Changes in the post-covid-19 consumers’ behaviors and lifestyle in italy. A disaster management perspective

The changes in consumption habits brought about from the covid-19 pandemic is completely reshaping the consumer profiles examined by different organizations. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the consumer behavior studies by analyzing changes post-disasters. Our paper aims at understanding Italians’ lifestyle and behaviours during and post crisis in order to explore what behaviours people would keep after the disaster and to identify possible megatrends. Through a mixed method approach, we propose a trendy avatar which summarizes in its representation the four categories emerged from our explorative study: (1) digital, (2) homescape lovers, (3) responsible and (4) self-care oriented. Drawing on the new behavioural consumer profile proposed, some research avenues and managerial implications are advanced.

Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as a global catastrophe by affecting every feature of our lives. While the capacity to provide forecasting is restricted, it seems likely that the impact of COVID-19 is bound to be abrupt and profound in relation to marketing strategies and principles (Hoekstra & Leeflang, 2020). The wide-ranging upheaval of the COVID-19 outbreak is reconfiguring the discipline of marketing in 1 3 a variety of directions. Notwithstanding the human catastrophe of the sudden rise in deaths and dramatic social effects the pandemic-driven lockdown might represent an opportunity to study the singular and unprecedented changes in consumer behavior (Sheth, 2020).
Right from the beginning of the pandemic, a large number of empirical studies have been published, for instance the study by Naeem (2020) has argued that during the COVID-19 pandemic the use of social media has affected customer psychology by improving its capacity to take optimal consumption decisions. In the same vein, the study by Mason et al. (2020) analyzes the alteration of consumer needs in the USA during the lockdown. The authors illustrated that the changes have affected both purchasing behavior and post-purchase satisfaction.
Unfortunately, the changes in marketing habits and procedures were provoked by such a very rare and unpredictable event as a COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the traditional marketing frameworks, much more focused on the symbolic value of products and hedonistic consumption experiences, seem to partially support the analysis by failing to capture some external determinants (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982;Kim et al., 2019). To address this absence and align the actor-based marketing analysis to such an enormous and tragic external event as the COVID-19 pandemic, we have drawn from another block of managerial literature that is focused on coping with crisis, catastrophe, and disaster. In fact, disaster management is able to provide some frameworks and lenses for analysis to reveal the effects of huge, rare, and unpredictable negative events. Accordingly, the COVID-19 outbreak acts as a Black Swan (Taleb, 2007) and it cannot be studied using ordinary theoretical approaches. Therefore, we decided to examine disaster management to conceptualize the main crisis drivers (Taleb et al., 2009). Disaster management studies (Grossi, 2005;Park et al., 2015;Pearson & Clair, 1998;Taleb et al., 2009) suggest analyzing the consequences of a catastrophe, adopting an event timeline, and splitting a disaster into phases. From the very beginning, marketing scholars have addressed the topic of behavioral changes in consumption habits, although what seems to be lacking is a deep understanding of the correlation between behavioral consumption frameworks and disaster management determinants. Our study tries to exploit the stage of the catastrophe recovery scheme, drawing from the disaster management field to investigate the real changes in consumption habits. Indeed, our work seeks to pursue three objectives: first, investigating consumer lifestyle changes due to the lockdown; next, looking further into the behaviors that people are willing to make permanent; and last, profiling a new consumer behavioral pattern. Specifically, disaster studies provide a mitigation measure scheme that inspired our quantitative investigation. Indeed, scholars approached a negative event by listing several mitigating measures that, during the outbreak, in Italy just as all around the world, corresponded to social distancing and compulsory home life. At the same time, the literature on the crisis argues that the reaction of people and a recovery phase always follows that of mitigation. As part of the reaction phase, people started to change their habits and also consumer behavior, with some of the factors related to the mitigation phase affecting consumption paradigms and leading toward simpler lifestyles and to the utilitarian value of goods (Cozzolino, 2012). Such a kind of change might be understood as part of the reaction or recovery phase in terms of consumer attitudes and resilience. Accordingly, we harness such a chronological perspective with the aim of studying if people will keep the consumption changes after the lockdown and, consequently, if a new consumer behavioral profile will emerge. In other words, this study aims to identify various consumer response attitudes. Thus, the research question is: how does COVID-19 change consumers' lifestyle and behaviors and what habits will remain post-crisis?
To answer to this research question we chose the Italian situation, because Italy was one of the countries most affected by the pandemic; indeed, the official news was posted on the Italian Ministry of Health website on March 10, the decree stating a limitation of movement for Italian citizens to mitigate the outbreak of the virus. Such restrictions were without precedent in Italy. Meanwhile, due to the extraordinary impact on social life and peoples' habits; citizens were obliged to respect social distancing measures; we decided to begin this article during the first phase of lockdown in Italy. We immediately thought about analyzing the disaster impact from a marketing perspective. We were witnessing a huge catastrophe that would provoke a disruptive transformation in social life. At the same time, consumer behavior was changing, so we started to gather data to capture the new direction of customer changes.
The phase of data analysis is based on a mixed method approach (Dunning et al., 2008) organized in two phases (quantitative and qualitative). In order to achieve a deep understanding, we set up a semi-structured questionnaire. We investigated the adaptation of consumers to new lifestyle habits by structuring the questions to achieve a full understanding of what the new consumption habits that the respondent has adopted are, and which of them the respondent perceives to be permanent, even after the lockdown. To expand comprehension of the phenomenon and for the sake of clarity, we arranged a qualitative phase of analysis by interviewing ten respondents belonging to the incumbent sample. This approach permits us have a deep insight into consumer changes and its latent categories of new habits that are strictly related to pandemic measures.
To accomplish our research project this paper is shaped as follows. In the first part we explain the theoretical background that supports our empirical work. Specifically, the first subsection concerns the exploration of the fundamentals of disaster management. The second part of the theoretical background section shows the crucial paradigm on consumer behavior and its evolution during the COVID-19 outbreak. The second section is dedicated to illustrating the methodology. Due to its mixed approach this creates both qualitative and quantitative investigations. The section relating to the findings, which replaces the methodical analysis pattern, illustrates both the qualitative and quantitative parts. At the end we debate our discussions and provide implications for scholars, practitioners, and policy makers 2 Literature background

