Untaming Grand Challenges Research: Against a De-Politicization of Grand Challenges

Abstract

Research on Grand Challenges often neglects capitalism as a major source of many social and ecological problems, and/or as a barrier to their solution. To find sustainable solutions through our research, we need to make explicit and problematize this systems-level cause of Grand Challenges instead of only looking for solutions at the organizational level.

Research on Grand Challenges (GCs) is en vogue. As summarized succinctly in another commentary on this topic (Carton et al., 2023), more and more researchers attend to the role of organizations in addressing issues such as climate change or economic inequality. Recognizing the relevance of business in these contexts is laudable. However, as outlined by Carton and colleagues (2023), ceremonially invoking GCs harbors the risk of “rainbow washing” limitedly relevant research, selling old wine in new bottles, and silencing existing important contributions.

While these points are certainly relevant, an additional—and potentially more severe—problem is the tendency of the GCs perspective to de-politicize social and environmental problems by focusing exclusively on the organizational level, thus deflecting attention from the root cause (or barrier to the solution) of many social and environmental problems: capitalism.

In the following, I show how the current focus of GCs research misses the role that capitalism plays in many GCs. I argue that this myopic focus harbors the risk of a de-politicization of GCs and potentially results in insufficient measures to overcome GCs. To address this problem, I suggest that GCs research should systematically consider the role of capitalism.

Current Grand Challenges Research: Alleviating Symptoms Instead of Curing the Disease

Current GCs research aims to mobilize businesses and organizations more generally to address the urgent problems of our times. However, many of these problems have their root cause not on the organizational level, but on the systemic level of capitalism. Let’s take the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an illustration. For instance, SDG 13 focuses on combating climate change. As convincingly shown by Smith (2016), climate change is an immediate implication of the continuous expansion of capitalism. Capitalism, with its inherent focus on continued accumulation of capital in the context of market competition, incentivizes businesses to externalize costs and exploit common pool resources and public goods to increase their profits. These dynamics lead to GCs such as climate change, exploitative working conditions (covered by SDG 8), and the depletion of oceans (covered by SDG 14). Due to competition, the internalization of externalities or the responsible stewardship of resources by a single firm will, in most cases, result in reduced competitiveness and bankruptcy. Consequently single organizations are unable to overcome the dynamics of capitalism individually.

Against this backdrop, the current organization-level focus of management research on GCs seems theoretically implausible, and empirical evidence of organizations sustainably addressing GCs is scant. As soon as we acknowledge that capitalism is either one of the direct causes of many GCs, or a major barrier to many of the solutions to these challenges, it becomes clear that any attempt to address GCs without considering capitalism is like attempting to cure symptoms while neglecting the actual disease. This is not to suggest that current work on GCs is useless. However, it misses a crucial component—capitalism—which is why I term this type of research “tame” GCs research.

Tame GCs research is problematic. By asking how organizations can help solve GCs, while systematically neglecting political-economic dynamics and their implications for organizations, researchers de-prioritize questions related to capitalism as the political-economic system that causes or prevents solving many of the issues usually identified as GCs. By neglecting this link between capitalism and GCs, tame GCs research depoliticizes GCs, contributes to the naturalization and maintenance of the status quo, and thus undermines its original intention to tackle societal challenges through research and collaboration.

Untaming Grand Challenges Research: Acknowledging the Relevance of Capitalism for Understanding and Tackling Grand Challenges

If capitalism lies at the root of many GCs, tame GCs research is unlikely to help tackle social and environmental problems. If GCs research aims to meet its promise, it is necessary to “untame” it. What does untamed research on GCs look like? Untamed GCs research takes a multi-level perspective to grasp the complex interdependencies between the organizational level and the systems level. It scrutinizes taken-for-granted certainties. And, it develops bold holistic solutions.

How can management scholars untame GCs research? First, researchers should zoom out from the organizational level to the macro-level of the political economy to consider the relevance of capitalism for understanding and tackling GCs. Doing so, and thus following the call of Carton and colleagues (2023) to uncover the ontological assumptions shared by certain GCs, can shed light on the problematic political-economic coordinates that underlie many GCs and also large parts of GCs research. Only on the basis of such a comprehensive and re-politicized understanding will meaningful research on these challenges be possible. Take the example of exploitative working conditions: Tame GCs research takes capitalism as a taken-for-granted backdrop against which it explores organizations’ capacity to improve working conditions in global production chains. In contrast, untamed GC research would—on the basis of a broad understanding of the interdependencies between the economic, political, and organizational level—broaden its focus by not only considering structures and processes on the organizational level but also the potential impact of political-economic factors on organizations and GCs.

Second, such inquiry should call things as they are and de-taboo inconvenient insights. While organizational researchers tentatively acknowledge that there is a “noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs” (Feix & Philippe, 2020, p. 129) and that continued economic growth (be it green, sustainable, or something else) is impossible within ecological and social boundaries (Banerjee et al., 2021), most GCs research currently does not connect to these conversations. Without establishing such connections GCs research ends up in impasses at best, or reinforces its problematic political-economic foundations at worst. For GCs research on exploitative working conditions this implies that failing to acknowledge that that exploitation of workers is a necessary condition for profits in many industries—and thus the result of the inherent logics of capitalism—will impede a comprehensive understanding of exploitative working conditions and the development of sustainable solutions to this GC.

Third, on the basis of the acknowledgment that capitalism affects many GCs and/or the attempts to solve them, researchers can zoom in on specific cases, ideally by simultaneously considering the influence of capitalist dynamics and the contextual factors that make a problem setting unique (D’Cruz et al., 2022), because capitalism is far from monolithic and materializes in different forms across different regions, and therefore affects different GCs in different ways. On this basis, researchers can explore the specific mechanisms through which capitalism is connected to GCs—oftentimes through organizations—and develop solutions that potentially go beyond the boundaries of organizations and involve modifications of the current political-economic system. In the case of exploitative working conditions, GCs research might explore how profit seeking results in exploitative structures, processes, and decisions in specific organizations under specific socio-cultural conditions. On this basis, researchers can contribute to developing alternative forms of organizing businesses and the economy to overcome the problematics effects of capitalism, and thus help establish decent work.

Conclusion

Management scholars’ increasing attention to GCs has the potential to be an important first step toward meaningful and impactful research. However, the focus of most GCs research on the organizational level overlooks that many GCs are shaped by political-economic dynamics of capitalism, and hence are of an essentially political nature. By neglecting the political nature of GCs, research on these challenges remains tame, and therefore potentially ineffective, or even counter-productive to addressing GCs. For this reason, a crucial second step needs to be the untaming of GCs research through acknowledging and exploring the deep connections between most GCs, (capitalist) organizations, and capitalism itself.

Exploring GCs in the context of capitalism, and thus re-politicizing them, will enable us to shed light on the role of organizations in the interplay between GCs and capitalism, to significantly contribute to addressing existential social and ecological challenges, and to thereby help create more equitable and sustainable organizations in a more equitable and sustainable society.