Organizations are increasingly interested in contributing to so-called grand challenges such as climate change and poverty alleviation. In this chapter, excerpted from "Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited" (Ferraro et al., 2015), we summarize a novel approach to...

Shifting to dramatically more sustainable systems is an unconventional or wicked problem, encompassing multiple actors, disciplines, and values. Yet to date, sustainability initiatives have been tackled primarily by means of conventional managerial approaches. We contend that these approaches...

Against the background of anthropogenic change, rapidly rising global temperatures and extremes of crisis across multiple spheres, the real possibility of synchronous inter-systemic failure at a level involving multiple cascading system failures (Homer-Dixon et.al. 2015) demands urgent...

Although management scholars have embraced grand challenges research, in many cases, grand challenges have been treated as merely a context for exploring extant theoretical perspectives. By comparison, our approach—robust action—provides a novel theoretical framework for tackling grand...

In this paper, we theorize a novel approach to addressing the world‘s grand challenges based on the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism and the sociological concept of robust action. Grounded in prior empirical organizational research, we identify three robust strategies that...