Explaining Covid-19 crisis response strategies from a Resource Based View

The Covid-19 pandemic requires immediate, simultaneous responses from countries with varying governing institutions, cultures, and geographies. Yet, we also see a wide variety of intervention strategies to mitigate its consequences within the same institutional or geographic context, e.g. between states in a federation such as Germany or the USA, between European member states, or between similar neighbors in one region. One of the most surprising phenomena in COVID-19 is the wide divergence of problem assessments, response strategies and their implementation in different jurisdictions. This divergence begs for an explanation, given the highly similar threat authorities were facing. Though crisis scholars already knew for long that sensemaking differs between organizations and leaders in crisis situations (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014), the idea persists in that problem perception, available expertise to reduce uncertainty and previous experience define the appropriate or likely crisis response strategy (Boin et al., 2016). Yet in the Covid-19 crisis, we witnessed another possible explanation that influenced crisis response strategy: resource availability. The above explanation resembles explanations for strategy heterogeneity in organizations under ‘normal’ circumstances: based a selection of core values, a target (group), and a cost benefit analysis, organizations formulate their strategy (Porter, 1985). However, organization science scholars soon departed from the idea that the assessment of the external environment resulted in a competitive strategy (Day & Wensley, 1988). Instead, introducing the grand theory of the Resource Based View (RBV), scholars claimed that firms use a specific mix of unique internal resources as assets in competition with other firms (Barney, 1991). Not external opportunity and threats define differences in corporate success, but resources from within define the strategy of the organization. The RBV holds promise as an explanatory theory to explain the variety we observe in the responses to the current pandemic. It may explain why some national authorities enforced the use of facemasks, and others did not. Or why their crisis response completely relied on testing and tracing, or isolation of incoming travelers. Why they started their vaccination campaigns vaccinating elderly, or chronically ill, or instead started with medical care takers. Many of these variations are puzzling when seen from the perspective of the external considerations, that were so similar in many cases, or even contrary to the selected response. In this paper, we compare the crisis response strategies of Belgium, Czech Republic, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden: all EU member states facing the same pandemic threat, with access to similar epidemiological expertise, under conditions of similar uncertainty, populations between 10 and 20 million people and the similar incidence of Covid-19 within their borders. This study first looks which resources could explain variation in performance, complying with Barney’s characteristics of scarcity, imitability and substitutability. We proceed by looking at the different strategies of the countries in terms of restrictions, and then we look into issues of availability of resources as explanatory mechanisms for the chosen strategies per case.