Disaster management: a lens of analysis for revealing new behavioral profiles
Disaster management has a huge body of parallel fields of study that can sufficiently provide a consistent clarification on the main characteristics of the disaster management concept. Therefore, the literature has addressed the theme of negative, relevant, and unexpected events labelling the studies in different ways. As a consequence, catastrophe management, emergency management, crisis management, and Black Swan management are the strains of literature that contribute to powering the understanding of the study of disaster management (Grossi, 2005;Park et al., 2015;Pearson & Clair, 1998;Taleb et al., 2009). The fragmentation of the study about disaster management is not just a matter of semantic clarification; instead it is related to several facets of disaster events. In fact, a large realm of disaster definitions exists (Perry, 2007); this study exploits the definition of McFarlane and Norris (2006, p. 4). The authors have argued that disasters are "potentially traumatic events that are collectively experienced, have an acute onset, and are time-delimited". A pioneer of crisis management like Burnett (1998) described seven categories of changes during a catastrophe at business level: (1) heroes are born; (2) changes are accelerated; (3) latent problems are faced; (4) people can be changed; (5) new strategies evolve; (6) early warning systems develop; and (7) new competitive edges appear (Burnett, 1998). The outbreak is depicted by exploiting the study of Taleb (2007) as a Black Swan event. Accordingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has the main features of a Black Swan in that it has an unconstrained impact, with no room for forecasting. The study of Neal and Philipps (1995) argues that disaster events open the route to new collective behaviour. The study has been useful for unpacking the disaster response. It was even full of novelty in considering the focal role of a group or subgroup of people in moving as a crowd. Disaster management has taken into account the timeline of a tragic event, especially for assessing the impact and confronting it. Houston (2012) has divided the disaster into phases by splitting it into: a pre-event phase that is hard to predict, an event phase that concerns the disaster spread, and a post-event phase that corresponds to the negative impact of the event. Cozzolino (2012) has presented an interesting approach on the evolution of a disaster and its correlation with the recovery path. The author has analyzed catastrophic events by introducing the concept of a disaster management cycle (Marshall & Schrank, 2014). The author argues that disaster management is framed as a cycle and that it is essentially formed by four categories: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
The theoretical framework that supports our study is inspired most of all by Cozzolino's (2012) study. Indeed, we adopt the disaster recovery path to investigate the changes in consumer behaviors. Our work exploits the disaster management cycle of Cozzolino (2012) to understand the evolution triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, Huston's (2012) study argues that a disaster is characterized by a post event phase that impacts on habits and behaviors. Our theoretical framework takes this post-event phase into account to discover customers' behavioral changes that might become permanent. To the best of our knowledge there are no extant studies that try to bridge disaster management and customer behavior. The work of Burnett is not directly focused on customer behavior, it addresses the changes in organization when a disaster occurs. As suggested by Burnett, there are no systematic or widely accepted strategies for managing crises (Burnett, 1998). Each disaster concurs with the loss of traditional business guidelines; therefore, it is needed to establish steps to limit negative impacts on markets. Highlighting this kind of consequence of disaster has been a crucial element in anticipating the emergence of spontaneous behavioral norms. Guion and his co-authors (2007) have faced the issue of behavioral changes of people, but only during the disaster. The authors argue that a catastrophe has the capacity to profoundly modify behavior (Guion et al., 2007). As a consequence of the negative event, people adopt a new lifestyle to directly or indirectly overcome the emergence of the disaster.

Italians' lifestyle and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic
In times of crisis, firms need to pay attention to consumer behaviors, reactions, and adaptation (Eger et al., 2021). The unexpected restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 outbreak (in early 2020), have made consumers deviate significantly from their usual shopping behavior (Eger et al., 2021). The more limited accessibility of store premises, the increase in digital shopping, the growth of self and home care orientation, and some other new habits, are reshaping the consumption paradigms (Eger et al., 2021). The need to investigate recent trends is crucial and useful to design new value propositions and consumer experiences (Dalli, 2004;East et al., 2016).
Postmodern consumption paradigms have long been characterized by demanding consumers oriented to the symbolic value of goods and services and hedonistic consumption experiences (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982;Kim et al., 2019). After the COVID-19 crisis, some effects such as lockdown, social distancing, the shortage of available resources, home life, more time available, and the fear of contagion, have brought people back to simpler lifestyles and to the utilitarian value of goods (Sheth, 2020), such as buying food and basic goods, going out to the grocer's, and using technology to feel close to loved ones.
New normal life derived from the consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic has pointed out the importance of time, space, and relations (Ferraresi, 2020), while increased digital adoption changed mobility patterns, changed purchasing behavior, increased awareness of health, and changed interpersonal behavior (SwisseRE institute, 2020).
With particular reference to purchasing and consumption behavior, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian consumers could mainly be identified as traditional shoppers, and only to a minor degree as online shoppers (called switch) (Zhai et al., 2017;Eger et al., 2021). Traditional shoppers and online shoppers use a single channel to shop, meanwhile switch shoppers are shoppers who buy online but have previously explored the store in the pre-purchase stage. If, previously, these shopping behaviors depended on many reasons, such as: type of products to buy, motivation (task or leisure), age, culture, the exogenous event of the pandemic and its restrictions have totally removed these paradigms by changing lifestyles and behaviors and shaping new habits and new consumption models toward a massive use of digitalization, a healthy lifestyle, and a local shopping orientation (Eger et al., 2021).
On this point, some recent studies have investigated the possible impact on individual habits and social consumption trends after the pandemic. For example, Sheth (2020) has analyzed the immediate impact derived from the general lockdown on consumer behavior with eight elements: 1. Hoarding, 2. Improvisation, 3. Pent-up demand, 4. Embracing digital technology (e.g. online meetings, digital education), 5. Shops come to the home, 6. Blurring of work-life boundaries, 7. Reunions with friends and family and 8. Discovery of talent. In the same vein, Hoekstra and Leeflang (2020) discussed the impact of the pandemic on consumer behavioral changes and five possible new marketing megatrends. In particular, the authors observed that digital technology should be used to enhance the connection between consumers and firms in a more emotional way (Connected Consumers); shopping habits have been characterized by the use of digital platforms and the consumption of local goods (shopping reinvented); moreover, authors have observed a propensity to protect health and lifestyle as new priorities for consumers (Healthy Living). An additional megatrend derived from an observation of the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the particular condition of middle and lower economic classes, who are keen to maintain their economic position and lifestyles (Middle Class and Lower Class Retreat). Finally, the authors observe a possible depopulation of large cities, where green areas are likely to become saturated soon, as well as a switch of market frontiers due to the impact of COVID-19 measures (e.g. the conversion of tourist services into agriculture) (Shifting Market Frontiers).
Against this backdrop, an interesting analysis may be carried out at a country level in the Italian context. Italy is well known all over the world for its food, art, fashion, and the Italian lifestyle, characterized by healthy consumption of food, healthy physical activity, and healthy prevention (Nomisma, 2020). Especially in some northern regions, this lifestyle was marked by fast work rhythms, well-defined roles within the family, and a lot of social activity (Nomisma, 2020). Italy was one of the countries most affected by the pandemic with over two million cases and over one hundred thousand dead (OMS, 2021). With the strict restrictions imposed by the Government, the COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly slowed down this lifestyle. On the one hand, it forced many cancellations (e.g. going to the restaurant, going to the gym, travelling), returning the country to the consumption of the 1980s. On the other hand, there was a speeding up of the dynamics of technological innovation, such as smart working, e-grocery, distance learning, and all public services, which were suddenly digitized (Deloitte, 2020). Furthermore, the need to stay at home has created a kind of comfort zone where Italians took refuge, especially to cook, unlike in previous years where there was almost an escape from the stove (Coop2020 Report). Thanks to the availability of time, the search for healthy food, and the need to reduce the family budget, people were made more aware and responsible, not only by cooking everything at home but also by purchasing from local suppliers (Cancello et al., 2020).
According to recent data (Nomisma, 2020), these trends also seem to have been confirmed in the months following the lockdown, in the so-called new normality, where people have shown a maintenance of respect for the hygiene and health regulations imposed by the pandemic, continuing to buy online and preferring sustainable products.
While the majority of the recent literature on consumer behavioral changes in Italy after the lockdown has been focused on food habits, this research aims to explore how the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 may influence long-term behavioral intentions, becoming new consumer trends. The present study contributes to the debate on behavioral changes and new trends of consumption and offers interesting insights for managers and policymakers.

