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Addressing societal problems requires the reorientation of firms-in-industries, including changes in technology, belief systems, and mission. The paper aims to make two contributions to the Dialectic Issue LifeCycle (DILC) model, which captures the dynamics of socio-political mobilization around societal problems and industry responses. First, the five phases in the DILC-model are elaborated with insights from social movement theory, political science, public attention, issue management, corporate political strategy, and innovation management. Second, a ‘cyclical’ lifecycle pattern is explored, in which a social problem does not linearly progress through successive phases, but can also move ‘backwards’ if public attention or political will decrease. We explore these contributions with a longitudinal study of the car-safety problem and responses from American automakers (1900–1995). We use a combined …