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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.

Early paradox research in organization theory contained a remarkable breadth of inspirations from outside disciplines. We wanted to know more about where early scholarship found inspiration to create what has since become paradox theory. To shed light on this, we engaged seminal paradox scholars in conversations: asking about their past experiences drawing from outside disciplines and their views on the future of paradox theory. These conversations surfaced several themes of past and future inspirations: (1) understanding complex phenomena; (2) drawing from related disciplines; (3) combining interdisciplinary insights; and (4) bridging discourses in organization theory. We end the piece with suggestions for future paradox research inspired by these conversations.

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.

In this commentary, the authors introduce certain paradoxes of religious experience, ways the sacred is both attractive and repulsive, how there are urges to merge with the divine and to meaningfully change the world, how sacred power is both ineffable and accessible, how the divine can best be understood as a coincidence of opposites, how there is both good and evil in the world, and how religions sometimes proclaim peace yet instigate wars. The authors link these paradoxes with the contributions of the chapters in this volume on religion and philosophy. On the basis of both our and the chapters’ contributions the authors demonstrate several domains where religious paradox adds important insights to organizational approaches to paradox.

The following three articles form a sequence of sorts in addressing changes required in our prevailing health care organizations, changes of a magnitude comparable to F.W. Taylor's “scientific management” revolution at the beginning of the 20th century as we seek to “transform the fundamental O.D. paradigm.” All three are based on case studies. And each has its own prescription: three “movements” each with three “key actions” for “constructive disequilibrium”; three “essential elements” for “integrated networks”, and five “dimensions of key day-to-day behavioral practices.”

This chapter engages with both religion and paradox in leadership and organization research by focusing on three sources of paradoxical tensions and how they are shaped by religion: worldly limits, diverse interpretations, and emerging relationships. First, regarding worldly limits, religion is predicated on an additional “very macro” level of reality, transcendence. This belief offers a distinct way of engaging with paradoxes as it extends the worldly realm’s boundaries. Second, contradictory interpretations of religions may rise, even among members of the same faith, leading to new cognitive paradoxes. Dynamizing boundaries between contradictory elements may allow organizations to maintain unity in a diversity of interpretations. Third, concerning emerging relationships, religions are global phenomena that are experienced side by side in multiple societal terrains. They cut across diverse social systems and give rise to novel relationships. This creates new tensions and paradoxical encounters, as religions traverse borders and boundaries and encounter existing social beliefs, structures, and practices. The expansion, dynamization, and shifting of boundaries then shapes persistent contradictions among interdependent elements. Our field should appreciate and embrace conflicting mysteries and paradoxes across boundaries. We may only need some faith.

Based on a review of selected chapters in this volume, this commentary examines how latent and salient contradictions unfold over time, and how perceptions and relative power of the parties involved may produce paradoxical and non-paradoxical outcomes. The empirical chapters also call attention to the need to expand the agenda of paradox scholarship to address the greater paradoxical complexities observed in organizational life.

The case is set in summer 2016, centered on the writer and performing star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose Broadway show Hamilton had grossed almost $75 million and won 11 Tony Awards. The musical's cultural influence was buoyed by Miranda’s 578,000 Twitter followers; hundreds of celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Jennifer Lopez had become ambassadors for the musical; and its impromptu #Ham4Ham live performances were engaging thousands of people on social media with each release. The case explores specific tactics the show employed, challenges students to consider the importance of personality in creating social media buzz, and studies the practical influence social media may have had on the show’s success. It is appropriate for any marketing course, particularly a digital media class in which students are familiar with the major platforms.