Comparative cross-cultural studies and identity research in social psychology focused on
national and organizational differences, clashes and dimensions (Hofstede, Barsoux &
Schneider, Jackson, Ward, Bochner & Furnham, Capoza & Brown). Mapping cultural software
of individuals and dynamics of small groups was supposed to provide additional managerial
knowledge and skills indispensable for global expansion of stable organizational bureaucracies.
However, social constructivists and critical social scientists have also exposed a contingent
nature of managerial skills in complex and chaotic environments and demonstrated
arbitrariness of sense-making in organizations (cf. Weick, Hatch). Increasing frequency of
individual interactions and accelerated evolution of organizational forms drew attention of
research communities to the unhealthy (irrational, pathological) paradoxes of what used to be
considered healthy organizational identities (Alvesson, de Vries, Gabriel, Carr). Problems of
identity and identization (cf. Honneth, Sievers, van Riel) acquired growing significance viewed
against the background of three paradoxes. First, managerial ideologies call for flexible
networks of empowered individuals, but managerialist ideologies tacitly support hierarchic
control. Second, there is no sustainable "fit" between new psychologized individualism and
evolving "organizationalism" (Leinberger & Tucker). Robust identities and sustainable fit are
continually challenged by unhealthy shadows of authoritarian "psychostructures" and dominant
forms of organizationalism (Negri, Melucci, Stehr, Beck). Third, emergent alliances in social and
managerial sciences have not succeeded yet in changing the methodological and ethical
landscape of research in order to challenge dominant modes of organizing, social embedding
and self-reflection. Such a shift could offer insights into the unhealthy paradoxes of healthy
identities assumed by functionalists and criticized by constructivists, contingency theoreticians
and evolutionists (Abrahamsson, Boje,Featherstone, Clark & Fincham, Denzin & Lincoln)