Methodology
The purpose of this research is threefold. First, it analyzes the consumer lifestyle during the COVID-19 lockdown; second, it explores the behaviors that people would keep after the lockdown, and finally, it proposes to define the new consumer behavioral profile. Therefore, this study adopted a mixed-method approach (Dunning et al., 2008).
To achieve the research aims, we adopted an exploratory sequential strategy, first starting with a quantitative analysis and then using a qualitative assessment to gain more insights into the individuals' perspectives toward identifying themselves under the categories revealed by the results of the quantitative study (Mikalef et al., 2019). More specifically, our research efforts comprise two phases. In phase 1, motivated by the aim of research, we used quantitative methods (explorative survey) and then, with the aim of analyzing if something changed five months after the end of the lockdown, in phase 2 we developed a qualitative analysis (short discussions) on previous respondents who have previously filled in the online survey in the first stage of the study (Mehta et al., 2020;Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007). This study was conducted in Italy because Italy was one of the countries most affected by the pandemic with 4,449,606 confirmed cases and 128,510 dead (OMS, August 2021). With the closure of all work activities (except for the primary goods supply chain), the forced transition to the use of digital technology to work and study, and the duty to stay at home, lifestyles have been profoundly reconfigured (Sheth, 2020).

Quantitative study
To examine the behavioral profile and lifestyles during the lockdown, a surveybased instrument was conducted on an Italian sample of people (n = 810) through a semi-structured questionnaire administrated via digital tools. The questionnaire was divided in five sections. Closed and open questions were included in the questionnaire. Given that the study was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic, it did not precisely follow pre-existing measurement scales. Therefore, the mixed method study adopted is based on the sequential in-depth qualitative phase after the quantitative survey, which helps to confirm the results which emerged from the explorative study or reveals if something changed in the first section of the questionnaire related to the behavioral profile of the respondents during the lockdown. Individuals were asked to indicate their level of adjustment with each of the items related to ten questions (see Table 1) about opinions and adaptation to the COVID-19 conditions, using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (for nothing) to 5 (totally). To explore the behavioral intentions, people were invited to answer the following questions: "Are there any consumption habits that you will keep in the future after the pandemic crisis?" and "If yes, could you tell us what they are?". Data resulting from this open question were analyzed adapting the thematic analysis approach by Braun and Clarke (2006), where each author searched for meanings and patterns using an iterative and hermeneutical approach.
Thematic analysis is defined as "a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns or themes within the data" (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p.79). Through this process, initial codes were produced from a frequency analysis. Then, based on an inductive-deductive approach to the thematic analysis, we have manually identified some codes as an expression of the ideas or feelings given in the text (e.g. "I will keep going to shop online" has been coded into "online shopping"; "I want to save money and shop once a week for food" has been coded into "weekly planning of food shopping") which were organized into broader categories (themes). Afterwards, the categories were re-examined and checked against the codes and the original data. Then we manually look at the codes we have created, identify patterns among them, and start to come up with themes. With the aim to identify behavioral factors, several codes were combined into a single theme to highlight the essential meaning (see Table 2 and the Fig. 1).
As national lockdown in Italy lasted from 9th of March to 18th of May, to be sure of capturing feelings derived from a new lifestyle, our questionnaire was disseminated in May 2020, almost at the end of the two month lockdown. Non-probability snowball sampling was used for the online survey due to the lack of an appropriate sampling frame (Nguyen et al., 2020). The questionnaire was disseminated via email to different groups of people (different age and work groups and residing across different areas in Italy) to prevent the formation of a homogeneous sample (Del Chiappa et al., 2021). People were invited to fill in the Google form and requested to find additional respondents. After a week of dissemination, a total of 810 surveys were returned.

Qualitative study
Second, a qualitative approach was followed (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2010) by using short discussions. Since the primary purpose of qualitative studies is to acquire relatively more comprehensive, updated knowledge on a specific topic, Table 1 Codes and extraction process. Source: Adapted from Braun & Clarke, (2006) a short discussion is a convenient method to match such purposes (Lamont & White, 2005). Due to the exceptionality of the event, we adopted a qualitative approach after the explorative survey to verify if something had changed five months after the end of lockdown. Table 2 The socio-demographic profile of the sample Online shopping I will keep going to I will keep the habit of I will buy online what I used to buy in the store I will keep the convenience of buying from home The online purchase of products for which in-store purchase is not necessary Fig. 1 An example of thematic map. Source: Authors' elaboration Hence, ten random short discussions were conducted in October 2020 with previous respondents who had previously filled in the online survey in the first stage of the study.
The focus of the discussions was to gain more insights into the individuals' perspectives toward identifying themselves under the latent categories revealed by the results of the quantitative study. Respondents received an introduction to the purpose of the study and an explanation of the four latent categories of new habits. The following are examples of questions asked during the discussion: "how do you feel after two months of lockdown?" "how much have you adapted yourself to the new lifestyle required by the pandemic?", "Are there any consumption habits that you will keep in the future after the pandemic crisis?" and "If yes, could you tell us what they are?" It was noticed that after the 7 th discussion, the quality and quantity of information gained was almost repeated and no more ideas about the new lifestyle trends after COVID-19 were evolving, which is a signal of "data saturation" (Guest et al., 2006). To make sure that the data obtained was sufficient for the current study, three more discussions were added. Each discussion lasted between 15 and 22 min. A code containing letters to denote the first letter of the participant's name followed by a number (the age of the participant), and M/F to indicate their gender is assigned to each quote in the transcript to protect the anonymity of the participants. Transcripts were analyzed by using the coding process of dividing data into codes and themes related to the segments (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Interpretation of data collected helped in informing and further explaining the study results.

