Grand Challenges, Covid‐19 and the Future of Organizational Scholarship

• Date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Jennifer Howard‐Grenville
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12647
• Published date: 01 January 2021

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Grand Challenges, Covid-19 and the Future of

Organizational Scholarship

Jennifer Howard-Grenville

University of Cambridge

Keywords: grand challenges, organization studies, organization theory, organizational

scholarship, sustainability

Grand challenges are ‘formulations of global problems that can be plausibly addressed

through coordinated and collaborative effort’ (George et al., 2016, p. 1880). By this defi-

nition, the Covid-19 pandemic certainly registers as a grand challenge. It is a type of

problem scientists have been warning about for decades – a pandemic unleashed when

a virus jumps from animals to humans, in part due to habitat loss (IPBES, 2019). The

pandemic’s global reach has no bounds; its economic, social, and health consequences

affect us all. We all hope this problem can be plausibly addressed through coordinated

and collaborative effort. Indeed, the myriad researchers working globally to develop a

vaccine suggest extensive coordinated – though not exclusively collaborative (Spinney,

2020) – effort.

Could there be a more pressing and urgent grand challenge than this? And, what

might its lessons be for how organisational scholars engage in work that seeks to under-

stand and tackle societal grand challenges?

In this essay, I reflect on the grand challenges discourse and how it has and should be

taken up in our field. I revisit our 2016 AMJ essay, (George et al., 2016), where we articu-

lated the importance of societal grand challenges for management research and offered a

framework for how scholars might conduct such research. The Covid-19 pandemic offers

an opportunity to reconsider our original messages.

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 Janua ry 2021

doi:10. 1111/j om s .12 64 7

Address for reprints: Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge,

Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1AG, UK (j.howard-grenville@jbs.cam.ac.uk).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which per-

mits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.