Joining Decision-Making, Moral Thinking, and Collective Action: Grand Challenges as a Phenomenology of Deliberation

Abstract

This conceptual article argues that the mutual relevance ofgrand challengesand organization and management studies is best approached phenomenologically. Rather than constituting objects to be theorized or denoting special empirical contexts, grand challenges structure researchers’ attention and shape their interpretations of the processes and systems of deliberation through which collective action is coordinated. From this perspective, grand challenges require researchers to innovate their understandings of deliberation and to ensure that newly generated knowledge is redirected towards management and policymaking. The article integrates the Carnegie School theory of organization with French pragmatic sociology’s theory of justification, oreconomies of worth, to develop a phenomenological model of situated deliberation that links decision-making with moral reasoning. This model highlights deliberation’s articulated, evaluative, contestable, and trans-institutional character, as well as its grounding in the cognitive capacities and sociality of actors and observers – regardless of the scale, scope, or stratification of the underlying coordination problems. Building on this framework, the article advocates that grand challenge researchers adopt the standpoint ofentrepreneurial observers: actors anchored by socio-economic and scientific commitments who envision the integration of previously disjointed social systems of deliberation to orient collective action.