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Enacting a grand challenge for business and society: Theorizing issue maturation in the media-based public discourse on COVID-19 in three national contexts

Schwoon, Bennet; Schoeneborn, Dennis; Scherer, Andreas Georg (2024). Enacting a grand challenge for business and society: Theorizing issue maturation in the media-based public discourse on COVID-19 in three national contexts. Business & Society, 63(4):869-919.

Abstract

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.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:03 Faculty of Economics > Department of Business Administration
Dewey Decimal Classification:330 Economics
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous)
Social Sciences & Humanities > Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Uncontrolled Keywords:COVID-19, discourse quality, framing dynamics, grand societal challenges, social problem work
Scope:Discipline-based scholarship (basic research)
Language:English
Date:1 April 2024
Deposited On:09 Mar 2023 08:41
Last Modified:29 Dec 2024 02:36
Publisher:Sage Publications
ISSN:0007-6503
OA Status:Hybrid
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503221110486
Other Identification Number:merlin-id:23477
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  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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