Quantitative findings
The socio-demographic profile of the sample is presented in Table 2. The majority of the interviewees were female (63.2%). In terms of age, 58 per cent were between 21 and 30, 17 per cent were between 31 and 40, 15 per cent above 41, and 10 per cent were below 20. The majority of the sample were from southern Italy (59.4%), 26.5 per cent from northern Italy, and 14.1 per cent from central Italy. In terms of employment status, a large portion of the sample (46.7%) were students, while the rest of the sample was divided among employed (26.7%), workers (6.9%), selfemployed (7.5%), entrepreneurs (1.9%), and unemployed (10.5%).
With the aim of verifying how much the lifestyle and habits of the Italians have changed during the lockdown, participants were asked if and how much their eating, study, and work habits have changed and how much they adapted themselves to these new dynamics of daily life (see Table 3). Before proceeding with the questions illustrated in the tables, respondents were asked if they had the opportunity to continue their work from home (70%).
Despite this extraordinary and forced change, respondents showed a satisfactory level of adjustment. Moreover, people also asserted that some of the new habits (e.g. home working, home studying) should be implemented even after the pandemic emergency. On the other hand, concerning leisure activities (e.g. eating out vs home delivery), people showed a propensity to go back to eating out in the post-COVID stage. In addition, regarding shopping behavior, people showed a change in their approach to shopping. However, during the lockdown, they felt they were not much influenced by advertising. Overall, in response to the last question, people showed a high propensity to return to pre-COVID life, even if they have appreciated some changes.
To understand the appreciated habits that people would keep after the pandemic, respondents were asked "Are there any habits you will keep in your post-COVID stage?" 65 per cent responded positively.
In a first step analysis, in order to obtain quick feedback from the question, a frequency analysis was performed. It revealed two relevant habits that people would keep in their new lifestyle: online shopping and home cooking. In addition, the table illustrated some interesting insights, with similar frequencies. To move from the list format to something that provides a better basis for the identification of new behavioral trends of information, in a second step we applied the identify-categories strategy (Braun & Clarke, 2006;Vaughn & Turner, 2016), which is discussed in the next paragraph.

Qualitative findings
After having verified similar topics in the manifest responses, we developed coding that makes connections between similar themes. Thus, we tried to combine the manifest definitions with similar meanings, similar values, similar goals and similar tools into themes. Four themes have been identified which help to shape the new profile of Italian consumers after the COVID-19 lockdown.
The first category is digital resulting from the unified items "online shopping" and "digital meetings"; the second category has been called homescape lovers, which is the manifestation of all the home-related items (home cooking, home delivery, food delivery, home working, spending more time at home); the third category has been named responsible to group all the items related to a more conscious behavior (saving money, doing proximity shopping, avoiding waste, more reasoned purchases, weekly planning of food shopping). Finally, the fourth category has been labelled as self-care oriented to indicate the items related to personal care (wearing a face mask, social distancing, personal and home care, eating healthy food, physical activities, and time for hobbies).
The data collected from the discussions revealed that all the participants interviewed in the second stage identified themselves in the four categories. In particular, regarding the category 'digital', a participant indicated "During the lockdown I appreciated the time spent at home, despite the new reorganization of work, spaces and family" and "Even though my work has partially returned, I continue to spend a lot of time at home through digital tools" (Y54, F). Another participant indicated "I see myself in the habits indicated and for the future I'm trying to maintain a more balanced work-life lifestyle, take better care of myself and the environment for a better society" (M55, M). On this point, another participant found himself in the categories responsible behavior and homescape lover and said "I would definitely 1 3 keep the habit of buying more stocks of basic goods and continue cooking at home, because I like it and it is certainly more hygienic and safe".
Two participants declared that they had completely changed their lifestyle and that the time spent at home also changed their consumption behavior, especially in terms of values. Accordingly, one participant said "I saved money and I am currently not interested in buying non-primary goods" (G43, F). In addition, when we asked what changes you would bring with you in your post-COVID life, some of the participants declared "Home life made me think about life priorities: caring for myself, the environment, and loved ones" (M67, M). Additionally, an interesting comment came from a young participant who said "Despite the fact that COVID robbed me of the pleasure of seeing my friends and colleagues, I appreciated the utility of following lessons from home and I would like this possibility to always remain after this" (H65, M).
Overall, discussions confirmed the categories that emerged from the coding by confirming that the main behaviors that people would like to maintain even beyond the pandemic emergency are related to a more responsible behavior, oriented toward taking care of oneself and others, especially the environment, and a new awareness of the use of technology and home spaces.

Discussion and conclusion
COVID-19 has revealed the unstable foundations upon which much of what we take for granted in the developed world is built, from the complex nature of globalized manufacturing chains and infrastructures to just-in-time supermarket deliveries, as well as stark contrasts between public health systems or those financed by private insurance. Furthermore, the results attested that this pandemic has produced many changes in the lifestyles of the individual and of society as a whole. Lockdown created resilience and improvisation behaviors, which influenced behavioral intentions in a post-crisis stage.
We derived a new behavioral consumer profile by presenting a trendy avatar (see Fig. 1) which summarizes in its representation the four categories that emerged from our explorative study: (1) digital, (2) homescape lovers, (3) responsible and (4) selfcare oriented (Fig. 2).
The avatar summarized the main evidence, which helped us to shape and propose the new profile of Italian consumers to manage the disaster after the COVID-19 lockdown. Indeed, the results presented in the previous Tables 2 and 3 attest to the fact that consumption behaviors in the next few years will not only be related to well-known and consolidated trends, such as the growing attention to health and wellbeing and the greater connection and sharing of information through digital devices, but also new orientations that will change the styles of living and consumer shopping globally.
In particular, the results of Table 2 show customers switching habits in favour of online shopping and adopting the principle of proximity when in need of a "brick and mortar store". Another piece of evidence referred to the rise in awareness about wellbeing and personal care (e.g. wearing a mask), and also that there is an increase in interest in environmental issues and new ideas of living together. For these reasons, the new behavioral consumer profile shows the adoption of more responsible consumption behavior, for instance waste reduction, frugality, and the remodulation of the shopping budget and homemade cooking. Furthermore, one of the main drivers toward these personal and family changes has been the activation of smart working for many workers, and for others, the temporary suspension of work as a result of the closure of businesses and workplaces (for example, shops and restaurants). Thus, the concept of the house is being expanded by adding the perspective of a workplace i.e. home working, and reinforcing the idea of the pivotal place of families.
As illustrated above in Table 3, the respondents described that the lockdown period allowed exploration of hobbies and interests (e.g. home cooking) that we may   (Tables 4 and 5). The knock-on effect of these behavioral changes can be the decline in the value of properties in large cities and the increase in the number of people who decide to move outside the metropolis, to the suburbs or to rural areas: a reversal of the trend compared to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
The economic impact was terrible, the effort and measures to neutralize the outbreak had a negative impact on different sectors. It occurred without any scope for predictions and it found the world completely unprepared to control and manage the outbreak and its consequences. As our very lives, companies, communities, and countries have been disrupted by this dramatic event, so too will be the philosophies, ideologies, and fundamental principles that theorize management studies, and more specifically the marketing field. Furthermore, our results offer an interesting focus on utilitarian value (Overby & Lee, 2006;Li et al., 2018) as a need after the emergency period, contrary to the pre-COVID stage where consumers were more demanding and hedonistic in their consumption experience. For these reasons, grabbing and developing new paradigms (e.g. new lifestyle habits) to understand the impact of disasters on customer habits is relevant for the advancement of marketing studies because the situation we are likely to see continue after the pandemic will be that of many employees who continue to work from home. Indeed, our research has shown that such a system worked during the lockdown, and this evidence will force many executives to no longer appeal to traditional arguments against requests for permission to work from home. This condition could in turn lead to a change in the expectations and culture of the workplace, where employees are evaluated based on their achievement in terms of the effectiveness and efficiency of the objectives assigned to them, and not on how many hours they sit behind their desk in the office. For these reasons, people who could continue to benefit from the extra time they have at home will be those whose working lifestyle has changed irreversibly. This situation is likely to favor employees over service industry workers, which means that not everyone will benefit equally from these changes in the future. Despite being enormously disruptive and painful, crisis management invariably also fuels the emergence of more reasoned purchases and proximity shopping by creating a more responsible profile. The difficulty in finding simple consumer products, or the inability to go shopping in stores, or perhaps just the fact that many of us had more time available, have developed online shopping skills by exploiting food delivery and resourcefulness in avoiding waste that have been largely shared online. Social media has opened small windows to share and compare with others regarding the different reaction mechanisms to the crisis through digital meetings. For these reasons, these conceptual limits related to these complex situations within disaster management have led to different lifestyles and behaviors. Other respondents have even affirmed the habit of dedicating themselves to physical activity around the house, or simply personal and home care in a small space on the windowsill of an urban window. I want to save money and shop once a week for food, I will try to optimize the weekly shopping, I will make weekly food supplies Weekly planning of food shopping 7.1 I will still buy food delivery at home, I loved food delivery and will keep this habit, I will order food delivery at least once a week Food delivery 5.7 I will continue to buy from brick and mortar stores, I will prefer neighborhood shops in the future, I will replace supermarket with brick and mortar stores Proximity shopping 4.7 I will spend more time with my family at home, I will work from home as much as possible Spending more time at home 4,3 I will keep the habit of using hand sanitizer, I will always use sanitizing detergents for the house, I will take better care of my health Personal and home care 3,3 I will try to avoid food waste, I will be more careful to avoid food waste I will buy more consciously, I will look for essential purchases without wasting money, I will avoid impulse purchases More reasoned purchases 0,9 1 3

