26:T554,

Businesses and NGOs are collaborating more frequently to address social issues with commercial solutions, yet not all collaborations work well. We wanted to know why some collaborations struggle where others succeed. We studied five projects in India in which businesses bought goods and services from NGOs that employed disadvantaged people. Two of these five projects met the expectations of both parties, whereas the other three did not. By drawing on the paradox literature, we argue that the project’s success indicates that the business and NGO engaged the commercial-social paradox. We found that in the projects that worked well, the two parties held fluid categories, i.e. they saw differences between business and NGO as contextual and aimed to find creative workarounds to emergent problems. In the projects that did not work well, businesses and NGOs imposed categorical imperatives, i.e. they saw sharp differences that they intensified by imposing standardized and familiar solutions on their partner. We contribute to the literature on paradox to show how cognition and action create generative or limited outcomes. We also weigh in on the ontological foundations of paradox, arguing that actors that assume that paradoxes are a social construction are more likely to engage paradoxes than actors that assume paradoxes are a social reality.

27:T4ba,

Both intuition and rationality can play important roles in strategic decision making. However, a framework that specifically accounts for the interplay between intuition and rationality is still missing. This study addresses this gap by using a paradox lens and conceptualizes the intuition–rationality duality as a paradoxical tension. We draw on seven case studies of innovation projects to empirically derive a three-step process for managing this intuition–rationality tension through paradoxical thinking. Our empirical data suggest that management of the tension starts with preparing the ground for paradoxical thinking by creating managerial acceptance for the contradictory elements of rational and intuitive approaches to decision making. The process then continues by developing decision-making outcomes through the integration of intuitive and rational practices. Finally, the outcomes of paradoxical thinking are embedded into the organizational context. For each step of the model, we indicate a set of practices that, by leveraging intuitive or rational characteristics of decision making, practitioners can use to deal with this cognitive tension in the different steps of our model.

28:T518,

This paper adopts a practice approach to paradox, examining the role of micro-practices in shaping constructions of and responses to paradox. Our approach is inductively motivated. During an ethnographic study of an organization implementing paradoxical goals we noticed a strong incidence of humor, joking, and laughter. Examining this practice closely, we realized that humor was used to surface, bring attention to, and make communicable experience of paradox in the moment by drawing out some specific contradiction in their work. Humor thus allowed actors to socially construct paradox, as well as—in interaction with others—construct potential responses to the multiple small incidences of paradox in their everyday work. In doing so, humor cast the interactional dynamics that were integral in constructing two response paths: (i) entrenching a response, whereby an existing response was affirmed, thereby continuing on a particular response path, and (ii) shifting a response, whereby actors moved from one response to paradox to another, thereby altering how the team collectively responded to paradoxical issues. Drawing on these findings, we reconceptualize paradox as a characteristic of everyday life, which is constructed and responded to in the moment.

29:T467,

We examine the case of a corporate spin-off, in which its reacquisition by the parent firm radically changed its structure and culture. Employing a discourse lens, we study paradoxica