FyA is a satellite organization of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order commonly known as the Jesuits. Founded by a Jesuit priest in the outskirts of Caracas, Venezuela, FyA's core purpose has always been to alleviate poverty through education. Embracing the spirit of popular education (Freire, 1968/1996), FyA is premised on the belief that education empowers the poor and excluded. FyA expanded in the 1960s and 1970s into other Latin American countries. In 1987, the national autonomous nodes of FyA formed the International Federation of Fe y Alegria to bundle and coordinate their efforts. FyA currently operates more than 2,500 schools and technical centers in 21 countries. Though most of their operations are in Latin America (16 countries), FyA has recently expanded into Africa (3 countries) and Europe (2 countries). In total, FyA provides education for circa 1.5 million individuals (Federacion Internacional Fe y Alegria, 2016).

#### *Data Collection*

We assembled a longitudinal data set that spans from 1955 to 2017. We used historical methods, conducted semi-structured interviews, and analyzed the notes from ethnographic observations made during our visits to FyA locations.

*Archival data:* We gathered 224 documents produced by FyA from 1960 to 2017. We were granted access to the FyA's official archives in Bogota, Colombia,

### *Table 1.* Characterizing Poverty Using Rittel and Webber's Dimensions of Wicked Problems.

which contain many original manuscripts recording FyA's history. These include letters by the founder, in which he explains his journey of tackling poverty across 10 Latin American countries, documents from each FyA national office, educational materials, strategic and operative plans, and promotional materials. Using archival documents produced at different points in time provided valuable insight into the evolving narrative constructions of the poverty problem.

*Interviews:* We conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with the following individuals: the former and current secretaries of the International Federation FyA, with respective tenures of 5 and 15 years; the three longest-serving country managers of FyA; the FyA's coordinator; and four project managers with over 10 years' experience each. Interviews lasted from 45 minutes to 2 hours and focused on interpreting the challenge of poverty alleviation and FyA responses.

*Ethnographic observations:* Observational data were derived from visits to seven countries where FyA has been operating: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Spain. We conducted observations at 22 schools in remote rural areas, slums, high-security prisons, and areas controlled by drug cartels and guerrillas. Visiting these places provided first-hand experience of the different challenges encountered and the types of organizational responses deployed to deal with the wicked problem of poverty in concrete local action contexts.

#### *Data Analysis*

Our data were subjected to narrative analysis (Riessman, 1993), which is particularly useful for examining efforts to create plausible accounts of a wicked problem, such as telling a "causal story" about what it is and how it can be made amenable to intervention (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Stone, 1989). Narratives contribute to the construction of social problems and their solutions because the narrative form inherently establishes causal claims regarding the objects and actions they represent (Wadhwani, 2018). By analyzing the case of FyA through a narrative perspective, we not only explored what happened and when but also revealed how events and experiences may relate to one another (Rhodes & Brown, 2005).

Our narrative analysis involved four stages. First, to develop an understanding of FyA's organizational development, we chronologically ordered key historical events, such as the foundation of FyA, the creation of a network of radio stations, and the expansion of FyA's portfolio of activities. Second, we analyzed the narratives that evolved around each of these major events and explored their impact on the story's plot (Riessman, 1993). This helped us to identify and locate shifts in the meaning of the wicked problem over time. For instance, the period from 1950 to 1970 favored an economic conception of poverty, whereas the years from 2000 to 2016 emphasized discrimination and exclusion as the major forms of poverty. We refer to the periods as the "economic poverty phase," "invisible poor phase," and "new forms of poverty phase." Third, we focused on FyA's responses to the changing manifestations of poverty over time, and the narrative explanations of the need for each specific response. Table 2 presents six key organizational responses deployed across the three phases; three of these responses will be explored in the Findings section. Fourth, to refine our understanding of how FyA responded to the changing manifestations of the wicked problem, we drew on classic pragmatist ideas such as James's (1904) notion of experience as "a process of change." We traced how experience shaped the narrative constructions of the problem and affected FyA responses. Table 2 summarizes our findings.

## **FINDINGS**

#### *The Process of Organizing for Tackling the Dynamic Complexity of Wicked Problems*

In our analysis of FyA and its ways of organizing for managing the dynamic complexity of poverty, we uncovered that the process followed the following steps. Initially, actors define a problem based on their confrontation and understanding of it. When they agree on a preferred definition of the problem, a form of organizing is deployed. However, when external conditions put pressure on the preferred definition, a new definition emerges. This new definition causes the organization to find a new way of organizing, thus creating an ongoing cycle.

*Phase 1: Poverty as the Lack of Education*

#### *Location:* Venezuela.

*Defining poverty as the lack of education:* The first step when dealing with dynamic complexity is characterized by constructing a definition based on actors' confrontation and understanding of the problem. In our case, this step emerged in December 1954 when the Jesuit priest José María Velaz and some of his students started to frequently visit an urban slum in Caracas called "Gato Negro" (Black Cat) (Saez, 1999). According to Velaz, the Gato Negro was a forgotten place where "there was nothing…garbage piled up everywhere and black water running down the hill guided only by the law of gravity. The air was filled with dirt and stench" (Perez Esclarin, 2010, p. 100).

During his visits, Velaz offered Mass and First Communion to the neighborhood children. However, throughout his interactions with the inhabitants, he realized that religious exercises could not change anything. In the words of Velaz:

It was a horrible picture of degradation and social debasement. What at first sight caught my eyes was only the purulent skin of a deep disease whose most tragic symptoms were generalised unemployment, undernourishment, family disintegration, abandoned childhood, un-healthiness and ignorance before all the demands of life. (Perez Esclarin, 2010, p. 100)

Gato Negro residents frequently asked Velaz and the university students why they visited such an abandoned neighborhood, devoid of services (Perez Esclarin, 2010). The closeness that Velaz showed through his frequent visits generated dialogues in which people aired some of their problems. Recurrent complaints concerned the lack of water and electricity. However, as Velaz engaged with the villagers, a new way of perceiving poverty unfolded: "after afternoon of contemplating the landscape of horrifying poverty, we think about its causes…

*Table 2.* Data Analysis.

Everywhere we found the correlation of misery and ignorance" (Perez Esclarin, 2010, p. 102). Velaz concluded that the most serious problem for Gato Negro inhabitants was a lack of agency and freedom of spirit, which could not be addressed through material things but required a change in people's mindset and, hence, education (Perez Esclarin, 2010). He then "discarded aids in form of food or sanitary type… and decided to create a school" (Saez, 1999, p. 32).

*Organizing to tackle poverty as the lack of education:* Viewing education as a much more powerful tool for social change than handouts or economic aid, Velaz decided that the best way to tackle poverty was through constructing autonomous primary and secondary schools. However, how to construct those schools posed a massive challenge. Velaz's problem was disclosed after one of his last catechisms exposing the need for impact by turning these catechisms into a real school (Perez Esclarin, 2010). A local bricklayer called Abraham Reyes, together with his wife Patricia, approached Velaz and told him: "look father, I have a ranch here that I built with my wife. It is yours if you want to see it" (Perez Esclarin, 1992, p. 5). For Velaz, that simple place, with the rustic concrete floor that Abraham Reyes had built with his own hands, burying in it the savings of seven years, represented an example of tenacity and generosity (Vilda, 1987).

The next step was to look for teachers. Diana and Carmen, who had just finished high school, offered their services as unpaid teachers (Saez, 1999). On March 5, 1955, a small poster was displayed outside Abraham's house: "school: we admit boys" (Saez, 1999, p. 32). On that day, around 100 young boys attended school for the first time in their lives, even though they all had to sit on the rustic concrete floor (Vilda, 1987). Days later, Abraham donated half of his house for a girls school (Saez, 1999). Responding to the new call, 75 girls joined. These boys and girls were the first students of FyA. Velaz observed the joy of giving and receiving education and the faith of believing that we all have more good than bad in our hearts (Lazcano, 2013).

This organic and community-driven way in which the first FyA school was founded was repeated numerous times. Throughout Latin America, FyA expanded through the will, work, and donations of the same poor that the schools were supposed to serve. In his letters, Velaz remembered that most of the schools opened in Venezuela

started in hired ranches, in sheds that grew on precipices and ravines, next to garbage dumps or rivers of black water, in inhospitable mountains, namely in those places that nobody cares about. (Perez Esclarin, 1992 p. 10)

For the inhabitants of these places, forgotten by the government, Velaz made them see that they were worth it, that they were not garbage, that they were not a thing thrown out there, worthless (Vilda, 1987).

Overall, the way of organizing deployed by FyA aimed to create autonomous schools that not only provided education for the economic poor living in slums but also empowered young people to become agents of change. More important, however, is the process that explains how responses are highly linked to the preferred definition of the problem. This might represent a double-edged sword, as it includes certain causes but leaves others untouched.

#### *Phase 2: Poverty as Reaching the Invisible Poor*

*Location:* Venezuela, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

*The evolution of poverty outside FyA's initial definition:* By the 1980s, most of the Latin American countries where FyA operated were experiencing critical economic situations. Their economies were growing less than in previous decades and debt levels were becoming untenable. Consequently, most of these countries' governments executed strict cuts in social welfare. This new panorama unveiled problems for other actors, such as prisoners and people without any skills education for work, outside the scope of FyA's original definition of poverty.

*(Re-)Defining poverty as the invisible poor:* The construction of over 500 schools had allowed FyA to reach impoverished communities in 13 countries across Latin America. Yet this had not solved the poverty problem in any of those countries. The massive financial cuts executed by governments across Latin America made visible some other neglected social actors. Among the newly identified communities, two received attention from FyA: adults without education and prisoners. According to Velaz, parents were a crucial cornerstone in changing reality as if they did not have the means for feeding young people, children will need to find a job and stop their education (Vilda, 1987). Also, for other Jesuits who directed FyA operations in Bolivia and Panama, government cuts exposed and compounded the lack of opportunities for prisoners: though most would return to society after serving their time, they could not be considered as productive members of society.

This shift that made visible some actors neglected by the economic definition of poverty and the educational alternative preferred by FyA influenced a (re-) definition of poverty. In this sense, the original definition gradually transformed to reflect the need to account for invisible actors.

*(New) Organizing to tackle poverty by reaching the invisible poor:* A particularly unusual, but probably the most successful, response to the above problem was the implementation of distance learning through educational radio stations. Radio stations could bring education to a much greater population of the poor. The creation of radiophonic education was driven by both FyA's founder Velaz and some national nodes. Velaz saw the radio as a way to expand FyA without increasing pressure on already deprived schools. In his words, "if Fe y Alegria was born on a ranch, the radio would allow us to convert each ranch into a school" (Perez Esclarin, 2010, p. 197). The main source of inspiration to embrace radio learning came from "Radio ECCA," a cultural broadcaster in Islas Canarias, Spain. Velaz was amazed by the station's innovative educational programme, which complemented radiophonic classes with books and monthly personalized assistance (Vilda, 1987). For Velaz, the already operating network of schools in Latin America could offer classes at night or on weekends to provide education for most of the illiterate adults living in slums, or for those who had abandoned their studies (Perez Esclarin, 2010).

The second process was initiated by the national directors of FyA in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Panama, who had worked at Jesuit radio stations before joining FyA. The radio had played a significant role in Jesuit evangelization in some Latin American countries during the 1960s and 1970s. The Jesuit directors of FyA had thus experienced the radio's benefits in terms of coverage and impact (Perez Esclarin, 2010). Still, the FyA's structured response of delivering radiophonic education only materialized in the early 1980s. The initiative was launched in Venezuela. The new "Instituto Radiofonico FyA" (IRFA) had a clear aim: to offer access to education each semester to people aged 15 and above at primary, high school, and complementary levels (Saez, 1999).

