Prelims

Half Title Page

INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUES ON ORGANIZATIONAL PARADOX

Series Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

Recent Volumes:

Editorial Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS ADVISORY BOARD

Series Editor

Michael Lounsbury

Professor of Strategic Management & Organization

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation University of Alberta School of Business

RSO Advisory Board

• Howard E. Aldrich, University of North Carolina, USA

• Shaz Ansari, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Silvia Dorado Banacloche, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Christine Beckman, University of Southern California, USA

• Marya Besharov, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Eva Boxenbaum, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

• Ed Carberry, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

• Lisa Cohen, McGill University, CANADA

• Jeannette Colyvas, Northwestern University, USA

• Erica Coslor, University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

• Gerald F. Davis, University of Michigan, USA

• Rich Dejordy, California State University, USA

• Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, FRANCE

• Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School, SPAIN

• Peer Fiss, University of Southern California, USA

• Mary Ann Glynn, Boston College, USA

• Nina Granqvist, Aalto University School of Business, FINLAND

• Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, CANADA

• Stine Grodal, Northeastern University, USA

• Markus A. Hoellerer, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

• Ruthanne Huising, emlyon business school, FRANCE

• Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM

• Sarah Kaplan, University of Toronto, CANADA

• Brayden G. King, Northwestern University, USA

• Matthew S. Kraatz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Tom Lawrence, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Xiaowei Rose Luo, Insead, FRANCE

• Johanna Mair, Hertie School, GERMANY

• Christopher Marquis, Cornell University, USA

• Renate Meyer, Vienna University, AUSTRIA

• William Ocasio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• Nelson Phillips, Imperial College London, UNITED KINGDOM

• Prateek Raj, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, INDIA

• Marc Schneiberg, Reed College, USA

• Marc-David Seidel, University of British Columbia, CANADA

• Paul Spee, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

• Paul Tracey, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

• Kerstin Sahlin, Uppsala University, SWEDEN

• Sarah Soule, Stanford University, USA

• Eero Vaara, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

• Marc Ventresca, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

• Maxim Voronov, York University, CANADA

• Filippo Carlo Wezel USI Lugano, SWITZERLAND

• Melissa Wooten, Rutgers University, USA

• April Wright, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

• Meng Zhao, Nanyang Business School & Renmin University, CHINA

• Enying Zheng, Peking University, CHINA

• Tammar B. Zilber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL

Title Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS Part 73B

INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUES ON ORGANIZATIONAL PARADOX: INVESTIGATING SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND HUMAN EXPRESSION, PART B

EDITED BY

REBECCA BEDNAREK

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

MIGUEL PINA E CUNHA

Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

JONATHAN SCHAD

King’s College London, UK

AND

WENDY K. SMITH

University of Delaware, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-187-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-186-1 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-188-5 (Epub)

ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

Contents

About the Editors

Rebecca Bednarek is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington. She studies paradoxes and strategizing practices and has written extensively about qualitative methods. She has co-authored a research-monograph “Making a Market for Acts of God” published by Oxford University Press.

Miguel Pina e Cunha is the Fundação Amélia de Mello Professor of Leadership and Organization at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). He studies organizational as process and paradox. He recently coauthored Elgar Introduction to Organizational Paradox Theory (Edward Elgar) and Paradoxes of Power and Leadership (Routledge).

Jonathan Schad is an Assistant Professor (‘Lecturer’) in Strategy and Organisation Theory at King’s College London, UK and an Academic Fellow of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research uses paradox theory to better understand the fundamental tensions contemporary organizations confront.

Wendy K. Smith is Professor and Deutsch Family Fellow at University of Delaware, USA. She explores how leaders navigate strategic paradoxes, such as tensions between exploration and exploitation or social missions and financial demands. Wendy co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox. She is recognized by the Web of Science for being among the top 1% of most cited scholars in 2019 and 2020.

About the Contributors

Marco Berti is a Senior Lecturer in Management at UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney. His research focuses on paradox and power, and has been published, among others, in Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Management Learning, Organization, and Journal of Management Inquiry.

Stewart Clegg, recently retired from the University of Stavanger Business School, Norway and Nova School of Business and Economics, and is recognized in several fields in the social sciences for his work in organization studies and on power. He is a Prolific Writer and Contributor to journals and has also produced a large number of books, gaining several awards of note.

Anders La Cour is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. His work on paradoxes appears in journals like Acta Sociologica, Cybernetics & Human Knowing and Journal of Civil Society. Currently co-editing a special issue in Voluntas on paradoxes within the management of volunteers.

Matthew A. Cronin is an Associate Professor of Management at George Mason University. He received his PhD in organizational behavior from Carnegie Mellon University. His research seeks to understand how collaboration can help produce creative ideas, and what it takes to then bring these ideas to fruition.

Ozumcan Demir-Caliskan is a PhD Student at UCL School of Management. Her research focuses on how new technologies and new forms of organizing affect creative processes and the experience of creative workers. She received her Master of Science and Bachelor degrees in Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University.

Colin M. Fisher is an Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at UCL School of Management. He studies temporal dynamics in team leadership, helping, creativity, and improvisation. He received his PhD in organizational behavior from the Harvard University while moonlighting as a jazz trumpet player, most notably with Grammy-nominated Either/Orchestra.