Implications
We used the COVID disaster event in order to see what is happening to consumer behavior during and after the event, especially regarding consumer behavior and lifestyle changes post-crisis. To answer this question, the study examined the Italian context to explore how Italians have already begun to make changes in their daily lives that allow the definition of a new consumer behavioral profile. Our theoretical contribution refers to the consumer behavior literature (Mason et al., 2020;Naeem et al., 2020;Shet, 2020;Eger et al., 2021) by offering some megatrends that may affect future marketing trajectories. Indeed, the results provide a new behavioral profile based on four categories, which could be interesting insights for future research. Second, our study seeks to exploit the disaster management perspective (Grossi, 2005;Park et al., 2015;Pearson & Clair, 1998;Taleb et al., 2009) in order to understand what post-crisis changes in consumers' lifestyle and behavior (Shet, 2020;Eger et al., 2021) will have a definitive impact and what will not persist for a long time.
We attempt to develop some interesting implications for scholars and practitioners through this proposal of a new behavioral consumer profile.
Starting from the observation of the effects of the pandemic as a disastrous event on health, economy, and society, we analyzed the changes in the lifestyle and behavior of Italians, strongly affected by the pandemic, with the final purpose to identify possible future trajectories in purchase and consumption models. The four categories identify trends that were unimaginable until a year ago and which instead are characterizing these months, and perhaps they will enter into future Referring to the managerial implications, firms can consider the deployment of new business models to face the rise in online purchasing and behavioral consumer changes, which affect the logistics chain. On the other hand, the reconfiguration of the customer timeframe is changing from daily purchasing to weekly planning. This is because daily habits are changing in favor of the pleasure of cooking for oneself, which has been rediscovered, avoiding take-away dinners when returning from the office, carefully choosing a recipe, chopping and mixing ingredients, enjoying, in short, the process of preparing a meal. For these reasons, large scale distribution should take account of this significant evolution by updating its discount plan. Finally, organizations have to rethink their product and services proposals by considering the redesign of homespace as a new opportunity. Indeed, the respondents affirmed that they have been involved in a large number of creative projects during the lockdown at home with their family. Additionally, personal care organizations such as beauty companies have to consider that many Italians have rediscovered activities and habits that were lost due to a hectic modern life: making things exclusively for themselves and realizing how deeply satisfying and fulfilling this can be.
Referring to the theoretical implications, scholars interested in consumer behavior studies and disaster management literature (Grossi, 2005;Park et al., 2015;Pearson & Clair, 1998;Taleb et al., 2009) can exploit this research by considering the lens of this study on Italian consumers during the COVID pandemic, which shows interesting insights on new habits and consumption experiences post-crisis. In line with the study by Shet (2020), we contribute to this field of literature of consumer behavior by examining the consumer lifestyle during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to explore post-disaster behaviors that people would keep after the lockdown, and finally, we propose a new consumer behavioral profile (see Fig. 1).

Limitations and future research
Our analysis has some limitations. First, it is closely connected to the COVID-19 disaster in Italy; therefore, we invite future researchers to study these behaviors in different contexts to understand if the model is replicable. Furthermore, we aimed to raise awareness of the necessity to examine these behavioral issues in depth in complex environments and situations, trying to conceptually classify them into homogeneous elements that shape the four main categories of the new consumer profile proposed in this study.
Future research could be carried out by profiling the sample to identify possible latent clusters; moreover, the consumer perspective and the highlighted consumer behavioral changes provide the opportunity to investigate the firm's response to the new needs and attitudes.


Ghost trains: Australian rail in the early stages of the global COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract The rail industry, as with all sectors worldwide, has faced disruptions due to the global COVID‐19 pandemic. This commentary considers how rail organizations in Australia have engaged within the early stages of the crisis, outlining the challenges faced and how they were addressed. Relying on our observations, and anecdotes obtained from others across the Australian rail industry, we identified a range of impacts including determining service delivery levels (and the associated running of “ghost trains”), implementing hygiene measures and social distancing, managing training and medical assessments, and changes in the behavior of passengers and members of the public (including aggression toward staff and increased instances of trespass). Within rail organizations, we saw changes to communication and control structures, new challenges related to balancing priorities (managing risk of rail accidents vs. virus transmission risk), and negative impacts on job design offset by increased informal support for frontline workers. Importantly, from the crisis, we gained new insights about culture. Finally, we provide recommendations regarding how the Human Factors and Ergonomics discipline can support safe and effective rail operations in the context of both widespread crises such as pandemics as well as the less dramatic, but ever present, shifts in the physical, social, economic, and political environments in which rail organizations operate.

