Over the past months, we have been witnessing nothing less than a radical rupture in the globally shared “institutional fabric”: ‘discontinuities in the taken-for-granted features of global society that have developed over the past decades’ (Hwang and Höllerer, 2020, p. 294). And academia is no exception. While deeply institutionalized practices of academic life have not been radically altered for the most part, many of us have formed the view that the COVID-19 pandemic and the cascading effects of the corresponding global crisis are likely to lead to the end of academic life ‘as we know it’. And still, we have little idea as to exactly how such changing practices will pan out in the long-run, how profound the changes might be, and how long-lasting their effects. Our commentary offers a number of provocations. A key metaphor we wish to develop is ‘cultural leapfrogging’: a situation ‘in which a next-generation institutional infrastructure is imagined and created more or less de novo rather than merely imitating, adapting, or translating an institutional design observed elsewhere’ (Gehman and Höllerer, 2019, p. 233). With the technological aspects of leapfrogging all too familiar to those of us who have spent considerable time moving our lives online, the social aspects of such a shift have attracted less attention. Cultural leapfrogging, happening in often contested instances, is not without risk: the moment you ‘leap’, regularly with limited time for reflection, you are catapulted into uncharted territory – with little idea as to where exactly you will land.
In this commentary, we wish to share anecdotes and insights on such a cultural leapfrogging experience drawn from organizing the 2020 EGOS Colloquium online: the first author as the then-President of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) and the second author in his role as Chair of the 2020 Local Organizing Committee. Overall, we intend to tell a cautionary tale, covering a number of issues such as community building, collegiality, critique and constructive feedback, cross-fertilization of ideas, socialization of newcomers, and networking among scholars. The current COVID-19 crisis has afforded a number of opportunities, but it has also led to more troublesome consequences – some of which, we argue, are potentially irreversible.