From Culprit to Cure: How Incumbents Use Prognostic Framing to Turn Societal Problem Sources into Solutions

Despite consensus on the urgency of addressing grand challenges, agreement on appropriate solutions remains elusive. Industry incumbents are increasingly influential in shaping solutions to these problems, yet their contentious involvement complicates their prognostic framing of such solutions. As moral legitimacy demands intensify, incumbents are pressured to advance transformative solutions while simultaneously meeting pragmatic legitimacy demands tied to the profitability of conventional businesses. How incumbents deploy prognostic framing under moral–pragmatic legitimacy tensions remains underexplored. We address this question through an inductive, longitudinal case study of a Norwegian oil major’s articulation of climate solutions. Our analysis reveals four prognostic framing mechanisms: bundling core business with cleaner alternatives, moralizing core business, assimilating incremental alternatives with core business, and contrasting radical alternatives with core business. Through these mechanisms, incumbents recast their contested core business as solution to a societal problem, thereby navigating moral–pragmatic legitimacy tensions while constraining the perceived problem–solution fit of radical alternatives. Deriving a grounded model of problem-source-to-solution reversal, our study advances research on framing and grand challenges by illustrating how prognostic framing can be deployed to shape problem–solution correspondence and constrain more transformative solutions to societal problems.