TY - JOUR

T1 - Enacting a Grand Challenge for Business and Society

T2 - Theorizing Issue Maturation in the Media-Based Public Discourse on COVID-19 in Three National Contexts

AU - Schwoon, Bennet

AU - Schoeneborn, Dennis

AU - Scherer, Andreas Georg

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.

PY - 2024/4

Y1 - 2024/4

N2 - While today it is universally acknowledged that COVID-19 has generated immense challenges for businesses and societies worldwide, public perceptions varied significantly at the time of the pandemic’s initial appearance, even among democratic societies with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal challenges in management and organization studies, however, tends to neglect the initial social construction of issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, and widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring the initial communicative enactment of COVID-19 in the media-based public discourse in Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. By applying a social problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms that explain the maturation of COVID-19 into a grand challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent on differences in discourse quality. We add to research on grand challenges, issue maturation, and framing dynamics by theorizing how issues become constructed and acknowledged as grand challenges in the first place.

AB - While today it is universally acknowledged that COVID-19 has generated immense challenges for businesses and societies worldwide, public perceptions varied significantly at the time of the pandemic’s initial appearance, even among democratic societies with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal challenges in management and organization studies, however, tends to neglect the initial social construction of issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, and widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring the initial communicative enactment of COVID-19 in the media-based public discourse in Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. By applying a social problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms that explain the maturation of COVID-19 into a grand challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent on differences in discourse quality. We add to research on grand challenges, issue maturation, and framing dynamics by theorizing how issues become constructed and acknowledged as grand challenges in the first place.

KW - COVID-19

KW - discourse quality

KW - framing dynamics

KW - grand societal challenges

KW - social problem work

KW - Management studies

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135166310&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/c4fb7e74-22dd-3a71-b6b0-fe2e56a85987/

U2 - 10.1177/00076503221110486

DO - 10.1177/00076503221110486

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 38529203

AN - SCOPUS:85135166310

VL - 63

SP - 869

EP - 919

JO - Business and Society

JF - Business and Society

SN - 0007-6503

IS - 4

ER -