Enacting a Grand Challenge for Business and Society: Theorizing Issue Maturation in the Media-Based Public Discourse on COVID-19 in Three National Contexts
研究了COVID-19在瑞士、德国和英国媒体公共话语中如何被初步建构为重大挑战，识别出三种机制解释议题成熟过程，并揭示话语质量差异的影响。
While today it is universally acknowledged that COVID-19 has generated immense challenges for businesses and societies worldwide, public perceptions varied significantly at the time of the pandemic's initial appearance, even among democratic societies with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal challenges in management and organization studies, however, tends to neglect the initial social construction of issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, and widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring the initial communicative enactment of COVID-19 in the media-based public discourse in Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. By applying a social problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms that explain the maturation of COVID-19 into a grand challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent on differences in discourse quality. We add to research on grand challenges, issue maturation, and framing dynamics by theorizing how issues become constructed and acknowledged as grand challenges in the first place.