Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Leveraging Management Research on Grand Challenges

Tragedy of the Commons

William Forster Lloyd, a British economist, introduced the term tragedy of the commons in an 1833 essay, but the term reached management and organization scholars via the work of economic ecologist Garret Hardin (1968), and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom (E. Ostrom, 1990) in collaboration with her colleagues at the Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (V. Ostrom, 1999; V. Ostrom et al., 2012). The concept communicates that, in the absence of constraints, self-interested actors will deplete a free resource. The idea connects Grand Challenges to definitions of complex problems as market failures (Have & van der Rubalcaba, 2016), central concepts in economics (see Santos, 2012). The concept also connects with the economic concept of free riding, which describes the tendency of individuals to advance their interests at the expense of the interests of the collective (Frischmann et al., 2019; Samuelson, 1954).

Hardin’s definition of tragedy of the commons has long been part of the vernacular in the management literature on complex social problems. In Hardin’s (1968) formulation, the problems of commons stem from governance obstacles, namely the barriers associated with the governance of natural resources and human activity. As an extension of economic theory, the definition of these barriers is top-down and derived through a thought experiment (Feeny et al., 1990) that builds on Hardin’s controversial and pessimistic view of the world and the welfare state. Hardin’s seminal article on the tragedy of the commons was the most frequently cited of all the articles we studied.

Hardin’s work is highly influential, yet another public policy scholar was the first to explore the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom explored the concept in her dissertation work, which she completed 3 years before the publication of Hardin’s article (Ostrom, 1965). She approached the question rather differently and offered an alternative perspective. In contrast to Hardin’s theoretical approach, Ostrom drew from extensive fieldwork on communities engaged in diagnosing and tackling commons problems, namely the availability of water and the distribution of water usage rights in Southern California. She also considered the fieldwork of other scholars. Subsequent research in collaboration with her husband Vincent Ostrom and colleagues from Indiana University (Dietz et al., 2003) brought about a redefinition of the commons problem dissociated from the neoliberal economic theories that had influenced Hardin’s thinking. This work situates the commons problem within the interdisciplinary research on collective action (Olson, 1965), connecting our understanding of governance obstacles with the iterative, nonlinear social dynamics defining how communities think about and organize to share resources (V. Ostrom, 1999), receive services (E. Ostrom, 1996), and tackle problems associated with common-pool resources, including climate change (E. Ostrom et al., 2012). Thus, the framing of governance offered by these authors is not narrowly associated with the concepts of corporate governance that draw on agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). Instead, it is a wider framing that includes the challenges to coordination, collaboration, and participatory action described in the public policy arena:

an arrangement of governing beyond-the-state (but often with the explicit inclusion of parts of the state apparatus) . . . organized as [apparently] horizontal associational networks of private (market), civil society (usually NGO) and state actors. (McCann, 2017, p. 314; Swyngedouw, 2005)

We found a total of 7,094 articles in journals on the ABDC list have cited Hardin’s (1968) article and our keyword search identified that at least 1,314 of these articles discuss Grand Challenges (see Table 1). A review of these articles shows that the vast majority focus on environmental sustainability. Other articles embrace the concept to study social problems in other arenas, including the arts (Borchi, 2018), migrant workers (Clibborn, 2019), intellectual property rights (Lambrecht, 2017), technological innovation (Allen et al., 2020), and market institutions that serve the interests of the poor (Gatignon & Capron, 2021). Finally, a few articles discuss topics associated with the psychology of cooperative behavior (see Weber et al., 2004, for a review) (see Appendix A).

