Strategic Organization · 2024
How are mundane everyday actions connected to grand challenges such as climate change and inequality, and why can small changes have far-reaching consequences?
Sele, K., Mahringer, C. A., Danner-Schröder, A., Grisold, T., & Renzl, B. (2024). We are all pattern makers! How a flat ontology connects organizational routines and grand challenges. Strategic Organization, 22(3), 530–549. 10.1177/14761270231215685
Grand challenges such as climate change, environmental pollution, and social inequality are usually described as large-scale problems. Research therefore often asks either how large policies and initiatives can change local behavior or how successful local initiatives can be scaled up. This creates a persistent divide between what happens at the “micro” level and what happens at the “macro” level.
The paper challenges this division by adopting a flat ontology. Instead of treating grand challenges as phenomena that exist above everyday organizational activity, it conceptualizes them as large patterns of actions that are continuously produced and reproduced through situated action. From this perspective, mundane activities such as commuting, consuming products, hiring people, producing goods, or participating in meetings are part of the patterns through which societal problems persist or change.
We ask: How are large phenomena of societal concern such as social inequality, climate change, or environmental pollution connected to organizational routines?
This is a conceptual article that develops its argument by reanalyzing two detailed empirical studies of interventions into grand challenges. One concerns an initiative addressing social inequality in rural Indian villages. The other examines efforts to eradicate child labor in Pakistan’s soccer-ball industry that unintentionally aggravated poverty and gender inequality. Reading these cases through a flat ontology allows the paper to trace how interventions alter spatial, temporal, and agentic relations between actors and actions, and how those changes strengthen or weaken larger societal patterns.
Adopting a flat ontology, we discuss how phenomena of societal concern are connected to organizational routines. We conceptualize grand challenges as large patterns of actions to overcome the micro-macro divide prevalent in existing research. We introduce spatial, temporal, and agentic relations as three interrelated aspects of scale that are of particular interest and demonstrate how social phenomena may be approached through these relations. Focusing on the situated enactment of routines allows us to identify weakening and strengthening between actors and their actions as important processes that reflect the continuous patterning of grand challenges. We contribute to the literature by highlighting the consequentiality of mundane actions and by questioning the dominant approach to change in research on grand challenges. Our insights offer several practical implications for intervening on grand challenges.
The paper shifts attention from levels and scale-up toward the connections through which everyday actions continuously reproduce or reshape grand challenges.
Climate change, inequality, and other grand challenges can be understood as patterns constituted through interconnected actions rather than as macro-level entities separate from everyday organizing. The “large” is therefore present in the “small” because mundane organizational activities help reproduce wider societal patterns.
Interventions reshape grand challenges by changing spatial, temporal, and agentic relations between actors and actions. New connections can expand actors’ ability to act, while other changes can weaken existing relations or create new constraints. These relational shifts explain how larger patterns evolve.
The consequences of interventions cannot be determined in advance. An initiative may improve one societal problem while worsening another because changes in one set of actions can vibrate through connected routines. Change is therefore provisional and is not inherently synonymous with social progress.
The paper offers an alternative to the familiar micro-macro framing of grand challenges. A flat ontology directs attention to horizontal connections and encourages researchers to trace how societal phenomena are continuously assembled through spatial, temporal, and agentic relations rather than assigning actions to predefined levels.
This perspective also changes how intervention and change are theorized. It foregrounds the consequentiality of mundane action, emphasizes emerging possibilities rather than predetermined outcomes, and allows researchers to examine how consequences travel across apparently separate challenges such as child labor, poverty, and gender inequality.
Addressing grand challenges does not always require beginning with a large-scale intervention. The paper suggests focusing on concrete actions and asking how small changes alter connections with other actors, routines, and problems. These consequences may accumulate and travel further than the initial intervention suggests.
This also requires continuous monitoring. Managers, policymakers, and organizations should trace what happens after an intervention begins, including effects outside the intended target. Rather than assuming that a well-designed initiative will scale toward a predefined outcome, interventions can be adjusted as strengthening and weakening connections become visible over time.