For Velaz, the FyA could alleviate poverty by not only empowering children but also meeting the learning needs of adolescents and adults who could not study in conventional ways (Lazcano, 2013). Although IRFA started with classes from primary to high school level, it found that most listeners preferred the complementary courses. By 1992, IRFA was providing classes in carpentry, masonry, electricity, and knitting. One of the most popular broadcasters was located in Guasdualito (East Venezuela) and reached nearly 25,000 inhabitants. Velaz commented that providing people with small tools will allow them to be productive in the society (Vilda, 1987). IRFA thus reached a population that the schools could not address. More importantly, it made FyA members aware that tackling poverty was a complex process of intertwined activities aimed at addressing several causes and actors.

Inspired by the success of radio broadcasts in Venezuela, FyA launched similar initiatives in other countries. The radio soon became FyA's primary medium to provide education to prisoners (Perez Esclarin, 2010). The fact that one simple broadcast could reach multiple homes, restore people's dignity, and contribute to reducing geographical distances was a reality beyond imagination (Vilda, 1987). The next country where FyA adopted the radio as an educational tool was Ecuador, followed by Bolivia and Paraguay. In each country, the radio was used to address specific problems. For instance, in Paraguay, it was used in penitentiaries as a means to reintegrate prisoners into society. Courses aimed to not only develop skills but also inculcate values. In Ecuador, radiophonic education focused on technical education for (among others) rural workers, which was complemented by some FyA educational centers offering additional training (National director, 2016 – interview).

Overall, using radio was an organizational experiment that moved beyond traditional forms of organizing. Through radio stations, FyA found a new way to reach people who were "invisible" but could be considered as poor according to economic definition. This experience revealed the need to change the previous definition of poverty in order to continue tackling it. In this sense, the organizational experiment highlighted that poverty was a highly complex challenge that required not only providing education but also reaching out to as many actors as possible and addressing several causes simultaneously.

#### *Phase 3: Poverty as Social Exclusion and Marginalized Actors*

#### *Location:* Latin America.

*The evolution of poverty outside FyA's definition of invisible poor:* The beginning of the twenty-first century brought many changes to Latin America. Among the most important is the change in the meaning of poverty. Identifying the timing of this change is difficult, although it mostly manifested at the end of the 1990s, when new discourses moved poverty from a pure economic phenomenon to a socio-political one. This new conceptualization of poverty emphasized different causes of the marginalization of social actors. Poverty came to reflect systemic and historical issues involving lack of equality, the marginalization of people with disabilities, and social exclusion. Exemplar cases are the fights for disability rights, women's equality, and protection of minorities.

*(Re-)Defining poverty as exclusion and marginalization:* Although FyA had been offering formal and technical education, most target communities still experienced high levels of undernourishment, broken families, social violence, and exclusion of specific actors. FyA's (re-)definition of poverty was informed by the local experiences of its employees and teachers in the various operating locations. The following ethnographic vignette illustrates that even if economic deprivation still dominates, FyA now confronted other and potentially more threatening forms of poverty:

Alexis (pseudonym) and I were driving through El Chaco in Paraguay, one of the most sparsely inhabited areas in South America. At some point, Alexis, who runs the local FyA school where we were heading, tells me, "*you see how the asphalt here comes to an end? We will now drive many kilometres without asphalt*." Even though the end of the asphalt seemed to symbolise the beginning of poverty, our conversation as we drove was centred on other types of problems. We were heading towards an area controlled by some guerrilla groups and drug cartels. "*Money here is not necessarily the problem. Violence is*," Alexis told me. Interestingly, that is not what I saw. I saw the end of the asphalt and poor neighbourhoods. However, as I started speaking with people, it was not poverty that they mentioned but the fact that many school pupils worked for the cartels at night. […] It was getting dark, and we were rushed to the car: "*we have to leave while we have sunlight; after that it's too dangerous*."

Based on new experiences of poverty, FyA started to analyze the manifold related challenges that actors faced in their communities. Through a long process of reflection, which started with the design of the first federative strategic plan in the 2000s, the organization's approach was evaluated and questioned. After several meetings in different countries, and the production of multiple documents in yearly congress since 1995, a new conceptualization of poverty emerged. This explicitly acknowledged a wider range of forms of exclusion, including marginalization, gender violence, gang-related violence, drug consumption, and forced migration. In this process, FyA managers and other actors realized that poverty now referred to inequality and systemic exclusion.

*(New) Organizing to tackle poverty as exclusion and marginalization:* Up to this point, FyA had been a network of autonomous schools and radio stations that provided formal and technical education. However, addressing the new definition of poverty demanded a radical organizing. This resulted in emphasizing more decentralized projects focused on nutrition, peace and citizenship, gender, and minorities, as seen in the federative strategic plans from 2000 to 2015. The construction of those decentralized projects followed two processes.

The first process involved FyA members starting to include the community more formally in constructing agendas and visions for development, with discussions focused on the needs of the community and ways to improve it. This led to the emergence of several social development projects, which have been seen as ways to learn about life and the world by establishing social and natural relations. From 2000 to 2016, FyA developed four federative strategic plans (i.e. Plan Global de Desarrollo y Fortalecimiento Institucional I (Global Plan of Development and Institutional Strengthening), 2000; Plan Global de Desarrollo y Fortalecimiento Institucional II, 2005; Plan Estrategico de la Federacion Internacional Fe y Alegria (International Federation Fe y Alegria's Strategic Plan) III, 2009; Plan de Prioridades Federativas (Federative Plan of Priorities) IV, 2015) that pay special attention to nutrition, health, and citizenship construction. For example, nearly 350 projects emerged that aimed to address drug abuse, lack of aspiration, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and child exploitation (International Federation secretary, 2016 – interview), while also emphasizing the construction of ethical citizens. These projects have underscored the importance of dialogue, negotiation, and construction of socially desirable values (Federacion Internacional Fe y Alegria, 2016).

The second main process undertaken by FyA focused on tackling the discrimination confronted by social actors with cognitive and physical disabilities when trying to access education. In this endeavor, FyA Bolivia has played a particularly meaningful role, accumulating more than 16 years of experience dealing with education for the blind and the deaf. For this purpose, it has created six centers of special education and adapted 47 schools to incorporate inclusive policies (former national director, FyA Bolivia, 2016 – interview).

To summarize, organizing to tackle poverty in this period demanded a new understanding of the problem based on contextual readings of the situation. Accordingly, organizing involved a series of small- and medium-sized projects that aimed to be one-shot operations in which the response was determined by the communities experiencing poverty.

## **DISCUSSION**

Societies face wicked problems that are extremely complex and may not have a definite solution (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Even though widespread consensus may emerge that highlights probable causes, advocates plausible solutions, and assigns responsibility for tackling wicked problems (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016), there are often many possible ways of addressing such problems. This makes it extremely difficult to formulate organizational responses.

#### *Theoretical Contributions*

To understand the process through which organizations deal with the changing manifestations of wicked problems, we conducted a longitudinal study documenting the narratives that shaped how FyA organized to respond to poverty in Latin America. This case yields three important discoveries. First, a wicked problem is always constructed based on experiences as there is never a "true" formulation. Second, how a wicked problem is constructed is intertwined with how responses are organized. Third, emerging narratives about what the problem is inspire new organizational responses as the cycle of interpretive problem definition and organizing solutions is ongoing (see Fig. 1).

*Fig. 1.* Organizing for Gaps Between Policies and Practices: Dynamic Complexity of Wicked Problems.

*There is never a true formulation, only a narrative construction that informs the interpretation of a wicked problem*. Recent studies on complex problems tend to propose frameworks (George et al., 2016), theory-based solutions (Ferraro et al., 2015), and a more detailed understanding of the variables of these social issues (Alford & Head, 2017). However, our case study of FyA challenges us to rethink how to understand the particularities of wicked problems. For example, the fact that wicked problems can have up to 10 identifiable dimensions (Rittel & Webber, 1973) does not mean that these can be standardized to foster a problem's understanding and possible solution.

Our study shows how a wicked problem is defined based on a narrative construction, which establishes causal claims regarding the objects and actions that the narrative construction represents (Wadhwani, 2018). Since there is no one true and objective formulation of a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973), organizations construct certain narratives about what they understand as the problem. Thus, wicked problems are defined not just by identifying certain material conditions at different points in time but also through the construction of narratives that establish links between certain causes and consequences. These narratives may not fully capture the problem, focusing on only one of its multiple causes and consequences.

The case of FyA highlights that narrative constructions of wicked problems are mediated through actors' involvement while acting in contexts where the problem is embedded. In line with the classic pragmatism of Dewey and James, there is no absolute way to access immediate knowledge of a matter and it is only through experience that primary awareness of raw givens can be gained. Hence, it is through experience that reality becomes meaningful; as James (1904) postulates, it is within the stream of experience that knowledge is created which generates expectations for action.

*The importance of the narrative construction that sustains the wicked problem and its intertwinement with the responses deployed*. Theoretically, the literature tends not to distinguish between complex problems, treating them as if a single entity (e.g., climate change, global hunger, poverty) to narrow their focus. However, given the contextual, social, historical, and economic roots of these problems, the way that each is experienced cannot result in one comprehensive construction explaining all contexts. Here, we highlight the need to avoid dominant narratives about how to deal with or respond to wicked problems. Each manifestation of a wicked problem will involve a unique narrative construction that reflects different experiences and language games.

Thus, responses to wicked problems are neither "right" nor "wrong," but "good" or "bad." In this sense, the construction of the problem frames actors' understanding of responses by temporalizing experience (Rorty, 1982) while projecting the expected future through the unfolding nature of the narrative. A "good" response will be one that offers a plausible way of acting to impact on the causes identified in the constructed narrative. Conversely, a "bad" response will be one that is imposed by external agents or does not consider the experience of the actors involved. For example, moving to address the problems of marginalization and exclusion while leaving behind an economic understanding of poverty represented a good response.

Finally, if responses are intertwined with narrative constructions, it is easier to highlight the small wins achieved, as suggested by Ferraro et al. (2015). One of the core postulates when attempting to tackle wicked problems is the ability to avoid failure. Recent alternatives that have failed, or are in a deadlock underscore the mismatch between the experience/interpretation of the problem and the solutions deployed.

*An ongoing cycle between the external environment and the construction of new narratives*. The way a wicked problem is defined changes over time. This mainly happens because actors encounter new manifestations of the problem, new causes are discovered, or new experiences confront organizations with new realities. In this regard, most changes in the narrative construction relate to changes in the external environment. Hence, new narratives are constructed, such that problem definition and organizing solutions is an ongoing cycle. This aligns with James (1904) fundamental fact that experience is a process of change and, although built on the past, constantly progresses forward.

In this regard, most studies on organizations responding to wicked problems (Dorado & Ventresca, 2013; Ferlie et al., 2013) use a static frame, obscuring that wicked problems are not "definition static" and so responses cannot "solidify" in time (Dentoni et al., 2018). The relationship between the external environment and what is experienced, and then narratively constructed, is dynamic and fluid. This highlights the importance of understanding change and time when dealing with wicked problems.

As organizational scholars, we are only beginning to understand the types of re-organizing toward the new forms of coordinated, collaborative, and collective efforts (Aslan Gümüsay & Haack, 2020) needed to tackle wicked problems and other grand challenges. By focusing on the important interplay between problem definition and organizational response in a context of dynamic complexity, our study suggests the need to focus more on how ideas, discourse, and understanding of issues are interrelated with modes of organizational design and collective action. Two future research avenues seem likely to be particularly fruitful. First, we call for research into how the dynamics of the external environment affect problem definition. As the case of FyA demonstrated, how a wicked problem is defined is fundamental to addressing its dynamic complexity. Institutional contexts differ widely as they reflect the attempts of governments, non-governmental organizations, supranational entities, and communities to impose a desired narrative construction of the problem. Hence, examining power struggles between actors' competing narratives and how one of these narratives solidifies, or perishes, can explain what leads to the transition from one dominant definition to another. We contend that a closer look at antenarratives can explain these definition changes. Antenarratives constitute fragmented, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculations that serve to mediate between actors' localized experience and external narratives (Boje, Haley, & Saylors, 2016). Hence, antenarratives have the power to differentiate and reconcile new characteristics and minimize old ones. Relatedly, we suggest focusing on the concept of constitutive-polyphony (Trittin, & Schoeneborn, 2017) and narratives' temporalities (Stjerne, Wenzel, & Svejenova, 2022) to understand the discursive representation of different voices, opinions and viewpoints when tackling a wicked problem.