Social Problems

Blumer (1971) provides a perspective on Grand Challenges that is focused not on tackling them directly, but on the social structures and processes that precede tackling efforts. He offers a social constructivist perspective (Berger & Luckmann, 1991) which suggests that social situations are identified as social problems through processes of collective definition “instead of existing independently as a set of objective social arrangements with an intrinsic makeup” (Blumer, 1971, p. 295). This perspective emphasizes the barriers influencing the type of social attention that Grand Challenges may receive (Holstein & Miller, 2006; Spector & Kitsuse, 1987). We label these barriers curation obstacles and define them as the processes influencing who comes to pay attention to which social problems when. The term is drawn analogically from the context of museums, where a curator decides what is worth collecting and displaying as well as how visitors experience the collection. Similarly, in the context of social problems, different actors (e.g., donors, multilateral organizations, governments, the media, researchers) summon and sustain our problem-solving attention by identifying some situations and not others as Grand Challenges. In their insightful 1988 article on attention to social problems, Hilgartner and Bosk (1988, p. 54) pondered,

[w]hy, for instance, does the plight of the indigenous people of South America (who are suffering from the rapid destruction of their cultures, and who in some cases are being killed off in large numbers) receive less public attention than the plight of laboratory animals used in scientific research? Why are conditions and events in the Third World that affect the life chances of millions of people, both abroad and in the United States, the object of only the most cursory and superficial public attention except during “crises”? Why do toxic chemical wastes in landfills receive more public discussion than dangerous chemicals in America’s work-places? Why do so few weep for the dying rain forest?

Our Scopus search for cites of Blumer’s seminal article yielded only 21 articles, and of these, only a few received a sizable number of citations themselves (see Table 1). Moreover, two articles were not focused on the identification of complex social problems and had instead adopted definitions of Grand Challenges associated with either tragedy of the commons or wicked problems (see Appendix B). With these caveats, we retained Blumer’s (1971) perspective because attention to curation obstacles brings to the forefront of the research agenda the antecedent processes that prefigure social problems before they are labeled as Grand Challenges. These processes may, for example, frame hunger either as an inequality problem or a poverty problem, which may compel different sets of actors and actions.

Wicked Problems

The term wicked problem focuses on diagnosis and resolution, highlighting the artificiality of the distinction between these two connected processes. The term is attributed to Rittel and Weber (1973) who sought to emphasize the distinction between social problems for which there is a linear path from ideation, to action, to outcome and social problems for which there is not. Linear science-based approaches are effective only when dealing with “tame” problems. Figure 3 includes the bottom-up definition of the concept provided in this landmark article. Following this definition, “wicked” problems defy neat description but include certain attributes. For example, consensus on diagnosis is impossible: In a pluralistic society, there is nothing like the undisputable public good (e.g., there is no objective definition of equity). Accordingly, policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false. It makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions to social problems unless, or until, severe qualifications are imposed first to predefine the arena. There are also no solutions if solutions are understood as definitive and objective answers (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 155). Instead, as wicked problems, Grand Challenges are re-solved repeatedly.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Characteristics of wicked problems.

Skaburskis (2008) gives us an insiders’ view into the origin story of this bottom-up definition of wicked problems. He dates the term to 1967, during a workshop organized by C.W. Churchman at the University of California Berkeley. In the workshop, Horst Rittel offered the list of attributes included in Figure 3. Skaburskis (2008) credits Churchman with offering the label “wicked.” At the urging of his coauthor Melvin M. Webber, Rittel later fully developed and published the concept in an article. Professor Churchman was also involved in his role as editor of the Management Science journal, where the concept first appeared in print. There Churchman used the definition of wicked problem that we adopt here (see Table 2):

. . . a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the in-formation is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing. The adjective “wicked” is supposed to describe the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed “solutions” often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. (Churchman, 1967, p. 141)

