Call for Papers

Over the last decade, grand challenges such as climate change (Howard-Grenville et al., 2014), rising authoritarianism (Adler et al., 2023), inequality and marginalization (Mair et al., 2016), ocean landfills (Porter et al., 2020), diseases in developing countries (Vakili & McGahan, 2016), forcible displacement (Kodeih et al., 2023), child malnutrition (Chatterjee et al., 2022), commercial sex exploitation (Sawyer & Clair, 2022), degrading water health (Couture et al., 2022), and others have become a rapidly growing area of interest in organization theory (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016; Gümüsay et al., 2022).
 
Grand challenges are marked by three distinct features: complexity, where “the problems involve numerous interactions and associations with nonlinear dynamics”; uncertainty, where “actors cannot define the possible future states of the world and therefore cannot adequately forecast the consequences of their present actions”; and evaluativity, where “the problems transcend jurisdictional boundaries, engage multiple criteria of worth, and reveal new concerns even as they are being tackled” (Ferraro et al., 2015: 365; Gehman et al., 2022: 261). Grand challenges thus demand actions that engage a wide array of diverse entities, each with different beliefs and interests, in the face of an unknowable future. Although these facets make grand challenges intractable and resistant to easy fixes, a primary emphasis of this research domain is to discover the mechanisms by which society can nonetheless successfully organize to make vital progress on these important issues.
 
The very nature of grand challenges as complex and evaluative clearly implicates institutional complexity (e.g., Greenwood et al., 2011) which foregrounds culture as a central element. However, many anachronistic conceptualizations of culture view it as merely a constraining force that limits actors' possibilities for action, leaving culture as primarily a barrier to tackling grand challenges that must be overcome. In contrast, more agentic views of culture conceptualize it as a “toolkit” or repertoire of resources that can be drawn on by actors to construct their lines of action (Giorgi et al., 2015; Swidler, 1986). In the domain of organization theory, a significant body of literature under the label of cultural entrepreneurship has built on this concept of culture as a toolkit to explore how astute cultural operatives can strategically draw on cultural resources and deploy them to create change through socio-cultural processes such as storytelling (Lockwood & Soublière, 2022; Lounsbury et al., 2019; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001, 2019). This perspective of culture is particularly generative in the spirit of this year’s overall colloquium theme of creativity and its role in generating lasting influence as it reveals how culture and institutions can be springboards of invention and change.
 
Contemporary research in the space has expressed explicit interest in how such processes can be extended to ‘solutions to grand challenges’ specifically (Lounsbury et al., 2019). Such an approach has the potential to be generative for fostering insight into the processes by which culture might also be an enabling force to make progress on tackling grand challenges, rather than a constraining one. Grand challenges demand ‘bold ideas’ and culture can be used creatively to construct such possibilities with lasting impacts on society and future generations.
 
Our aspiration with this sub-theme is to cultivate a generative dialogue at the interstice of these two relatively divergent domains. We invite papers that expand the frontiers of knowledge regarding how culture can serve as a toolkit for tackling grand challenges and are especially interested in papers that skillfully blend insights from both literatures. We welcome both conceptual and empirical papers and are open to all methodological approaches including both qualitative and quantitative studies.
 
Some of the broad, though by no means exhaustive, questions and puzzles of interest to us include:

• How do different cultural resources engender creativity and the bold ideas necessary to tackle grand challenges?

• How do cultural operatives craft, communicate, and propagate projective stories and/or other symbolic constructions that highlight grand challenges and rally collective action in the face of radical uncertainty?

• How can the diverse array of heterogeneous entities that grand challenges cut across (such as nongovernmental organizations, transnational bodies, or governments) also serve as astute cultural operatives to shape whether and how grand challenges are tackled?

• How can a diverse assemblage of actors engage in collective storytelling and/or other processes of collective meaning-making to facilitate engagement with grand challenges?