Second, we suggest focusing on the diagnostic tools, heuristic devices, and other methods that actors use to analyze and produce knowledge about wicked problems, and how this influences narrative constructions of definitions and solutions for wicked problems. Since "wickedness" requires the creation of some cognitive shortcut to grasp the problem's complexity and inspire collective action (Camillus, 2008; Reinecke & Ansari, 2016), the type of heuristic tools employed to facilitate this are consequential. For example, the UNDP's Human Development Index deliberately moved away from sole focus on economic growth to include a much wider range of indicators, including education and health. Nonetheless, by capturing statistical data, it creates a rather static measure that oversimplifies what human development entails. Ethnographic methods, as employed in our case, or diary studies (Rauch & Ansari, 2022) would lead to a very different focus and understanding. Another pressing question is the significant impact of AI and algorithmic data in re-wiring forms of knowledge production and thereby understanding of wicked problems and social challenges. Thus, studying the role of diagnostic tools in shaping problem definitions and collective organizational efforts is another promising area for future research.

#### *Practical Implications*

*Tackling wicked problems and causal narratives*. Despite our specific focus on FyA, cases provide opportunities to elucidate more general principles, with implications for a wider set of phenomena. Because there is no ultimate definition of a wicked problem, the processes of narrative construction are central to determining what comes to be seen as a major social problem, what is assumed to be its root cause, and what might come to be seen as a plausible solution. This insight is important for practitioners who seek to tackle wicked problems and motivate other actors to support their efforts. Practitioners must acknowledge their active role in the social construction of a wicked problem, and the associated responsibility. The framing and definition of wicked problems is, therefore, a challenging task that requires a skillful balancing act. If wicked problems are seen in their full complexity, they might appear as intractable and a "lost cause," thus complicating actors' ability to mobilize wider action. To avoid a sense of powerlessness, practitioners have to offer causal narratives that identify plausible causes and solutions. These need to be framed in ways that have wide appeal and generate consensus among multiple stakeholders and audiences, motivating widespread support for and commitment to tackling the problem.

*Tackling wicked problems and the flaws of "one-size-fits-all."* Some narratives might oversimplify a wicked problem and associate it with a single cause, even if there might be many. While it is necessary to create narratives that portray the problem as solvable, this can also lead to narrow solutions that only treat a problem's symptoms, or in the worst case aggravate it over time. The well-known problem of "one-size-fits-all" also results from the oversimplified framing of complex problems. Similarly, mission-driven organizations may become so invested in their narrative of the problem and its solution that it becomes difficult to revise approaches and well-worn solutions.

It may then be tempting to find problems that fit existing solutions, rather than seeking new solutions. Our study encourages scholars and practitioners to recognize the dynamic complexity of wicked problems, for which solutions are at best preliminary attempts. This calls for greater reflexivity to examine our own values, beliefs, and assumptions in the process of constructing wicked problems and practices of organizing (Stjerne et al., 2022), so as to be open to revising our own definitions and solutions. In sum, organizing for wicked problems requires ongoing encounters with manifestations of the problem in concrete action contexts, and willingness to revise frames and adapt organizing efforts as these manifestations change.

## **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

We gratefully acknowledge the comments of a blind reviewer on an earlier version of this paper. We would like to thank Emilio Marti, Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Hannah Trittin and Christopher Wickert for their helpful feedback and editorial guidance.

## **REFERENCES**

# FROM A CLASH OF SOCIAL ORDERS TO A LOSS OF DECIDABILITY IN META-ORGANIZATIONS TACKLING GRAND CHALLENGES: THE CASE OF JAPAN LEAVING THE INTERNATIONAL WHALING COMMISSION

## Héloïse Berkowitz and Michael Grothe-Hammer

## **ABSTRACT**

*Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations' ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance metaorganizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the "decidability" of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level.*

**Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges**

**Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 79, 115–138**

**Copyright © 2022 Héloïse Berkowitz and Michael Grothe-Hammer. Published by Emerald**

**Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of**

**this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons. org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode**

**ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20220000079010**

*We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective's mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges' governance success while the emergence of "non-decidability" of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.*

**Keywords:** Social order; meta-organization; grand challenges; governance; marine ecosystem; decidability

## **INTRODUCTION**

Grand challenges denominate fundamental problems of modern society – e.g., climate change, aging societies, exploitative labor, biodiversity loss – which can be understood as "specific critical barrier(s) that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem" (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016, p. 1881). We suggest that to better understand these fundamental problems, we can relate these to one of sociology's most fundamental research objects, i.e., the problem of social order (Abercrombie et al., 2006; Hechter & Horne, 2003). The notion of social order refers to the general "ordering" of the world, which can be broadly defined as relatively stable social structures or temporarily fixed meanings – such as values, norms, rules, hierarchies, rituals, or acquaintances – that lend the world a degree of expectability (Johnson, 2000; Morgner, 2014). Grand challenges affect existing social orders, are often produced, reproduced and reinforced by these, and can be tackled only through the changing of social orders so that these contribute to solving the problem at hand. At the same time, social orders provide the basic context in which grand challenges unfold and solutions for these challenges can be developed.

We draw on Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) and their distinction between two fundamental forms of social order, i.e., purposefully constructed social order that is created through decisions, and self-emergent social order that is non-decided. Social orders constantly intermesh, particularly in the context of organizations. Organizations are social systems that couple and shape a multiplicity of social orders (Laamanen, Moser, Bor, & den Hond, 2020). Many organizations moreover tend to organize in so-called meta-organizations, i.e., organizations that have other organizations as their members (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008). Hence, through meta-organizations, organizations and social orders are "layered" since these integrate (on a meta-level) not only multiple forms of social order but also multiple organizational levels of social order as well (Grothe-Hammer, Berkowitz, & Berthod, 2022). Meta-organizations provide a space for their member organizations to make decisions collectively on social orders such as rules, regulations, or monitoring programs that serve as structures for their members (Ahrne, Brunsson, & Seidl, 2016). Hence, these meta-organizations serve as global governance devices that produce certain social orders through collective decisions, often intertwined with certain contradictory, emergent – in particular institutional – social orders stemming from their members.

Recent literature has emphasized the crucial role international metaorganizations play when it comes to tackling global societal challenges (Berkowitz, Crowder, & Brooks, 2020). Examples such as the United Nations Environment Programme or the European Women's Lobby have been quite successful in tackling the ozone hole or promoting women's rights (Andersen & Sarma, 2002; Karlberg & Jacobsson, 2015). Yet, we still understand relatively little about how the embeddedness of social orders affects meta-organizations and their ability to tackle grand challenges.

This paper investigates how different kinds and levels of social order are handled in international meta-organizations dealing with grand challenges. Specifically, we are interested in how different social orders interfere with each other in the process of meta-organizing, and which problems can occur that might prevent a meta-organization from effectively tackling a grand challenge. To do so we take a look at the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which is an international governance device dedicated to sustainably managing whaling and conserving whales on a global scale. Whales play an important part in the functioning of marine ecosystems. Unsustainable whaling practices have been proven to trigger ecosystems' collapse (Springer et al., 2003), and can thus have broader impact on humans (Pörtner et al., 2019). In the context of increased pressures on marine resources, ocean acidification, warming and pollution, and more generally climate urgency, marine ecosystems' conservation constitutes a grand challenge, in which sustainable whale population management plays a key role (Estes, 2016).

In the past decades, the IWC has been crucial in successfully tackling this global challenge of whale management. Since 1982 when the IWC decided to pause commercial whaling, some whale populations have recovered significantly. However, in 2018, Japan, one of the major pro-whaling nations, left the IWC to resume commercial whaling in its territorial waters. Therefore, the multi-national management of whale conservation and sustainable whaling practices suffered a major setback. While Japan is still bound to international law and regulations, it is now reopening and managing commercial whaling autonomously (Kojima, 2019). Japan's exit from IWC membership has disrupted the internal IWC order as well as global orders. This withdrawal significantly undermines international governance efforts to tackle such a global societal challenge and poses global threats to marine ecosystems. Through a better understanding of the organizational challenges that the IWC faced in globally governing sustainable whaling and whale conversation, we can gain important insights into what factors might be relevant in successfully governing grand challenges on a global scale.

By engaging with theories of social order and specifically putting on a metaorganizational lens, we show how, in the IWC's case, different types of social orders on the different organizational levels at play evolve and interact over time. Our paper illustrates how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its member organizations as well as among those member organizations ended up clashing. This clash of orders led to abrupt, decided changes of meta-organizational orders that ultimately rendered some crucial orders unchangeable. Social orders that had remained decidable for decades were abruptly rendered non-decidable and instead locked permanently as they were.

We contribute to the literatures on both grand challenges and the sociology of organization by conceptualizing decidability and non-decidability as properties of existing social orders. In the context of a meta-organization, decidability, hence, means the possibility of concretely reaching collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under the collective's mandate. Non-decidability, on the other hand, describes the absence of the possibility to reach collective decisions about changing a social order that falls under the meta-organizational mandate. We argue that meta-organizational decidability is necessary to ensure the continuity of collective action in governance-mandated meta-organizations. Decidability enables members' implementation and compliance with meta-organizational rules even if there is no consensus about them. Non-decidability, however, may force members to exit and may lead to meta-organizational failure to govern grand challenges.

## **THEORETICAL FRAMING**

In this section, we want to relate the problem of social order in the context of meta-organizations with the fundamental grand challenges of modern society. To motivate our research question, we present three basic assumptions: first, that social orders can be either emergent or decided, second, that social orders are embedded in organizations and meta-organizations, and third, that grand challenges both require social orders to be solved and raise specific issues.

#### *Decided and Non-decided Social Orders*

The question of what social order is and how it comes about has virtually always been an integral part of sociological research (Abercrombie et al., 2006; Hechter & Horne, 2003; Turner, 2013). A widely-accepted assertion is that it is possible to distinguish between two fundamentally different forms of social order, i.e., some kind of spontaneously and unintentionally formed order on the one hand and some kind of consciously constructed order on the other (Elster, 1989; Hechter, 2018, p. 24; Luhmann, 2020; von Hayek, 1991; Williamson, 1991). Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) recently added to this theory tradition by proposing a similar binary typology of social orders, i.e., the distinction between "decided order" and "emergent order." They assert that it is possible to ground the distinction between the two forms of social order in the question of decisions. According to them, the consciously constructed form of social order is always one that is created through decisions (decided order), while the other form of social order is one that is basically not decided, i.e., when it emerges on its own or when it is taken for granted as a behavioral premise (emergent order).

One of Ahrne and Brunsson's main contributions to sociological theory has been not only to outline and describe these two fundamentally different forms of social order, but moreover to offer a novel and innovative meta-theoretical foundation for the classic binary distinction. Moreover, Ahrne and Brunsson's conceptualization of social order implies that social order is processual in nature – i.e., social structure is produced and reproduced in social operations. Social order as such exists only in the process. Social orders enable and facilitate certain activities while these very activities produce, reproduce, and change these orders in the process.

Emergent orders emerge either spontaneously – e.g., in unplanned face-to-face interactions (Goffman, 1967) – or develop slowly over time, thereby becoming taken for granted and constantly reproduced without being questioned – e.g., traditions, beliefs, taken-for-granted status orders. The latter variant of emergent orders can thus be called "institutional orders" (Czarniawska, 2009), since they are accepted as premises for behavior without having their validity questioned (Jepperson, 1991). Institutional orders can emerge from spontaneous orders as well as from originally decided orders. Something that developed spontaneously in an instant (e.g., a nickname) might become taken for granted over time; and what once was decided (e.g., a new product) might also become so taken for granted that it is not a possibility anymore to redecide it.