Charles Hampden-Turner received his MBA and doctorate from Harvard and worked at Cambridge University for 18 years. In the United States, he won Guggenheim and Rockefeller Humanities Fellowships as well as The Douglas McGregor Memorial Award and was President of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. He authored Maps of the Mind and 21 other books.

Mel Yingying Hua is a PhD Student at UCL School of Management. Her research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate how individuals and teams develop, evaluate, and execute their creative ideas. She received her Bachelor’s from the National University of Singapore and worked as a Journalist and Marketer in various start-ups.

Paula Jarzabkowski is a Professor of Strategic Management at Cass Business School, City, University of London and University of Queensland, Business School. Her research focuses on strategy-as-practice in pluralistic and paradoxical contexts, particularly how actor’s practices in such contexts shape wider market and society dynamics. Her central interest is using a practice lens to address the complex problems, or “grand challenges” affecting society, most recently in disaster risk financing.

Joshua Keller is an Associate Professor of Management at University of New South Wales Sydney. His research focuses on cultural and cognitive approaches to organizational and strategic paradoxes. His work has been published in multiple top-tier Organization Studies journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Human Relations, and Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes.

Ann Langley is an Honorary Professor at HEC Montréal. Until her retirement in August 2020, she was the Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings. Her research deals with strategic processes and practices in complex organizations, and draws on qualitative process-based methods. She is Co-editor of Strategic Organization.

Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on tensions and the transformation of boundaries in collaborative innovation. Her work on paradox has been published in journals, such as Research Policy, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Jane Lê is the Chair of Strategic Management at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. Her research focuses on how people in organizations experience and respond to strategic tension and complexity. Passionate about interpretive research, She has published in Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, among others, and is currently an Associate Editor at Organizational Research Methods.

Marianne W. Lewis is the Dean and a Professor of Management at the Lindner College of Business University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the nature and management of organizational paradoxes. She is among the world’s top 1% most-cited researchers (Web of Science).

Dean Pierides is a Lecturer in Business and Management at the University of Stirling, Scotland. He holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a DipEd, MEd, and PhD from the University of Melbourne. His research explores how organizations deal with uncertainty, focusing on government agencies responsible for emergencies.

David Seidl is a Professor of Organization and Management at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, UK. His research interests include strategy-as-practice, routine dynamics, standardization, and philosophy of science.

Ping Tian is a Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the application of linguistics and semiotic theory and analytical framework in various contexts, such as business communication. She has taught and published in the areas of multimodality, discourse analysis, media studies, and intercultural communication.

Mike Zundel is a Professor at the University of Liverpool Management School in the UK. His work draws on processual ideas in relation to learning, organizing, and strategy. He is particularly interested in the role of media and technology, and the development of ecological perspectives in the spirit of Gregory Bateson’s ‘pattern that connects’.

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Foreword: Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Research in the Sociology of Organizations (RSO) publishes cutting edge empirical research and theoretical papers that seek to enhance our understanding of organizations and organizing as pervasive and fundamental aspects of society and economy. We seek provocative papers that push the frontiers of current conversations, that help to revive old ones, or that incubate and develop new perspectives. Given its successes in this regard, RSO has become an impactful and indispensable fount of knowledge for scholars interested in organizational phenomena and theories. RSO is indexed and ranks highly in Scopus/SCImago as well as in the Academic Journal Guide published by the Chartered Association of Business schools.

As one of the most vibrant areas in the social sciences, the sociology of organizations engages a plurality of empirical and theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of the varied imperatives and challenges that these organizations and their organizers face. Of course, there is a diversity of formal and informal organizations – from for-profit entities to non-profits, state and public agencies, social enterprises, communal forms of organizing, non-governmental associations, trade associations, publicly traded, family owned and managed, private firms – the list goes on! Organizations, moreover, can vary dramatically in size from small entrepreneurial ventures to large multi-national conglomerates to international governing bodies such as the United Nations.

Empirical topics addressed by Research in the Sociology of Organizations include: the formation, survival, and growth or organizations; collaboration and competition between organizations; the accumulation and management of resources and legitimacy; and how organizations or organizing efforts cope with a multitude of internal and external challenges and pressures. Particular interest is growing in the complexities of contemporary organizations as they cope with changing social expectations and as they seek to address societal problems related to corporate social responsibility, inequality, corruption and wrongdoing, and the challenge of new technologies. As a result, levels of analysis reach from the individual, to the organization, industry, community and field, and even the nation-state or world society. Much research is multi-level and embraces both qualitative and quantitative forms of data.

Diverse theory is employed or constructed to enhance our understanding of these topics. While anchored in the discipline of sociology and the field of management, Research in the Sociology of Organizations also welcomes theoretical engagement that draws on other disciplinary conversations – such as those in political science or economics, as well as work from diverse philosophical traditions. RSO scholarship has helped push forward a plethora theoretical conversations on institutions and institutional change, networks, practice, culture, power, inequality, social movements, categories, routines, organization design and change, configurational dynamics and many other topics.

Each volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations tends to be thematically focused on a particular empirical phenomenon (e.g., creative industries, multinational corporations, entrepreneurship) or theoretical conversation (e.g., institutional logics, actors and agency, microfoundations). The series publishes papers by junior as well as leading international scholars, and embraces diversity on all dimensions. If you are scholar interested in organizations or organizing, I hope you find Research in the Sociology of Organizations to be an invaluable resource as you develop your work.

Professor Michael Lounsbury

Series Editor, Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Alberta