Seminar (Dept. of General Management)

Title: Decomposing Both/And: SMART Strategies for Balancing Paradoxical Opposites

Speaker: Xin Li (Newcastle Business School)

Time: 14:00pm, Jun 6th (Thursday), 2024

Venue: Online Meeting

Language: Chinese/English

ABSTRACT:

Organizational paradox literature points out the importance of both/and thinking and acting. While the notion of both/and is largely treated as a unitary concept, paradox scholars have associated it with diverse responses to paradoxical tensions, such as ambidexterity, Yin-Yang balancing, and Zhong-Yong middle way. To bring order to the literature, this paper aims to decompose the notion of both/and, and identify generic strategies for balancing paradoxical opposites, i.e., to hold or achieve both elements of a paradoxical tension simultaneously. We first review existing classifications of approaches to paradoxical tensions, resulting in the identification of six distinct non-either/or responses. We then use these distinct responses to help build a typology to accommodate and relate ten generic strategies, falling into five categorical types characterized as superficial, multiversal, amalgamative, reconciliatory, and transcendental, respectively (and hence the SMART acronym). Finally, we propose a prescriptive model of selection of generic strategies under different circumstances.