Decided orders can be characterized as explicit, specific, potentially abrupt, accountability-producing, and inherently provocative. Decided orders represent those decisions that become accepted by others as behavioral expectations for at least some time. They often take the form of rules, goals, hierarchies, memberships, monitoring instruments, and sanctioning mechanisms (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011). Decisions about such orders can be made in an instant and can become quite specific. However, a decision always implies the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Decisions therefore by nature require that one must justify the selection of one alternative over another (Brunsson & Brunsson, 2017).

Decisions and decided orders are paradoxical: upon being made, a decision discloses discarded options (Luhmann, 2018). Hence, one peculiarity of decided social orders is that in their making they are always accompanied by the simultaneous creation of disorder (see Vásquez, Schoeneborn, & Sergi, 2016). Deciding on certain elements of social order always fixes and opens up meaning at the same time, for a decision selects one option while making other options visible as well (Grothe-Hammer & Schoeneborn, 2019). As a result, decisions and decided order run the inherent risk of remaining mere "attempts" (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011, p. 8). So how do decided orders become accepted as premises for behavior in the first place? One general answer to this question is: through organizations.

Organizations are social systems consisting of distinctive processes of action or communication processes (Luhmann, 2018, 2020). Organizations can be seen as nexuses of social orders. Many different kinds of social orders come together in an organization. On the one hand, they serve as premises for the organizational processes while, on the other hand, they are being produced, reproduced, maintained, changed, or discarded in these processes as well. Thus, all kinds of social order are being coupled within organizations and via organizations and their processes (Laamanen et al., 2020). For instance, decided orders build on institutionalized orders and facilitate spontaneous orders that in turn might facilitate new decisions on decided orders, which might become institutionalized over time, and so on.

Organizations are faced with the challenge to cope with this myriad of social orders through their decisions. Through decisions, organizations can couple or change certain orders or create new (decided) ones. Think of the example of a university course. The course is a combination of decided orders (combining certain decisions about place and time, the teacher, the admitted students, the course theme) that builds on institutionalized orders (e.g., the general understanding of what a course is, or the taken-for-grantedness of having chairs in a room with a board). Based on this combination of orders, other spontaneous orders emerge (e.g., certain interaction orders and statuses, running gags, etc.), and so on. Organizations can make decisions on some social orders that affect which social orders are coupled in which way. However, organizations cannot decide everything and they cannot prevent non-decided orders from appearing or make them disappear. In some cases, organizations can also lose their ability to decide on certain forms of social order at all, i.e., when social orders become overly fixed to one meaning (Grothe-Hammer & Schoeneborn, 2019).

#### *Meta-organizations as Complex Nexuses of Embedded Social Orders*

The complexity of intermeshing orders increases even more in cases in which organizations organize each other in a meta-organization. In such cases, another layer of social orders is put on top of the already existing social orders. Most importantly, meta-organizations bring in a layer of "meta-organizational decided orders," which we define as those decisions that are collectively acknowledged as activity premises by member organizations and which concern and guide the activities on the meta-level.

Meta-organizations are organizations in which members are themselves organizations. As organizations, members maintain their own identities, agendas, resources, or organizational values (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008). By nature, metaorganizations may therefore constitute multi-referential organizations, that bring together non-convergent or even contradictory references and logics (Apelt et al., 2017). In addition to and resulting from these two central parameters – i.e., being an organization and having organizations as members – meta-organizations present other features that may distinguish them from organizations that have individuals as members, thus requiring a different theoretical apparatus (Ahrne et al., 2016; Berkowitz, Bor, et al., 2018).

Meta-organizations are more often than not partial organizations, i.e., they lack one or more decided orders that are otherwise typical of organizations such as hierarchy or central sanctioning power (Ahrne et al., 2016; Berkowitz et al., 2020). They also create a forum among members, consisting in an inter-organizational space in-between, where decision-making is possible (Berkowitz, 2018; Berkowitz et al., 2020). Because they gather potentially competing organizations, meta-organizations also facilitate coopetition among members (Berkowitz, 2018; Berkowitz et al., 2020).

Meta-organizations constitute a peculiar decided order because through them, members internalize their organized and institutional environment (competitors, stakeholders, governments) (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Valente & Oliver, 2018). Yet at the same time, members still maintain their proper decided, organizational boundaries, their specific internal coordination mechanisms, their social norms that may vary from one organization to the next and may even conflict with one another.

Meta-organizing collective action raises very specific issues in terms of joint decision-making capabilities, accountability, and the maintenance of internal social order. These issues are even more salient in governance-mandated metaorganizations dedicated to grand challenges, because grand challenges themselves raise obstacles – such as changing social norms – to collective decision-making.

#### *Grand Challenges and Their Implications for Meta-organization*

Grand challenges such as climate change, aging societies, or gender discrimination are always at least partly a result of existing social orders – and perhaps even the manifestation of these. As such, they can be tackled only by changing existing orders effectively. Simultaneously, social orders provide the basic context in which grand challenges unfold and solutions for these challenges can be developed. Yet grand challenges are themselves conceived differently by different stakeholders. These conflicting views and values may therefore affect how knowledge and solutions for the transition are developed (Caniglia et al., 2021).

Because of their complexity and interdependencies, grand challenges are unlikely to be solved through traditional forms of organization (Arciniegas Pradilla, Bento da Silva, & Reinecke, 2022; Doh, Tashman, & Benischke, 2019; Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015; George et al., 2016; Kaufmann & Danner-Schröder, 2022). Recent works have emphasized the multiple contributions of meta-organizations as one innovative mode of organization to tackle grand challenges and sustainability issues (Berkowitz, 2018; Berkowitz et al., 2020; Carmagnac & Carbone, 2019; Chaudhury et al., 2016). Indeed, meta-organizations like the IWC, the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, or the European Women's Lobby, have been crucial in tackling such diverse challenges as the ozone hole, environmental pollution, species extinction, and gender inequality. Tackling social and environmental problems seems to have become an objective of certain metaorganizations only in the second half of the twentieth century (Berkowitz & Dumez, 2015). These meta-organizations enable member organizations to develop joint solutions, self-regulation or capacity building for sustainability (Berkowitz, Bucheli, & Dumez, 2017; Chaudhury et al., 2016; Karlberg & Jacobsson, 2015).

Multi-stakeholder meta-organizations are particularly well positioned to address grand challenges because they allow member organizations to draw directly on diverse expertise and reflect diverse interests and complementary perspectives (Berkowitz et al., 2020; Berkowitz & Souchaud, 2019; Carmagnac & Carbone, 2019). These multi-stakeholder meta-organizations gather players from different spheres of society, e.g., public administrations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), economic players, and scientific institutions. Yet from that perspective, meta-organizing for grand challenges also poses complex organizational problems, such as geopolitical roadblocks, disagreement on priorities, or free rider issues (Berkowitz et al., 2020).

Grand challenges will be conceived differently by different stakeholders but require collective action at different levels if problems are to be solved. If metaorganizations in particular are needed to govern grand challenges but at the same time the underlying social orders have different views on these, how do metaorganizations cope with the emergence of contradictory social orders and how does that affect their ability to meet grand challenges? Few works have examined closely how governance-mandated meta-organizations cope with contradictory social orders among their members, how different social orders may interfere with each other in the process of meta-organizing, and how this might prevent a metaorganization from effectively tackling a grand challenge.

## **METHODOLOGY**

Our objective is to investigate the creation and maintenance of social orders in meta-organizations, and more specifically how meta-organizations cope with the development of contradictory social orders. We focus on this issue in the context of grand challenges governance. Given the nature of this pervasive phenomenon, an in-depth single case study aimed at theory building appears to be the most appropriate methodology (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2012). In-depth single case studies can be fruitfully used to analyze how organizations contribute to the mitigation and solution of grand challenges (Arciniegas Pradilla et al., 2022; Karlberg & Jacobsson, 2015). In addition, focusing on a single case study enables us to investigate this complex phenomenon from different viewpoints without having to choose beforehand which types of data to collect (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2012).

#### *Case Selection*

To address our research question, we chose to focus on the IWC and the issue of whaling, which has environmental, social, political, and economic implications, as it provides an exemplar of social order challenges. This case is particularly appropriate for two reasons. First, whales play a crucial role in the functioning of marine ecosystems, and unsustainable whaling practices can potentially trigger a collapse of these ecosystems (Springer et al., 2003). Recent research also demonstrates that whales contribute significantly to climate change mitigation (Chami, Cosimano, Fullenkamp, & Oztosun, 2019). Second, the IWC is a long-standing meta-organization that has successfully contributed to whales' population recovery but had recently faced significant organizational challenges, culminating in Japan's exit, thus undermining global governance efforts.

The IWC is a meta-organization with 88 nation states as members and seeks to address one specific grand challenge, the overexploitation of whales. The protection of whales is crucial for ecosystem-level marine conservation and sustainable management and therefore for humans (Springer et al., 2003).

Founded in 1946, the historical goal of IWC has been, until recently, the sustainable global management of whaling stocks based on scientific evidence. In other words, the collective goal was initially to facilitate the exploitation of whale stocks. Over the past years, however, and as we will discuss in the analysis, the collective goal has implicitly changed both to whale conservation, preventing the exploitation of whales at all, in seeking answers to environmental issues (overexploitation and the effects of whaling on ecosystems) and to social change toward the protection of whales.

Any country can become a member of the IWC and there is no membership requirement apart from formally agreeing to the 1946 convention (IWC, 1946). Members have a status of "Contracting Government" and delegate a "Commissioner" who represents them (IWC, 2018). Members pay a fee to the IWC (IWC, 2018). In addition, scientists participate in the Scientific Committee to provide scientific evidence for global management. They meet annually and produce an annual report (Vernazzani et al., 2017). While direct members are states, this meta-organization can be characterized as a multi-stakeholder due to the participation of both scientific institutions and government representatives from diverse countries (Gillespie, 2001).

#### *Data Collection and Analysis*

*Data Collection.* This paper relies on a qualitative, in-depth analysis of the evolution of social orders in the IWC. To conduct this analysis, we seek to identify when collective decisions can be made, what they are about, when they can no longer be made, and under which conditions.

We collected primary and secondary data to triangulate our results (Eisenhardt, 1989; Gibbert, Ruigrok, & Wicki, 2008). We first collected primary data drawing on different types of decision archives available on the IWC website: minutes of meetings, formal decisions, scientific reports, press releases, and other documents that allow one to observe the decision-making process at the meta-organizational level (see Table 1). Different bodies in the IWC are taking decisions or informing them, from the "Commission" to the "Scientific Committee," and we collected documents from these different bodies. These documents are ideal to review historical decisions, especially in a historical perspective like ours, where it would prove difficult to reconstitute the evolution of decisions and the constitution of social orders based on the memory of individual participants. Besides, individual participants are regularly renewed and would therefore lack a holistic comprehension of the case. In addition, the meta-organizational nature of the case raises specific methodological issues that cannot be solved by interviews with individuals (Berkowitz & Dumez, 2016).

We also collected existing and peer reviewed analyses of the IWC, which is a well investigated meta-organization (as synthesized in Table 1), allowing us to enrich our analysis and to triangulate our sources. In total, we collected 35 IWC archives, one International court of justice report of judgment, 12 existing

Types of Sources.

analyses of IWC, for a cumulative number of 2,420 pages. The richness and diversity of documents were sufficient per se to facilitate a rich reconstitution of our case, without needing additional information through interviews.

*Data Analysis.* Our analytical strategy aimed to identify and frame the emergence and evolution of social order(s) in the meta-organization. To do so, we made an inventory of key decisions over time and identified to which specific form of social order they belonged. We first selected decisions that are connected to the official goals of the meta-organization, with the assumption that growing votes in favor of a decision against the existing goals hinted at the emergence or reinforcement of a new social order. For that purpose, we listed the number of votes in favor of each key decision. We then sought potential "tipping points," i.e., the point when the order seemed to tilt from one type to another.

