Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

With this sub-theme, we welcome contributions on how professionals and their expert knowledge can be mobilized to address complex societal challenges, and how attentional dynamics influence the coordination and collective action required to do so. Societal issues such as wicked problems, grand challenges, and complex social problems are marked by profound uncertainty, interdependence, and multilevel dynamics (Head, 2022; Rittel & Webber, 1973). They unfold simultaneously on global and local stages and demand collaboration across professions, disciplines, institutions, and sectors (George et al., 2016). Professionals—including scientists, clinicians, engineers, planners, public health workers, and policy analysts—are central actors in interpreting these challenges, translating them into actionable work, and shaping the collective responses that follow (Abbott, 1988; Compagni et al., 2024). However, abundant research highlights the difficulties experts face in collaborating across boundaries. Studies of professions (Abbott, 1988), expertise (Anteby & Holm, 2021; Eyal, 2013), stakeholder engagement (Banks et al., 2016), and institutional logics (Currie & White, 2012; Reay & Hinings, 2009) reveal that professional jurisdictions, epistemic differences, and specialized knowledge systems often fragment rather than unify efforts. Coordination frequently falters when expert groups frame problems differently, apply divergent assumptions, or prioritize competing demands (Lefsrud & Meyer, 2012). These challenges become even more pronounced when global knowledge must be adapted to local realities, or when local insights must travel upward to inform higher-level strategies (Drori et al., 2025).

To advance organizational scholarship on these dynamics, this sub-theme focuses on the interplay among professional roles, expert knowledge, and attention. Professional roles provide the formal and informal expectations that shape what various occupational groups see as their domain, responsibility, and legitimate contribution (Noordegraaf, 2020). How professionals interpret these responsibilities through their professional role-identities deeply influences how they frame societal issues, interact with others, and negotiate authority and accountability (Kyratsis et al., 2017). When societal problems cut across jurisdictions, professionals must often reconsider what their roles mean in practice: where their responsibilities begin and end, how they should collaborate, and what obligations they hold toward other expert groups and toward society (Susskind & Susskind, 2015). Expert knowledge, meanwhile, is increasingly distributed across scientific, professional, practitioner, managerial, and experiential domains (Heimstädt et al., 2024). Societal challenges demand not only technical expertise but also the ability to integrate diverse knowledge forms across global–local scales. Professionals often act as translators, boundary spanners, and intermediaries in this integration. Their role interpretations influence whether they draw on lay or local experiential knowledge, how they integrate practitioner insights, and how they reconcile scientific generalizations with contextual realities (Compagni et al., 2024). Digital technologies and artificial intelligence increasingly shape these processes. They alter how expert knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated, and they redistribute tasks and authority among professionals, organizations, and algorithmic systems (Bailey et al., 2022; Kellogg et al., 2020). These developments raise new questions about which actors are recognized as experts, how professional judgment is exercised, and where attention is directed when work is mediated by data and machines. Attention is the third key dimension. The Attention-Based View (Ocasio, 1997) shows that what actors collectively attend to shapes how problems are defined and what actions are taken. Professional communities face competing demands, evolving institutional pressures, and multiple, simultaneous societal challenges. Their attentional structures, and the role expectations that guide them, shape which issues are prioritized, which are sidelined, and how urgency is established (Nigam & Ocasio, 2010). Attention thus becomes a mechanism linking professional roles with knowledge mobilization and coordination.

Research on grand challenges has examined how organizations and fields can act under conditions of deep uncertainty, often through pragmatist and collaborative modes of organizing (Ferraro et al., 2015; Gümüşay et al., 2022). Less attention has been paid to the professional work that underlies these collective responses. Bringing these elements together provides a rich agenda for understanding how professionals actively shape, contest, and reconfigure collective responses to societal challenges. We invite contributions that illuminate how professionals work across jurisdictional and epistemic boundaries; how expert knowledge is mobilized, translated, or contested at global–local interfaces; and how attentional dynamics influence what problems become visible, urgent, or actionable. We particularly welcome studies that reveal the often subtle organizing work through which professionals frame issues, negotiate authority, and orchestrate collaboration across diverse expert groups and institutional settings.

Indicative Research Questions:

• How do professionals reinterpret responsibilities and negotiate boundaries when societal challenges cut across established jurisdictions?

