In a world facing catastrophic shocks, there are tremendous opportunities for management scholars to engage and make fundamental contributions to the grand challenges that lie ahead. To do so, our focus must move away from a theory-fetish toward a more applied action orientation that contributes to theory-building but does not make that its main or singular aim. In this paper, we argue, that our field’s primary research aim must not be to see how we can build theory out of a crisis, but rather how our organizational and management theories can contribute concretely to helping humanity prepare for and respond to these shocks and build long-term societal resilience. Furthermore, we argue that management scholars need to vigorously embrace a research agenda on sustainability focusing on deep engagement with practitioners to address grand challenges. To do so, we draw on experiences from our deep engagement with practitioners—an ethnographic study and a scientific activism effort. We offer several lessons and identify implications of deep engagement for impact within organization studies such as dedicated space in journals for impact cases.

在一个面对灾难性冲击的世界中，管理学者们有巨大的机会参与并为即将出现的巨大挑战做出根本性贡献。为此，我们的重点必须从理论迷恋转向更加实用的行动导向，这种行动导向有助于理论建构，但不能使其成为主要目标或单一目标。在本文中，我们认为，该领域的主要研究目标不应是看我们如何从危机中构建理论，而应是我们的组织和管理理论如何能够具体地帮助人类为这些冲击和灾难做准备并做出反应。建立长期的社会适应力。此外，我们认为管理学者需要大力接受有关可持续性的研究议程，重点是与从业者深入互动以应对重大挑战。为此，我们借鉴了与从业者的深入互动中的经验，即人种学研究和科学行动主义努力。我们提供了一些课程，并确定了深入参与对组织研究中的影响的影响，例如在期刊中专门用于影响案例的空间。