Towards a social practice theory of paradox

This paper explores the shared ontological basis of the paradox and practices perspectives. Advancing the emerging ‘practice turn’ in paradox, we outline the practice-theoretical approach to studying paradox, articulating four main principles that define its research agenda. We describe each theoretical principle, explain its implications for the way we understand and study paradox, and illustrate it with an example of existing work. Next, we use these principles to reflect on the potential of a practice-based view of paradox, highlighting avenues for future research. Herein we review, integrate and develop a foundation for practice-based studies of paradox

Timing practices and material markers in coordinating collective market patterns

This paper considers the practices of coordination in financial markets that do not rely on a common market device (e.g., trading platform or calculative tool) to organize trading between buyers and sellers. Our case focuses on the coordination of the pricing cycle within the reinsurance sector. Building on social studies of finance, we adopt a practice-theoretical perspective. Our study goes beyond existing work in showing the importance, and inherently strategic nature, of timing practices in financial markets. Specifically, our ethnographic study of coordination in the reinsurance market shows the recursive interplay between four types of timing practices – delaying, readying, rushing and settling – and the various material artifacts that reinsurers (i.e., sellers) create in shaping the unfolding market pricing cycle. We show how market actors shape the temporal flow of the markets by strategically manipulating time, to both position themselves favorably on individual deals and to collectively push the pricing cycle up. In theorizing the interplay between timing practices and material markers in financial markets, our study advance theory on financial market coordination in three ways. First, we bring to the foreground the strategic nature of financial actors’ sociomaterial practices and show how such practices can impact on broader market outcomes, in our case the market cycle. Second, our exploration of material markers extends concepts of materiality in financial markets beyond the technological affordance of a common trading platform or pricing tool. Third, we further our understanding of the complex relationships between the temporality of financial market microstructures and their coordination practices

Constructing risk objects and their controllability in the insurance industry

This study examines the interrelationship between the social construction of a risk object and the associated means of controlling it within organizations. Drawing on data from 35 insurance organizations, we develop a framework that theorizes how organizations construct risk objects along different dimensions of proximity/distance and tangibility/abstraction, which shapes and is shaped by how they construct their ability to control those risk objects as a matter of protection or capital efficiency. We show that organizations vary in these constructions of risk, developing three categories of Risk Protector, Risk Optimizer and Risk Jugglers. We explain this variation and offer an expanded conceptualization of the construction of the risk object and its controllability through three explanatory organizational features of centralizing, modelling and diversifying. Our findings are drawn together into a conceptual framework that illuminates two pathways that organizations follow in constructing and controlling risk: coherent pathways (with consistent either/or choices) or composite pathways (individual both/and approaches). In doing so, we theoretically extend the notion of the risk object within organizational studies and provide a platform for additional studies into this important but nascent area of organizational research

Legitimacy defense during post-merger integration: Between coupling and compartmentalization

During post-merger integration, the realization of the benefits of potential synergies depends on managing the legitimacy of the merger. However, we still know little about how threats that change stakeholders’ assessments of a merger’s legitimacy are managed. This study is based on the merger case of Air New Zealand’s trans-national acquisition of Ansett Australia where a delegitimizing event occurred at Ansett relatively early after the integration had started. The study builds a framework of an evolving legitimation process depicting the oscillation between legitimation responses that maintain the coupling between the two organizations and a compartmentalization response used to manage diverse stakeholders’ legitimacy demands and illegitimacy spillover concerns. We explain how these legitimation responses can create an unproductive oscillation where stakeholder assessments of illegitimacy build up and ultimately become unresolvable. Our processual framework provides novel insights regarding when attempts to defend legitimacy can prove self-defeating, demonstrating how previous responses emphasizing integration or separation can affect the success of subsequent swings back to coupling or compartmentalization

Transcendence through historial practices: responding to paradox in the science sector

