Grand Societal Challenges Research Articles

Data-driven prediction in dynamical systems: recent developments.

In recent years, we have witnessed a significant shift toward ever-more complex and ever-larger-scale systems in the majority of the grand societal challenges tackled in applied sciences. The need to comprehend and predict the dynamics of complex systems have spurred developments in large-scale simulations and a multitude of methods across several disciplines. The goals of understanding and prediction in complex dynamical systems, however, have been hindered by high dimensionality, complexity and chaotic behaviours. Recent advances in data-driven techniques and machine-learning approaches have revolutionized how we model and analyse complex systems. The integration of these techniques with dynamical systems theory opens up opportunities to tackle previously unattainable challenges in modelling and prediction of dynamical systems. While data-driven prediction methods have made great strides in recent years, it is still necessary to develop new techniques to improve their applicability to a wider range of complex systems in science and engineering. This focus issue shares recent developments in the field of complex dynamical systems with emphasis on data-driven, data-assisted and artificial intelligence-based discovery of dynamical systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Data-driven prediction in dynamical systems'.

Advancing societal grand challenge research at the interface of entrepreneurship and international business: A review and research agenda

Societal grand challenges are increasingly attracting the attention of both entrepreneurship and international business scholars. While entrepreneurship focuses on the opportunities that emerge and need for bold and innovative solutions, international business research emphasizes the global reach of the challenges and role of multinational enterprises. Although both conversations are insightful, we argue that examining one without the other gives an incomplete picture on how to address grand challenges. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of the conversation on grand challenges in the international business and entrepreneurship literature. Upon synthesizing the results, we create an integrated framework and research agenda for viewing grand challenges through an international entrepreneurial lens.

Income inequality, social cohesion, and crime against businesses: Evidence from a global sample of firms.

Rising inequality is one of the grand societal challenges of our time. Yet, its effects on firms – including multinational enterprises (MNEs) – and their operations have not been widely examined by IB scholars. In this study, we posit that income inequality within a country is positively associated with the incidence and severity of crime experienced by businesses. Further, we propose that this relationship will be negatively moderated by social cohesion (in the form of greater societal trust and lower ethno-linguistic fractionalization) in these countries, such that social cohesion helps to offset the negative impacts of inequality on crime against businesses. We test these hypotheses using a comprehensive data set of 114,000 firms from 122 countries and find consistent support for our theses. Our findings, which are robust to different alternative variables, model specifications, instrumentation, and estimation techniques, unpack the intricate ways through which inequality affects businesses worldwide and the associated challenges to MNEs. They also offer important managerial and policy insights regarding the consequences of inequality and potential mitigation mechanisms.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41267-022-00535-5.

How science creates impact: A comment

AbstractAddressing the grand societal challenges is a task for science. To get this done, innovation needs to be the focus of all research institutions together with industry, as discussed in the following comment by Dr. Arik Willner.

Building on Its Past: The Future of Business and Society Scholarship

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems.

Advancing the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Initiatives of selected publicly listed companies in the Philippines

Advancing the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Initiatives of selected publicly listed companies in the Philippines

Illuminating the Dark Side of Values: A Framework for Institutional Research

Values are pivotal to institutions. Although prior research has mostly highlighted their positive effects, values also have a “dark” side, which we illuminate by looking at cases in which values perpetuate societal grand challenges, such as corruption or climate change. Societal deliberation plays an important role in efforts to change such values. In this essay, we explore how institutional scholars can produce insights that support societal deliberation on values that perpetuate grand challenges. We develop a framework on how institutional scholars can support such deliberation by analyzing (1) which alternative values are attainable and (2) how dominant values create trade-offs. By using this framework, institutional researchers can take a middle position between activist research on values, which jeopardizes the independence of research, and detached research on values, which loses the connection to practical concerns.

Policy mix or policy mess? Impacts of policies on the productive efficiency of the Chinese wind power industry

Grand societal challenges call for a sustainability transition away from a fossil-based society toward a low-carbon society. Wind power is highly valued in China, owing to its strong environmental benefits and abundant reserves. Although accelerating the development of wind power industry is near the top of the agenda of the Chinese government, the impact of policies and their mixes on the productive efficiency of the wind power industry is still unclear. In this study, the productive efficiency of the Chinese wind power industry is systematically evaluated using microdata of 119 listed enterprises from 2006 to 2019. The effects of wind power policies and their mixes on the productive efficiency are then elucidated. The empirical results imply that the overall productive efficiency of the Chinese wind power industry is relatively high but that it fluctuated greatly between 2006 and 2019. Moreover, the effects of Chinese wind power policies and their mixes on productive efficiency are ambiguous. Both economic policy (EP) and regulatory policy (RP) hinder productive efficiency; only soft policy (SP) has a significant positive effect. Furthermore, the policy mixes of EP and RP, EP and SP, and RP and SP have no significant impact, but the policy mix of EP, RP, and SP significantly inhibits the productive efficiency of the Chinese wind power industry, indicating conflictive effects and confusion in the policy mix.

