COVID-19 Secure Guidance: Organizational Decision Making and Politics in a Public Health Crisis

23 March 2021, a year since the first “work from home” government instruction so as to rein the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic in the United Kingdom. On 25 March 2020, the Coronavirus Act 2020 gained Royal Assent, came into law and it is a parliamentary consensus that the Act has beneficially enhanced the ability of public bodies to implement measures to save lives. In a commitment to continuously review the COVID-19 secure guidance that operationalizes the Act, the One Year Report on the Status on the Non-devolved Provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 was presented to Parliament in March 2021. In parallel response to the Government’s review of measures implemented to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, organizational theorists have investigated the management of compliance with these containment efforts. Bounded rationality, the classical rational choice critique, as espoused by Herbert A. Simon (1955), is a spurious penchant given its inadvertence of structural formulation. Primarily informed by a critical realist approach to the politics of organizational decision-making this article identifies limitations in rational choice theory, coupled with gender blind technological determinism, as insufficiently recognised determinants of compliance with COVID-19 secure workplace guidance.