Culture as a Toolkit for Robust Action: Tackling Grand Challenges with Cultural Entrepreneurship

A new grand challenges paradigm has emerged in organization theory that has reoriented scholarly attention toward how society can effectively tackle a broad array of complex, uncertain, and evaluative matters of concern including climate change, forcible displacement, poverty, authoritarianism, child malnutrition, commercial sex exploitation, and many more. In this paper, I argue that the literature has tended toward a view of culture as a constraining force that inhibits tackling grand challenges and renders them remarkably intractable. Yet, alternative views of culture also purport that it can serve not merely as a constraining force that prevents action but also as a toolkit or repertoire of resources that actors use to solve problems and thus an enabling force for progress. The substantial literature on cultural entrepreneurship provides several powerful theoretical affordances that are uniquely useful in overcoming known obstacles to addressing grand challenges. I draw on the intellectual resources of this literature to augment the robust action model—one of the premiere theoretical frameworks for tackling grand challenges—by expanding each of the three robust action strategies through an integration with cultural entrepreneurship. This theoretical elaboration advances our understanding of the early moments of initiation of robust action strategies when they are merely uncertain future possibilities, as well as the culturally informed ensuing dynamics by which robust action continues in perpetuity. I conclude by discussing a new generative dialogue at the interstice of these two domains which has substantial synergies for future scholarship.