Zero trains equate with zero safety risk, but in this case, there are different criteria at play. While it may seem counterintuitive, for rail operators, there is less effort and cost involved in keeping these trains running, even though it is rare to find any passengers on board (Ruggeri, 2015). The impacts and shockwaves of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak have been felt in all corners of the globe and in every sector; in rail, they yielded a situation that turned every train into a different kind of "ghost train" entirely.
COVID-19 has provoked a rapid response in the face of uncertainty and encouraged teams to either match solutions to known risks and apply known controls or to adapt and respond to new risks by devising solutions and strategies with more flexibility and agility. This places a spotlight on changes to working practices and organizational response, and the role of Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) approaches in the design of policies, procedures, and organizational risk management. Rail transportation was quickly labeled an "essential service" and every person working in the delivery of services in the rail environment was identified as "essential workers." The extent of systemlevel disruption brought on from unprecedented scenarios such as COVID-19 has rarely featured in emergency and business continuity planning, perhaps unsurprisingly. In the rail context then, the response to COVID-19 provides an opportunity to learn and draw insights from scenarios that were previously unprecedented and have particular potency for future continuity planning.
This COVID-19-related commentary places a spotlight and critique on operations and ways of working in Australian rail, 2 particularly in the early disruption phase (i.e., after March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization characterized the outbreak as a pandemic). The emphasis is placed on front-line workers in rail, though there is potential for many of these observations to be broadly applicable to analogous domains with overlapping elements (e.g., bus industry). The authors are academics with rail HF/E expertise, have strong industry-research focused backgrounds, and a broad knowledge of Australian rail operations across the country.
As a commentary on the response in the early stages of disruption (March to April 2020), this article presents our own first-hand observations, and anecdotes obtained from others across the rail industry. The commentary considers how rail organizations engaged with the crisis with the aim to outline some of the challenges associated with COVID-19 disruptions and how they were addressed, along with key insights and future challenges and requirements for rail from an HF/E perspective.

| COMMUNICATION AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Early in the pandemic, and following protocols as part of their formal management structures, rail organizations set up local COVID-19 task forces and crisis management centers to coordinate the response. One of the first important decisions that needed to be made (and would go on to shape all activity) was about how a near-vertical drop in patronage would be reflected in train services. Leading ideas were to change the working week timetable to a weekend timetable, meaning fewer services, later starts, and earlier finishes in many cities. The patronage representing a typical day for Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, 3 and elsewhere had dropped by up to 85% (Steger, 2020). However, many organizations determined that, because trains had been characterized as an "essential service," they were needed to support the travel of "essential workers" who used trains, such as those in health care. Further, government contracts in many jurisdictions required certain levels of service delivery to be maintained. It was deemed imperative that services remained available, and so, the working week timetable remained, crew and rostering patterns were unchanged, and trains ran as normal. Except there was nothing "normal" about it. Railways had become a citysized diorama of ghost trains and eerily empty stations, devoid of the usual throngs of commuters and schoolchildren. Trains passed to and fro with windows you could look straight through, with the odd person looking back. The question also turned to the length of trains.
For example, if joining multiple modular units of car sets/carriages was normal, then why not reduce the number of modular units, given that longer units reduce rail capacity and increase the burden of risk (e.g., more caution signals, longer traversal of railway level crossings).
Perhaps in view of storage constraints, issues of time-cost associated with the requisite shunting activity (en route or in shunting yards), and the uncertainty of the COVID-19 landscape, these questions remained hanging.
Previous work has conceptualized rail as a complex sociotechnical system (Wilson et al., 2007), with safety managed through formal, hierarchical structures (Read et al., 2019). Contrary to this traditional hierarchical structure of control and communication, when the pandemic hit, information about COVID-19 flowed in new ways. In the case of decisions about rail transportation hazard identification and risk management, information was synthesized from a variety of sources. A strong influence was carried by media (radio, TV, etc) as well as government sources, where decisions were being made with high fluidity. Public websites focussing on rapid dissemination of customer-focused information were established. 4 Health and safety committees representing the workers that are only required to meet "at least once every 3 months" (Work Health and Safety Act, 2011) were now meeting weekly. The experience at work was an onslaught of information, shared through bombardment of emails, additional meetings and advice, webinars, forums, and live videos (e.g., from the rail organization's Medical Officer), orchestrated to always remain informed. Frontline staff, who seldom have time to review safety notices before commencing work (Naweed, 2016) became overloaded with large volumes of information and 2 The terminologies and examples used in this paper originate in Australia, but based on discussions and observations with colleagues, we believe many may ring true to those in other countries and contexts.

