Abstract
Grand challenges demand continuous experimentation and recombination, yet social development organizations often face restrictive institutional environments where visible deviation from institutional templates triggers scrutiny, stigmatization, and sanction. How, then, do such organizations keep reconfiguring their organizing to address evolving grand challenge complexity while maintaining legitimacy? Drawing on a 13-year longitudinal qualitative study of a leading Indian social development organization and its temporary spinoff, we develop an inductive process model of propellant organizing. We show how organizations break legitimacy vs mission deadlocks through four mechanisms: negotiated grafting, creative bonding (a temporal connect–disconnect choreography across parent and spinoff), legitimized heterogeneity for grand challenge mitigation, and exiting the spinoff as legitimacy scaling. Our model advances theory on grand challenge organizing by explaining legitimacy-gated reconfiguration, re-theorizes spinoffs as temporary propellants enabling interorganizational synchronization, and reveals how evolving meanings of “being social” sustain both identity coherence and external legitimacy.