Culture as a Toolkit for Robust Action: Tackling Grand Challenges with Cultural Entrepreneurship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A new grand challenges paradigm has emerged in organization theory that has reoriented scholarly attention toward how society can effectively tackle a broad array of complex, uncertain, and evaluative matters of concern including climate change, forcible displacement, poverty, authoritarianism, child malnutrition, commercial sex exploitation, and many more. In this paper, I argue that the literature has tended toward a view of culture as a constraining force that inhibits tackling grand challenges and renders them remarkably intractable. Yet, alternative views of culture also purport that it can serve not merely as a constraining force that prevents action but also as a toolkit or repertoire of resources that actors use to solve problems and thus an enabling force for progress. The substantial literature on cultural entrepreneurship provides several powerful theoretical affordances that are uniquely useful in overcoming known obstacles to addressing grand challenges. I draw on the intellectual resources of this literature to augment the robust action model—one of the premiere theoretical frameworks for tackling grand challenges—by expanding each of the three robust action strategies through an integration with cultural entrepreneurship. This theoretical elaboration advances our understanding of the early moments of initiation of robust action strategies when they are merely uncertain future possibilities, as well as the culturally informed ensuing dynamics by which robust action continues in perpetuity. I conclude by discussing a new generative dialogue at the interstice of these two domains which has substantial synergies for future scholarship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".