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

This conceptual article argues that the mutual relevance of grand challenges and organization and management studies is best approached phenomenologically. Rather than constituting objects to be observed and theorized, grand challenges structure researchers’ attention and contribute to their interpretations of situated deliberative processes and systems through which collective action is coordinated. From this perspective, grand challenges demand that organization and management researchers innovate in their understanding of such processes and systems and 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, or economies of worth, to develop a phenomenological model of deliberation. This model highlights deliberation’s articulated, evaluative, contestable, and trans-institutional character, and its grounding in the cognitive capacities and social embedding of actors and observers—regardless of the scale, scope, or stratification of underlying coordination problems. Building on this framework, the article advocates that grand-challenge researchers adopt the standpoint of entrepreneurial observers: actors who envision new deliberative processes capable of integrating disjointed systems in situ, thereby extending coordination and redirecting collective action in view of long-range socioeconomic and scientific commitments.