrics in both degrees. She was awarded at the congress
R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R
“XXV ASEPUMA Conference - XIII International Meeting 2017” and obtained a research
Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.
project of the Fundación Mapfre as main researcher. Her research has been developed
org/.Reuters. T. (2019). ISI Web of Knowledge Web site (accessed February 6. 2019).
using the statistical package R-studio, getting to have a good command of it.
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www.isiwebofknowledge.com. related to various fields: International Trade, Efficiency, Input-Output and Logistics.
Sharma, P., Leung, T. Y., Kingshott, R. P. J., Davcik, N. S., & Cardinali, S. (2020). Currently, she has focused on issues related to innovation, sustainability and construction
Managing uncertainty during a global pandemic: An international business of synthetic indexes, which are leading to publications in internationally prestigious
perspective. Journal of Business Research, 116, 188–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. journals. Member of Group of International Economics and Development.
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Sharma, A., Adhikary, A., & Borah, A. B. (2020). Covid-19′ s impact on supply chain
Luisa Marti is PhD in Economics and Business Studies from the University of Valencia
decisions: Strategic insights from NASDAQ 100 firms using Twitter data. Journal of
(2001). For the last 20 years I have been a professor at the Polytechnic University of
Business Research, 117, 443–449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.05.035.
Valencia, where I have taught subjects related to the field of applied economics. Since
Sheth, J. (2020). Impact of Covid-19 on consumer behavior: Will the old habits return or
2019 I have been a university lecturer. My main areas of research are trade, economic
die? Journal of Business Research, 117, 280–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
impact analysis, quantitative data analysis in companies, and efficiency analysis. Having a
jbusres.2020.05.059.
six-year research and numerous publications in prestigious journals of impact Journal
Citation Report.

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