In this article, we theorize a novel approach to addressing the world’s grand challenges based on the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism and the sociological concept of robust action. Grounded in prior empirical organizational research, we identify three robust strategies that organizations can employ in tackling issues such as climate change and poverty alleviation: participatory architecture, multivocal inscriptions and distributed experimentation. We demonstrate how these strategies operate, the manner in which they are linked, the outcomes they generate, and why they are applicable for resolving grand challenges. We conclude by discussing our contributions to research on robust action and grand challenges, as well as some implications for research on stakeholder theory, institutional theory and theories of valuation

Social science theories can become self-fulfilling by shaping institutional designs and management practices, as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. They also perpetuate themselves by promulgating language and assumptions that become widely used and accepted. We illustrate these ideas by considering how the language and assumptions of economics shape management practices: theories can "win" in the marketplace for ideas, independent of their empirical validity, to the extent their assumptions and language become taken for granted and normatively valued, therefore creating conditions that make them come "true." The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood (Keynes, 1936: 383). We thank Elizabeth Mannix and three anonymous reviewers for excellent feedback and guidance throughout the review process. We also gratefully acknowledge helpful comments by

Little is known about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. In a multimethod study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members settled on a shared conception of authority, it was more expansive than their original design. A statistical test of the predictors of leadership reinforced this finding. By blending bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms, the governance system evolved with the community's changing conceptions of authority.

We study institutional entrepreneurship in an emergent field by analyzing the case of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its efforts to purposefully institutionalize the practice of sustainability reporting. We suggest that analogies affect institutionalization processes through two mechanisms. In early stages of institutionalization, analogy operates primarily as a normative mechanism and adoption is driven mainly by an instrumental logic. This emphasis on similarity to existing institutions stresses conformity and promotes legitimacy. Yet, analogies can also have a cognitive effect on institutional design, especially once initial acceptance from the environment has been secured, by directing attention towards incongruences between the emergent institution and its analogical source. Institutional entrepreneurship can spur innovation and departure from existing institutions by highlighting limitations of the analogical source and providing a compelling value-rational argument underscoring the worth of the new institution. This theoretical contribution helps explain how analogies to existing institutional practices can both provide legitimacy to novel institutions and constitute the basis for a creative process of institutional design.3 Institutional entrepreneurship is a delicate balancing act between two conflicting tasks. On the one hand institutional entrepreneurs must disguise the radical nature of their enterprise in order to engage supporters and evade the wrath of incumbents, while on the other they cannot adhere too closely to existing practices, for by doing so, they will not be able to further any meaningful change (Aldrich and Fiol 1994). Institutional entrepreneurs need to become skilled cultural operatives, fashioning stories in order to attract resources. In this work it is essential to "balance the need for legitimacy by abiding by societal norms about what is appropriate with efforts to create unique identities that may differentiate and is relatively well-studied. However, the role of analogy in shaping institutional design has not been explored in depth. Tropes like simile, analogy and metaphor can help gather political support and legitimacy, but they also lead to analytical closure (Oswick, Keenoy and Grant 2002). Remaining within the confines of a clearly defined analogy cannot lead to evolution to profoundly different institutions (Hoffman and Ventresca 1999). Furthermore, the analogy cannot be discarded at later stages (Ocasio and Joseph 2005) when deeper institutional change is being advocated, as cognitive lock-in has already limited external constituents' receptivity to alternative scenarios. How, then, do analogies shape the construction and evolution of proto-institutions? 4In this article we address the role of analogies in institutional change by presenting a longitudinal case-study of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its strategies to promote and institutionalize sustainability reporting practices. GRI, a non-profit organization headquartered in Amsterdam, ...

Social science theories can become self-fulfilling because they shape institutional designs and management practices as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior they predict. Social theories also perpetuate themselves to the extent that they promulgate language and assumptions that become widely used and accepted. Language and assumptions affect what people see and think about and what alternative organizational arrangements they consider implementing. We illustrate these ideas by considering how the language and assumptions of economics shape management practices. We argue that theories can "win" in the marketplace for ideas independently of their empirical validity to the extent that their assumptions and language become taken for granted, normatively valued, and therefore, create conditions that make the theories come "true."

Socially responsible investing (SRI) is gaining traction in the financial sector, but it is unclear whether the dominant financial logic complements or competes with the social logic in the founding of SRI funds. Based on insights we gained from observation at an Asian SRI industry association, interviews with SRI professionals in the U.S. and Europe, and other fieldwork, we questioned explanations for SRI's conflicted relationship with the financial logic. Our observations prompted us to build a panel database of SRI fund foundings from 1970 to 2014 in 19 countries so that we could examine how a dominant logic interacts with alternative logics to promote or stifle institutional change. We decomposed the financial logic into interdependent dimensions as the provider of means (resources, practices, and knowledge) for novel financial ventures to be founded and the enforcer of profit-maximizing ends that constrain such foundings. Our theory suggests a paradoxical role for the financial logic, which explains an intriguing empirical finding: the founding of SRI funds has a curvilinear, inverted-U-shaped relationship with the prevalence of the financial logic. We propose and find that the relationship between the dominant financial logic and the social logic of SRI shifts from complementary to competing as the financial logic becomes more prevalent in society and its profit-maximizing end becomes taken for granted. We examined how certain alternative logicsthose of unions, religion, and green political parties-moderate these effects. Our results shed light on how and to what extent institutional change can occur in fields in which one institutional logic is dominant. They also reveal countrylevel institutional factors that drive SRI.

a b s t r a c tShifting to dramatically more sustainable systems is an unconventional or wicked problem, encompassing multiple actors, disciplines, and values. Yet to date, sustainability initiatives have been tackled primarily by means of conventional managerial approaches. We contend that these approaches are illsuited for achieving sustainability transformations. We propose an alternative approach founded upon the sociological concept of robust action. In robust action, leaders embrace ambiguity (rather than striving for clarity), focus on short-term accomplishments (rather than long-term goals), and are satisfied with oblique movement (rather than linear progress). We elaborate on three robust strategiesdparticipatory architecture, multivocal inscription and distributed experimentationdand investigate their effectiveness in three sustainability related contexts: wind power, sustainability reporting and microcredit. We conclude by discussing the applicability of robust action to other contexts, and the complementarities between robust action and other forms of leadership towards sustainability.

This study investigates the effects of high-status inbound mobility on the performance of incumbents. Leveraging sociological theory on status, we suggest that highstatus newcomers generate only limited knowledge spillovers compared to the resources they drain from incumbents. Building on this mechanism, we formulate our first hypothesis that hiring stars negatively affects incumbents' performance. We argue that this effect is asymmetric across incumbents. Because high-status incumbents can better cope with the shock in the internal allocation of resources produced by high-status newcomers, we expect that they will experience a lower performance decline than low-status incumbents. We test our hypotheses by studying the change in recommendation profitability of incumbent securities analysts experiencing inbound mobility events in the period 1996-2007. Our results show that the higher the status of the hired analyst, as captured by the Institutional Investor ranking history, the greater the decline in the incumbent analyst's recommendation profitability, and that this decline is moderated by the status of the incumbent analyst.