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.
Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this paper. We first outline the methodological implications of a shift from single researcher to team ethnography, and from single case site to the multiple sites that constitute global ethnography. Then we present a detailed explanation of a global, team-based ethnographic research project that we conducted over three years. Our study of the global reinsurance industry involved a team of five ethnographers conducting fieldwork in 25 organizations across 15 countries. We outline three central challenges we encountered; team division of labour, team sharing, and constructing a global ethnographic object. The paper concludes by suggesting that global, team-based, ethnography provides important insights into global phenomena, such as regulation, finance, and climate change among others, that are of interest to management scholars.
In this paper we outline a methodological framework for studying the inter-organizational aspects of paradoxes and specify this in relation to grand challenges. Grand challenges are large-scale, complex, enduring problems that affect large populations, have a strong social component, and appear intractable. Our methodological insights draw from our study of the insurance protection gap, a grand challenge that arises when economic losses from large-scale disaster significantly exceed the insured loss, leading to economic and social hardship for the affected communities. We provide insights into collecting data to uncover the paradoxical elements inherent in grand challenges and then propose three analytical techniques for studying inter-organizational paradoxes: zooming in and out, tracking problematization, and tracking boundaries and boundary organizations. These techniques can be used to identify and follow how contradictions and interdependences emerge and dynamically persist within interorganizational interactions and how these shape and are shaped by the unfolding dynamics of the grand challenge. Our techniques and associated research design help advance paradox theorizing by moving it to the inter-organizational and systemic level. This paper also illustrates paradox as a powerful lens through which to further our understanding of grand challenges.
Despite the importance and proliferation of ethnography in strategy and organization research, the central issue of how to present ethnographic findings has rarely been discussed. Yet, the narratives we craft to share our experience of the field are at the heart of ethnographic papers and provide the primary basis for our theorizing. In this article, we explain the "textwork" involved in writing persuasive findings. We provide an illustrative example of ethnographic data as it is recorded within fieldnotes and explain the necessary conceptual and writing work that must be done to render such data persuasive, drawing on published exemplars of ethnographic articles. This allows us to show how such texts, through various forms of writing and data representation, are transformed from raw fieldnotes to comprehensible findings. We conclude by asserting the value of these specifically ethnographic ways of presenting evidence, which are at odds with the canonical methods of data presentation in management studies.
Research Summary: This article brings together the competitive dynamics and strategy-as-practice literatures to investigate relational competition. Drawing on a global ethnography of the reinsurance market, we develop the concept of micro-competitions, which are the focus of competitors' everyday competitive practices. We find variation in relational or rivalrous competition by individual competitors across the phases of a micro-competition, between competitors within a micro-competition, and across multiple micro-competitions. These variations arise from the interplay between the unfolding competitive arena and the implementation of each firm's strategic portfolio. We develop a conceptual framework that makes four contributions to: relational competition; reconceptualizing action and response; elaborating on the awarenessmotivation-capability framework within competitive dynamics; and the recursive dynamic by which implementing strategy inside firms shapes, and is shaped by, the competitive arena. Managerial Summary: Competition is often seen as war: "attack," "retaliation," and "dethronement." Yet competition can also be relational, incorporating collaboration and reciprocity. We show these dynamics in a syndicated financial market, reinsurance, where multiple competitors get the same price for a share of the same deal. Our competitors have rivalrous motivations to win business and relational motivations to ensure buoyant pricing, maintain market health, and enable long-standing client relationships to persist. These motivations are grounded in the strategizing practices with which firms implement their strategic portfolios and compete on deals. Competitors' rivalrous or relational motivations are highly dynamic, shifting throughout the competition on any deal and *The first and second authors contributed equally to this publication.
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