Are “grand challenges” too challenging for management studies?

In 2003, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $200 million initiative to research “grand challenges” in medicine. The project sparked interest throughout the academic world in societal grand challenges, roughly defined as the most complex problems that our societies face, and led numerous journals to call for special issues to investigate them. Management and organisational studies scholars in particular hoped to use the concept of grand challenges to make research in their field more relevant to society and instil in it a sense of societal responsibility. Has the concept lived up to expectations? 

In their article “The future of grand challenges research: Retiring a hopeful concept and endorsing research principles”, published in December 2022 in the International Journal of Management Reviews, Hertie School adjunct Professor Christian Seelos, Professor of Organisation, Strategy and Leadership Johanna Mair, and Senior Research Associate Charlotte Traeger conducted a literature review to take stock of the last ten years of grand challenges research. Their conclusion: grand challenges has not proven useful as a concept for theory development, but it does show promise as a guiding set of research principles for future research.

The problem with research on grand challenges up to now

In their literature review, the authors examine scholarly articles, calls for papers and editorial notes published in management journals to explore how consistently researchers use and define the concept of grand challenges. They find a discrepancy between what the editorial notes and special issue journal calls intended to be researched and what variables were actually studied. “Our review shows that authors employ the term grand challenges inconsistently, and some don’t even define the term at all,” says Christian Seelos. “This basically leaves us with a hodgepodge of research with no transparent criteria for deciding whether and in what way grand challenges research might eventually be successful.” The authors argue that this inconsistency makes it difficult to theorise and derive practical insights from work using the concept, and they even see a potential bias in the choice of studying certain problems over others. As a result, important problems could be overlooked.

Keep the baby, throw out the bathwater

Despite these issues, Johanna Mair stresses that “we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, seeing as the idea of grand challenges has generated important enthusiasm and momentum”. Instead of retiring the term altogether, the authors suggest a set of principles that can guide future grand challenges research. These principles include:

• urgency: asking whether there is a moral imperative that we step up our engagement with important societal challenges;
• broadening the theoretical scope of current research: expanding the range of theoretical perspectives that we integrate in our studies of complex phenomena;
• broadening the empirical scope of current research: engaging closely with relevant stakeholders and carefully considering how to translate complex social contexts into concrete phenomena for investigation;
• and realism: aiming to validate theories in terms of their practical adequacy.

“The continued excitement about grand challenges research is an opportunity to enact this set of principles to guide and guard a progressive agenda on grand challenges in management research,” say the authors. “We are hopeful that the next decade of grand challenges research will be marked by ambitious advances in both theory and practice.”

Read the full literature review in the International Journal of Management Reviews.

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