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The way organizational actors use language to think about and communicate their organizational experiences is central to how organizational actors enact organizational paradox. However, most inquiries into the role of language in the organizational paradox literature has focused on specific components of language (e.g., discourse), without attention to the complex, multi-level linguistic system that is interconnected to organizational processes. In this chapter, we expand our knowledge of the role of language by integrating paradox research with research from the linguistics discipline. We identify a series of linguistic tensions (i.e., generalizability-specificity, universalism-particularism, and explicitness-implicitness) that are nested within organizational paradoxes. In the process, we reveal how the organizing paradox of control and autonomy is interconnected to other paradoxes (i.e., performing, learning, and belonging) through the instantiation of linguistic paradoxes. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on paradox and language.

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.

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.

The current study examined cultural (diffuse orientation), organizational (organizational work-family climates) and individual (role centrality) antecedents of key work-family (WF) experiences (WF conflict, WF enrichment and WF boundary management) in India.

Survey data were collected from 586 white-collar employees in India. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Analyses revealed interesting culture-specific insights into the WF dynamic. For example, less demarcation between WF boundaries (diffuse orientation) did not increase WF conflict, but significantly fostered WF enrichment, challenging the findings in the Western cultural contexts. A supportive organizational WF climate was found to be a crucial factor that alleviated WF conflict, whereas greater investment in work role led to greater WF enrichment.

This study addresses a dearth of research on antecedents of WF interface that simultaneously examines the positive and negative aspects of WF interface. It also advances the WF literature by generating empirical evidence related to the cultural dimension of diffuse orientation.

This study provides a holistic view of WF interface in the Indian context by incorporating various antecedents in one model.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative perspective on Zhong-Yong that is different from the notion of “Yin-Yang balancing” and apply it to understand the issue of balancing the top-down and bottom-up processes in strategy making.

The authors adopt a “West meets East” mindset and approach to develop an alternative perspective on Zhong-Yong, and then apply this perspective to understand the issue of balancing the top-down and bottom-up processes in strategy making. There are three steps in the process of developing the alternative perspective. First, the authors argue that the essence of “Yin-Yang balancing” is a ratio-based solution to paradoxical balancing, which is in fact equivalent to Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and compatible with some western management scholars’ approaches to solving paradox. Second, the authors identify a different generic solution to paradoxical balancing implicit in the western management literature. Third, the authors find in the original text of Zhong-Yong equivalent ideas to the identified different generic solution and then propose an alternative perspective on Zhong-Yong that is fundamentally different from the notion of “Yin-Yang balancing.”

Applied to the issue of balancing the top-down and bottom-up processes in strategy making, the new perspective on Zhong-Yong provides us with the following prescriptive insights from the life-wisdom of eastern philosophy: first, top management (e.g. Shun as the sage-king) must listen to various views and opinions also from employees and low-level managers at the bottom of the organization to be better informed about complex issues. Second, top management must analyze the diverse elements of the various views and opinions they collect and synthesize by taking the good from the bad to find smarter solutions and make decisions with better outcomes. Third, abiding by a set of (more or less) cohesive values help top managers be open and receptive to information and insights from low-level organizational members and enhancing unbiased information.

This paper is mainly a theoretical perspective. Empirical work is needed to test the prescriptions offered in this paper.

Practitioners may learn new perspectives from ancient Chinese philosophies on how to balance.

This paper applies a new perspective on Zhong-Yong to an important paradox in strategic management.

This paper makes a case for the investigation of organizational paradoxes through the analysis of documents. After having presented what paradoxes are and the methodological challenges of studying them, the paper turns to document research, with emphasis on its potential contribution to paradox research. More specifically, document research typically provides ready-to-code data in a nonintrusive manner, allowing for the potential longitudinal, multilevel and multivoice analysis of organizational paradoxes and their management, in practice. To illustrate this, the purpose of this paper is to explore exemplar research based on multiple approaches to the study of different paradoxes in/around various documents and sets a research agenda.

Exemplar research on paradoxes using organizational documents as central data are presented. This highlights the range of documents and analytical strategies that can be used to explore organizations’ discursive management of paradoxes, as well as the roles documents can play in organizational contexts marked by different types of paradoxes.

A research agenda is developed, formulated around the needs to study paradoxes within documents and around them; grasp the discursive strategies deployed in documents to deal with paradoxes and/or the action of documents in contexts marked by paradoxes; follow the organizational processes involving documents, paying special attention to the paradoxes surrounding the development, adoption and appropriation of documents; and compare paradoxes in documents and those around the documents’ mobilization.

Despite growing interest in organizational paradoxes, reflections on methodological approaches to exploring them remain scarce and alternative methods largely unexplored. This paper makes the following proposition: organizational documents (strategic plans, annual reports, policies, websites, etc.) can provide a valuable entry point to explore organizational paradoxes.

This chapter investigates the mutual relationship between logic and paradox, showing that paradox is indispensable to test logic, as well as logic is necessary to extend our understanding of paradox. Firstly, I consider the lesson that organizational theory can draw from formal logic’s investigation of semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. Subsequently, I survey the plural interpretations of the concept of “logic” in organizational theory (as logic of theory, logic of practice, and institutional logics). I argue that this plurality of meanings is not a source of confusion but offers an opportunity to illustrate different manifestations of, and ways to cope with, organizational paradoxes.