Our search for citations of Rittel and Weber’s article yielded 2,447 articles published in journals on the ABDC list of which 571 had keywords that identified them as discussing Grand Challenges (see Table 1). Most of these articles embrace the concept in its original formulation (Brook et al., 2016; Dentoni, Bitzer, & Pascucci, 2016; Dentoni, Bitzer, & Schouten, 2018; Dorado & Ventresca, 2013; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; van Tulder & Keen, 2018). Scholars have leveraged the term Wicked Problem to describe Grand Challenges in domains as diverse and dramatic as modern slavery (Caruana et al., 2021), cataract-induced blindness (see Dorado & Ventresca, 2013), and the COVID-19 pandemic (Moon, 2020; Sahin et al., 2020). Many of these highlight the differences between wicked and tame problems. Several of the most cited articles (see Appendix C) address public policy and sustainability issues, focusing on the governance obstacles that we have associated with the tragedy of the commons or, as discussed later, the adaptation obstacles brought forward by the metaproblems concept (Emery & Trist, 1965; Trist, 1983).

Metaproblems

The concept of metaproblems describes “sets or systems of problems (meta-problems), rather than discrete problems” (Trist, 1983, p. 269) that are beyond the domain of action of any one organization (problem domains, Emery & Trist, 1965). We trace the origin of this research to the work of Tavistock Institute members in a number of consulting engagements capturing challenges in a world that was changing and becoming rapidly interconnected (Trist & Murray, 1990). Eric Trist was the institute’s founder and director for many years. The center worked with scholars in other locations and the concepts of interest to us here follow from these fertile partnerships as participants like Russell Ackoff shared the concepts that they were learning and developing. ¹

Of the 978 articles we found in the ABDC list of journals, only 73 ² included the keywords associated with Grand Challenges (see Table 1). In our review, we find that these articles were concerned with two sets of obstacles. The first set dovetails with the scholarship discussing governance obstacles. These articles discuss a plurality of complex social problems exploring issues related to cooperation and collaboration among organizations from the public, business, and civic sectors of society (Brown, 1991; Brown & Ashman, 1996; Gray, 1985; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Lawrence & Hardy, 1999; Trist, 1983). The second set of articles leverages research in ecology exploring human societies within the plural, overlapping, and connected socio-ecological systems that define planetary life (Dentoni, Pinkse, & Lubberink, 2021; Schad & Bansal, 2018; Westley, 2013) and is associated with systems theory (Lewin, 1936, 1943) (see Appendix D).

Curation Obstacles

We identified curation obstacles in our reading of Blumer’s pragmatism-based conceptualization of social problems. These obstacles include the social structures and processes framing the why, who, and when of selecting, organizing, and presenting specific areas of social action as Grand Challenges (Blumer, 1971). Two separate streams of inquiry in organization studies and management have explored the social processes and structures we identified. One stream is interested in actors who can deliberately reorient collective attention to an alternative formulation. This research considers the role of social entrepreneurial movements, such as Hands Across America (see Waddock & Post, 1991) or the Life Aid global concert organized by Bob Geldof (Westley, 1991). The focus has been on organizations, with any profile, but businesses with socially oriented founders, such as Patagonia, have also played a role in these structures and processes (Ryan, 2021). Most directly, they can engage in entrepreneurial efforts that generate attention toward specific social problems (Waddock & Post, 1991; Westley, 1991). In addition, several authors in this stream document the role of storytelling and storytellers in eliciting and maintaining collective attention to complex social problems (Hoffman, 2020, 2021; Waddock, 2008, 2015).

The second stream of research draws from the critical management tradition (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992) and articulates the role of incumbent structures of power in creating the frames (Goffman, 1974) that actors use. These frames define how complex social problems receive attention in ways which are more likely to reinforce than undermine the incumbent structures for the continued benefit of those in power (Khan et al., 2007; Levy & Kaplan, 2008; Levy et al., 2016). This stream cautions that businesses engagements are more likely to reinforce than to erode the hegemonic structures that benefit them. For example, Khan and colleagues (2007) explored how media attention to the engagement of children in the production of soccer balls in Sialkot Pakistan brought about a diagnosis of the problem by the companies involved that ended by making the situation worse for the children involved. Specifically, they identified the problem as production practices that allowed for work at home. The result was the elimination of this practice and, with it, the elimination of job opportunities for the stay-at-home mothers who had been using this work to supplement the family income.