| MANAGING RISK ON THE FRONTLINE
Frontline staff experienced as much cognitive dissonance as everybody else. The rhetoric swung widely. On the one hand, as "essential workers," there was gratitude that there was still a job to go to, and that unlike their spouse or friends, they were not furloughed or placed on Jobkeeper allowance. 5 On the other hand, train drivers and guards had turned into apparitions at the helm of ghost trains in an odd limbo state, and staff began questioning the point of running and driving trains when nobody was using them. In the rush to respond to the crisis, key principles of job design may have been overlooked. Seminal HF/E research on job design, such as Richard and Oldham's (1976) Job Characteristics Model and sociotechnical systems design values advocated by Cherns (1976Cherns ( , 1987Read et al., 2018), has long acknowledged the importance of quality of working life. Such work provides a reasonable level of challenge for the employee, provides them with variety, incorporates scope for decisionmaking and choice, includes ongoing opportunities for learning, and facilitates social support and recognition of people's achievements.
Further, there is a sense of meaning in the work whereby it has relevance to life outside of work and leads to some sort of desirable future. In rail specifically, there is a well-documented need for train drivers to find their role meaningful and satisfying, despite its many challenges and health and wellbeing concerns (Naweed et al., , 2020. Activities in the immediate aftermath of COVID-19's characterization were frantic and panicked. Immediate activity around risk assessment and action was not unlike the reactive responses observed within the public. There was an urgent need to procure hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizers have typically always been available to staff as part of their standard personal protective equipment (PPE), but were rarely used. Now, staff began demanding their own portable supply and hand sanitizers quickly became a headlining agenda item for many a meeting. Rail organizations explored nontraditional options in the heavily strained supply chain by obtaining hand sanitizers directly from local gin distilleries. 6 Ordinarily, such material would arrive in the workplace with a safety data sheet, meet with follow-up risk assessment, staff consultation, identification of issues around storage facilities, risk mitigations for leakage and spillage, and so on. But such activities in the broader safety management system were rendered into a luxury, eclipsed by time pressures. Thus, rail organizational managerial functions demonstrated some flexibility in devising solutions to adapt to risk, even if such responses were fundamentally reactive.
There were also clear challenges around introducing hand sanitizer for customers. What were the HF/E considerations? How large should the dispenser units be and at what height should they be placed? Should they be encased in some of stand or housing? What were the safety management system requirements for compliance?
What new safety hazards would be introduced? Would the units be top-heavy? What if they toppled onto small children? What if they were stolen or vandalized? Should they be screwed to the ground?
What were the labeling requirements? Where should units be placed, how should locations be prioritized? All of these were new and emerging issues in the course of hazard and risk assessment. But once a risk mitigation resource had been rapidly procured, decisions about its application deferred back to application of known solutions and controls, and compliance against safety management system requirements.
Disinfecting train cabins became an overriding control measure.
Contract cleaners were brought in to offer cab cleaning at all turnaround locations, but in practice, this control measure met with some resistance.
Drivers and guards were, for example, reluctant to invite a potential "COVID-19 carrier" into their own personal workspace, perhaps because it conflicted with feelings of control in the face of a threat (Habersaat et al., 2020), and a sense of autonomy in a situation of increasing restrictions and constraints on how they could perform their work. In this sense, workers were perhaps taking control of their own job design where they would have greater decision making and choice (Cherns, 1976(Cherns, , 1987. Thus, hygiene/presentation service attendants began "haunting" deserted platforms-wiping and cleaning potential customer areas. Procurement and distribution of disinfecting wipes became important so that drivers and guards could wipe down train surfaces themselves. Mandatory social and physical distancing to contain community transmission was implemented through health and safety communication, and rail organizations enforced this control measure, though there were confusion and variability on its parameters (Ciric, 2020), aided by the considerable and growing political contention on the issue (Lewnard & Lo, 2020). Signage was posted in public areas, in trains, and on steps, reminding people to maintain the distance. Handrails, a key control for slips, trips, and falls, were now out of bounds and not to be used. Entrances to rooms had notices indicating the (calculated and measured) minimum number of people capable of maintaining safe distance requirements. Like everywhere, "X marked the spot" but it appeared to mean different things. On floors and entrances to constrained areas, combinations of lines and X markers meant "stand here," but on the seats of chairs and benches on platforms and trains, "X" meant "don't sit here." Before long, green ticks/checkmarks entered into the picture to provide clarity.
Face masks were a highly contentious topic in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic (Feng et al., 2020). Through the aid of media commentary, face masks found themselves at the epicenter of talk around the politicization and bureaucratization of rail safety; this included debate on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19, surgical masks versus cloth masks, and indeed, whether they can be considered PPE. In the early days of disruption, the topic appeared to 5 A temporary Australian Government scheme designed to cover the costs of employees' wages of COVID-19 affected businesses (Australian Taxation Office, 2020). 6 Many gin distilleries adapted their businesses to produce alcohol-based hand sanitizer during the pandemic, given supply shortages. cause widespread discussion and distress. Antisocial behavior is a real problem in the public transport context (Miles, 2020;Thompson et al., 2012) and instances of people spitting on rail staff (Murray, 2020;The Lancet, 2020) was an obvious concern for many. The managerial response to frontline staff who wanted masks, such as those working at stations (and therefore interfacing directly with people), was to pass the responsibility onto somebody else-a behavioral tendency linked with unattractive outcomes, avoidance of blame for negative outcomes, and delegation to people of equal or higher power who can officially assume responsibility for these choices (Steffel et al., 2016). In this case, referrals were made to the local organizational medical officer who invariably referred to guidance at the ministerial level from the office of the Chief Medical Officer of Australia at which point it encountered a brick wall; the presiding view was that masks were ineffective and therefore not needed. A constraining consideration here was that if facemasks were to become part of the standard PPE, then training would be required on how to use them correctly (Work Health and Safety Regulations, 2011). Thus, any staff-member requesting a face mask to ameliorate substantive health concerns (e.g., respiratory conditions and asthma) was advised to speak to their doctor or line manager with a view that their concern could be progressed or escalated to the local health office for advice. Gradually the narrative evolved, forced in-part by other issues, for example, customers returning from COVID-19 stricken cruise ships (Walker, 2020) 7 and international flights who required rail transit and transfer. For this cohort, it was prudent to provide and offer face masks if they were requested, and in a climate where such items were in critically short supply, impressively, face masks were somehow procured, though in view of the presiding rhetoric, were not necessarily P2/N95 8 compliant. However, this created conflicts for operational tasks in a way that compromised their integrity as PPE. For example, use of a whistle when giving "right of way" at a station required staff to remove their mask/touch their face each time they blew the whistle.

| BALANCING RISKS TO SAFETY: CONTAGION OR COLLISION?
In COVID-19, rail organizations have faced obstacles challenging the traditional approaches that they draw on to manage safety. In practice, they have encountered new trade-offs between preventing accidents and risks to personal health. Procedures and policies have been getting in the way and what was once a control has turned into a risk. In the case of two-driver freight operations, for example, a second person is used to verify upcoming signals (to manage Signal Long-standing wicked and perennial safety issues such as fatigue and SPADs (e.g., Filtness & Naweed, 2017;Naweed et al., 2015 were (and remain) overshadowed by the focus on auditing and compliance around control measures for COVID-19. This included ongoing exhaustive checks for signage and marking for social distancing requirements (internally and externally) within buildings, on platforms, and trains. The issue has also created confusion in relation to the process and procedures for managing the cardiometabolic health of rail workers. A topic that has already been subject of much scrutiny in terms of ways of working (Naweed et al.,

2018), advice/requirements issued by the Chief Medical Officers
Council for health assessments was identified as "contrary to the requirements of the Rail Safety National Law" (Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator, 2020, p.2).
Elsewhere on the rail network, COVID-19 had other impacts. For example, rates of trespassing increased, which may seem odd at first given the decrease in patronage. Working from home, the closure of gyms, restrictions around travel, general isolation, and other factors produced a boom of walking for leisure. A spike was seen in trespass at active level crossings, but also over mainline rail corridors to reach 7 The Ruby Princess docked in Sydney, NSW, on March 19, 2020, and 2647 passengers disembarked into the city. 8 The Australian Government advocated surgical masks compliant to the P2/N95 standard as PPE for essential workers in health care and separate advice for others, including how to make cloth masks. In both cases, it is conveyed as a preventive measure (Department of Health, 2020a, 2020b). 9 Simulators are a way of reproducing familiar situations or recurring experiences, while reducing the scale and number of factors involved. Rail simulators tend to come in all shapes and sizes, many with remote instructor pods that may aid social-distancing requirements, and trainers would be considered essential workers.

NAWEED ET AL.
| 441 other paths, and commonly used shortcuts. At one particular network, reported trespass cases rose exponentially from 2 incidents in March, to 13 in April, and 30 in May. Such cases were perhaps partly an issue of exposure-there were many more people walking but just as many trains as before. From a behavioral perspective, this may be due to a reduced sense of being observed by those in authority (Felson et al., 2020) or perhaps a sense of entitlement around being able to venture wherever one wishes to go, given that other freedoms have been taken away (Nowak et al., 2020).

