Paradox as a Metatheoretical Perspective Sharpening the Focus and Widening the Scope

Organizations are rife with tensionsflexibility versus control, exploration versus exploitation, autocracy versus democracy, social versus financial, global versus local. Researchers have long responded using contingency theory, asking Under what conditions should managers emphasize either A or B? Yet increasingly studies apply a paradox perspective, shifting the question to How can we engage both A and B simultaneously? Despite accumulating exemplars, commonalities across paradox studies remain unclear, and ties unifying this research community weak. To energize further uses of a paradox perspective, we build from past reviews to explicate its role as a metatheory. Contrasting this lens to contingency theory, we illustrate its metatheoretical nature. We then dive deeper to sharpen the focus and widen the scope of a paradox perspective. Identifying core elements viewed from a paradox perspectiveunderlying assumptions, central concepts, nature of interrelationships and boundary conditionsoffers a guide, informing the practice of paradox research. Next, we illustrate diverse uses of this lens. We conclude by exploring implications and next steps, stressing the rising need for paradox research, as complexity, change, and ambiguity intensify demands for both/and approaches in theory and practice.