The ties that bind global governance: Using media-reported events to disentangle the global interorganizational network in a global pandemic

This article disentangles the global interorganizational network by analyzing the ties of international actors – comprising multinational companies, intergovernmental organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations. The onset of COVID-19 is a rare opportunity to explore how this network has evolved in an exogenous event. Using a unique GDELT big dataset of events reported by the world’s media, we extract and analyze the interorganizational interactions of international actors before and after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the COVID-19 outbreak was a public health emergency of international concern. Adopting an exploratory and descriptive approach at multiple levels of analysis, we draw on the theory of networks to uncover the fragmented, polycentric, and complex characteristics of the global interorganizational network. Our study highlights the use of media-reported events and the Goldstein scale as means to unpack the difficult-to-capture relational dynamics of international actors, which can help in theory development of the global interorganizational network that is crucial for collective action to address societal grand challenges.

To thrive or not to thrive: Pathways for sustaining thriving at work

Thriving, the psychological experience of both vitality (or energy) and learning, is often elusive. Rather than growing, developing, and feeling energized, workers report stagnation and depletion. While much of the research on thriving at work has focused on what managers can do to promote thriving amongst workers, we highlight the means by which people are empowered to take control of their well-being. Workers can sustain their own thriving through three pathways: (1) by engaging in self-care, (2) creating and maintaining high quality relationships, and (3) building community within and outside the organization. We show that these three pathways are particularly important given the changing nature of more temporary and flexible work arrangements, increases in remote work, and the larger need for community embeddedness to address the many grand societal challenges that confront us.

Rethinking Corporate Power to Tackle Grand Societal Challenges: Lessons from Political Philosophy

Rethinking Corporate Power to Tackle Grand Societal Challenges: Lessons from Political Philosophy

Grand Societal Challenges and Responsible Innovation

Grand Societal Challenges and Responsible Innovation

Environmental social governance information and disclosure from a company perspective: a structured literature review

The availability of non-financial information including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data has skyrocketed in the last two decades. The information on ESG scores is valuable for understanding whether companies are explicitly considering ESG targets, developing plans to incorporate these targets into their businesses, and assessing to what extent the companies successfully reach these targets. In fact, the higher the ESG score, the better the company's performance should be with respect to ESG targets. The explicit incorporation of ESG targets could lead towards transitioning to sustainable and socially responsible businesses capable of dealing with grand societal challenges. While ESG has been mostly explored from an investor's point of view, this structured review takes a company's perspective. By analysing the citation network using CitNetExplorer, two important managerial trends are identified: 1) the characteristics of CEOs and their boards affect ESG disclosure and performance; 2) ESG disclosure influences access to debt financing, cost of capital, and financial performance.

Transforming universities to address grand societal challenges: a case study of organisational and institutional change at Lund University

Transforming universities to address grand societal challenges: a case study of organisational and institutional change at Lund University

Influential Article Review - Formulating a Healthy Ageing at Workplace Scale: A Unique Approach to Evaluating Professional Growth

This paper examines leadership and development. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: The aging of the world’s population has become a grand societal challenge, which requires an urgent response from researchers, professionals, and the wider society. One way to respond to this challenge is by supporting individuals in sustaining longer and healthier working lives, that is, age successfully. Although the advantages of promoting and enabling successful aging at work have been widely acknowledged, no single instrument for measuring this construct has been published so far. We develop and test in three consecutive samples a two-dimensional successful aging at work scale. This novel instrument is rooted conceptually in the most recent theoretical developments and is applicable to a variety of work settings and groups of workers. It can be used by both employees and employers for the purposes of individual and organizational development. We also propose directions for future research. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.

Grand Societal Challenges and Responsible Innovation

AbstractGrand societal challenges (GSCs) represent complex, multi‐level, multi‐dimensional problems that require concerted efforts by various actors – public, private, and non‐profit – to be successfully addressed. Businesses – alone or in conjunction with governmental and non‐profit organizations – are relevant actors in this regard, as they represent a source of innovation. Responsible innovation (RI) is a framework that allows for the governance and evaluation of innovations with regard to their potential harmful consequences and positive contributions to societal challenges. Moreover, it stipulates that this evaluation process should be facilitated by appropriate governance structures at various levels. The aim of this article is to expand theorizing on GSCs and RI and to encourage research that explores their links. We outline pertinent characteristics of GSCs that make current conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility and social innovation limited in addressing GSCs. We explicate the reflexive and participative capacities of RI governance as a complementary and promising way forward. Finally, we introduce the contributions to this Special Issue as illustrations of relevant theoretical and empirical groundwork around GSCs and RI, and outline the agenda for future research.

