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Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although improvisation has been conceptualized as a way of managing such paradoxes, the process of improvisation itself contains paradoxes. In this essay, we return to jazz improvisation to identify a new paradox of interest to organizational scholars: the paradox of intentionality. To improvise creatively, jazz musicians report that they must “try not to try,” or risk undermining the very spontaneity that is prized in jazz. Jazz improvisers must therefore control their ability to relinquish deliberate control of their actions. To accomplish this, they engage in three interdependent practices. Jazz musicians intentionally surrender their sense of active control (“letting go”) while creating a passive externalized role for this sense of active control (using a “third ear”). Letting go allows new and unexpected ideas to emerge, while the metaphorical third ear can identify promising ideas or problematic execution and, in doing so, re-engage active agency (“grabbing hold”). Examining the practices within creative improvisation reveals the complexity of the lived experience of the paradox, which we argue suggests further integration among organizational research on improvisation, creativity, and paradox.

The purpose of this study is to identify how ethical stances can be used to develop a frame set in the design of a web-based decision support system (DSS) for ethical decision-making and to test both the efficacy of these frames and the potential of such a tool for individuals and groups in both leadership development situations and organisational practice. Unethical behaviour by executives is a frequently cited reason for erosion of trust with other stakeholders.

Utilising action research, by choosing ethics frames such as heuristics, a web-based ethics DSS designed to enable users to explore ethical issues from multiple perspectives was constructed and this was beta-tested with a major UK bank and a global oil company.

In orchestrating constant revisions of the ethics frames in the tool, learning from each research cycle was identified, a new form of action research, a design action research, which emphasises the importance of collaboration in the design of such decision-making tools, was offered and the tool for management development and other applications was successfully beta-tested.

It was demonstrated to management developers how web-based systems might be designed by non-information technology professionals; the framing literature was added by demonstrating the value of engaging in dialogue about ethical issues of concern to managers and their organisations and thus improving decision-making; and additions were made to the literature on ethics and Information systems (IS) and contribution toward action research in the fields of IS and ethics was done.

Two major approaches to manager development in schools are identified. The first provides a tool kit for purposive action; the second is aimed at helping managers cope with the pressures and dilemmas of the job. The need for the sharing and coping style of manager development is traced to the cultural diversity that can exist within schools. Schools, as organisations, are seen within the context of recent work on culture in human service organisations. A framework of manager development which tries to synthesise both approaches within a single perspective is developed.

Concerns the stances that Indian and UK managers take towards ethical issues at work. This topic is part of the broader cross‐cultural research agenda on managerial values. Makes a contribution to the subjects of business ethics and corporate citizenship. The responses of samples of Indian and UK managers to ethical issues were classified, using a research instrument called Redundancy, by eight ethical stances that are defined in a conceptual framework presented. The results are used to clarify issues that arise from the literature about Indian and UK managers’ values. The tentative findings are that Indian managers’ ethical stances were similar to those of Western managers but that, compared with the UK respondents, they were more likely to experience ethical tension between their personal, espoused, stances and those they took at work. The preference for a pragmatic, ethical puzzle, approach to issues, that was reported by both Indian and UK samples, is seen as a problem in developing good corporate citizenship. Presents an agenda for future research.

Comprises Part II of a two‐part exploration of the consequences of variability in the design of appraisal schemes. While Part I was descriptive, Part II suggests prescriptions to help scheme designers to devise proposals which are commensurate with appraisees′ worries, arguments and expectations.

The term business model is a phrase that is loosely used but in this chapter it will be given a temporarily fixed definition. Magretta (2002) likens a business model to a story that explains what a company does to make a profit. The plot of the story is how all the characters in the story, the employees, the customers, the suppliers interact to produce a product or service that the customers are willing to pay for at a price that is profitable. Like a good short story a good business model has a ‘twist’ or an unexpected sting in the tail. Johnson, Christensen, and Kagermann (2008) illustrate this by the way that Apple's business model for the iPod involved providing cheap downloads in order to lock customers into purchasing the hardware. In other market sectors, such as white goods, the twist is the reverse, the products are sold cheaply in order to realise profit on adjunct services such as insurance and maintenance contracts.

Interdisciplinary research allows us to broaden our sights and expand our theories. Yet, such research surfaces a number of challenges. We highlight three issues – superficiality, lack of focus, and consilience - and discuss how they can be addressed in interdisciplinary research. In particular, we focus on the implications for interdisciplinary work with paradox scholarship. We explore how these issues can be navigated as scholars bring together different epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies within interdisciplinary research, and illustrate our key points by drawing on extant work in paradox theory and on examples from this double volume. Our paper contributes to paradox scholarship, and to organizational theory more broadly, by offering practices about how to implement interdisciplinary research while also advancing our understanding about available research methods.

In this essay, I draw on the chapters by Fisher et al., Keller and Tian, and Zundel et al. that deal with the role of paradox in the context of jazz, linguistics, mathematics and poetry respectively to reflect on the nature of paradox, also considering examples from my own and other research. I argue specifically, that in everyday language, the notion of paradox is used mostly to refer not so much to persistent tensions between interdependent elements, but to describe an outcome as irony where action intended to achieve one goal actually results in its opposite or in something contrary to it. I suggest that while there may be a relation between the formal definition of paradox in the academic literature and the everyday understanding of paradox as irony, this has not been fully elucidated and would deserve further analysis and research. Doing so might perhaps bring back some of the feeling of discomfort and intractability that the notion of paradox naturally inspires, acting as a possible counterpoint to the optimism of both-and.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.