Communicative Dynamic to Reconstruct Paradoxes in Organizations

The paper explores the question of how paradoxes become reproduced in daily organizing practice. Based on a single longitudinal case study of changing a nursing department, we demonstrate not only historically how a specific paradox emerged, and was unfolded successfully. But more so, and inspired by social systems theory, we use a the concept of communicative dynamic to depict how the paradox was reproduced within the daily organizing in which it is situated locally. In our view, the communicative dynamic provides a promising approach to explore paradoxes within organizations for academics and practitioners alike. It contributes to the understanding of paradoxes as integral to organizational life to pursue both/and approaches and encourages a paradoxical lens on organizational phenomena such as change processes.