Max Weber’s principle of Wertfreiheit (value freedom) rests on a paradox: the call for science to be value-free is itself a normative stance. In this blog post, we explore how this paradox plays out in management research and social science more broadly.

16.10.2025 / Marvin Hanisch, Joep Cornelissen

A pyromaniac in a fire-station. That’s how I felt writing a PhD on degrowth in an economics department. I still remember the bewildered face of the department director during our first meeting.

This special issue stems from the idea that what we can imagine in our minds can eventually become true. However, we do not see desirable futures as solely an exercise in imagination but above all a lived endeavor facing up to the multiple challenges at hand:

16.09.2025 / The Editorial Team

As climate crises escalate, the urgency of science-informed policymaking grows increasingly pronounced, particularly in the Global South. Here, climate science finds itself at an ideological crossroads, marked by the stark tension between quantitative, metrics-driven methodologies “Precisionism”(1) and qualitative, participatory knowledge “Groundtruthing.”

By 2040, AI-driven data centers are projected to consume up to 8% of global emissions. Could we use artificial intelligence (AI) to power climate solutions, or is AI fueling a deeper crisis?

02.09.25 / Axelle Miel, Christof Brandtner

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Today’s interdependent and aggravating social-ecological crises warrant a profound rethinking of our economic system. “Putting people and planet before profit” must not stay a slogan but become a reality.

29.11.24 / Elena Hofferberth, Matthias Schmelzer 

Business scholars have taught generations of students and executives how to create and capture value. Among the richest that have mastered that doctrine are the Big Tech firms with their digital platforms.

16.07.2024 / Dovev Lavie

At the 28^th Conference of the Parties (COP28) of the UN’s climate regime, most countries agreed to triple installed renewables (RE) capacity by 2030. This has been widely considered to signal the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

09.07.2024 / Max Schmidt

Climate change calls for intergenerational decision-making. The negative consequences of not acting on grand challenges fall disproportionately on future generations, while the benefits largely accrue to the current generation, such as the benefit of avoiding significant financial and psychological costs of change. This discrepancy leads individuals to perceive a desired outcome for future generations as less valuable than an equivalent outcome for the present generation. This is known as intergenerational discounting.

Companies, governments, universities, and other organizations have long been calling for innovative solutions for the world’s most pressing problems: climate change, health and well-being, hunger and water scarcity, poverty, and conflicts (Jarvenpaa & Välikangas, 2020).

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The HEC Research Centre for Grand Challenges held a Practice and Research Seminar on 16th March 2023.  Duncan Pollard and Sébastien Houde debated our current corporate and economic approaches to climate change. They concluded that our current market-based solutions have come to an important junction. Here they explain how we got to where we are, their challenges, and what be done to improve upon them.

Man is not at the center of the universe. In fact, the universe has no center. There are many suns, surrounded by many planets and on some of them there might even be life forms comparable to ours.

The world is not in a good shape. When Rockström and colleagues defined the ecological crisis along nine different planetary boundaries – from global warming to the extinction of species in 2009, they did not expect that six out of these nine boundaries would be transgressed just one decade later. Ecological problems increasingly destabilize societies, reinforcing existing and creating new social problems.

This is an appeal to conceive today’s grand societal challenges as interconnected problems of sustainability. The prime question asked is therefore how current un–sustainability can be overcome by realizing just transformations towards economies that thrive within planetary boundaries. Un-sustainability, overshadowed today only by the news of ruthless war and repression, manifests as existentially threatening social and environmental outcomes.

03.04.2023 / Philipp Censkowsky

A response to Christian Seelos, Johanna Mair, and Charlotte Traeger, “The Future of Grand Challenges Research: Retiring a Hopeful Concept and Endorsing Research Principles.” Published in the International Journal of Management Reviews.

30.03.2023 / Patrick Haack

In our research, we examine discourses that shape the strategies and resource allocation processes of organizations in the philanthropic and development sectors. Discourses often become fads with surprisingly long tails.

30.03.2023 / Christian Seelos & Johanna Mair