Sub-plenary 5
From Zeno’s Paradoxes to Organizational Paradoxes: Tension, Ambidexterity and Change
Friday, July 3, 2015, 11:00–12:30Location: {tba}
Speaker:
Paula Jarzabkowski
Professor of Strategic Management
Cass Business School, City University London, UK
Paula Jarzabkowski’s research focuses on strategy-as-practice and practice theoretical approaches to complex, pluralistic and paradoxical contexts, such as regulated infrastructure firms, third sector organizations and financial services, particularly insurance and reinsurance. Her work on paradox and contradiction in organizations and institutions has appeared in Academy of Management Journal, Human Relations and Strategic Organization. She has also published a corpus of work on practice approaches to strategy and markets in a number of journals including Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies. Her most recent book “Making a Market for Acts of God: The Practice of Risk Trading in the Global Reinsurance Industry” was published with Oxford University Press in 2015.
Speaker:
Marianne Lewis
Professor of Management and Associate Dean
Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati, USA
Her research develops paradox theory in such diverse yet interwoven fields as innovation, organizational change, governance, and technology implementation. Her paper, “Exploring paradox: Toward a more comprehensive guide” received the Academy of Management Review Best Paper Award in 2000. Other publications appear in such top journals as the Academy of Management Journal, California Management Review, Organization Science, and Human Relations.
Speaker:
Wendy Smith
Assistant Professor of Management
Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware, USA
Wendy K. Smith received her doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard University. Her research focuses on how leaders and organizations manage strategic paradoxes, and has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and Harvard Business Review.
Chair:
Ann Langley
Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings, Professor of Management, HEC Montréal, Canada
Ann Langley has research expertise in strategy, organizational change, health care management, and research methods.
Ann's current work deals with leadership collaboration, identity and strategic change in complex organizations from a process perspective.
Previous work has appeared in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Strategic Organization.
Abstracts
Paula Jarzabkowski
For this panel, Paula Jarzabkowski will discuss the theoretical and empirical potential of exploring paradox as an everyday practice. She will argue that, far from being remarkable, or exceptional, paradox is a pervasive characteristic of organizational life that needs to be considered as part of people’s everyday work. As such, actors have knowledgeable, often reflexive, practices for engaging with the paradox that is integral to performing their contradictory roles and tasks. She will consider some of these practices, such as the everyday practice of humor, and explain how a social theory of practice generates new theoretical insights for our understanding of paradox.
Marianne Lewis
For this panel, Marianne Lewis looks forward to discussing the continuing evolution of a paradox lens. Organization scholars
continue to learn from its roots in early Greek and Far Eastern philosophy, as well as psychoanalysis. More recent work explores
leaders’ ability to think and manage paradoxically. Accepting the simultaneity, even complementarity, of competing demands,
managers may differentiate opposing forces to enable focus, and explore means of integration that enable synergy. The result,
she believes, is the potential for organizations to thrive in both the short- and long-term.
Wendy Smith
Paradox studies offer a meta-theoretical lens – providing insights to understand competing demands across varied tensions, phenomena and levels-of-analysis. A number of existing theories have adopted ideas from and contributed to our understanding of organizational paradox. In this session, Wendy will draw from existing studies to explore how paradox informs and is informed by other organizational theories.