Can 3 academic theories help tackle the world’s problems?

A lot can be gained by going further with analysis of the narratives we share and spread. Dialogue is the key word, and there’s also a lot of research on dialogue in other areas that we haven’t been tapping into. Nowadays a lot of this is happening in the environment of social media and relatively new technologies that are developed all the time.

We should apply attention-based perspectives to understand what’s going on inside particular organisations and to look at attention across organisations. Emerging concepts such as strategising networks could be helpful precisely in order to understand how we can together make the world a better place.

Open strategy is defined as “dynamic bundle of practices that affords internal and external actors’ greater strategic transparency and/or inclusion” – and this can help deal with questions that go beyond particular companies or organisations, to broaden the scope.

Connecting a detailed analysis of practices with broader issues of institutional change would help us a great deal to better understand the processes and mechanisms of change, and to comprehend how particular practices impede change. Paradoxical tensions are also very closely related to a practice-based angle when analysing tensions and struggles and how to deal with them.

We are all familiar with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. But we don’t know what the consequences are even if we do act on them, and we don’t know how our actions to address them will unfold.

These problems are wicked. When we find solutions often those solutions cause new problems. For example, with climate change, we install wind turbines to reduce our carbon emissions, and those kill birds and create health problems. So these are not easy issues to tackle, and they’re rife with tensions.

A common reaction people may have to paradoxes is to feel defensive about them. When we bring opposites together and try to pull them together, it may be uncomfortable, and as a result, people, organisations, or institutions may ignore them or treat them as an either-or choice. However, paradox theory argues that when we pull these poles together, when we juxtapose opposites and engage with, and work through paradoxes, we can get to more sustainable solutions.

Institutional theory is a useful foil to study climate change. It enables us to study the conflicting institutional demands from different stakeholders that generate conflicting logics, so institutional theory helps us reconcile divergent perspectives among dissenting actors – rather than labelling shared responsibilities as someone else’s problem or by finger pointing at culpable others.

The Kyoto Protocol and how different people shifted their radically different positions helps us understand the ‘commons logic’ element of institutional theory as it relates to climate change. Greenpeace used to hate market mechanisms, but they came around to agreeing to carbon trading because they felt that ‘the train has left the station’ and that they needed to be on it to remain relevant in addressing climate change.

It’s interesting that emissions trading started at one company, British Petroleum (BP) and then got diffused to the EU level, and even globally. We call this ’catalytic amplification’ – and while there still controversies around the ‘gaming’ of carbon trading, it has become a major market mechanism.

We identified 3 criteria of a commons logic as it relates to institutional theory. Key stakeholders need to view an issue as a collective problem in which their fates are interconnected; they need to acknowledge the issue’s complexity rather than blame others; and they need to reach a common position on a collective remedy, no matter how difficult that may prove. During the pandemic, for example, many people came to realise that they are not safe until everyone is safe, underlining our interdependence.

The idea of a ‘commons action’, or lack of it, also applies to other sectors such as the financial sector. A really interesting paper some years ago addressed why it’s so difficult to tackle tax avoidance and the black market, and this because there is not a commons logic in global finance.

There are some weaknesses in institutional theory, including the scant attention accorded to materiality at the expense of illuminating the symbolic. Actor-network theory (ANT), which focuses on shifting relationships, does a better job at this because it brings a broader understanding of an actor as someone or something who acts, attributes or is attributed agency by others. From an ANT perspective, grand challenges could more fruitfully be studied as a social praxis entangled in material formations of humans (eg key stakeholders) and non-humans (eg the atmosphere). A forthcoming paper takes an interesting look at how our understanding in this area is shaped not just by history and tradition, but also how things smell, the space, the place, and broader feelings from an experience.