Managing Dialectics to Make a Difference: Tension Management in a Community-Building Organization

Race and Faith: The Role of Congregations in Racial Justice

“…The 1957 Central High School integration crisis provides the historical background for a city that remains, in many ways, divided by race, while also highly religious. 1 Faith and race thus have a historic relationship in the city, with congregations taking sides on the integration crisis in the 1950's (Campbell and Pettigrew 1959) and, in more recent years, faith leaders collaborating to address race relations, issue reports (Driskill and Camp 2006), and engage in service and relationship building efforts across Black and white congregations (Driskill, Arjannikova, andMeyer 2014, Driskill, Meyer, andMirivel 2012).…”

Conceptions of Conflict in Organizational Conflict Research: Toward Critical Reflexivity

“…From this theoretical perspective, how disputants manage tensions and possibly overcome them would be our focus. Recent contributions from Driskill, Meyer, and Mirivel (2012); Erbert (2014); and Jameson (2004) apply a dialectical framework to study conflict and extend conflict research by studying conflict as arising from the dynamic interplay of oppositional forces and contradictions that are not resolved but represent organizational members’ basic needs in various degrees and intensities. Although in stark contrast to the compartmentalized conception of conflict found in traditional conflict research about conflict types and conflict management styles, we welcome these recent developments in dialectical conflict research, as they broaden the scope of attention in conflict research to not only examine the positive or negative conflict outcomes but to consider what these conflicts look like as they unfold in practice and how people experience and manage conflict as opposition and tensions, oftentimes exhibiting a variety of conflict behaviors.…”