To analyze, structure, and present our findings, we developed a historical narrative of the case, i.e., a "construction of a detailed story from the raw data" (Langley, 1999, p. 695). This narrative is the first main output of our analysis: it enables us to understand ourselves and then to show the reader the dynamics of the meta-organization's decided order, while at the same time revealing and breaking down the complexity of the case (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

To build this narrative, we read the collected material about the IWC individually, separately, and repeatedly. We met several times to discuss the different milestones in the IWC history, the key decisions and tipping points of the social orders in the meta-organization. We also discussed our analysis of the key events and of the different orders emerging from the material and how to interpret them. An early key event was Japan's exit from the organization in 2018. Starting from there, we moved back in history and sought to understand what had led to this exit and how it related to various forms of social order within the meta-organization.

Constructing the narrative also served as a "data organization device" that then guided our more conceptual analysis (Langley, 1999). Based on the narrative, the next step was to unpack (1) the initial social order in the meta-organization, (2) the emergence of an institutional order within the meta-organization that contradicts the social order, (3) the clash of orders within the meta-organization that leads to 4) the creation of "non-decidability" and the exit of Japan. The next section starts with the narrative and then follows these three points.

## **FINDINGS**

Our paper seeks to draw a picture of the different social orders within the IWC and how these orders were created and related in the organizational processes over time. To do so, we make a crucial distinction between decided and institutional social order within the IWC. Our findings are organized in three parts. First, we present the historical narrative of the case by describing the IWC's history where decisions on whaling are concerned, with some key elements of context. Then we analyze the dynamics of the creation and evolution of social orders in the metaorganization. Finally, we unpack the notions of decidability and non-decidability of social orders.

#### *IWC History: Pro Versus Anti-whaling Nations and the Evolution of the IWC's Decisions on Whaling*

Looking back at the meta-organization's decisional history, i.e., the key decisions taken by the meta-organization, the IWC was established in 1946 for the purpose of the "proper conservation of whale stocks" and the "development of the whaling industry" (IWC, 1946, p. 1). It holds annual meetings as well as some special sessions for working groups. Table 2 synthesizes the key dates that are then analyzed in the remainder of this section.

*Putting Whaling on Hold Until Further Notice in the 80s.* In the period 1973– 1981, many whale species were identified as endangered species (*Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna & Flora*, 1973). At the time, the IWC was repeatedly criticized for unsustainable whaling management. Non-Whaling and even Anti-whaling nations joined the meta-organization and started to gain a majority. The United States in particular, historically a prowhaling country, became one of its strongest opponents.

In 1982, the IWC approved the first "Moratorium" on commercial whaling with full effect from 1986. It set commercial catch limits to zero to allow whale species to recover:

Notwithstanding the other provisions of paragraph 10, catch limits for the killing for commercial purposes of whales from all stocks for the 1986 coastal and the 1985/86 pelagic seasons and thereafter shall be zero. This provision will be kept under review, based upon the best scientific advice, and by 1990 at the latest the Commission will undertake a comprehensive assessment of the effects of this decision on whale stocks and consider modification of this provision and the establishment of other catch limits. (International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946, Schedule, 2018 paragraph 10 (e) page 5)

The decision is not consensual, as 25 countries voted in favor, seven against (Brazil, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Peru, South Korea, Soviet Union), and five

*Table 2.* IWC Key Social Order's History Timeline.

abstained (Chile, China, Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland). While different factors came into play, the moratorium left open the possibility that catch limits might be increased in the future:

There were a number of factors involved in this decision. These included difficulties in agreeing what catch limits to set due to scientific uncertainties in the information needed to apply the management procedure then in place, and differing attitudes to the acceptability of whaling. The wording of the moratorium decision implied that with improved scientific knowledge in the future, it might be possible to set catch limits other than zero for certain stocks.(The Revised Management Scheme, 2020)

Japan, Norway, the Soviet Union, and Peru filed a formal complaint, arguing that the moratorium was not based on scientific evidence delivered by the Scientific Committee of the IWC – beyond the sole identification of endangered species. Forced through international political pressure by the United States of America, Japan soon withdrew its complaint and later began scientific whaling, which remained an authorized form of whaling. The successful implementation of the moratorium was due mostly to the United States, which threatened to sanction countries engaged in illegal whaling, especially by cutting down fish importations. Simultaneously, NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) contributed to raising awareness about the impact of commercial whaling in society. They did so by developing a strategy of "totemization" of whales, beyond any scientific rationale about whaling (Kalland, 1993). After the 1970s, whales "turned into totems, thus dichotomizing mankind into "good guys" (protectors of whales) and "bad guys" (whalers) (Kalland, 1993, p. 124), so that "'Not killing whales' became the *default* option" for the anti-whaling nations (Bailey, 2008, p. 299). In other words, NGOs highlight a symbolic value of whales and the necessity of stopping whaling. Furthermore, NGOs also play an active role in increasing the membership composition toward anti-whaling nations (Mulvaney, 1996).

*Failed Attempts at Re-organizing Whaling Internationally in the 90s*. In 1994, the IWC adopted the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) to calculate sustainable catch limits while developing an inspection & observation scheme (Revised Management Scheme, or RMS for short). A working group for the RMS was established to develop a monitoring system and to ensure that total catch limits are respected. But the negotiations appeared to be extremely difficult. Over the next few years, several new working groups were created to work on different problematic areas, such as catch verification and compliance. However, in 2007 the RMS development reached an impasse due to political disagreements regarding the question whether whaling can be sustainable at all. Over the previous two decades several issues had been introduced as possibly relevant in this respect, such as environmental and climate change during the 50th annual meeting of the IWC in 1998, as well as chemical pollution, ozone depletion, and marine noise (Burns, 2000, p. 336).

Parallelly, Japan continued to develop a legal program of scientific whaling. A caveat is in order here. The IWC has allowed two types of whaling: aboriginal and scientific. Indigenous people can conduct aboriginal whaling for cultural reasons. Aboriginal whaling is strictly monitored to ensure the sustainability of as well as a minimal respect for animal welfare (Reeves, 2002). Scientific whaling is authorized for research purposes at the discretion of the member countries. However, there were growing doubts concerning Japan's use of the program for research purposes. In 2010, two anti-whaling countries that are members of the IWC, Australia and New Zealand, accused Japan of breaching its obligations vis-à-vis the IWC. In 2014, the International Court of Justice ordered Japan to stop its program in the Antarctic Ocean (*Case concerning Whaling in the Antarctic (Australia* v. *Japan: New Zealand Intervening)*, 2014; Gogarty & Lawrence, 2017). Japan resumed the program in 2016, albeit with a drastic reduction of catches.

*Recent Developments at the IWC: From Whaling Management to Whale Conservation.* Since 2018, certain whale species have recovered and are no longer considered endangered. This is acknowledged by the Scientific Committee of the IWC1 for Minke Whales and Bryde's Whales2 as well as for parts of the Humpback Whales population:

In central and western areas [Humpback Whales] have recovered to perhaps pre-exploitation levels and number over 12,000 animals. Less is known of the abundance in eastern regions but almost 5,000 animals are estimated in the Norwegian and Barents Seas. They have been increasing off West Greenland…They are vulnerable to entanglement. (Intersessional Report of the International Whaling Commission, 2018, p. 15)

As a consequence, in Florianopolis, Brazil, at the 2018 IWC summit, Japan initiated a proposal to create a new committee for setting whaling quotas to make catch limits decidable again. The objective was to make commercial whaling possible again. The proposal was rejected (with 41 against the proposal, 27 pro). At the same summit, the IWC decided to change its main goals, with 40 votes in favor and 27 against. The new goals are the recovery of all whale populations to pre-industrial whaling levels and the implementation of non-lethal management of whale species:

#### NOW THEREFORE THE COMMISSION:

AGREES that the role of the International Whaling Commission in the 21st Century includes inter alia its responsibility to ensure the recovery of cetacean populations to their pre-industrial levels, and in this context REAFFIRMS the importance in maintaining the moratorium on commercial whaling;

ACKNOWLEDGES the existence of an abundance of contemporary non-lethal cetacean research methods and therefore AGREES that the use of lethal research methods is unnecessary. (IWC/67/13.Rev1,1, 2018, p. 2)

By changing IWC goals to pre-industrial levels, the key function of the metaorganization changes from whaling management to whale conservation and protection. At this point, Japan decided to leave the IWC. The pro-whaling nation then announced that it would resume commercial whaling. This exit highlights a governance failure as the IWC has lost any influence on whaling in Japanese waters. It now needs to achieve sustainable management and whale conservation without Japan, a key player and major contributor to the organization since its creation.

#### *Dynamics of Social Orders Within the Meta-organization*

*Definition of the Decided Social Order in the Meta-organization.* From this history, we identify the following key decisions circumscribing the meta-organizational decided social order:

Against the backdrop of these existing meta-organizational social orders, it becomes increasingly obvious for the involved actors that zero catch limits for certain whale species are becoming hard to justify in the internal and scientific logic of the meta-organization. The IWC has explicit goals to support the whaling industry, an implemented management tool for calculating catch limits, an evidence-based assessment that certain species are not endangered anymore, and in general is responsible for *managing* whaling – not simply forbidding it.

Hence, in the logic of the meta-organizational decided orders, there is good reason to argue for setting catch limits to other than zero again. Explicitly referring to this meta-organizational decision history, Japan finally made a fresh attempt to make catch limits re-decidable to values other than zero. By creating a new internal committee responsible for deciding on catch limits, it wanted to make catch limits manageable again. However, the proposal was rejected by the majority of the members, and the IWC stuck to the decision to leave all catch limits at zero. Moreover, the majority of the other members then pushed forward the setting of a new major goal of whale recovery to their pre-industrial levels. This brings us to the role of the member organizations, specifically of those member organizations that have repeatedly blocked all attempts by pro-whaling members to set catch limits to other than zero. In the following section, we will specifically look at the institutional orders which are effective for the anti-whaling members and guide their actions and decisions within the IWC.

*Emergence of an Institutional Order of Anti-whaling Members* The original moratorium decision in 1982 was grounded in extensive and concrete scientific justifications of whale overexploitation. At that stage, the scientific evidence took priority over commercial and economic interests which had been more present at the time of the creation of the IWC. Whaling catch limits were set to zero because all species for which the IWC was responsible were endangered and hence their potential extinction posed a severe threat to the stability of oceanic ecosystems.

The new decision to change the IWC's goals to restore all whale populations to pre-industrial levels has not been justified in a science-based way as was the case with the arguments advanced in the 1986 moratorium. On the political level, a variety of reasons have been brought up and introduced in the meta-organization over the decades. However, these consist mainly of rather abstract value-laden references such as environmental change. Accordingly, the anti-whaling members refer only to such abstract values but offer no concrete reasons for this new goal. It seems that the anti-whaling members that voted for this resolution did not see the need to justify this decision within the meta-organization or to the public. This lack of justification hints at an institutional order in the form of implicit norms relevant for the pro-whaling members that contrast with the explicit norm buttressing actual decisions.

Institutional orders are those that are taken for granted. They are assumed to be right without questioning that they are. This seems to be the case with the conviction that whaling is per se a bad thing, which is prevalent in anti-whaling countries. While in these countries there was a debate in the 1970s that featured several arguments against commercial whaling (e.g., cruel catch methods, whales' high intelligence), nowadays whaling is seen as "simply inhumane" (Normile, 2019, p. 110). For anti-whaling nations, there should be no whaling whatsoever (Bailey, 2008; Kalland, 1993), and hence, in principle no decidability on whaling catch limits. In the context of such an unquestioned implicit norm that rejects any kind of whaling, the whole idea of making collective decisions about catch limits or sustainable thresholds becomes unthinkable, since catch limits should all and always be set to zero.

