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PDW on "Foregrounding context in researching organisations and grand challenges" (session 606, Sunday, 9 August)

Grand challenges have a global reach, but they instantiate in local and national contexts. Yet, in our quest to generate universal, theoretical knowledge, we may overlook the role of such social-ecological and institutional contexts. Without a deep appreciation and knowledge of context, we may also impose our own assumptions that are based on not only our scholarly training, but also our embeddedness in our own lifeworld contexts. This PDW calls for greater explicit attention to context to improve the validity of our arguments and to challenge taken-for granted assumptions. Our guiding questions:

• How do we ensure that context is appropriately addressed in theorizing organizational responses to grand challenges, especially by problematizing our assumptions and theories?
• How do we maintain authenticity in studying contexts very different to our own?
• How can dialogue and collaboration between researchers across contexts help further such contextual reflexivity?

This is an asynchronous session and we invite you to contribute via the ongoing chat.
 
Organizers and panelists:

Andrea Prado (Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at INCAE Business School)

Anil Gupta (Professor in the Centre for Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad)

Maoliang Bu (Associate Professor at Nanjing University and Visiting Professor at Ivey Business School)
Ralph Hamann (Professor at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business)
Stephanie Bertels (Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance and Sustainability and an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business)
Xolisa Dhlamini (Lecturer in the Development Finance Centre at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business)