Embracing Complexity through Contradiction: Paradox Theory and Business History
Paradox theory has developed in management studies over the last 25 years as a conceptual lens to understand contradictions persisting in organizations’ lives over time. Recent state-of-the-art articles on paradox theory recognize its relevance for understanding complex problems, its potential limits and challenge researchers to focus on time in process studies.
Notwithstanding this invitation to consider time and processes as a fundamental approach for understanding tensions and complexity in organizational studies, historical analyses have rarely featured in paradox theory. Instead, paradoxes have been used as a rhetorical device in historical studies, but business history has yet to join the conversation.
We contribute to a historical perspective on paradox theory, mapping three research lines to dialogue between business history and paradox theory. The first is historical studies where latent paradoxes show up, particularly analyzing ambivalent boundaries in business practices and organizations, as the relation between profit and non-profit organizations, hybrid and mixed organizations, competition and cooperation, institutions, government and business, and entrepreneurial philanthropy.
The second research strand emphasizes how context-awareness, inherent to historical studies, may be deployed to understand complexity and tensions. This is particularly evident in the history of international business, with the diversity of business forms and contradictory agendas faced by multinationals, or the historical analysis of the tools deployed by organizations for managing contradictions.
The third perspective emphasizes that any paradox has a heuristic function by pinpointing puzzling issues and thus raising an “incitation of insight”. Exemplary cases are the study of the psychic distance paradox in international retailing, the Icarus paradox in the movement from market dominance to irrelevance, or the paradox of firms’ nationality.
Finally, the intersection between paradox theory and business history follows a growing rapprochement between management studies and history.
Other keywords: Paradox Theory, Management Studies, Business History
