Societal Governance in the Face of Polycrisis: Exploring Alternatives through International and Comparative Research [2028-2031]

Despite the existential threats posed by these multiple, interconnected crises, responses by countries have so far proven largely ineffective in altering prevailing trajectories (Sachs, Lafortune, Fuller, & Iablonovski, 2025). Likewise, management and organization studies and adjacent academic fields have struggled to reorient scholarship to match the urgency and enormity of these challenges (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016).

Our SWG aims to help overcome two key obstacles that limit our fields’ scientific contributions to confronting the current polycrisis. First, management and organizational scholarship’s traditional focus on the individual firm and its competitors has produced much stronger insight into corporate failure and development than into societal-level failure and development, underscoring the need to study societal governance in the face of the polycrisis. Second, our fields’ Western-centric orientation, rooted in research concentrated in the US and Europe, has become increasingly untenable in a rapidly changing world where major innovations also emerge in countries such as China, India, or Brazil. Together, these two obstacles suggest two directions of conceptual and methodological expansion–from a focus on firm-level governance to societal governance,

and from Western-centric research to genuinely international and comparative research–that guide our EGOS SWG.

The overall goal of the SWG is to equip our fields with the conceptual and methodological foundations for studying societal governance from an international and comparative perspective. Achieving this will require broadening our intellectual resources. By societal governance, we mean the decision-making structures and processes that shape the direction of society as a whole. Systems of societal governance–the kinds of actors involved in setting this direction (government agencies, private sector businesses, community organizations, and others) and their relative roles–vary by country and sector. We are eager to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of these systems in the face of the polycrisis and the interacting grand challenges that form it. We envision an international and multidisciplinary learning process that engages SWG members with (1) disciplines such as management and organization studies, public management, public policy, political science, and comparative social sciences; (2) perspectives from Asia, Europe, North America, as well as Africa and Latin America; and (3) social movements and organizations at the forefront of addressing the polycrisis.