The 2018 decision to change the overall goals of the IWC can be considered an act of enshrining the institutionalized "not killing whales"-norm in the IWC statutes. As outlined above, a decision implies alternatives among which one may choose, and hence, decisions require the actualization of more or less rational reasons to justify the selection of one alternative over another. The absence of any justification for the decided goal change indicates that, for the anti-whaling nations, there is no alternative to this change. The decision of the IWC to set a goal for the restoration of all whale populations to pre-industrial levels can be understood as the logical fulfillment of an underlying institutional order on the level of anti-whaling member nations.

This is in sharp contrast to the pro-whaling members of the IWC, especially Japan, Iceland, and Norway, which seek to legitimate their whaling through traditions – and hence also refer to a deeply institutionalized social order relevant for their nations. They indeed defend their right to commercial whaling to perpetuate a cultural heritage, which clearly relates to the continuation of an institutional order rather than a decided one. Even if the consumption of whale meat has decreased substantially in these countries in the past decades, there is still no general disapproval of whaling as unethical, probably due to their history of whaling (cf. Bailey, 2008). On this basis, pro-whaling nations advocate the principle that commercial whaling is not something that should per se be prohibited.

*The Clash of Social Orders in the Meta-organization.* As long as all concerned whale species were listed as endangered based on scientific evidence, the institutionalized order of the anti-whaling member organizations (i.e., whaling is to be rejected) was in line with the decided order of the meta-organization (i.e., zero catch limits). However, with the de-endangering of certain species, the institutional anti-whaling order of many members increasingly clashes with the decided orders of the IWC. To certain members, the zero catch limits increasingly appear unjustified in the evidence-based meta-organizational logic buttressed by an explicit scientific norm. To the anti-whaling nations, whaling seems by nature unacceptable, which has become a shared implicit norm, beyond the issues of climate change and depletion of stocks themselves. Fig. 1 synthesizes the evolution of institutional and decided orders in the meta-organization.

In 2018, this clash of contradictory orders finally triggered two significant attempts to change existing social orders within the IWC. First, Japan suggested that a committee be tasked with determining catch limits. Second, the anti-whaling nations conversely offered to define new goals of whale conservation. Both attempts can be interpreted as a result of the clash of social orders at the level of the meta-organization and between levels of the meta-organization and its members. Thereby, on the one hand, Japan's proposal aimed at building on the existing internal meta-organizational logic of decided orders. On the other hand, the anti-whaling proposal aimed at changing fundamental aspects of the metaorganizational order profoundly in order to ensure congruence with their existing institutional orders at the member level. Finally, the latter proposal was accepted, which induced Japan to leave the IWC.

#### *The Significance of "Decidability" and "Non-decidability" in the Meta-organization*

Setting new goals for the meta-organization from sustainable whaling to whale conservation ultimately rendered whaling "non-decidable" since there could no longer be any collective decision about new catch limits. Before 2018, IWC decision-making processes seemed to make raising catch limits possible, at least in principle, even though members always reached a roadblock. Before setting new

*Fig. 1.* Evolution of Orders in the Meta-organization.

goals, Japan had never been in favor of the IWC moratorium, and yet it submitted to this decision for decades. In contrast, for instance, to Iceland that simply ignored the moratorium, Japan accepted it and changed its whaling activities mostly in accordance with IWC regulations (which included the possibility of Scientific Whaling). Japan always wanted to change the commercial catch limits again to other than zero and for decades tried on multiple occasions to achieve that. These attempts have always been rejected. And yet, Japan remained in the IWC and accepted the moratorium.

We argue that this can be partly explained by the fact that although the catch limits have remained at zero since 1986, they still appeared to be "decidable." The decidability of whaling can be understood as a major condition for Japan to remain in the meta-organization. For instance, as already mentioned, in 1994 the IWC adopted the RMP to calculate sustainable catch limits. Moreover, contrary to common belief, whaling has never been prohibited by the IWC. Internally, the IWC simply decided to set catch limits to zero to allow whale species to recover from endangerment. This is the reason why the moratorium is indeed called a "moratorium" and not a "ban" or something similar.

However, the 2018 change of goals, which have become specifically anti-whaling as such, effectively put a new decided order (new goals) on top of the old decided order (zero catch limits) and thereby have cemented the latter and rendered it non-decidable. In other words, the once decided order of zero catch limits has been "locked" in place by the new goals, which make the catch limits virtually unchangeable. In practice, commercial whaling can be considered banned without a chance of redeciding this ban because if anyone would want to change the catch limits, they would from now on have to first challenge and change the new collective goals. Only through a collective decision to change these new goals, could the catch limits become decidable again. Hence, Japan can no longer assume the possibility of making a new decision on the catch limits since there is no decidability any longer. The consequence is that, for Japan, the newly non-decidable order has no legitimacy anymore since this order has no institutionalized grounds.

## **DISCUSSION**

Our work contributes to the debate about essential questions of how social order is achieved and maintained (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011; Luhmann, 2020; Turner, 2013). It also connects with recent debates about the intertwining and compatibility of social orders (Laamanen et al., 2020). Our paper provides a better understanding of how the layering of social orders in meta-organizations may affect their functioning and ultimately their ability to tackle grand challenges. We combine sociological theories of organization and business studies' perspectives on grand challenges with the fundamental social theory of social order.

Our study shows (1) how different kinds of social orders may clash in a metaorganization, (2) how certain meta-organizational decisions may render existing decided orders virtually unchangeable in future decisions, and (3) how such a radical transformation may affect membership inclusion.

Regarding the first point we illustrate how the decided orders on the metaorganizational level are highly contradictory to institutionalized orders of parts of the member organizations. With the decision on the moratorium, pro-whaling members' institutionalized order of approving commercial whaling stands in direct opposition to the decided order of the moratorium. Nevertheless, over decades, pro-whaling countries have continued to participate in the IWC and especially, even Japan voluntarily accepts the moratorium as a binding premise for her national policies. However, over time, other meta-organizational decided orders – i.e., especially the scientific outputs of the IWC that question the legitimacy of the zero catch limits – are increasingly at odds with the anti-whaling members' institutional orders of "not killing whales." This ultimately leads these member organizations to change the meta-organizational orders to match these to their own institutional orders. This comes at the cost of permanently cementing these orders in significant contradiction to pro-whaling members' institutional orders, leading to Japan finally leaving the IWC. We derive from this insight the following proposition:

*P1:* In a meta-organization that features joint decision-making, meta-organizational decided orders can be accepted by member organizations for long periods even if the members feature fundamentally contradictory institutional orders, as long as the meta-organizational orders remain in principle changeable by decision, i.e., decidable.

In that regard, we define decidability as a parameter of social orders, describing the possibility of successfully reaching collective decisions about an object that belongs to the collective's mandate, at the meta-organizational level. In other words, by decidability, we do not mean that a meta-organization needs to constantly achieve consensus about something, but only that a decision can be in principle made by the collective about certain issues within the parameter of its mandate.

Correspondingly, non-decidability describes the inability of a meta-organization to reach collective decisions about its own mandate. In the case of the IWC, recovering pre-industrial levels of whale stocks means concretely that commercial whaling can no longer be the object of meta-organizational decisions. So, as we have also seen, meta-organizational orders might also be changed in cases in which they contradict member organizations' institutional orders while some member organizations hold a majority.

*P2:* If a majority of member organizations see a "clash" between their institutional orders and the meta-organizational decided orders, they might abruptly change the meta-organizational orders through majority decisions to match the institutional orders.

As we have seen, this abrupt change of the meta-organizational order can take rather extreme forms. In our case the majority of anti-whaling members introduced the new overarching goal to restore all cetacean populations to preindustrial levels, which provided an entirely new rationale for the existing moratorium on commercial whaling. We argue that this new goal factually "locked" the decided order of zero catch limits in place. In more formalized terms, order A (the rule that all whaling quotas are set to zero) is fixed permanently in place and can from now on only be changed if the new order B (the new organizational goal of restoring whale populations to pre-industrial levels) is changed beforehand – hence, only by removing the obstacle that "locks" order A. Hence, we derive our next proposition:

*P3:* In a meta-organization that features joint decision making, a certain decidable social order A can be made non-decidable by changing or creating another decided order B as a premise for A that no longer allows a decision on A.

We argue that maintaining decidability can be an organizational condition of governance success. Here, we understand governance success not only as concrete outcomes, e.g., restored whale stocks, but also as retaining members in the meta-organization and implementing and following collectively decided rules at the meta-organizational level. When there is no shared consensus among members but the meta-organization maintains decidability about an issue, members can voice their dissent but they may remain loyal to the meta-organizational decided order, in Hirschman's (1970) terms. In these cases, the acceptance of decided orders is maintained through inclusive decision-making, even if the decision outcome might not be what the participating actors desired (March, 1994, pp. 167–168).

Non-decidability, however, may lead to dissident members' exits, because these members now do not have even a remote possibility any longer of adjusting the meta-organizational order to their own institutional order. For them, the contradiction between orders suddenly becomes permanent and indefinitely insoluble. From a membership composition perspective, homogenization of members can be achieved by creating non-decidability, which leads to either the exit of misaligned members or the conversion of the remaining members.

Therefore, we argue that the abrupt emergence of the non-decidability of meta-organizational social orders can have a negative impact on membership, and ultimately on governance success:

*P4:* The non-decidability of a meta-organizational decided order that strongly contradicts the institutional orders of a member organization, may motivate a member organization to leave the meta-organization, because of the factual impossibility of eventually resolving the contradiction.

Our work complements recent works in communication and political science literature that have analyzed drivers of Japan's withdrawal from an economic or international relations perspective (Holm, 2019; Kojima, 2019; Yuya, 2019). These media analyses and some political science literature offer valuable insights into some factors which probably have contributed to Japan's withdrawal and the IWC's recent governance failure. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has focused on the significance of social orders in these matters. By investigating whether and how meta-organizations might cope with the emergence of contradictory social orders, we argue that the sudden establishment of non-decidability, may constitute a key challenge for governance success and membership loyalty.

In that same line, these results finally complement recent works on grand challenges (Arciniegas Pradilla et al., 2022; Eisenhardt, Graebner, & Sonenshein, 2016; Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016; Kaufmann & Danner-Schröder, 2022) by highlighting the relevance, importance and difficulties of maintaining decided social orders for governance. In that perspective, we more specifically contribute to the meta-organizational literature. Recent works have emphasized the value of meta-organizations as an innovative mode of organization to collectively tackle grand challenges at a meta-level (Berkowitz, 2018; Chaudhury et al., 2016). In particular, the literature has highlighted the significance of multi-stakeholder membership to jointly design solutions, i.e., by gathering members with different or even contradictory views that, however, bring the diverse expertise needed to address the complexity of grand challenges (Berkowitz et al., 2020; Carmagnac & Carbone, 2019). This, however, complexifies not only decision-making but also the creation and maintenance of social orders. Little work had examined the effects of the "layering" of organization in meta-organizations closely (Grothe-Hammer et al., 2022), especially on the collective's ability to govern grand challenges. Layering organization implies both multiple decision processes and multiple social orders that may interfere with each other. We contribute to this issue by showing the significance of decidability of social order as a boundary condition for meta-organizational governance of grand challenges. While contradictory, institutional, and decided social orders may coexist, their layering would not prevent governance as long as the premise for collective action remains decidable.

Here the main limit of our findings lies in the specificities of the single case study of an international meta-organization, with countries and scientific representatives as members. We believe our results can apply to other settings, such as meta-organizations with even more diversified membership, or on the contrary homogeneous meta-organizations, tackling other types of grand challenges, and at different levels of action, whether local, regional, national, or international. However, our assumptions need further testing in these various settings, which provide many new research perspectives. Future research could fruitfully investigate whether and how decidability is easier to maintain depending on the degree of membership's cohesiveness, or of the specificity of the challenge (Berkowitz et al., 2017). One major effect of non-decidability was membership exit. It could prove interesting to further investigate whether the locking of a social order can be solved or bypassed through other means, for instance by drawing on other elements of organizationality, relative to decision-making, actorhood, or identity construction at the level of the meta-organization (Grothe-Hammer et al., 2022).

