The field of management and organization studies has started to increasingly address grand societal challenges (GSCs), such as climate change, pandemics, or sociel inequalities. Yet, polarization —defined as the growing alignment of societal differences into an “Us vs. Them” dynamic—has received surprisingly little attention, thus far. This blogpost argues that polarization should be recognized as a “Meta-GSC” due to its profound impact on tackling other GSCs. Polarization weakens societies’ ability to address pressing global issues by undermining collective understanding and hindering mobilization for action. Hence, tackling polarization is not just an add-on to the GSC agenda—it is foundational to tackling GSCs adequately.
Polarization: An understudied grand societal challenge (GSC) in management research
In recent years, the field of Management and Organization Studies (MOS) has expanded its research focus. While traditionally centered on corporations and how to improve their performance, MOS scholarship is increasingly focusing on the question of how management scholarship can help tackle current GSCs, such as climate change, pandemics or global inequalities. This laudable development has increased the societal relevance of MOS as a field as well as its embeddedness into the larger social sciences. However, apart from rare exceptions, there has been a surprising lack of attention in management scholarship to the troubling trend of rising polarization in public discourses in democratic societies . The polarization of public discourses is specifically relevant for businesses, as well, because it creates a challenging communicative environment that firms and management need to navigate. Instead of a variety of legitimacy demands, polarized public discourses tend to confront businesses with opposing and irreconcilable stakeholder demands. To navigate such environments, firms in practice seem to have developed various strategies, such as remaining silent, creating empowered spaces for deliberation within the firm, fueling polarization, or shifting back and forth between polarized stakeholder positions.
Polarization needs to be considered as a “Meta” GSC – for three main reasons
We argue that MOS scholarship’s lack of attention toward the issue of polarization is particularly unfortunate given that polarization can be seen as a “Meta-GSC” (or “Foundational GSC”, as Gualtieri, 2024, calls it in his recent dissertation). This because polarization tends to affect societal capacities to tackle various other GSCs. Our classification of polarization as a “Meta-GSC” is based on three main arguments:
1. Polarization directly affects other GSCs
First, we suggest considering polarization as a “Meta-GSC” in that it diminishes societal capacities to understand and collectively make sense of other immediate GSCs (Schwoon et al., 2024). We argue that polarized public discourses hinder societies from developing comprehensive understandings of GSCs, as open-ended collective negotiation of meanings is replaced by citizens’ loyalty to their team, striving for its victory at all costs.
2. Polarization weakens societies’ abilities to tackle other GSCs
Second, we suggest considering polarization as a “Meta-GSC” because it diminishes societal capacities to mobilize collective action to adequately address GSCs. As McCoy et al. (2018) argue, “we expect that the intergroup conflict dynamics characterizing severe polarization lead to the perception of zero-sum interests replacing positive-sum interests, impeding joint collective actions and reinforcing the perception of mutually exclusive identities in a vicious feedback loop” (p. 24).
3. Polarization needs to be addressed in simultaneity to other GSCs
Third, we suggest to consider polarization as a “Meta-GSC” because it needs to be addressed in simultaneity to other GSCs. More specifically, we argue that when, due to polarization, societal capacities for collective understanding and mobilization diminish, other GSCs can intensify and accelerate due to a lack of comprehension and ineffective governance (see also our earlier BOS blogpost that still seems more relevant than ever).
To conclude, how to further engage in MOS research on polarization?
Check out the recent Special Issue in Management Communication Quarterly as well as the current Call for Papers on polarization by the Academy of Management Review. We have added some further useful entry point references below.
Some further readings
- Bail, C. (2022). Breaking the social media prism: How to make our platforms less polarizing. Princeton University Press.
- Bennett, W., & Livingston, S. (2020). The Disinformation Age. Cambridge University Press.
- Ferraro, F., Etzion, D., & Gehman, J. (2015). Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisted. Organization Studies, 36(3), 363–390.
- George, G., Howard-Grenville, J., Joshi, A., & Tihanyi, L. (2016). Understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research. Academy of Management Journal 59(6), 1880–1895.
- Gualtieri, G. (2024). Organizations in a world without truth. University of Lugano.
- Gümüsay, A. A., Marti, E., Trittin-Ulbrich, H., & Wickert, C. (2022). How organizing matters for societal grand challenges. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 79, 1–14.
- Knight, E., & Tsoukas, H. (2019). When fiction trumps truth: What ’Post-Truth’ and ’Alternative Facts’ mean for management studies. Organization Studies, 40(2), 183–197.
- McCoy, J., Rahman, T., & Somer, M. (2018). Polarization and the global crisis of democracy: Common patterns, dynamics, and pernicious consequences for democratic polities. American Behavioral Scientist, 62(1), 16–42.
- Schoeneborn, D., Golob, U., Trittin-Ulbrich, H., Wenzel, M., & O’Connor, A. (2024). CSR Communication and the Polarization of Public Discourses: Introduction to the Special Issue. Management Communication Quarterly, 38(4), 751-774.
- Schwoon, B., Schoeneborn, D., & Scherer, A. G. (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.
About the authors
Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor of Communication, Organization, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School and a Visiting Professor at Organization and Management at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.
Bennet Schwoon is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford (2024/25) and at Copenhagen Business School (2025/26), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).