• How do different symbolic constructions such as narratives that are championed by different actors interact and conflict or coalesce?

• What types of cultural resources do operatives draw on to create change and motivate action (or fail to do so)?

• How can the process of ongoing storytelling foster sustained engagement (or fail to do so) over the long time horizons in which tackling grand challenges unfold?

• How can cultural operatives continue to sustain collective stories and other symbolic constructions that resonate with a diverse set of heterogeneous entities?

• To what extent are different approaches culturally resonant with heterogeneous entities?

• How does the cultural context influence the ideation, development, and scaling of solutions for grand challenges?

References

• Adler, P.S., Adly, A., Armanios, D.E., Battilana, J., Bodrožić, Z., et al. (2023): “Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion.” Journal of Management Inquiry, 32 (1), 3–20.

• Chatterjee, A., Ghosh, A., & Leca, B. (2022): “Double Weaving: A Bottom-Up Process of Connecting Locations and Scales to Mitigate Grand Challenges.” Academy of Management Journal, 66 (3), 797–828.
• Couture, F., Jarzabkowski, P., & Lê, J.K. (2022): “Triggers, Traps, and Disconnect: How Governance Obstacles Hinder Progress on Grand Challenges.” Academy of Management Journal, 66 (6), 1651–1680.
• Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. (2015): “Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited.” Organization Studies, 36 (3), 363–390.
• George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. (2016): “Understanding and Tackling Societal Grand Challenges through Management Research.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (6), 1880–1895.
• Giorgi, S., Lockwood, C., & Glynn, M.A. (2015): “The many faces of culture: Making sense of 30 years of research on culture in organization studies.” The Academy of Management Annals, 9 (1), 1–54.
• Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeih, F., Micelotta, E.R., & Lounsbury, M. (2011): “Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses.” Academy of Management Annals, 5 (1), 317–371.
• Gümüsay, A.A., Marti, E., Trittin-Ulbrich, H., & Wickert, C. (eds.) (2022): Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 70. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited.
• Howard-Grenville, J., Buckle, S.J., Hoskins, B.J., & George, G. (2014): “From the Editors: Climate Change and Management.” Academy of Management Journal, 57 (3), 615–623.
• Kodeih, F., Schildt, H., & Lawrence, T.B. (2023): “Countering Indeterminate Temporariness: Sheltering work in refugee camps.” Organization Studies, 44 (2), 175–199.
• Lockwood, C., & Soublière, J.-F. (2022): Two Advances in Cultural Entrepreneurship Research. Advances in Cultural Entrepreneurship, Vol. 80. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited.
• Lounsbury, M., Cornelissen, J., Granqvist, N., & Grodal, S. (2019): “Culture, innovation and entrepreneurship.” Innovation, 21 (1), 1–12.
• Lounsbury, M., Gehman, J., & Glynn, M.A. (2019): “Beyond Homo Entrepreneurus: Judgment and the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Management Studies, 56 (6), 1214–1236.
• Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M.A. (2001): “Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources.” Strategic Management Journal, 22 (6–7), 545–564.
• Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M.A. (2019): Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Mair, J., Wolf, M., & Seelos, C. (2016): “Scaffolding: A Process of Transforming Patterns of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (6), 2021–2044.
• Porter, A.J., Tuertscher, P., & Huysman, M. (2020): “Saving Our Oceans: Scaling the Impact of Robust Action Through Crowdsourcing.” Journal of Management Studies, 57 (2), 246–286.
• Sawyer, K.B., & Clair, J.A. (2022): “Hope Cultures in Organizations: Tackling the Grand Challenge of Commercial Sex Exploitation.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 67 (2), 289–338.
• Swidler, A. (1986): “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review, 51 (2), 273–286.
• Vakili, K., & McGahan, A.M. (2016): “Health care’s grand challenge: Stimulating basic science on diseases that primarily afflict the poor.” Academy of Management Journal, 59 (6), 1917–1939.
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