| SUPPORTING FRONTLINE WORKERS
The Australian Minister of Transport indicated that the transport sector would be one of the last sectors to resume "normal" operations post-COVID-19, that is, return to the working arrangements that were in-place in pre-COVID-19. This meant that rail staff that were not on the front-line or had no need to work within the office, would be able to continue to work from home. The acute issue for home workers became equipment supply, set-up and support, and dealing with behavioral stigmas of working from home. However, this paved the way for the notion and emergent feeling that, by being able to work from home, office staff were fundamentally protected while operational/front-line workers were being left having to deal with the public and placing themselves and/or their families at risk.
Recognizing this issue, those who interacted directly with drivers (e.g., health and welfare staff and line managers) appeared to have spent more time on the rail concourse engaging in (socially distanced) conversation. More communication also appeared to happen on the phone than in person with nonwork-related chatter focused on Easter plans, COVID-19 impacts on children, school holidays, friends, family, and so on. Talking became important and a lifeline to air worries and concerns. These informal conversations were positive in the sense of providing social support (Cherns, 1976(Cherns, , 1987, and their emergence had the effect of perhaps balancing out some of the negative impacts on job design in terms of having meaningful work and autonomy of decision-making. Nonetheless, front-line workers remain at-risk. Although the restriction of travel and activities suppressed a significant rise in the rate of COVID-19 transmission and infection in Australia in the early days (Beck et al., 2020), the statistics from hard-hit countries paint a sobering picture. In New York City, for example, 120 employees of the Metropolitan Transport Authority were reported to have died due to COVID-19 before June 2020, with~4000 having tested positive (The Lancet, 2020).

| AN INSIGHT INTO CULTURE
As has been the case in many industries, it would appear that the crisis management procedures that were in place in rail organizations did not cover all of what would be required in a pandemic scenario. This is not so much a critique of their inadequacy as a commentary on the way how organizations have dealt with the planning and development around subsequent ways of working. In crisis, people have a tendency to feel justified about letting things go, and the more embedded cultural values drive decision making. Much of what we have observed in the Australian rail sector has been a mix of reactivity where rapid decisions amenable to more flexible boundaries of risk (O'Keeffe et al., 2015) have been required, but also a struggle to adapt quickly elsewhere, including on the frontline, given a longstanding rule-based culture. Observations about the way that rail organizations have dealt with COVID-19 since its characterization as a pandemic has revealed much about their levels of cultural maturity.
In the case of rail organizations within Australia, processes were overlooked and eclipsed by the urgency and fear of COVID-19, for example, focussing on the procuring of hand sanitizer overrode any thought around how it would be handled, risk assessed, and stored.
Approaches have vacillated over uncertainty. Some approaches have tried to match and enact uncertain risks with known solutions and strategies and apply known controls from the existing safety management system. Others have responded with more agility and engaged uncertain risks by devising solutions and strategies in ways that have been more adaptive and responsive to risk. It may be that the relatively hierarchical, prescriptive structure of safety management implemented within the rail industry had the effect of reducing the capacity to adapt and identify new and emerging sources of risk.
The integration of organizational mindfulness (Weick & Sutcliff, 2001) may provide some stability and support rail systems to achieve a balance between control and flexibility to adapt and evolve to environmental constraints (Lintern & Kugler, 2017).

| IMPLICATIONS FOR HF/E IN RAIL
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new kind of "ghost train." Unlike the elusive parliamentary ghost train, the COVID-19 ghost train is ubiquitous while the pandemic is in full force. It also has empty carriages, but not because it runs at obscure times, and not because of effort to keep a rail line viable. A COVID-19 ghost train is empty because its regular patrons are not using it, and the effort is being made to keep the country itself viable-to ensure that the essential worker relying on their rail service is still able to travel. Like parliamentary ghost trains, the COVID-19 ghost train is, however, also a symbol of increased risk, of poor balance between control and flexibility to adapt.
Safety-critical industries like rail are not unfamiliar with the need to balance trade-offs between competing goals. Rasmussen's (1997) model of migration argues that organizational behaviors are influenced by gradients toward efficiency and least effort. These gradients push a system toward the boundary of acceptable performance where it is then at risk of experiencing an accident or adverse outcome. Two other boundaries constrain behavior: the boundary to economic failure, and the boundary to unacceptable workload. COVID-19 has shifted these boundaries for rail organizations. They faced potential loss of revenue and thus the risk of shifting toward economic failure, there has been higher tolerance for additional workload and around cleaning and sanitizing (although these behaviors may drift over time), and the boundary of acceptable performance is now concerned with virus transmission, as well as traditional safety risks. In addition to the notions of migration and drift, Rasmussen's work proposed that the diffusion of top-down control mechanisms and effectiveness of bottom-up feedback mechanisms to management are key to managing risk.
Such mechanisms support vertical integration whereby there is alignment in the decisions and actions of actors across a sociotechnical system.
Drawing together key threads of HF/E from job design and providing meaningful work to culture and risk management, the following key areas are proposed in how the discipline can contribute in planning for, and responding to, widespread disruptions such as global pandemics: • Job design: Ensuring that workers at all levels continue to have quality work, including mechanisms to ensure social connection and social support are available where traditional avenues may have been lost.
• Operational task design: Ensuring that workers are able to coordinate their tasks with PPE in ways that do not compromise the integrity of PPE or attract further risk. Monitoring the use of PPE and the challenge in its sustained use where risk may be perceived as low.
• Design of fitness for duty and personnel support mechanisms: Ensuring that hardships outside of work (i.e., concern for unwell family/friends) and within work (i.e., concern for own health, increased trespass events) are managed and do not lead to risks in service. Avenues for support should consider platforms beyond the intranet, and alternatives to the Employee Assistance Program.
• Design of top-down communication processes: Ensuring information is clear, concise, consolidated, and relevant to the enduser and provided in a format that is easy to access, read, and understand and recognizes system constraints (e.g., short amount of time to read during shift, easy access to intranet, difficulty of reading on work phone, technological literacies).
• Design of feedback mechanisms: Ensuring that management have insights into emerging issues being faced on the ground, allowing adaptation of risk control strategies.
• Design of administrative processes: Ensuring procurement safety requirements are reviewed and designed in ways that increase efficiencies.
• Design of new safety initiatives: Assisting to ensure the user and stakeholder needs are addressed, that designs are usable, and inclusive design and participatory/codesign processes are supported where possible.
• Culture change: Developing and implementing programs and structural changes to enhance the cultural maturity of the organization. Efforts to facilitate improved organizational mindfulness as well as a sense of trust and openness between staff and management should be considered to increase the adaptive capacity of the organization. Such changes are beneficial whether the next challenge is a pandemic, other widespread disruption, or even the day-to-day shifts in the physical, social, economic, and political environments in which rail organizations operate.
Anecdotally, many people are talking about the so-called silver-lining of COVID-19, and how it has created more opportunity. In the context of rail (and this may also apply to many other industry settings), it may be more useful to frame COVID-19 as not an opportunity to regress but to overhaul the cultural and structural maturity of the organization. A worry around what is being lost and not gained may return us back to former, lessdeveloped and inflexible states where safety is overtly bureaucratized-and where such bureaucracy introduces "ghost trains" as a work-around solution despite expending valuable resourcing and attracting additional safety risks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the key rail industry contacts across Australia who communicated with us since March 2020, and shared insights into the impacts of COVID-19 on their business. Anjum Naweed's contribution to the preparation of this manuscript was supported by his Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE160101137) and Gemma Read's contribution was supported by her ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DE180101449).

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing not applicable-no new data generated, or the article portrays a commentary or describes entirely theoretical research.

PEER REVIEW STATEMENT
The peer review history for this article is available at http://publons. com/publon/10.1002/hfm.20886 ORCID