Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis worsened emerging markets’ major pain points, particularly the precarious labor market and, within it, the situation of women. In this chapter, we focus on Arbusta, an Argentine software and application testing start-up that was born with the mission to provide jobs to the most vulnerable communities, especially women. In the extremely uncertain COVID-19 context, Arbusta managed to grow and expanded from Argentina to the USA. Among the core insights of the Arbusta case is that COVID-19 helped them develop further a set of distinctive practices: adopting an unbiased attitude and reflexivity, as well as redundancy and plurality of perspectives. As a result, the tacit talent of these women came to light. In short, by understanding what COVID-19 revealed about this special organization, we signal to a set of organizational changes what could contribute to weave antifragility nets for a sustainable future. The present crisis has also shown that technology might work as a buffer to alleviate some social and economic challenges, especially in emerging economies.
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Notes
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“Ba” is a Japanese word. It means a shared space for emerging relationships. Not necessarily a physical space. It was first introduced by the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and then translated to management by Nonaka and Konno (1998).
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Echenique, L.K., Pels, J. (2022). Antifragility Strategies: The Arbusta Case in COVID-19 Argentina. In: Shultz, II, C.J., Rahtz, D.R., Sirgy, M.J. (eds) Community, Economy and COVID-19. Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98152-5_2
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