Large spatial variation and stagnation of cropland gross primary production increases the challenges of sustainable grain production and food security in China

Sustainable crop grain production and food security is a grand societal challenge. Substantial investments in China's agriculture have been made in the past decades, but our knowledge on cropland gross primary production in China remains limited. Here we analyzed gross primary production (GPP), solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), terrestrial water storage, crop grain production, and agricultural investment and policy during 2000–2018. We found that based on croplands in 2000, approximately 52 × 106 ha (~37%) had continuous increasing trends in GPP during 2000–2018, which were mainly located in northern China. GPP for 63% of croplands was stagnant, declined, or had no significant change. At the national scale, annual cropland GPP increased during 2000–2008 but became stagnant in 2009–2018, which was inconsistent with the interannual trend in the crop grain production data for 2009–2018. The spatial mismatch between crop production and water availability became worse. The major grain exporting provinces, mostly located in water-stressed regions, experienced increased water resource constraints, which posed a challenge for sustainable grain production. The stagnant cropland GPP and increasing water resource constraints highlight the urgent need for sustainable management for crop production and food security in China.

Towards a European framework for community engagement in higher education – a case study analysis of European universities

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the development and piloting of a novel European framework for community engagement (CE) in higher education, which has been purposefully designed to progress the CE agenda in a European context.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed framework was co-created through the European Union (EU)-funded project towards a European framework for community engagement in higher education (TEFCE). The TEFCE Toolbox is an institutional self-reflection framework that centres on seven thematic dimensions of CE. This paper follows the development of the TEFCE Toolbox through empirical case study analysis of four European universities and their local communities.FindingsThe findings in this paper indicate that the TEFCE Toolbox facilitates context-specific applications in different types of universities and socioeconomic environments. Incorporating insights from engagement practitioners, students and community representatives the TEFCE Toolbox was successfully applied in universities with diverse profiles and missions. The process facilitated the recognition of CE achievements and the identification of potential areas for improvement.Originality/valueDespite a range of international initiatives, there remains an absence of initiatives within the European higher education area that focus on developing tools to comprehensively support CE. The TEFCE Toolbox and case-study analysis presented in this paper address this gap in knowledge. The broader societal contribution and social responsibility of higher education have become increasingly prominent on the European agenda. The TEFCE Toolbox represents an innovative, robust and holistic European framework with the potential to support universities in reflecting upon their pursuit of addressing grand societal challenges, whilst promoting CE.

Small wins for grand challenges. A bottom-up governance approach to regional innovation policy

ABSTRACT Grand societal challenges as a policy target have received increasing attention in regional innovation policy. To date, concrete governance strategies to address such challenges with local solutions are underexplored. We propose a small wins approach as a new governance strategy to deal with wicked societal problems. A small wins strategy focuses on accelerating bottom-up initiatives guided by a shared mission. The aim is to activate propelling mechanisms to support and couple self-organizing change processes. We studied 17 regional initiatives for plastic pollution removal in the Netherlands, which show that i. institutional barriers are the hardest for small wins to overcome and achieve wider impact; ii. bottom-up propelling mechanisms reinforce each other, but are generally too weak to transform existing practices due to limited policy support; and iii. systemic propelling mechanisms are largely absent to achieve robust change processes across scales. We see a key task for regional policy to activate systemic mechanisms that help local solutions upscale. This requires policy to learn about the plurality of change processes ‘on the ground’, and to use multi-level governance arrangements to create coherent policies to scale up bottom-up solutions.

Using Theory of Change to evaluate the role of stakeholder engagement towards socially desirable outcomes in ICT research projects

Information Communication Technologies (ICT) research projects are important in generating breakthrough technologies that translate into solutions for numerous societal grand challenges through research and innovation (R&I). However, to ensure that such solutions are socially desirable, there is a concerted drive for the engagement of different stakeholders, including industry, academia, public and government. In the face of the growing recognition of stakeholder engagement in ICT research projects, particularly as part of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), there is a limited discourse on how its consequence could be evaluated. This paper suggests and uses a Theory of Change approach to evaluate the value of stakeholder engagement on the attainment of socially desirable and responsible outcomes in projects, particularly ICT research projects. Using a multi-case study approach, the paper appraises the value of stakeholder engagement in ICT research projects by elucidating the linkages between stakeholder activities and socially desirable outcomes. The findings from the paper could apply to other types of projects apart from ICT research projects in understanding some of the roles stakeholders play in ensuring responsible innovation as an outcome of the projects.