There are many other illustrations of how the engagement of businesses directs attention to some social problems and away from others such as the role of large multinational companies (e.g., Nike or Adidas), which are very active in drawing attention to the social challenges with impact on their bottom line, namely the infringement of copyrights by lobbying for the inclusion of certain markets that sell counterfeit identical replicas of their products in the United States Department of State list of notorious markets. ³ Inclusion on this list makes these markets subject to raids by local police enforcement. In contrast, these same large corporations remain idle when it comes to the policing of the sweatshops where many sellers of these counterfeit products work and, in this way, get hold of their designs. These places where subcontractors manufacture their products, typically pay very low salaries, have poor working conditions and, in extreme cases, engage in modern slavery (Crane, 2013). Other examples of businesses partaking in curation processes include how large multinationals hid knowledge of the harmful effects of their products from public view to avoid or at least delay social efforts to limit these harms such as tobacco (Velicer & Glantz, 2015), oil companies such as ExxonMobil (Supran & Oreskes, 2017), and internet giants, such as Facebook (Mac & Kang, 2021).

Governance Obstacles

Governance obstacles are the focus of scholarship associated with both the tragedy of the commons (E. Ostrom, 1996; E. Ostrom et al., 2012; V. Ostrom, 1999; Parks et al., 1981) and metaproblems (Gray & Purdy, 2018; Trist, 1983). Scholarship considering governance obstacles to business engagement in Grand Challenges has largely been grounded in either a technical rationality ontology or a pragmatic one, each advancing separately. Scholarship in the technical rationality tradition has been centered on the neoliberal understanding of why businesses would engage with Grand Challenges. Following this thinking, businesses engagements are driven by governance concerns associated with the need to prioritize the interests of shareholders. These governance concerns include the market-based structures associated with the literature on shared value (Porter & Kramer, 2002) and nonmarket strategies (Dorobantu et al., 2017). This research has emphasized the potential for, and the need to search for, win-win situations. They also include the historically and geographically bounded corporate governance norms (Aguilera & Jackson, 2010) that guide business leaders’ attention and the targeted state regulations defining their legal responsiblities. For example, Reid and Toffel (2009) have discussed the role of businesses in tackling climate change exploring the role of shareholder resolutions and targeted state regulations. Scholars have also considered obstacles deriving from the social norms and institutional structures that hinder collaborative arrangements (Kanter, 1994, 2010), including the polycentric structures advocated by Ostrom and colleagues (Dietz et al., 2003; E. Ostrom et al., 2012).

Drawing from Trist’s concept of metaproblems, research on governance obstacles using a pragmatic ontology has explored collaborative arrangements between businesses and civic society (Brown, 1991; Brown & Ashman, 1996; Gray, 1985; Gray & Purdy, 2018; Kanter, 1994, 2010; Westley & Vredenburg, 1997; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). This research has shown how these arrangements present opportunities to reveal and repair divisions in accountability and responsibility between businesses and civic society, or those conflictual or collaborative processes that may foster businesses’ willingness to embrace responsibilities beyond those associated with their organizational purposes including, for example, the preservation of biodiversity (Westley & Vredenburg, 1997), or old-growth forests (Cashore et al., 2007; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010).

In short, research on governance obstacles as it applies to businesses is divided in its ontological focus. Scholarship with a technical rationality ontology focuses on topics associated with corporate governance, while that with a pragmatic ontology focuses on the impact of participation in collaborative arrangements with civic society–based organizations. The two bodies of work overlap in considering how the assumptions and structures that govern the actions of business leaders guide how they engage in efforts to address complex social problems.

