Wendy K. Smith

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.

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.

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.

Institutional complexity and paradox theory: Complementarities of competing demands

Organizational success increasingly depends on leaders’ abilities to address competing demands simultaneously. Scholars have applied both institutional theory and paradox theory to better understand the nature and responses to these competing demands. These two lenses diverge in their understanding and responses to tensions. Institutional theory depicts competing demands emerging from divergent field-level pressures and stresses their contradictory and oppositional nature. Organizational responses vary from making tradeoffs and choosing pressures with which to conform to seeking strategies for engaging both and managing conflict. Paradox theory locates competing demands as inherent with organizational systems, surfaced through environmental conditions, individual sensemaking, or relational dialogue. According to these scholars, paradoxes are contradictory, interdependent, and persist over time, demanding strategies for engaging and accommodating tensions but not resolving them. In this essay, we highlight these distinctions and argue that drawing from both of these lenses will results in rich, generative theorizing to better address key challenges in the world. We identify specific areas where future research can benefit from such integration.

Diverging and Converging: Integrative Insights on a Paradox Meta-perspective

Paradox theory stands at an exciting moment in organization and management theory. Scholars increasingly seek out insights about the nature and management of contradictory demands to explain a wide array of organizational phenomena across multiple levels of analysis. Our two reviews in the 2016 Academy of Management Annals attest to this growing breadth and depth, each integrating and expanding related, yet different bodies of research. Schad, Lewis, Raisch, and Smith (2016) emphasize the depth of scholarship by analyzing an increasing number of paradox studies within management science. Putnam, Fairhurst, and Banghart (2016) highlight the breadth of scholarship by comparing paradoxes that emerge from multiple theories and paradigms that embrace an interdisciplinary orientation. By drawing on distinct literatures, these two manuscripts reveal diverse insights and reflections about paradoxical demands in organizations. In this integrative reflection, we juxtapose our two review articles, surface distinct assumptions and emphases, highlight complementarities, and raise questions for future scholarship. In doing so, we hope to fuel insights toward a meta-perspective on paradox.

Adding complexity to theories of paradox, tensions, and dualities of innovation and change: introduction to Organization Studies Special Issue on paradox, tensions, and dualities of innovation and change

Approaches to paradox have deep historical roots. Eastern philosophers such as Lao Tzu and Confucius described the world as a mystical interplay of interdependent contradictions (Chen, 2002; Li, 2014). The Tao te Ching, for example, opens with the puzzling and circular first line, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Western scholars such as Aristotle and Hegel depicted paradox as irrational and unsolvable puzzles or double binds. The classic example is the liar’s paradox, with the statement “I am lying” leading one in strange loops between honesty and falsehood. Both these traditions stress that our greatest insights derive from grappling with intricate, interwoven and often irrational contradictions.

Bowing before Dual Gods: How Structured Flexibility Sustains Organizational Hybridity*:

Organizations increasingly grapple with hybridity—the combination of identities, forms, logics, or other core elements that would conventionally not go together. Drawing on in-depth longitudinal data from the first ten years of a successful social enterprise—Digital Divide Data, founded in Cambodia—we induce an empirically grounded model of sustaining hybridity over time through structured flexibility: the interaction of stable organizational features and adaptive enactment processes. We identify two stable features—paradoxical frames, involving leaders’ cognitive understandings of the two sides of a hybrid as both contradictory and interdependent, and guardrails, consisting of formal structures, leadership expertise, and stakeholder relationships associated with each side—that together facilitate ongoing adaptation in the meanings and practices of dual elements, sustaining both elements over time. Our structured flexibility model reorients research away from focusing on either stable or adaptive approaches to sustaining hybridity toward understanding their interaction, with implications for scholarship on hybridity, duality, and adaptation more broadly.

Quo vadis, paradox? Centripetal and centrifugal forces in theory development

Organizations increasingly face contradictory goals, multiple stakeholder expectations, and pluralistic missions that surface and intensify competing demands. Paradox theory offers a lens to understand and engage these tensions. Yet as research adopting a paradox lens continues to grow, scholars warn that its success could advance a dominant logic, which will ultimately hinder conceptual development and result in its downfall. We suggest that scholars can avoid this denigration by embracing theory development’s driving forces—centripetal forces that define and buffer a conceptual core and centrifugal forces aimed at challenging the core and extending its boundaries. Although these forces’ directions diverge, we depict these dual forces as paradoxical—contradictory and fundamentally interdependent. That is, we explore paradoxical forces of theory development to understand the development of paradox theory. We offer means to use, balance, and leverage these insights to help surface the black boxes in paradox research.