Managing a Strategic Paradox across Organizational Boundaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Top managers are increasingly embedding paradoxes into the goals of the firm’s strategy to reinforce both/and thinking and manage competing demands simultaneously. The paradox literature offers important insights into how management can address strategic paradoxes effectively. However, given that paradoxes are persistent by definition, the paradox literature theorizes surprisingly little about how firms can deal with continuously emerging tensions from strategic paradoxes. In this paper, we draw on an in-depth case study to examine how a top management team manages a strategic paradox that opposes organizational efficiency and employee identity goals. The study reveals how the proliferating tensions emerging from a strategic paradox may be managed by incorporating opportunities that reach beyond organizational boundaries. We identify five managerial practices that enact mutually exclusive, mutually constraining, mutually enabling, and mutually reinforcing relationships among contradictory elements, and that taken together offer an integrative and dynamic model of the management of strategic paradox. The model extends the previous literature by incorporating practices that traverse organizational boundaries, and by integrating a diverse set of practices into a holistic explanatory framework.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".