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Organizational paradoxes must first be recognized by managers before they can respond to them. Yet scholars have adopted different perspectives on how paradoxical tensions become salient and engender management responses. Some approaches have focused on the socially constituted nature of paradoxes, and others on the inherent aspects of paradoxes in the environment. The authors propose an approach that gives ontological meaning to both the socially constituted and inherent nature of organizational paradoxes. Our approach, which is inspired by quantum physics, opens up new opportunities for engaging with the socio-materiality of paradoxes, how they are measured, and the implications this has on the probabilities of managing organizational responses to paradox.

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 study aims to propose a multi-level (bottom-up) analysis to build an organizational change capability (OCC) development model by integrating paradox and social cognitive theories. Using these theories, OCC (Level 2) is influenced by the leader’s paradox mindset (Level 1) and collective PsyCap (Level 2). The study also examined the moderating effect of magnitude to change on the effect of leader’s paradox mindset on OCC.

The proposed hypotheses were tested empirically using data from 327 respondents and 48 work teams from 21 leading private higher education institutions in Indonesia. To analyze the data, a multi-level analysis was conducted with Mplus software.

The results showed that, in a cross-level relationship, leader’s paradox mindset had a positive effect on OCC, whereas OCC mediated the effect of leader’s paradox mindset on organizational change performance. On an organizational level, collective PsyCap affected OCC, and OCC significantly mediated the relationship between collective PsyCap and organizational change performance. Moreover, the authors found a moderating effect of magnitude on change of leader’s paradox mindset to OCC.

This study used a multi-level analysis to evaluate the mechanisms of influence of leader’s paradox mindset (bottom-up) on OCC and the moderation effect of magnitude to change in an Indonesian context.

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.

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.

Accumulated evidence suggests that efforts at diversity management (DM) yield mixed results or even fail in terms of promoting workforce diversity. Previous scholarly attempts to explain the mixed results of DM initiatives provided only partial understanding. This study applies a paradox perspective to better understand the challenges of DM from the vantage point of diversity managers, who play a central role in the promotion and implementation of diversity initiatives.

In-depth interviews with diversity managers in large business organizations in Israel explored practitioners' conceptions of the challenges underlying the implementation of diversity initiatives. A grounded theory approach was utilized.

The findings reveal the emergence of paradox: diversity initiatives generate organizational tensions that undermine their success and hence amplify the need for further diversity interventions. Three distinct paradoxes are identified: necessary change vs desire for stability; bureaucratic control vs flexible procedures; and long-term business gains vs short-term losses. Diversity managers utilize two opposing strategies to contend with these paradoxes.

This study does not represent voices of diverse employees or of top executives. The data focused on mid-level practitioners' descriptions of DM challenges and their methods of contending with them.

The findings shed light on an effective strategy of contending with paradox. Recognizing paradox and navigating it properly may greatly advance the success of costly DM change interventions. Implications are suggested regarding the academic education and training of DM practitioners.

Based on the paradox framework, which offers a novel vantage point for understanding the challenges of implementing DM, the findings contribute to the scholarly understanding of the limited success of DM interventions.

The primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of viewing paradoxes, which are commonly‐accepted logical perspectives that appear contradictory, as being useful for organizational learning and to show why organizational paradoxes need to be managed integratively.

The cultural industries (those that promote art, music and entertainment) are used as a backdrop for developing propositions that explain the benefits of dynamically shifting between poles of a paradox and the relationship between elements of managing multiple paradoxes integratively and organizational outcomes.

It is expected that organizations which move between the poles of paradoxes are more likely to increase organizational knowledge about their capabilities and to enhance their ability to deal with paradoxes.

Organizational researchers should consider identifying the direction and rate of movement along the poles of paradoxes by organizations when studying the appropriateness of various organizational methods for achieving outcomes such as growth or performance. Future research should examine a larger variety of paradoxes in order to increase understanding of the appropriateness of their integrative management.

Managers should become familiar with the speed and direction of movement (organizational change) between the poles of organizational paradoxes before making operational and strategic decisions. In addition, managers should be cognizant of the variety of paradoxes present in their organization and of the need for their integrative management.

The paper describes how movement along the poles of organizational paradox enhances organizational learning, as well as the importance of managing organizational paradoxes integratively.

The traditional dualism view regards stability and change as opposites and separate, two essential but largely incompatible and mutually exclusive elements in an organization, and it advocates contingency theories to handle the paradox situation; more recent research has adopted the paradoxical lens to highlight both the contradiction and the interdependence between the two elements. This paper aims to address how an organization pursues stability and change simultaneously, i.e., how stability and change contradictorily enable each other to promote the development of an organization.

By adopting a case study on the strategic and structural change of Signcomplex in China, this paper attempts to explore the paradoxical relationship between stability and change, especially their interdependence. Multiple approaches were used during data collection to meet the criteria for trustworthiness, and the data analysis went through a five-step process. Through this analysis, the main mechanisms of stability and change were identified. An analysis was also conducted on how these stable and variable mechanisms enable each other, and finally, a framework was set up to show this paradoxical relationship.

The results confirm the paradox of stability and change: stability enables change by supplying security and consistency, offering reserved knowledge and skills and enabling commitment and the provision of resources for a better realization of the change. Change enables a firm to set up a new state of stability through variable mechanisms such as trial-and-error and exploration activities. The results also indicate that the nature of organizational change is to help an organization reach a new stable stage with higher efficiency and that organizational development relies on the paradoxical effects of both stability and change.

This research is constrained by several limitations. The findings need to be further confirmed through the investigation of more organizations; other stable mechanisms, such as habits, tight coupling, commitments, control and low variance, and variable mechanisms, such as search, mindfulness, redundancy and openness, should be considered. As an organization may experience many cross-level or cross-department changes which struggle with each other for resources and with stable mechanisms, to explore the paradox, future research may need to conduct a more in-depth examination of the system of change.

The findings offer some valuable insights for further research and hold important implications for management practices, especially management practices in a Chinese context. The findings extend the existing paradox theory by further revealing how stability and change enable each other and offer a paradoxical perspective to look into the nature of organizational change and organizational development. The results remind managers to rethink the relationship between stability and change, to factor these coexisting concepts into their decision-making and to accept, understand and use this paradoxical relationship to realize synergistic effects for the firm.