• How are responsibilities, jurisdictions, and boundaries reconfigured when multiple expert groups collaborate, and how do professionals integrate scientific, practitioner, managerial, and experiential knowledge when addressing problems that span global and local levels?

• How do attentional dynamics shape problem visibility, prioritization, and coordinated action among professional groups?

• What shapes the attentional priorities of professional communities, and how do these priorities influence problem framing and action?

• How do digital technologies and AI reshape professional roles, expertise, and coordination patterns in addressing societal issues?

• In what ways do professionals act as translators or intermediaries across knowledge systems, stakeholder groups, or governance levels?

• How are tensions between institutional logics or competing expectations managed in multistakeholder collaborations?
   

• Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor. University of Chicago Press.
• Anteby, M., & Holm, A. L. (2021). Translating expertise across work contexts: U.S. puppeteers move from stage to screen. American Sociological Review, 86(2), 310–340. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122420987199
• Bailey, D. E., Faraj, S., Hinds, P. J., Leonardi, P. M., & von Krogh, G. (2022). We are all theorists of technology now: A relational perspective on emerging technology and organizing. Organization Science, 33(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1562
• Banks, G. C., Pollack, J. M., Bochantin, J. E., Kirkman, B. L., Whelpley, C. E., & O’Boyle, E. H. (2016). Management’s science–practice gap: A grand challenge for all stakeholders. Academy of Management Journal, 59(6), 2205–2231. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0728
• Compagni, A., Cappellaro, G., & Nigam, A. (2024). Responding to professional knowledge disruptions of unmitigable uncertainty: The role of emotions, practices, and moral duty among COVID-19 physicians. Academy of Management Journal, 67(3), 829–861. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2022.0697
• Currie, G., & White, L. (2012). Inter-professional barriers and knowledge brokering in an organizational context: The case of healthcare. Organization Studies, 33(10), 1333–1361. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840612457617
• Drori, I., Neumann, K., Vaara, E., Boersma, K., Kyratsis, Y., Santacreu-Vasut, E., & Suddaby, R. (2025). Grand challenges and the rhetoric of collective action. Academy of Management Perspectives, 39(1), 7–21. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2024.0333
• Eyal, G. (2013). For a sociology of expertise: The social origins of the autism epidemic. American Journal of Sociology, 118(4), 863–907. https://doi.org/10.1086/668448
• Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. (2015). Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36(3), 363–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840614563742
• 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. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.4007
• Gümüşay, A. A., Marti, E., Trittin-Ulbrich, H., & Wickert, C. (Eds.). (2022). Organizing for societal grand challenges (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 79). Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X202279
• Head, B. W. (2022). Wicked problems in public policy: Understanding and responding to complex challenges. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94580-0
• Heimstädt, M., Koljonen, T., & Elmholdt, K. T. (2024). Expertise in management research: A review and agenda for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 18(1), 121–156. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2022.0078
• Kellogg, K. C., Valentine, M. A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control. Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 366–410. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2018.0174
• Kyratsis, Y., Atun, R., Phillips, N., Tracey, P., & George, G. (2017). Health systems in transition: Professional identity work in the context of shifting institutional logics. Academy of Management Journal, 60(2), 610–641. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.0684
• Lefsrud, L. M., & Meyer, R. E. (2012). Science or science fiction? Professionals’ discursive construction of climate change. Organization Studies, 33(11), 1477–1506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840612463317
• Nigam, A., & Ocasio, W. (2010). Event attention, environmental sensemaking, and change in institutional logics: An inductive analysis of the effects of public attention to Clinton’s health care reform initiative. Organization Science, 21(4), 823–841. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1090.0490
• Noordegraaf, M. (2020). Protective or connective professionalism? How connected professionals can (still) act as autonomous and authoritative experts. Journal of Professions and Organization, 7(2), 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joaa011
• Ocasio, W. (1997). Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187–206. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199707)18:1+<187::AID-SMJ936>3.0.CO;2-K
• Reay, T., & Hinings, C. R. (2009). Managing the rivalry of competing institutional logics. Organization Studies, 30(6), 629–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840609104803
• Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
• Susskind, R., & Susskind, D. (2015). The future of the professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts. Oxford University Press.