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The authors draw on an article by Fondas published in 1997 to expose a masculine ethos underlying “feminine” management practices, diffused through management texts. This is based on the findings that: management theories are of a masculine nature; companies seldom implement “feminine” practices; and those that do use those practices to maintain their underlying masculinity. This challenges academics and practitioners to recognize that management theory is gendered and that changes towards feminine organizations are superficial, at best.

This study shows how 152 researchers from several research centers of a Portuguese university perceive the facilitators and barriers to knowledge management. Three domains are considered – knowledge gathering, creation, and diffusion. Three dimensions of barriers and facilitators were considered – individuals, socio‐organizational processes, and technology. Regarding both barriers and facilitators, but mainly barriers, the findings suggest that researchers are more sensitive to the “soft” aspects of knowledge management (i.e., individuals, socio‐organizational processes) than to the “hard” ones (i.e., technology). This suggests that, although technology is an important facilitator, it is people and their interactions that create knowledge and promote the knowledge flow.

In this paper, some peculiarities of a Southern European country are made explicit, namely, how the attraction of new, “global”, management practices combines with deeply persistent, thus traditional, ways of imagining organization. The dominant Anglo‐Saxon and Protestant models of management may not be fully adequate to characterize management and organization in the Latin Catholic countries of the south, or those postcolonial societies that they inscribed in Latin America. We present an interpretation of why what are glossed by moderns as dysfunctional management practices persist, sometimes despite their recognized inadequacy. The contributions advanced here may thus be relevant to researchers interested in the route of transition from closed to open societies and who are concerned that all models need to be appreciated in context.

The reorganization of the Portuguese national healthcare system around networks of hospital centers was advanced for reasons promoted as those of effectiveness and efficiency and initially presented as an opportunity for organizational transcendence through synergy. The purpose of this paper is to study transcendence as felt by the authors’ participants to create knowledge about the process.

The paper consists of an inductive approach aimed at exploring the lived experience of transcendence. The authors collected data via interviews, observations, informal conversations and archival data, in order and followed the logic of grounded theory to build theory on transcendence as process.

Transcendence, however, failed to deliver its promise; consequently, the positive vision inscribed in it was subsequently re-inscribed in the system as another lost opportunity, contributing to an already unfolding vicious circle of mistrust and cynicism. The study contributes to the literature on organizational paradoxes and its effects on the reproduction of vicious circles.

The search for efficiency and effectiveness through strategies of transcendence often entails managing paradoxical tensions.

The case was researched during the global financial crisis, which as austerity gripped the southern Eurozone gave rise to governmental decisions aimed at improving the efficiency of organizational healthcare resources. There was a sequence of advances and retreats in decision making at the governmental level that gave rise to mistrust and cynicism at operational levels (organizations, teams and individuals). One consequence of increasing cynicism at lower levels was that as further direction for change came from higher levels it became interpreted in practice as just another turn in a vicious circle of failed reform.

The authors contribute to the organizational literature on paradoxes by empirically researching a themes that has been well theorized (Smith and Lewis, 2011) but less researched empirically. The authors followed the process in vivo, as it unfolded in the context of complex strategic change at multiple centers.

This paper aims to describe the hidden presence of improvisation in organizations. The authors explore this presence through George Perec’s notion of the infra-ordinary applied to the study of the learning organization and its paradoxes.

Most studies of paradox and improvisation are qualitative and inductive. In this conceptual paper, the authors offer a conceptual debate aiming to redirect conceptual attention on studies belonging to the domains of learning, improvisation and paradox.

The authors defend the thesis that improvisation is an example of a paradoxical practice that belongs to the domain of infra-ordinary rather than, as has been habitually assumed in extant research, the extraordinary.

The study draws research attention to the potential of the infra-ordinary in the domains of paradox, improvisation and learning.

For practice, the study shows that improvisation can be a relatively trivial organizational practice as people try to solve problems in their everyday lives.

Most organizations depend upon the capacity of their members to solve problems as these emerge. Yet, organization theory has failed to consider this dimension. As a result, organizations may be unintentionally harming their capacity to learn and adapt to environments by assuming that improvisation is extra-ordinary.

The study of paradox and improvisation from an infra-ordinary perspective has not been explicitly attempted.

That life is inundated with constant push–pull between contradictory demands is indisputable. Different traditions and worldviews inform individuals’ approaches to dealing with the ensuing paradoxes. However, the literature has focused on Western and Eastern philosophies and traditions, while disregarding others such as the Afrocentric. In this chapter, the authors explore Ubuntu, an Afrocentric tradition, as an alternative philosophical underpinning that can inform the nature of paradoxes. Doing so enriches the understanding, problematizing and managing of paradoxes. Central to Ubuntu is otherness: the emphasis on the need of the other that implies focusing on the other; in doing so, the polarities of diverse needs are accommodated, striving for an ultimate goal of harmony. Moreover, the authors elaborate on the hybrid space where collapsing the East–West and the West and non-west dualism allow engagement with a multiplicity of worldviews. In so doing, the authors expand paradox theorizing beyond the orthodoxy of East and West antinomies and challenge the basic assumption in paradox management by asking the question: what if we start from others’ demands?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Brazilian managers’ attitudes toward older workers, and how those attitudes explain HRM decisions in hypothetical scenarios.

Brazilian managers (n=201) reported their attitudes toward older workers and their decisions in scenarios involving an older vs a younger applicant/worker.

In spite of expressing positive attitudes toward older workers, a significant number of managers chose a younger one even when the older worker is described as more productive. To build a better understanding of how attitudes predict decisions, it is necessary to identify attitudinal profiles and the interplay between attitudinal dimensions, rather than simply studying each dimension separately. Attitudinal profiling also shows that some managers discriminate against younger workers, a finding, that is, ignored when (only) regressions are taken into account. The managers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions relate with their age. Evidence does not support the double jeopardy effect against older women workers.

The sample is small. The scenarios cover a reduced number of HRM decisions. The data about attitudes and decisions were collected simultaneously from a single source. The findings may be influenced by idiosyncrasies of the context. Future studies should also consider real situations, not hypothetical ones.

Efforts must be made (e.g. via training and development) to raise managers’ awareness about the consequences of ageism in organizations.

Empirical studies about managers’ perceptions/attitudes toward older workers are scarce. Studies in the Brazilian context are even scarcer.

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.