Research
At the School of Business and Economics
How Everyday Actions Shape Solutions to Grand Challenges
Climate change, social inequality, and technological disruption are among the biggest challenges of our time. While these issues are often discussed at a high level—by policymakers, scientists, and business leaders—a new study highlights a different perspective: the power of everyday actions in shaping solutions to these complex problems.
Titled "Tackling Grand Challenges: Insights and Contributions from Practice Theories," the study explores how people’s routines, interactions, and knowledge shape both stability and change. Instead of viewing challenges as isolated problems requiring top-down solutions, the research focuses on how change emerges from daily practices and relationships.
Key Insights from the Study
1. Actions are both stable and transformative.
Change does not happen in opposition to stability—rather, the two are interconnected. For example, businesses striving for innovation often rely on structured processes to support creativity. Likewise, workers learning to use new technologies bring their own experiences and routines, shaping how those technologies are adopted. The study shows that meaningful change happens when people work within existing structures while also adapting and reshaping them.
2. Everything is connected.
No problem exists in isolation. The study highlights how actions and decisions create ripple effects, linking people, ideas, and even different global challenges. For instance, extreme weather events like flooding in Australia do not just impact local communities—they influence emergency response strategies worldwide and inspire new ways of working together, even among people who have never met. Similarly, healthcare technologies do not just affect doctors and patients but can reshape entire systems of care and decision-making.
3. Emotions matter in decision-making.
While problem-solving is often seen as a rational process, the study highlights the crucial role of emotions. Feelings like frustration, urgency, or hope can act as powerful forces, pushing individuals and organizations to reflect, adapt, and take action. Whether in responding to crises or driving social movements, emotions shape how people engage with challenges and influence change.
4. We are all part of the solution.
One of the study’s key messages is that researchers, policymakers, business leaders, and everyday citizens all play a role in shaping the world. The lines between experts and practitioners, between those studying challenges and those experiencing them, are blurred. Change does not come from a single source—it emerges through collective actions, relationships, and shared experiences.
Why This Matters
This research challenges the idea that solving grand challenges requires only large-scale interventions from governments or corporations. Instead, it shows that solutions often emerge from how people work, interact, and adapt in real-world situations. By paying closer attention to these everyday practices, we can better understand how to foster meaningful, lasting change.
For more information or to access the full study, please visit:
Danner-Schröder, A., Mahringer, C., Sele, K., Jarzabkowski, P., Rouleau, L., Feldman, M., Pentland, B., Huysman, M., Sergeeva, A. V., Gherardi, S., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Gehman, J. (2025). Tackling Grand Challenges: Insights and Contributions From Practice Theories. Journal of Management Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926241292262
Top publication in the Journal of Management Studies ranked in the Financial Times Top 50
New paper from Anja Danner-Schröder (RPTU Kaiserslautern), Kathrin Sele (Aalto University) and Christian Mahringer (University of Stuttgart)!
In their study, the authors unpack the role of the lived body in routine recreation in extreme contexts. They examined Restaurant Nolla, a zero-waste fine-dining restaurant in Helsinki, during the COVID-19 pandemic and find that ‘embodied connection work’ plays an integral part in actors’ attempts to establish new ways of operating. Specifically, they show how this active process of making connections between actors and actions consists of embodied imagining and embodied protecting—two interrelated practices that enable the reintegration of stakeholders and the reassembling of what matters to them. This research is particularly relevant in times of crisis, as it details the process of resuming operations.
The paper has been published in the Journal of Management Studies, a leading journal in the management and organization studies field.
Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.13113
Study on capital market anomalies: Does machine learning help to better predict stock returns?
In a dynamic financial market, the precise prediction of share returns is a challenging task. A common approach is to utilise capital market anomalies. These include certain company characteristics that are known to influence stock returns. However, conventional linear methods often struggle with the complexity inherent in these anomalies, especially in a global sample of stock returns. A research project by scientists from Kaiserslautern and Munich has used machine learning to overcome this challenge. This novel study uses machine learning to combine information from hundreds of capital market anomalies in a global sample of stocks. Their results were presented in the renowned 'Journal of Asset Management'.
Project "Smart batch processes in the energy system of the future"
The RPTU is working on topics of the future that move society and industry. This is demonstrated by the latest success in research: RPTU has received over 5 million euros from the Carl Zeiss Foundation's "CZS Breakthroughs" programme for the interdisciplinary project "Smart Batch Processes in the Energy System of the Future". The Carl Zeiss Foundation's "CZS Breakthroughs" programme supports top international research from Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Thuringia. The chairs of "Production Management" with Prof Dr Florian Sahling and "Sustainability Management" with Prof Dr Katharina Spraul from the Department of Economics are involved.
Best Paper Award for Prof. Steininger
The paper "Fusing Contingency Theory and Upper Echelon Theory For A New Perspective on the Critical Juncture of Family Firm Succession" by Baris Istipliler, Jan-Philipp Ahrens, Annegret Hauer, Dennis Steininger and Michael Woywode received a Best Paper Award at the "5th International Family Business Research Forum" - an international conference that took place at the end of September 2022 at Hasselt University in Belgium.