## **NOTES**

1. It is noteworthy that the Scientific Committee had acknowledged this in general since the early 1990s but only to a very limited degree. In 1993, the Chairman of the IWC Scientific Committee even resigned in protest against the IWC's refusal to resume commercial whaling (Bailey, 2008).

2. https://iwc.int/status

## **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

Both authors contributed equally to this paper. The authors are grateful for the valuable guidance from Emilio Marti and the anonymous reviewer, for the helpful comments on past versions from participants of the autumn conference of the German section on organizational sociology in Lucerne 2019, the weekly "kakelunsj" meeting of the Department of Sociology and Political Science (ISS) of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, in April 2020, the IBEI research seminar and the ESADEGeo seminar in Barcelona in 2020, the LERASS seminar "Axe Usages sociaux du langage" in Toulouse in 2021.

## **REFERENCES**

Reeves, R. R. (2002). The origins and character of 'aboriginal subsistence' whaling: A global review. *Mammal Review*, *32*(2), 71–106.

Vernazzani, B. G., Burkhardt-Holm, P., Cabrera, E., Iñíguez, M., Luna, F., Parsons, E. C. M., … Stachowitsch, M. (2017). Management and conservation at the International Whaling Commission: A dichotomy sandwiched within a shifting baseline. *Marine Policy*, *83*, 164–171.

# COMMITMENT TO GRAND CHALLENGES IN FLUID FORMS OF ORGANIZING: THE ROLE OF NARRATIVES' TEMPORALITY

Iben Sandal Stjerne, Matthias Wenzel and Silviya Svejenova

## **ABSTRACT**

*Organization and management scholars are increasingly interested in understanding how "fluid" forms of organizing contribute to the tackling of grand challenges. These forms are fluid in that they bring together a dynamic range of actors with diverse purposes, expertise, and interests in a temporary and nonbinding way. Fluid forms of organizing enable flexible participation. Yet, they struggle to gain and sustain commitment. In this case study of the SDG2 Advocacy Hub, which supports the achievement of zero hunger by 2030, we explore how the temporality of narratives contributes to actors' commitment to tackling grand challenges in fluid forms of organizing. In our analysis, we identify three types of narratives – universal, situated, and bridging – and discern their different temporal horizons and temporal directions. In doing so, our study sheds light on the contributions by the temporality of narratives to fostering commitment to tackling grand challenges in fluid forms of organizing. It suggests the importance of considering "multitemporality," i.e., the plurality of connected temporalities, rather than foregrounding either the present or the future.*

**Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges**

**Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 79, 139–160**

**Copyright © 2022 Iben Sandal Stjerne, Matthias Wenzel and Silviya Svejenova. Published by**

**this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons. org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode**

**ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X20220000079012**

**Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of**

**Keywords:** Grand challenges; fluid forms of organizing; commitment; narratives; temporality; food

## **INTRODUCTION**

Organization and management scholars are increasingly interested in gaining an understanding of "grand challenges," defined as multidisciplinary "barrier(s) that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem with a high likelihood of global impact through widespread implementation" (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016, p. 1881). Such interest also involves the generation of insights on how the tackling of grand challenges is organized and managed across organizational boundaries, with what challenges, and with what effects. One example is the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2015, which constitute "a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030" (UN, 2020a). What makes achieving SDGs such as "zero hunger" (SDG2), "decent work and economic growth" (SDG8), and "responsible consumption and production" (SDG12) grand challenges is their large-scale, complex, and intractable nature. The tackling of grand challenges, therefore, requires actors with different expertise and goals to commit to finding ways forward together (Mair, Wolf, & Seelos, 2016). As the UN (2020b) affirms, "to make the 2030 Agenda a reality, broad ownership of the SDGs must translate into a strong commitment."

Promoting and sustaining commitment to tackling grand challenges is a complex organizational problem (see Kanter, 1968), as it involves transcending organizational, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries (George et al., 2016; Grodal & O'Mahony, 2017). Enabling commitment is particularly challenging in contexts involving fluid forms of organizing due to their flexible, open, and boundaryspanning nature "based on relentlessly changing templates, quick improvisation, and ad hoc responses" (Schreyögg & Sydow, 2010, p. 1251). Although fluid forms of organizing enable diverse actors to participate in tackling important issues (Seidl & Werle, 2018), such issues are often detached from actors' core tasks (du Gay, 2005) and everyday work (e.g., Brès, Raufflet, & Boghossian, 2018) in their respective organizations, which is where commitments to the future must be made to successfully tackle grand challenges.

Examining narratives and storytelling constitutes one promising approach to understanding how commitment to tackling grand challenges can be achieved in contexts involving fluid forms of organizing. As prior research shows, narratives enable actors to find joint ways forward amid divergent understandings, expertise, and interests (e.g., Chreim, 2005; Cunliffe, Luhman, & Boje, 2004; Hernes, Hendrup, & Schäffner, 2015), especially with regard to sustainability initiatives (Haack, Schoeneborn, & Wickert, 2012). Narratives bring together actors' different experiences and interpretations of the past, present, and future, thus contributing to strong bonds between actors within present actions (Hernes & Schultz, 2020). Yet, despite the recognized importance of narratives in driving actors' commitment to tackling important large-scale issues, we know little about the types of narratives involved in this process or the roles of different temporalities therein. Hence, the guiding question of our study is: *How does the temporality of narratives contribute to actors' commitment to tackling grand challenges in contexts involving fluid forms of organizing?*

## **THEORETICAL BACKGROUND**

#### *Grand Challenges*

Grand challenges have been a topic of academic debate for at least a century. The original aim was to spur interest in "solving" particular problems to generate breakthrough insights within specific disciplines of the natural sciences (George et al., 2016; Howard-Grenville, 2020). Organization and management scholars have begun to focus on grand challenges rather recently (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015; Gehman, Etzion, & Ferraro, 2022; George et al., 2016; Gümüsay, Claus, & Amis, 2020). In contrast to earlier literature, the emergent organizational literature highlights that it is difficult, if not impossible to "solve" grand challenges as if they were mathematical problems with unambiguous solutions. grand challenges are "seemingly 'intractable puzzles'" (Howard-Grenville, 2020, p. 3) for at least two reasons.

First, although varying definitions of grand challenges exist, organization and management scholars generally view grand challenges as large-scale, complex, and intractable societal problems (e.g., Ferraro et al., 2015; Mair et al., 2016). As such, grand challenges "'resist' easy fixes" (Porter, Tuertscher, & Huysman, 2020, p. 248) on a local scale and "lack a clear solution" (Grodal & O'Mahony, 2017, p. 1801) that would ensure their complete disappearance. Therefore, involved actors must sustain their commitment (George et al., 2016) to "tackling" grand challenges on a continuous basis in order to counteract repercussions that may emerge along the way.

Second, the large-scale, complex, and intractable nature of grand challenges emerges partly because these problems typically affect and are produced by multiple groups of actors with heterogeneous interests (Mair et al., 2016). This plurality implies that grand challenges defy unidimensional and unilateral approaches, and "require collaborations across multiple parties" (Schad & Smith, 2019, p. 56). Such collaborations involve "working across [organizational] boundaries" (Martí, 2018, p. 969), bringing together actors with different backgrounds, expertise, and interests, and enabling the creation of shared understandings of a specific grand challenge (Seidl & Werle, 2018). Such shared understandings enable actors to envision, articulate, and potentially commit to joint paths forward because they "build on and apply knowledge generated in multiple disciplines" (Mair et al., 2016, p. 2023).

The multidisciplinary, heterogeneous, and boundary-spanning nature of tackling grand challenges raises questions about how such efforts can be organized effectively and how commitment to shared courses of action can be achieved (Kaufmann & Danner-Schröder, 2022). Conventional forms of organizing, characterized by hierarchical and entrenched structures and processes, and guided by self-referential strategic goals (see Puranam, Alexy, & Reitzig, 2014) are potentially unproductive for tackling grand challenges due to two interdependent reasons. First, these forms of organizing are partly responsible for producing and sustaining grand challenges, as they often continue to rely on unsustainable managerial and organizational practices (George et al., 2016). Second, the primacy of self-referential strategic goals that permeate conventional forms of organizing implies that it is difficult, if not impossible to engage in and generate commitment to shared interests and boundary-spanning activities if such activities do not contribute to achieving these goals (Grodal & O'Mahony, 2017).

#### *Fluid Forms of Organizing*

A recent yet growing literature delves into the nature, dynamics, and possibilities of fluid forms of organizing, shedding light on promising alternatives for organizing multidisciplinary, heterogeneous, and boundary-spanning efforts directed toward tackling grand challenges. Fluid forms of organizing circumscribe ways of coordinating activities that have been loosely referred to as "new" (Palmer, Benveniste, & Dunford, 2007), "postbureaucratic" (Ashcraft, 2005), and "unconventional" (Brès et al., 2018), among others. The identified array of and notions associated with such forms of organizing are broad. Among others, these forms of organizing relate to the coordination of activities in social collectives that defy common definitions of "organization," such as hacker collectives (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015), digital work platforms (Gegenhuber, Ellmer, & Schüßler, 2021; Gegenhuber, Schüßler, Reischauer, & Thäter, 2022), terrorist groups (Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012), and grassroots initiatives (Daskalaki, Fotaki, & Sotiropoulou, 2019).

Despite their empirical plurality and diverse labels, fluid forms of organizing have a shared conceptual core that sets them apart from conventional forms of organizing. Specifically, whereas fluid forms of organizing may partly involve governance structures and/or roles, the majority of their participants or contributors are not bound to them through formal commitment mechanisms, such as contracts or hierarchies (Brès et al., 2018). This conceptual core of fluid forms of organizing manifests in at least four important ways.

First, unlike the rigid, entrenched, hierarchy-based nature of conventional forms of organizing, fluid forms of organizing are more flexible in character (Schreyögg & Sydow, 2010). This flexibility is carried out by more distributed ways of coordinating work that are rarely aligned with hierarchy-based coordination and control. Hence, instead of focusing attention on formal position and status, fluid forms of organizing typically put actors' expertise in the coordination of activities center stage (Kornberger, 2017).

Second, fluid forms of organizing typically transcend organizational boundaries. This is enabled by greater openness (Dobusch, Dobusch, & Müller-Seitz, 2019). That is, fluid forms of organizing typically allow actors to participate even if they are not formal members (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015). In doing so, they provide the means for bringing together actors with different disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, even across organizational boundaries, to accomplish common goals and objectives.

Third, fluid forms of organizing are not bound exclusively to the achievement of unidimensional, self-referential goals and objectives. Instead, they are often driven by social (Arciniegas Pradilla, Bento da Silva, & Reinecke, 2022), religious (Gümüsay, 2015), and ecological purposes (Schüßler, Rüling, & Wittneben, 2014), among others, many of which extend beyond the realms of conventional organizations. This does not mean that goals and objectives pursued through fluid forms of organizing may not partly be self-referential, especially when oriented toward achieving greater flexibility for the production and distribution of innovations (e.g., Carroll & Morris, 2015). However, the flexibility and openness of fluid forms of organizing imply that actors can pursue various interests, many of which extend beyond those driven by their organizations' specific strategic goals.

Fourth, in contrast to their conventional counterparts, fluid forms of organizing at best incentivize, but do not obligate participants to contribute to collective activities. Hence, organizational fluidity also comes into being through the nonbinding nature of actors' participation (Schreyögg & Sydow, 2010). Thus, the ongoing renewal of actors' commitment becomes a critical coordination task when fluid forms of organizing dominate.

#### *Enabling Commitment Through Narratives*

In tackling grand challenges, fluid forms of organizing experience a tension. On one hand, they can make important contributions to coordinating activities aimed at tackling grand challenges. In contrast to conventional forms of organizing, fluidity makes it possible to cross organizational boundaries to bring together a shifting heterogeneous set of actors with different areas of disciplinary expertise and varied interests. This fluid coming together enables ongoing collective sensemaking of what grand challenges mean and what addressing them entails, and the envisioning of joint courses of action.