Sensemaking Obstacles

Sensemaking obstacles connect, most directly, with scholars embracing concepts drawing on Rittel and Weber’s wicked problems. This scholarship has focused on exploring the topic without a specific focus on businesses. Scholars have advanced this research agenda by debunking hero-centered narratives on how to tackle complex social problems (Bacq et al., 2016; Dorado, 2005; Dorado & Ventresca, 2013; Ferraro et al., 2015; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Schad & Bansal, 2018). They have also advanced our understanding of both the difficulties in advancing “bold ideas” and “less conventional approaches to tackling large, unresolved problems” (Colquitt & George, 2011, p. 432), and the role that processes such as design thinking (Buchanan, 1992; Gruber et al., 2015) can play in tackling these barriers to the discovery of novel approaches. Design thinking describes methods for actors to engage in fieldwork and develop thought experiments to loosen “the grip of pre-existing assumptions and paradigms” (Grimes & Vogus, 2021, p. 2).

More relevant for considering the specificity of businesses is attending to views of sensemaking obstacles, which consistent with Wicked Problems’ pragmatic foundation, see these obstacles as irremediably intertwined with governance obstacles (Ferraro et al., 2015). Drawing from this connection, we can reflect on their interplay. For example, we can consider how businesses’ sensemaking expectations regarding the time frame of an engagement has the potential to define the governance norms they are likely to accept (Kim et al., 2019). For example, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have been willing to give autonomy to other stakeholders, such as allowing workers to work from home, or to coordinate with them, such as partnering with government agencies in relation to vaccine mandates. These governance arrangements may have been motivated by assumptions about the temporary or short-term nature of these engagements (Kim et al., 2019). Interestingly, considering the longer-than-expected period of the pandemic, these engagements could have a lasting impact on the governance norms defining these relations in ways which will only become clear at later date.

Another avenue for reflection includes research exploring the increased likelihood of new bold approaches to Grand Challenges emerging from collaborative governance structures. With time, these structures can redefine participants’ sensemaking, increasing their willingness to embrace ideas they once considered undesirable (Dorado, 2013). Dorado and Ventresca (2013) offer an example. Their study showcases how a collaborative governance structure created the conditions for the unlikely emergent out-of-the-box approaches to the tackling of complex social problems, building on Hirschman’s idea of the hiding hand (Hirschman, 1967). Hirschman’s hiding hand explains the emergence of these out-of-the box engagements revealing the influence of evolving conditions in the ground. Dorado and Ventresca illustrate the role of the hiding hand with an example drawn from a case study (written by Marseille, 1994) on how SEVA, a U.S.-based nonprofit partnered with Aravind, a well-known social enterprise (Rangan, 2009), found itself financing and co-owning Aurolab, an intraocular lens manufacturing plant in India. SEVA’s involvement in this venture runs counter to its founding purpose, which instructed them to support low-cost, technologically modest solutions. However, as described by Marseille (1994), SEVA’s involvement in Aurolab emerged as an inevitable response within the chain of interactions grounding the years-long relationship between its leaders and Aravind’s founder. The case describes a nonprofit. However, the dynamics of the hidden hand (in yielding out-of-the box involvements) are relevant to explain why corporations may ever advance initiatives that deviate from their commercial aims.

In short, research on sensemaking obstacles reveals how the framing of problems and solutions affects actors’ approaches to tackling Grand Challenges. In considering the role of businesses, we highlight the interplay between sensemaking and governance obstacles (consistent with the pragmatic ontology framing research in sensemaking). Heeding this interplay allows explaining business actions beyond what is expected when considering separately the sensemaking or the governance obstacles framing their engagement. It also reveals, as the COVID-19 example illustrates, how sensemaking structures may motivate businesses to embrace governance norms they may have never considered. Or how, via Hirschman’s hidden hand, businesses may unexpectedly embrace bold out-of-the-box ideas that break away from the dominant governance norms guiding their leaders’ decision making.

