Search results

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.

Organizational ambidexterity brings together the paradoxical tensions between exploration and exploitation. Embracing such paradoxical tensions depends on both separating the poles to appreciate their distinct elements and integrating them to appreciate their synergies. This paper explores integrative ambidexterity that focuses on the synergies between exploration and exploitation and theorizes these as a single, paradoxical mode of learning.

The authors provide conceptual commentary that aims to expand the attention within the ambidexterity literature from emphasizing separation to further accommodating integration.

The authors outline that attention to separating exploration and exploitation needs to be complemented with a focus on integration, hence, the notion of integrative ambidexterity.

The authors surface three processes that advance integrative ambidexterity – novelty via memory; agility via focus; and the potential for improvisation. Together, these dynamics enable organizations to achieve an alternative approach to learning and adaptation.

Understanding “integrative ambidexterity,” stressing the synergies between exploration and exploitation, extends the understanding of the nature and approaches to creating learning organizations. The authors three practices offer a potential blueprint to do so.

Previous scholarship emphasized how leaders can separate exploration and exploitation by allocating these learning modes to distinct organizational units or addressing them in different time horizons. However, extant authors have less insight about the integration and synergies between exploration and exploitation, and the organizational factors that advance such integration.

Decisions have recently been given by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg which are of vital importance for the cause of equality between men and women. They demonstrate the relevance of the European provisions on equal pay and opportunity and serve to warn that no one who has a complaint on this subject can afford to be unaware of the European law. Five cases have been referred by the UK courts to the European court and each concerns equal pay and opportunity between men and women. The individuals have been assisted by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), a statutory body in the UK. The individual's trade unions have also given assistance in some of the cases.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

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.

This article presents our experiences of conducting research interviews with Australian academics, in order to reflect on the politics of researcher and participant positionality. In particular, we are interested in the ways that academic networks, hierarchies and cultures, together with mobility in the higher education sector, contribute to a complex discursive terrain in which researchers and participants alike must maintain vigilance about where they ‘put their feet’ in research interviews. We consider the implications for higher education research, arguing that the positionality of researchers and participants pervades and exceeds these specialised research situations.

Scholars increasingly depict hybridity as pervasive across organizations. The authors offer insight about how paradox theory informs and expands this approach to hybridity. To do so, the authors do a deeper dive into paradox theory, comparing and contrasting a dynamic equilibrium approach with a permanent dialectics approach. Integrating these two approaches offers paradox theory insights that can enrich and expand hybridity scholarship. The authors offer suggestions for how paradox theory can help develop a future research agenda for organizational hybridity.

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.