Organizations are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated objectives. An important response to such paradoxes is transcendence: the ability to view both poles of the paradox as necessary and complementary. Despite the centrality of transcendence to existing frameworks within the paradox literature, we still know little about its practice. We address this gap by surfacing and analysing rhetorical practices across three science organizations. We outline four rhetorical practices that constitute transcendence (Ordering, Aspiring, Signifying, and Embodying) as well as the underlying features of these practices that explain how they construct a response to paradox. In particular, we show that transcendence entailed balancing the enabling features of focus (paradoxical content/context), time (stability/change) and distance (maintaining/reducing). Finally, we develop a dynamic view of transcendence as a process of oscillation, showing how these practices are bundled together and interrelate to construct moments of transcendence

The paradoxes of management

Funding text: this work was funded by national funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under the project ref. UID/ECO/00124/2013 and by POR Lisboa ubder the project LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-007722.This paper explores paradox, a way of seeing organizations that emphasizes interdependence, opposition and persistence, as both a source of novelty and absurdity. Paradoxes are processes with a dual potential for organizational harm or good, depending on the way they are framed and tackled. We explore this dual side of paradox and discuss some of its implications for the management of organizations.publishersversionpublishe

Strategizing for Legitimacy in Pluralistic Contexts: New Zealand’s Science Sector

How do organizations strategize for legitimacy in pluralistic contexts? Little is known about the strategies organizations use to manage their legitimacy with multiple internal and external stakeholders within pluralism. For instance, how strategies interrelate and are combined simultaneously by organizations has not been researched. Through addressing this question the thesis seeks theoretical elaboration that contributes to our understanding in this regard and addresses this gap in the legitimacy literature. In particular, a combinatorial picture of legitimacy strategies is provided that provides insight into how strategies might be combined and interrelate. Based on a novel tabulation that brings the various strands of the literature together a framework is developed for investigating the research problem. Theoretical extension is then sought through an empirical focus on the pluralistic setting of New Zealand’s science sector. Six case studies based on two layers of replication are explored, principally through 58 multi-stakeholder interviews. The findings show that multiple embedded tensions and complex diffused power relationships characterise these organization cases. This provides a basis for investigating legitimacy strategies amidst pluralism: the basis of the analysis A picture of agency intensive legitimation is provided with organizations found to construct and change, as well as conform to, legitimacy demands. This informs the research agenda focused on redressing an identified ‘conformity bias’ (Kitchener, 2002) in much legitimacy theory. Further, a traditional preoccupation with overarching field level systems within dominant strands of legitimacy research has been recognized (Kraatz & Block, 2008). This research contributes by seeking to rectify this imbalance through adopting a framework of legitimacy strategies at the organizational level. The result is five propositions and extension to the theoretical framework. Prior work has tended to associate an organization with a dominant single strategy. This thesis finds multiple legitimacy strategies and strategic combinations being implemented by organizations amidst pluralism. Propositions are offered in this regards. The result is increased understanding of both infrequently explored legitimacy strategies and the relationships between them. Such theoretical development blurs the ‘demarcating lines’ that and are implicit in many frameworks and empirical studies. Additional propositions are also provided regarding why similar organizations experiencing similar pluralism might implement different legitimacy strategies. It is proposed that differences in stakeholder perceptions of pluralism’s dimensions are associated with the implementation of different legitimacy strategies by organizations. Overall, both the creative potential and challenges inherent in strategizing for legitimacy amidst pluralism are illustrated. A nuanced picture in this regard is enabled by the diverse array of strategies surfaced both within and across the focal pluralistic organizations

Beyond borders:charting the changing global reinsurance landscape

This report presents the full results from a two-phase study commissioned by the IICI, looking at the London, Bermuda, Continental European and Asia Pacific reinsurance markets from the perspective of cedents, reinsurers and brokers. An interim report from Phase 1 was released at Monte Carlo in 2010

Managing risk as a duality of harm and benefit: a study of organizational risk objects in the global insurance industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm-benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk-transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating, and diversifying. Through variation in these practices not all organizations seek balance and we, in turn, uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co-constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm-benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade-offs between harm-benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality

Die administratiewe funksionering van bewindsinstellings in die Ciskei met besondere verwysing na plaaslike bestuur

As gevolg van die ongekonsolideerde aard van die Bantoegebiede in die Ciskei is dit onmoontlik om diè gebied te begrens binne bepaalde relief kenmerke, soos bv. berge en riviere; of selfs binne administratiewe grense soos bv. magistraatsdistrikte. Intro., p.