Adaptation Obstacles

Finally, adaptation obstacles connect with the concept of metaproblems. These obstacles address the same processes and structures associated with curation, governance, and sensemaking obstacles. Yet they do so from the complex adaptive ontological perspective. This perspective provides an uncertainty framing highlighting that the outcomes of actors’ efforts depend on their alignment with the adaptive, plural, overlapping, and connected socio-ecological systems that define planetary life (Dentoni, Pinkse, & Lubberink, 2021; Schad & Bansal, 2018; Westley, 2013). Research on adaptation obstacles is the least developed (Mair & Seelos, 2021). It has thus far focused on exploring social innovation processes associated with Grand Challenges (van Wijk et al., 2019) without a distinct concern for the specific circumstances of businesses.

With a focus on these circumstances, we argue that a consideration of adaptation obstacles emphasizes the need to consider businesses actions within a long historical durée (Braudel, 1958). Only with the benefit of history, it is possible to appreciate the alignment, or lack thereof, of any action within the forward evolutionary momentum of the systems of which they are a part (see Westley et al., 2017). It is only with this long-term perspective then that we can capture that the outcomes of business actions may depend not only on the moral enlightenment of their leaders but also on the reinforcing evolutionary adaptive dynamics defining their actions. Dorado (2021) offers an example on the impact of these evolutionary dynamics in her study of the 200-year history of sheltered workshops in the United States. In it, she describes the dramatic changes in social formulations surrounding the engagement of people with disabilities in the labor force as a Grand Challenge. A recognition for people with disabilities as workers as a complex problem emerged after the Industrial Revolution. It was only then that that concerns for worker productivity brought about the idea of people with disabilities as unemployable and a societal burden, borne by families in the private sphere. Starting in the 20th century, social views on disability changed. This shift followed social trends, including the growing number of soldiers returning from war conflicts with a disability and a newfound faith in science to address all sorts of social ills. This reframed the desirability and potential of individuals with disabilities as workers with the right technical intervention (medical advances, rehabilitation, accommodations). Another dramatic shift followed the social movements of the 1960s, redefining the presence of people with disabilities in the labor force as a human rights issue. Finally, we are now witnessing the emergence of still another redefinition associated with changing social views about the role of unpaid labor, such as child and family care, which are not included in a country’s GDP. This shift on our understanding of the need to integrate people with disabilities into the labor force is likely to have a still to be seen impact. As shown in this example, social changes and trends at a wider societal scale have been curating the same social situation—the employment of people with disability—as different problems over time: a private problem in the nineteen-hundreds, a technical one after the world wars, and a human right since the 1960s. These obstacles are analytically distinct from curation obstacles and only visible in macro cross-country comparisons and longue durée studies (Braudel, 1958).

We can also observe the impact of evolutionary dynamics via the example of TOMS shoes, whose founder’s creative approach to philanthropy involved alleviating poverty by giving away a pair of shoes for every pair they sold. A focus on the governance and sensemaking obstacles that frame direct engagement would have us considering the origin of this creative idea and the potential role of the processes and structures associated with these obstacles. From an adaptation obstacles perspective, the focus shifts toward the unintended consequence of this well-intentioned effort, which ended by flooding markets with free shoes and depressing the demand for locally produced products. TOMS’ buy-one-give-one model of engagement was well aligned, and hence was supported by the global market evolutionary dynamics favoring philanthropic merchandizing (Griskevicius et al., 2010). It connected these dominant global market dynamics with vulnerable local ones in ways that undermined the self-reinforcement and growth of the latter.

These examples convey the distinct nature of the adaptation obstacles. They show the relevance of considering the business engagement in Grand Challenges taking into account how efforts align with the multiple overlaying systems over time. They also underscore the dramatic difference between the original and the long durée dynamics of interest in the scholarship associated with research on the resilience of socio-ecological systems (Allison & Hobbs, 2004; Folke, 2006; Gunderson & Holling, 2001; Holling, 2001; Levin et al., 1998; Walker et al., 2004).