This article advances a discourse-theoretical reconceptualization of societal grand challenges. In organization studies, grand challenges have become a privileged vocabulary for engaging urgent societal problems such as climate change, global health, and sustainable development. While this expanding literature has generated insights into how such problems may be addressed, less attention has been paid to the processes through which grand challenges are constructed, framed, and legitimized as shared objects of concern. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, I argue that grand challenges derive their organizing force from their operation as empty signifiers, discursively open terms whose indeterminacy enables them to gather heterogeneous meanings and defer closure. As empty signifiers, they evoke a shared social imaginary that organizes collective action in response to what is perceived as absent or lacking in society. In this view, the articulation of a grand challenge is a political project in which hegemonic ordering takes place, selectively privileging certain interpretations and shaping legitimate action against a backdrop of apparent consensus. To theorize how grand challenges acquire meaning, I develop a triadic model of signification that conceptualizes them as empty, floating, and partially fixed signifiers. The article’s primary contribution is to reconceptualize grand challenges as hegemonic projects constituted through articulatory practices. The discussion derives three analytical implications for grand challenges scholarship: (1) approaching problem articulation as a political process, (2) reorienting empirical inquiry toward tracing situated partial fixations, and (3) making explicit the epistemic assumptions underwriting solution-oriented research.
Miranda Kanon (Tue,) studied this question.