Paradox is gaining more and more pervasiveness in and around organizations, thus increasing the need for an approach to management that allows both researchers and practitioners to address these paradoxes. We attempt to contribute to this project by suggesting a relational approach to paradoxes. To this aim, we first present the state of the art of research on management paradoxes and then explain four regularities surfaced in the literature on this topic. We conclude by arguing that taking these regularities as a whole allows us to suggest a new perspective on paradoxes - one with a positive regard for the co-presence of opposites but that takes seriously the potential relationship between these.

This paper argues that the apparent contradiction in current conceptualizations of time in organizations (e.g., Chronos vs. Kairos) is only apparent, and that a synthesis between these opposing poles is both possible and desirable. We propose improvisation (where time to plan converges with time to act) as a vehicle for articulating a dialectical view of time-based organizational phenomena, while focusing on the three major time-related problems organizations have to solve: scheduling, synchronization, and allocation. The paper discusses how improvisation helps to synthesize even time and event time in scheduling processes, internal pacing and external pacing in synchronization processes, and linear and cyclical time in allocation processes. Methodological and practical obstacles to synthesis are also discussed.

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This paper calls for research on organizational improvisation to go beyond the currently dominant jazz metaphor in theory development. We recognize the important contribution that jazz improvisation has made and will no doubt continue to make in understanding the nature and complexity of organizational improvisation. This article therefore presents some key lessons from the jazz metaphor and then proceeds to identify the possible dangers of building scientific inquiry upon a single metaphor. We then present three alternative models - Indian music, music therapy and role theory. We explore their nature and seek to identify ways in which the insights they generate complement those from jazz. This leads us to a better understanding of the challenges of building a theory of organizational improvisation. Copyright 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

This paper argues that the apparent contradiction in current conceptualizations of time in organizations (e.g., Chronos vs. Kairos) is only apparent, and that a synthesis between these opposing poles is both possible and desirable. We propose improvisation (where time to plan converges with time to act) as a vehicle for articulating a dialectical view of time-based organizational phenomena, while focusing on the three major time-related problems organizations have to solve: scheduling, synchronization, and allocation. The paper discusses how improvisation helps to synthesize even time and event time in scheduling processes, internal pacing and external pacing in synchronization processes, and linear and cyclical time in allocation processes. Methodological and practical obstacles to synthesis are also discussed.