On the other hand, fluid forms of organizing may partially undermine efforts to tackle grand challenges. In contrast to conventional forms of organizing, actors' participation in activities coordinated via fluid forms of organizing is nonbinding. Tackling grand challenges, however, is a process that requires ongoing commitment from actors to participate in finding and maintaining sustainable ways forward. Fluid forms of organizing thus face an important difficulty in enabling and sustaining commitment among actors with diverse interests and flexible participation.

Commitment is defined as "the willingness of social actors to give their energy and loyalty to social systems" and as a "process through which individual interests become attached to the carrying out of socially organized patterns of behavior which are seen as fulfilling those interests" (Kanter, 1968, p. 499). Commitment to collective action involves engagement in consistent lines of activity (Becker, 1960). In the context of voluntary associations, commitment has been found to increase with communication and involvement in decision-making (Knoke, 1981). As Salancik (1977, p. 63) explained,

behavior is what is being committed, because behavior is a visible indicator of what we are and what we intend to do. Our behavior leads to expectations about what we will do in the future.

As prior research shows, narratives play an important role in gaining and sustaining such commitment (e.g., Barry & Elmes, 1997; Hernes et al., 2015; Sonenshein, 2010), especially when implementing sustainability initiatives (Arciniegas Pradilla et al., 2022; Haack et al., 2012; Kroeger, Siebold, Günzel-Jensen, Saade, & Heikkilä, 2022; Schoeneborn, Vásques, & Cornelissen, 2022). Narratives are "temporal, discursive constructions that provide a means for individual, social, and organizational sensemaking and sensegiving" (Vaara, Sonenshein, & Boje, 2016, p. 496). They support the gaining and sustaining of commitment due to their built-in temporality, i.e., their often implicit references to and connections between the past, present, and future (Polletta, 1998). The temporal orientation of narratives enables actors to construct interpretations (Meretoja, 2017) and joint paths forward amid plural understandings and interests (e.g., Chreim, 2005; Cunliffe et al., 2004; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013), thereby enabling them to "respond to questions pertaining to the very meaning of acting together" (Hernes et al., 2015, p. 127).

In the collective meaning-making processes underlying sustainability initiatives, narratives foregrounding the future are often essential for generating commitment, yet are worked with in different ways (Wenzel, Krämer, Koch, & Reckwitz, 2020). Specifically, actors may shorten the time horizons by referring to the present and near future; or they may reach out into the distant future (Hernes & Schultz, 2020). Relatedly, actors may formulate and project a shared future goal that guides, motivates, and legitimizes action in the present, or they may work toward a shared future goal (Crilly, 2017). The main difference between these approaches is, again, temporal in nature. That is, narratives make connections in two directions: backward, thereby linking the future with concerns of the present; and forward, thereby linking the present with projections of the future. As Reinecke and Ansari (2015) showed, such temporalities collide at times, and suggested the notion of "ambitemporality" to denote actors' efforts to work through conflicts between temporalities.

Actors make sense of these temporal dynamics through storytelling activities in the present (Hernes & Schultz, 2020). Yet, despite the importance of these dynamics in sustainability initiatives in particular, and in organizing more generally (e.g., Haack et al., 2012; Hernes et al., 2015), we still know little about the role that the temporality of narratives plays in fostering actors' commitment in fluid forms of organizing. Thus, the guiding question for our paper is: *How does the temporality of narratives contribute to actors' commitment to tackling grand challenges in fluid forms of organizing?*

## **METHODS**

The setting for our case study was the SDG2 Advocacy Hub, which seeks to bring together and amplify the work of diverse key actors such as NGO representatives, advocacy groups, civil society, private sector, and UN agencies to support the achievement of zero hunger by 2030. The hub provides a platform that enables actors to meet, share expertise and ideas, and collaborate on campaigns. In this sense, the SDG2 Advocacy Hub is characterized as a fluid form of organizing given the characteristics elaborated above: (1) with only three permanent employees, a lack of hierarchy-based forms of governance and control, and a reliance on distributed ways of coordinating work, the hub is flexible in nature; (2) the bulk of actors involved as "hub members" work for and are driven by goals and interests of other organizations; (3) in doing so, these actors engage in jointly pursuing a plurality of goals and interests; and (4) engagement in the hub's activities is voluntary and nonbinding, thus requiring continual efforts to gain and sustain the hub members' commitment. Finding ways to gain and sustain these diverse actors' commitment to tackling the food challenge is a difficult task. Therefore, according to a "new game plan" (Hub Website, July 2020), the main task of the hub was to build commitment to tackling SDG2.

Our interest in the role of the temporality of narratives arose in the field. Specifically, we were intrigued by the observation that, despite the flexibility and nonbinding nature of the hub's activities, the hub members displayed continuity concerning their participation in these activities. Among others, this manifested in many hub members' reappearance in the hub's monthly meetings with active contributions to tackling SDG2 as joint overarching interest. Thus, they displayed commitment in Kanter's (1968, p. 499) sense, namely, as "socially organized pattern […] of behavior which [is] seen as fulfilling those interests." Importantly, the hub's members focused almost exclusively on creating, sharing, and disseminating future-oriented narratives that sought to ensure and amplify diverse actors' commitment. Given the lack of plausible rival explanations, we became interested in the activities of the SDG2 Advocacy Hub as a revelatory case that renders salient the role of the temporality of narratives in gaining and sustaining actors' commitment to tackling grand challenges.

#### *Background: SDG2 "Zero Hunger" – For a Better Food Future*

As part of a broader vision to create "peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future" (UN, 2020b), one of the key goals that the UN member states aim to achieve by 2030 is SDG2: Zero Hunger. The aim is to "end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture" by (UN, 2020c): (2.1) providing safe, nutritious, and sufficient food for all people on a continuous basis; (2.2) ending all forms of malnutrition; (2.3) doubling agricultural productivity and income of small-scale food producers; (2.4) ensuring sustainable food production systems and implementing resilient agricultural practices; and (2.5) maintaining genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, and farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species. Each of these five targets is addressed by different sets of actors from diverse organizations, including: advocates from humanitarian aid organizations (SDG2.1); representatives from the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), Harvest Plus, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Power of Nutrition, and other nutrition-oriented foundations (SDG2.2); members of research collectives on agriculture, humanitarian aid, and CEO sustainability, and representatives of various foundations (SDGs 2.3 and 2.4); and policymakers who regulate food systems such as the EAT Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health; The Food Forever Initiative; and Integrated Seed Sector Development (SDG2.5).

#### *Setting: SDG2 Advocacy Hub*

The origins of the SDG2 Advocacy Hub date back to 2016 when several service firms explored the viability of a hub for addressing issues of hunger in informal back-and-forth dialogues. They secured funding for a research report which, together with a landscape analysis, was developed in consultancy with What World Strategies and Vision Campaign Works, two experienced professional service firms specialized in designing and driving policy campaigns. Because this report was commissioned as "a project for" the UN branch organization World Food Program (WFP), we refer to it as the WFP report in the remainder of the text. The 2016 WFP report revealed an overcrowded hunger and nutrition sector, with over 20 global networks already in place and little space for additional initiatives organized through conventional workshops and meetings; the report also highlighted a need for a new approach, quoting one interviewee as saying: "Please no, not another workshop!"

In the recollections of the Director of the SDG2 Hub Secretariat, establishing the hub was "like setting up a start-up" and in 2017, it involved incubation at the WFP. By the nature of its mandate on food, the WFP agreed to hold the hub

in trust for a bigger group of people, which represented civil society, private sector, UN, … because you need to have some organizing entity to start with … especially if donor funds are involved. (interview)

The WFP provided some initial funding to manage the SDG2 Advocacy Hub, but subsequent funding sources remained anonymous, as part of the hub's strategy was to remain unbranded in order to provide "neutral ground" for engagement of diverse actors. The hub leader, who worked as a consultant to the WFP communications team during the incubation period, began coordinating digital and public engagement for SDG2 advocacy. In 2018, the SDG2 Advocacy Hub became an independent entity managed by its own secretariat and a governance body with advisory competences on strategy and resource allocation, referred to as "the Bridge." Currently, the Bridge consists of 12 organizations, including WFP, EAT, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Save the Children, etc., and takes a long-term view of advocacy, working with a 10-year time horizon. Importantly, the hub director does not have formal power to obtain and sustain relevant actors' commitment; he needs to persuade and inspire additional actors to participate in an initiative that is worth realizing.

#### *Data Collection*

During a one-year study of the SDG2 Advocacy Hub's initiatives, we collected data through participant-observation of live and online events, as well as from relevant documents.

**Participant-observation**. Our primary data source consisted of observations recorded while participating in events organized by the SDG2 Advocacy Hub. The hub leader and the so-called "SDG2 hub advocates," i.e., members who, by signing up, implicitly agreed to support and amplify actions toward achieving SDG2 goals in their respective fields, initiated these events to bring together different organizational agendas in order to create a shared narrative for SDG2 and formulate a strategy for the year to come. In August 2018, the first and third authors of this paper negotiated field access by participating in an event related to SDG2.5. We conducted an interview with the hub leader, which was recorded. In this interview, we asked to follow other important events. Among others, he recommended that we participate in an SDG2 strategy event in Washington, DC in the spring of 2019 to gain insights into how the hub is organized.

The first author participated in the Washington, DC event as well as other key events suggested in the interview. In addition, she participated in follow-up events in 2019 to develop strategies based on agreements negotiated during live events. Observations were recorded in extensive field notes, which detailed actors' conversations and behaviors throughout the events, as well as impressions formed during informal interviews with advocates during breaks. In these nine recorded interviews, she asked about their backgrounds, why they were part of the hub, what they gained from it, and what they thought about the event in which they were participating. Through these informal interviews, we gained an in-depth understanding of participants' expertise and interests, the hub's challenges and opportunities, and, most importantly, the ways in which the hub leader fostered participants' commitment to tackle the grand challenge despite the fluid, nonbinding nature of this form of organizing. Overall, we collected detailed field notes from five live events and four online events, amounting to 10 full days of participant-observation.

**Documents**. We supplemented our participant-observation data with documents from SDG2 and the hub websites. These documents included reports detailing initiatives and successes, videos from global meetings, SDG2 promotion materials, invitations, and pictures. In addition, we collected the hub's newsletters, promotion videos, meeting notes, and initiative statements. From February 2019 to February 2020, we also downloaded the hub's online calendar, which was shared with all actors to coordinate their activities. Overall, we gathered 172 documents.

#### *Data Analysis*

We simultaneously engaged in data collection and analysis, following an abductive process of shifting back and forth between data and theory. At the first event we attended, the underlying politics of participants representing different interests attracted our attention. This initial point of access led us to note differences between participants' behaviors. Whereas the hub leader's speeches seemed rehearsed and the materials that were distributed seemed professional, other participants voiced a desire to enact change in presentations that were relatively unrefined. As a result, several themes stood out in this initial phase: the "advocacy hub" itself and how it was organized, hunger issues, as well as "the need to fix the broken food system," "amplify change," and the hub's motto "act now."

Participating in the event in Washington, DC enabled us to develop additional insights into the hub's political realities as well as the broader context and complexity of SDG2. The most prominent theme that emerged when analyzing field notes and documents was the importance of advocacy, narratives, and communicative spaces, and the need to unite the diverse actors operating in the SDG2 field. Given the prevalence of narratives, we decided to explore these further. Revisiting prior literature (Vaara et al., 2016), we came to appreciate the temporal aspects inherent in narratives. Overall, "the intertwinement of the past, present, and future – in different forms – is germane to all narratives" (Meretoja, 2017, p. 50). Of particular relevance for change-directed collective efforts, such as mobilization for tackling grand challenges, is their "temporally configurative capacity … to integrate past, present, and future events" (Polletta, 1998, p. 139). Examining the narratives and their underlying temporalities, we identified three main types of narratives – universal, situated, and bridging – that differed in terms of their temporal horizon and direction.