Prof Dr Gordon Müller-Seitz (Chair of Strategy, Innovation & Cooperation, RPTU in Kaiserslautern) presents the book "Enjoy Digital" in this transfer story. Enjoy Digital contains practical "recipes for success" for small and medium-sized companies that want to master digitalisation. https://youtu.be/GNDgey5ayFM
Das Paper „Ignorance is Bliss: Effects of Real Activities Management by Employees and the Role of Managers“ von Markus C. Arnold, Kai A. Bauch und Eric W. Chan wurde auf dem diesjährigen Annual Meeting der American Accounting Association in San Diego mit dem IMA Best Management Accounting Paper Award ausgezeichnet.
The current version of the working paper is available on SSRN.
Best Paper Award 2022 : Anja Danner-Schröder, u.a. „Getting Ahead of Time—Performing Temporal Boundaries to Coordinate Routines under Temporal Uncertainty“
Top-Publikation von Prof. Dr. Tanja Rabl und Koautor:innen im Information Systems Journal (A-Journal im VHB-JOURQUAL3 und eines der acht weltweit einflussreichsten Journals im „Senior Scholar’s Basket of Journals“ der Association for Information Systems) zur Rolle der Unterstützung durch digitale Technologien für Intrapreneurship.
Corruption research by Prof Dr Tanja Rabl topic in the BR podcast "Character and Corruptibility - The Psychology of Corruption": https://www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/radiowissen/charakter-und-bestechlichkeit-die-psychologie-der-korruption-2/1790646
VHB expert statement by Prof Dr Tanja Rabl on "Corruption prevention in small and medium-sized enterprises": https://vhbonline.org/vhb-experts/statements?tx_news_pi1%5Baction%5D=detail&tx_news_pi1%5Bcontroller%5D=News&tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=407&cHash=dd2a655ebbf33a92f8fa12861ebd1934
The research profile is initially derived from the individual profiles of the departments. In addition, interdisciplinary topics, such as sustainable corporate management, are also addressed. There are cooperative relationships with other departments, affiliated institutes and other universities, particularly in the case of third-party funded projects. With its third-party funding per professorship, the department is one of the top departments in economics.
Modelling of investment decisions under undercertainty in capital markets, as well as the investigation of the behaviour of agents with subjective expectations in OLG models.
The research focuses in particular on
Research at the Chair of Environmental Economics, based on microeconomic theory, examines issues in the following areas:
In the context of digitalisation, various dimensions of entrepreneurship and organisational innovation are at the heart of the field. The main focus is on theory-based and empirical research into digital start-ups, innovations and forms of financing as well as the associated mechanisms of action and their management in business and society.
These topics are reflected in the three central research areas of the professorship:
Research at the Chair of Business Administration, in particular External Accounting, is classified as behavioural accounting and aims to better understand the use and provision of accounting information by economic actors and the associated decisions in order to be able to make suggestions for improving decision-making in practice on this basis. This follows the basic understanding that one of the main purposes of accounting is to provide information that is useful for decision-making.
This is examined primarily against the background of current social and economic developments, such as digitalisation and the associated increasing availability of information. Exemplary questions to which the Chair's research would like to contribute are, for example: What is the mode of action of differently designed corporate communication, in light of the fact that more and more investors:inside are carrying out transactions on mobile devices? How can artificial intelligence be used to increase employee satisfaction and the effectiveness of performance incentives? What drives unethical behaviour at middle management level? Experimental research methods are used to answer these questions.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The chair’s research objective is to make the capital markets fairer and more efficient. Our research agenda focuses on:
The research activities of the Chair of Marketing focus on the areas of pricing, services and digitalisation. The research projects carried out form both the basis for teaching and the interface to practice and thus the common framework for the Chair's activities.
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The research focuses in particular on organisations in especially dynamic contexts. Numerous current phenomena are addressed, such as change processes through digital technologies or dealing with social challenges such as the refugee crisis. Theoretically, the research is guided by a focus on organisational routines, processes and practices, as well as temporal and spatial dimensions.
The theory-based empirical research of the department is dedicated to practice-relevant questions on current challenges that require responsible and innovative action in and by organisations. It addresses the management of the risk of corrupt behaviour, demographic change, diversity and digital transformation as well as intrapreneurship in organisations and strategic international HR management.
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The Chair of Production Management primarily deals with practical issues in the field of industrial production of goods and services. To support decision-making, operational decision-making problems are mapped as mathematical optimisation models. Quantitative methods from the field of operations research are used to solve these decision problems.
The combination of theory and practice with a view to current challenges, such as the management of digital transformation, open innovation or strategy processes or the management of networks.
In our research we focus on the topic of sustainability management. Our research strategy curently focuses on the following areas of research:
The research content of the LUC can be structured into three central focal points, which are interdependent in many ways:
BISOR research extends and combines decision models and methods from:
with a strong focus on the application domains of: