TSElosophers meeting 28.1.2020, Kari Lukka, Milla Wirén, Mohamed Farhoud, Otto Rosendahl

Berti & Simpson: THE DARK SIDE OF ORGANIZATIONAL PARADOXES: THE DYNAMICS OF DISEMPOWERMENT, Forthcoming in Academy of Management Review

Summary

The literature on organizational paradoxes pivots on themes such as ‘change – stability’, ‘exploration – exploitation’ or ‘competition – collaboration’ and predominantly views the simultaneous existence of these contradictions as sources of beneficial organizational versatility. Berti and Simpson want to join the discussion by highlighting the ‘dark side’ of paradoxes, building on a view that the extant paradox literature falsely assumes similar agency on both sides of the paradoxes. Their claimed key contribution is that the power disparity needs to be included into the discussion of organizational paradoxes, especially when, or if, endowing the paradoxes with beneficial qualities.

Berti and Simpson present several, genuine sounding and relevant themes where the power disparity in organizations indeed positions the employees in between the rock and the hard place. They also go further and propose means of mitigating the ensuing problems. These discussions are written well, with clarity and insight, and merit ample attention.

However, there is one notable problem with the paper. We TSElosophers were not convinced that the paper is actually about paradoxes at all. Paradoxes mean, well, by definition, simultaneously existing polar opposites that cannot logically coexist. Instead, what the authors focus on are tensions, that can (at least in theory, if not in organizational practice) be solved, remedied, or mitigated. Some circular reasoning occurs: At least some, if not all, of the ‘paradoxes’ the paper talks about might actually source from power differences – not only that power differences enter the picture later on when trying to live/deal with the paradox. Hence, resolving, or developing a remedy on, a paradox must mean somehow changing the power difference in question, which would in turn mean that no paradox would then exist. The problem the paper actually addresses is the power disparity that creates tensions, not the tensions-as-paradoxes themselves. There is little we learn of the “dark side of paradoxes”, but a lot about the impact of power differences for the organizational actor.

In our discussion we pondered whether this apparent mismatch with the literature into which the authors have positioned their discussion, and the discussion itself, could be due to the twists and turns of the review process. Yes, paradoxes may have more scholarly appeal than tensions, but TSElosophers were left wondering whether the authors could have originally been quite so blind to the issues of consistency that our discussion spotted.