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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.

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.

Eradicating Ebola from West Africa was struggled with from 2014 through 2016. While at first inefficient and ineffective, undeniable progress was made in responding to the outbreak once countries and organizations steeled themselves for the task at hand. A separate outbreak occurred concurrently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during this period. This episode marked the seventh time that DRC had dealt with the virus over a roughly 45-year span. In 2017, there was an eighth occurrence. Moreover, in 2018, DRC faced its ninth and tenth outbreaks. Comparing the experiences of countries in West Africa facing the disease for the first time, with a state that has a long history addressing its impact, is offered here as a means of better understanding successful disease management where public health epidemics are concerned. Results indicate that early investment in cultivating disease-specific practices, combined with establishing cooperative networks of actors across levels of political response, enables improved mitigation and response during outbreaks.

International mobility outgoing and incoming from almost every university around the world is not just oriented to highly educative standards among them, but to enhance the development of international competences for students, as well as for academics. While students' mobility are mostly an individual effort that implies individual consequences, academics' mobility involve several resources from universities and trigger collective processes such as research collaboration, visiting lecturers, exchange experiences and best practices meetings, plenary sessions, classes, among others. This case study aims to provide insights about how planned activities related for/with visiting international scholars suffer major disruption and collateral damages when an unplanned and unexpected global crisis occurs, which forces them to react immediately under different real-time decisions and nonexistent protocols. The chapter focuses on Latin America, using the case of the Global Business Week organized by Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico, and involving visiting scholars from Peru and Colombia.

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.