Department of Management seminar Organization and paradox

With Dr Tom Vine

While the study of organization enjoys a distinct conceptual visage, it builds upon both empirical and theoretical content courtesy of the more traditional social sciences. These include anthropology, economics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology, among others. This multidisciplinary heritage does of course mean that the study of organization is inevitably rather challenging. Ever the sage, Charles Handy (1994: 37-38) passes the following comment in respect of our native field: ‘We used to think we knew how to run organisations. Now we know better. More than ever, they need to be global and local at the same time, to be small in some ways but big in others, to be centralised some of the time and decentralised most of it. They expect their workers to be both more autonomous and more of a team, their managers to be more delegating and more controlling.' Suffice it to say, organizational life remains staggeringly complex. Moreover, and unlike comparable units of analysis such as, say, ‘society' or ‘culture' (over which few of us would dare to suggest we comprehend in full technicolor), there remains a stubborn — and misguided – insistence on the part of both practitioners and many academics that organizational life can be understood and controlled. In this brief session, Dr Vine unpacks one of the principal arguments advanced in his 2024 book, Paradox: Towards a Metatheory; that is, paradox is both endemic to organizational life and integral to its effective navigation. Even the very semantics reflect this. As Cooper and Law (1995: 240) note, dictionary definitions marshal organization both as “the state of being organized” and “the act of organizing”. The first definition tells us that organization is an effect, while the second suggests it is an active process of organizing that has not yet solidified into an effect.