Marianne W. Lewis

Toward a Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic equilibrium Model of Organizing

As organizational environments become more global, dynamic, and competitive, contradictory demands intensify. To understand and explain such tensions, academics and practitioners are increasingly adopting a paradox lens. We review the paradox literature, categorizing types and highlighting fundamental debates. We then present a dynamic equilibrium model of organizing, which depicts how cyclical responses to paradoxical tensions enable sustainability—peak performance in the present that enables success in the future. This review and the model provide the foundation of a theory of paradox.

Product Development Tensions: Exploring Contrasting Styles of Project Management

Successful product development requires managing tensions—coping with fluctuating contingencies to foster innovation and efficiency. To investigate this challenge, we explored the nature, dynamics,...

Critical Pedagogy in the `New Paradigm'

This article argues for the adoption of critical pedagogy by management educators. This change not only recognizes the Profound shifts in competitiveness that have already occurred in the business environment, but would also equip students as independent learners. Students become capable of a complicated understanding of the historical, social, political, and philosophical traditions underlying contemporary conceptions of organizations and management. Truly critical pedagogy necessitates changes in educational roles, curricular content, and classroom practices to create a learning space that supports and encourages students to engage in critical commentary. This space emerges when power in the classroom is de-centered, disciplinary borders become permeable, and issues are problematized. Two examples of implementing critical pedagogy in content (text selection) and process (paradoxical thinking) are presented to illustrate the potential for the transformation of organizational arrangements. Critical pedagogy in management education possesses the capacity for developing students with a greater sensitivity to the emancipatory and transformational possibilities in the future.

Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox

Organization studies is a robust field, replete with diverse, often contentious perspectives that may enrich understandings of pluralism and paradox. Yet polarization of modern paradigms and ruptures between modern and postmodern stances may inhibit researchers from tapping this potential. In response, this article delves into a provocative alternative - multiparadigm inquiry. First, we juxtapose modern, postmodern and multiparadigm approaches to contrast their underlying assumptions. We then review three multiparadigm strategies, exploring their objectives, exemplars and limitations. Our conclusion addresses how multiparadigm inquiry fosters greater reflexivity, while posing considerable challenges.

Paradox Research in Management Science: Looking Back to Move Forward

Paradox studies offer vital and timely insights into an array of organizational tensions. Yet this field stands at a critical juncture. Over the past 25 years, management scholars have drawn foundational insights from philosophy and psychology to apply a paradox lens to organizational phenomena. Yet extant studies selectively leverage ancient wisdom, adopting some key insights while abandoning others. Using a structured content analysis to review the burgeoning management literature, we surface six key themes, which represent the building blocks of a meta-theory of paradox. These six themes received varying attention in extant studies: paradox scholars emphasize types of paradoxes, collective approaches, and outcomes, but pay less attention to relationships within paradoxes, individual approaches, and dynamics. As this analysis suggests, management scholars have increasingly simplified the intricate, often messy phenomena of paradox. Greater simplicity renders phenomena understandable and testable, however, oversimplifying complex realities can foster reductionist and incomplete theories. We therefore propose a future research agenda targeted at enriching a meta-theory of paradox by reengaging these less developed themes. Doing so can sharpen the focus of this field, while revisiting its rich conceptual roots to capture the intricacies of paradox. This future research agenda leverages the potential of paradox across diverse streams of management science.

Paradox as a Metatheoretical Perspective: Sharpening the Focus and Widening the Scope

Organizations are rife with tensions—flexibility versus control, exploration versus exploitation, autocracy versus democracy, social versus financial, global versus local. Researchers have long responded using contingency theory, asking “Under what conditions should managers emphasize either A or B?” Yet increasingly studies apply a paradox perspective, shifting the question to “How can we engage both A and B simultaneously?” Despite accumulating exemplars, commonalities across paradox studies remain unclear, and ties unifying this research community weak. To energize further uses of a paradox perspective, we build from past reviews to explicate its role as a metatheory. Contrasting this lens to contingency theory, we illustrate its metatheoretical nature. We then dive deeper to sharpen the focus and widen the scope of a paradox perspective. Identifying core elements viewed from a paradox perspective—underlying assumptions, central concepts, nature of interrelationships and boundary conditions—offers a guide, informing the practice of paradox research. Next, we illustrate diverse uses of this lens. We conclude by exploring implications and next steps, stressing the rising need for paradox research, as complexity, change, and ambiguity intensify demands for both/and approaches in theory and practice.

Managing creatives: Paradoxical approaches to identity regulation

Creative workers often experience identity tensions. On the one hand, ‘creatives’ desire to see themselves as distinctive in their artistry, passion, and self-expression, nurturing an identity that energizes their innovative efforts. Yet daily pressures to meet budgets, deadlines and market demands encourage a more business-like identity that supports firm performance. Through a comparative case study of New Product Design (NPD) consultancies, we explicate the potential management of such identity tensions. Case evidence illustrates overarching, paradoxical approaches to identity regulation as the firms emphasized both differentiation and integration strategies. Differentiation practices promoted disparate identities by segregating related roles in time and space, while integration efforts encouraged a more synergistic meta-identity as ‘practical artists’. Leveraging paradox literature, we discuss how these strategies may accommodate creative workers’ needs to cope with multiple identities, as well as their aversion to sanctioned subjectivities.

Factors impacting AMT implementation: an integrative and controlled study

Abstract Advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) poses tremendous advantages and challenges for organizations. To integrate previous studies of AMT implementation, we investigate how varied operations strategies, organizational cultures, and implementation practices impact performance. Our research design controlled for the type of AMT and examined the timing effects of implementation, enabling a survey of 110 plants that had implemented computerized die/mold machinery over the past 3 years. Results indicate that high-performing plants employ: a strategy that emphasizes quality, delivery, and flexibility over costs; a balanced culture that stresses flexibility and control; and systematic practices that facilitate change (training, pilot projects, long-term AMT objectives). Moreover, we find that implementation timing may act as a confounding variable, as plants that had recently implemented AMT outperformed those with older implementations.

Paradoxical Leadership to Enable Strategic Agility

Strategic agility evokes contradictions, such as stability-flexibility, commitment-change, and established routines-novel approaches. These competing demands pose challenges that require paradoxical leadership—practices seeking creative, both/and solutions that can enable fast-paced, adaptable decision making. Why is managing paradox critical to strategic agility? And which practices enable leaders to effectively manage tensions? This article describes the paradoxical nature of strategic agility. Drawing from data from five firms, Astro Studios, Digital Divide Data, IBM Global Services Canada, Lego, and Unilever, it proposes leadership practices to effectively respond to these challenges.

Learning through Paradox: A Pedagogical Strategy for Exploring Contradictions and Complexity.

Over the past decade, the notion of paradox has become increasingly of interest in organization studies. This article seeks to extend the topic to the arena of management education. Specifically, we present paradox as one means of raising the complexity of students’ understandings of what it means to manage in an increasingly turbulent world. Invoking a “pedagogy of paradox” intentionally introduces contradictions that exist simultaneously to discussion, thereby initially prompting a degree of confusion and feelings of anxiety to stimulate creative thinking that moves beyond either—or toward both—and understandings. We begin by discussing the key components of paradox, then introduce three pedagogical strategies—conceptual polarities, personal contradictions, and paradoxical predicaments—and elaborate accompanying classroom exercises for each.