Performing Organizational Paradoxes

Gail T. Fairhurst, Linda L. Putnam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780367856335
• eBook ISBN: 9781000955002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Performing Organizational Paradoxes takes a constitutive, process approach to organizational paradoxes. It underscores the performative nature of paradox through underlying dialectical tensions, its sociomaterial foundations, and power features that bring paradoxes to life, sustain them, and enable their transformation.

The book first situates a constitutive approach in the extant organizational paradox literature, by broadening the constitutive approach and addressing the many debates and inaccuracies around it. For the novice, several early chapters devote themselves to considering how paradoxical tensions present themselves, invite responses, and interrelate through their organizing outcomes. For the advanced, latter chapters consider the ubiquity of power and paradox, how bodies escape the quarantine of their paradox narratives, how inventive category work can resist power-imbued paradoxes, and an agenda for future research that challenges scholars to do more on the process side of paradox.

Filling an important gap in the existing literature, this book will be a key resource for scholars and students in the fields of communication, management, educational administration, organizational psychology and any other fields that study organizations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Perspectives
• 3 Multiple Paradoxical Tensions
• 4 Responding to Paradox
• 5 Paradox and Process Outcomes
• 6 Paradox and Power
• 7 Narrating Paradox, Bodies, and Emotions
• 8 Paradox Category Work
• 9 Possible Futures for Paradox Research
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index