Journal of Management Inquiry · 2025
How do everyday actions sustain or transform grand challenges such as climate change, social inequality, extreme events, and digitalization?
Danner-Schröder, A., Mahringer, C., Sele, K., Jarzabkowski, P., Rouleau, L., Feldman, M., Pentland, B., Huysman, M., Sergeeva, A. V., Gherardi, S., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Gehman, J. (2025). Tackling grand challenges: Insights and contributions from practice theories. Journal of Management Inquiry, 34(2), 143–166. 10.1177/10564926241292262
Grand challenges such as climate change, poverty, social inequality, pollution, public-health crises, and technological disruption are usually described at a very large scale. Yet these phenomena are also produced and reproduced through ordinary actions: how people commute, consume, collaborate, hire, introduce themselves, use technologies, organize work, and respond to crises. This creates a central challenge for management and organization research: how can we connect mundane everyday activity to problems that unfold across organizations, societies, and ecosystems?
The article addresses this problem through practice theories. Practice approaches direct attention to situated doings and sayings, bodily and mental activities, technologies, knowledge, and the relations through which social life is continually produced. This allows researchers to zoom in on concrete organizational action while also tracing how actions become connected across time and space to larger phenomena such as sustainability, inequality, extreme events, digital transformation, and the future of work.
The curated debate asks: What can practice-theoretical approaches contribute to studying, understanding, and tackling grand challenges?
The article brings together contributions from several major practice-oriented research traditions, including strategy-as-practice, extreme-context research, routine dynamics, technology-as-practice, and posthumanist practice theory. The contributions are synthesized around three principles: actions are consequential, nondualistic, and relational. Reflections by Kathleen Sutcliffe and Joel Gehman extend the debate toward research impact, small wins, robust action, and the responsibilities of scholars as both researchers and citizens.
This curated debate examines how practice theories can help scholars study, understand, and tackle grand challenges. Its central premise is that large societal and environmental problems are not detached from everyday organizational life but are continually enacted through mundane situated actions. The contributions show how a practice perspective draws attention to the consequences of everyday action, challenges simple dualisms between micro and macro or stability and change, and traces relations among people, practices, technologies, events, and environments across time and space. Together, these perspectives connect grand challenges to strategy, routines, extreme contexts, technology, embodiment, and posthumanism, and culminate in a call for researchers to consider their own role in sustaining and changing the phenomena they study.
Practice theories make large societal problems more tangible by showing how they are produced, sustained, and potentially transformed through everyday activity.
Grand challenges are not only the result of distant systems or exceptional decisions. Mundane practices can reproduce social inequality, environmental damage, technological disruption, and other large-scale patterns while their effects remain hidden in plain sight. Studying concrete action therefore helps reveal where harmful dynamics are actually produced and where alternatives may emerge.
Practice theories resist simple oppositions such as micro versus macro, human versus technology, stability versus change, or researcher versus citizen. Local actions can simultaneously reproduce existing problems and create possibilities for change. This nondualistic perspective is especially useful for understanding complex problems whose causes and consequences cannot be separated cleanly.
Actions gain significance through their connections to other people, routines, technologies, events, and practices across time and space. A relational perspective therefore explains how seemingly small organizational activities can accumulate into large patterns, and how changing connections among practices can contribute to broader societal and organizational transformation.
The curated debate connects research on grand challenges with practice theory, strategy-as-practice, routine dynamics, extreme contexts, technology-as-practice, posthumanism, sustainability, responsible innovation, and business and society. It shifts attention from treating climate change, inequality, digitalization, or extreme events only as macro-level phenomena toward studying how they are enacted through concrete organizational practices.
It also provides a methodological agenda: scholars can zoom in on situated action and zoom out by following relations across people, practices, technologies, places, and time. This opens ways to investigate how local actions accumulate, how impacts materialize at different speeds and scales, and how researchers themselves participate in the phenomena they study.
Organizations cannot address grand challenges only through high-level sustainability strategies, policies, or targets. Those ambitions ultimately depend on the practices through which people hire, coordinate, use technology, allocate resources, consume materials, make decisions, and interact with others. Examining those everyday practices can reveal why well-intentioned initiatives fail to alter the patterns that sustain a problem.
The debate also cautions against expecting one complete solution to complex societal problems. Approaches such as small wins, experimentation, participation, and maintaining multiple perspectives can enable progress under uncertainty. For managers and policymakers, the practical task is therefore to identify which everyday patterns reproduce unwanted outcomes, create opportunities for reflection, and support alternative practices that can connect into wider change.
