Enacting a Grand Challenge for Business and Society: Theorizing Issue Maturation in the Media-Based Public Discourse on COVID-19 in Three National Contexts

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 pandemic’s initial appearance, even among democratic with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal in management organization studies, however, tends to neglect social construction issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring communicative enactment media-based discourse Switzerland, Germany, United Kingdom. By applying a problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms explain maturation into challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent differences quality. add research challenges, issue maturation, framing dynamics theorizing become constructed first place.