Organization Studies

Paradoxical goals, such as demands in industrial R&D for exploratory learning and short-term business performance, may foster synergistic possibilities, but also surface tensions that can paralyse actors. Defensive responses can trigger vicious cycles, where over-focusing on one goal provides actors with temporary comfort, but intensifies the pull from the neglected goal. Paradox studies identify typical initiators of vicious cycles and have started to unpack managerial interventions to reverse into virtuous dynamics. Yet, we still know little about how dysfunctional dynamics drive persisting vicious cycles. Our in-depth longitudinal qualitative case study of an ICT corporate research lab reveals multifaceted and nested dysfunctional dynamics at the heart of persisting vicious cycles. Our study makes three interconnected contributions to the paradox literature. First, while extant studies suggest that managerial interventions can enable organizations to reverse vicious into virtuous cycles, our findings show that interventions may backfire and instead re-fuel dysfunctional dynamics. Particularly when paradoxical goals are almost impossible to attain in practice, managerial interventions that treat the symptoms of over-focusing on one goal instead of addressing the impossibility of the task, can feed dysfunctional dynamics. Second, our process model shows how defensive responses are continually ‘becoming’. Unpacking the shifting nature of defensive responses introduces granularity into current conceptualizations of paradox dynamics but also enriches our understanding of how the management of paradoxes may sometimes feature as an impossible task. Third, our model shows how dysfunctional dynamics are nested across organizational levels. Extending current insights on paradox nestedness, we show that persisting vicious cycles are fuelled by the interlocking effects of senior management interventions to restore dynamic equilibrium and counter-balancing defensive responses at lower organizational levels. We stress the key role of middle managers in contextualizing paradoxical demands into concrete everyday activities that employees can comprehend, while attending to employees’ concerns.

Corporate sustainability rankings have become integral to global governance but their growing influence contrasts sharply with limited progress on urgent societal challenges. This raises critical questions about the value of rankings and the conditions under which rankings may drive substantive adoption of corporate social practices. In the context of the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), we find that (non)reactivity to rankings emerges under different combinations of commitment alignment, pressure and capacity for organizational transparency. Specifically, we find that societal pressure amplifies commensuration, capacity enables self-disciplining, while rankings can be ignored or avoided when commitment or pressure are absent. Furthermore, we find that lacking capacity leads to superficial or symbolic compliance depending on the pressure faced by ranked organizations. Our study advances research on rankings by reframing reactivity through a configurational lens, demonstrates how external–internal alignment fosters substantive implementation of social practices, and identifies the conditions under which rankings contribute to pluralistic governance in business and human rights.

Consensus is often seen as a necessary condition for collaboration in multi-stakeholder initiatives and in multilateral settings. Yet, how the requirement of consensus shapes deliberations and negotiations of global governance issues – and at what costs – remains underexamined. This article raises the questions: How are contested frames revised for consensus in multilateral contexts, and what are the implications for the issues framed? We trace contestations over the framing of sustainable diets across diverse actors in the United Nations (UN). Based on a frame analysis of official policy documents, substantiated by insights from interviews with UN staff and experts on UN policy, we develop a processual model of frame revision in multilateral governance that explains how different forms of frame consensus – integrative, antagonistic and evasive – are reached. We advance framing research by theorizing how frames are revised for consensus through compartmentalization and subversion of contentious issues, thereby masking incommensurable differences. We also contribute to research on deliberative tensions through a processual take on consensus in multilateral settings. These contributions have wider implications for understanding global governance, highlighting why UN consensus politics are often associated with incremental rather than radical changes.

Corporate social responsibility research often emphasizes the commissive effects of corporate discourse, ignoring silence or considering it a deliberate strategy to evade stakeholder pressure. From this perspective, only corporate discourse commits, and silence is the absence of discourse. This paper challenges this approach. Drawing on ventriloquial theory (Cooren, 2010) and the notion of metaventriloquism (Castor, 2020), this paper develops the concept of corporate commissive silence (CCS) to theorize how corporate silence on commitments operates as a malleable sign and a contested semiotic space. Specifically, it interprets CCS as an absence of message that different agents identify, attribute to a company, and imbue with meaning to promote their own opinions about what animates and/or should animate that company. As this concept highlights, not only words but also silence can generate commissive dynamics for corporations. The communicative force of this type of silence does not depend on corporate intentionality, but rather on the operations of appropriation and reinterpretation executed by other agents. To illustrate the utility of this concept, I describe several metaventriloquial practices executed by various agents in a recent controversy surrounding Disney’s silence on Florida’s HB 1557 law.

Including marginalized voices in organizational research requires researchers to establish trust and authenticity. Methodologically, creating this level of rapport can be challenging, especially with marginalized organizational participants. Previous research suggests ethnographic, participative, and visual approaches as potential solutions to facilitate greater meaning-making of the experiences of those in marginalized groups. Yet, despite advances in these methods, the voices of marginalized groups in organizations are often not fully embraced. We suggest photovoice as a method particularly well suited for studying marginalized groups because it prioritizes the voices of participants by including them throughout a research project. While photovoice has been used in other disciplines, in this article we provide guidance to management and organizational researchers about how to conduct photovoice with marginalized groups in an organizational context. We present a figure describing each element of the photovoice process using sensemaking and sensegiving lenses and illustrate this method with two examples. Overall, we shed light on the benefits that photovoice can offer as a complement or an additional methodological tool for researchers seeking to elevate voices of marginalized groups and their role in organizational phenomena.