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The closure of schools and nurseries during the COVID-19 lockdowns triggered the re-insourcing of childcare to the home, sparking extensive public debate and academic research on the pandemic's potential impact on gender equality (see, for example, Burgess and Goldman, 2021; Vandecasteele et al. 2022). My PhD research, which explores parents' decision-making influences when planning care during their child's first year in the UK context, coincided with COVID-19. The coinciding of my data collection with COVID-19 (seven online discussions with a total of 36 participants and 12 follow up interviews, 10 which include partners) created microcosms in which wider public debates were echoed. My research draws on the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 2009) to conceptualise parents' capabilities to share leave as they aspire to and employs dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) (Riessman, 2008) to explore how gendered parenting norms are constitutive of parents’ care capabilities. In this chapter, I draw on feminist ethics of care to explore the disruption of gendered parenting norms, in the COVID-19 context, within parents' decision-making and a possible ‘reimagining’ of the value attributed to care (Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen, 2021; Tronto, 2017). My findings support anticipation of what the promise of greater flexibility could bring as a result of increased visibility of caregiving during COVID-19. However, I also find evidence which supports the caution previously recommended of the need to reflect on work cultures and the predominance of masculine ideal worker norms in the UK (Chung et al. 2021).

This chapter presents an international review of the experiences of children and parents regarding care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic profoundly impacted children and families, magnifying the influence of governmental policies, socio-economic disparities and cultural contexts on children's experiences and exacerbating global inequalities. Vulnerable families faced increased challenges affecting children's rights and well-being, while the transition to digital learning highlighted the critical need for equitable access to technology. Despite extensive documentation of these challenges, research focusing on the pandemic's impact on young children's development, well-being, socialization and learning opportunities, as well as the experiences of parents/carers, remains limited. This scarcity stems from the pandemic's constraints on research activities, requiring reliance on online methods and the increased burdens on parents/carers, making participation in research more challenging.

Employing the PRISMA 2020 method for a literature review, this chapter aggregates international research findings on the subject, examining the impacts of COVID-19 on health and well-being, knowledge of the pandemic, effects on learning, educational strategies, online activity engagement and collaboration with Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services. It concludes with a synthesis of insights and recommendations drawn from the reviewed literature.

The chapter contributes to a comprehensive framework for understanding the pandemic's impact on young children and their families, emphasising the importance of targeted interventions, equitable resource distribution and ongoing support for the ECEC sector to address the challenges and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and future crises.

Organizations are increasingly deploying algorithmic human resource management (HRM) for decision-making. Despite algorithms beginning to permeate HRM practices, our understanding of how to interpret and leverage the functions of algorithmic HRM remains limited. This study aims to review the stock of knowledge in this field of algorithmic HRM and introduce a theoretical perspective of functional affordance to enhance the understanding of the value of algorithmic HRM.

A systematic literature review was conducted in this study based on 283 articles. The articles are extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus. The content of the articles was then integrated to formulate the framework for this study.

Functional affordance highlights algorithmic HRM can be systematically embedded within the organizational environment, with its characteristics naturally suggesting the functionalities or actions available for HR managers to choose from. The findings of this study demonstrate five features of algorithmic HRM from the perspective of functional affordance: awareness of algorithmic HRM, alignment with business model design, action readiness, adaptation to business context and attribution to individuality.

This study provides a novel perspective for understanding the insufficiently theorized application of algorithmic HRM within organizations. It presents an integrated framework that elucidates the key features of algorithmic HRM and elaborates on how organizations can better develop algorithm-driven capabilities based on functional affordance.