27 years of research on organizational paradox and coping strategies : A review

Although paradox is an increasingly popular phenomenon in organization and management research, we know very little about how this research has evolved over time. This review is the first systematic analysis of the literature on paradox and related phenomena on contradictory tensions (i.e. duality, dilemma, dialectic and ambidexterity) analysing 373 articles published in 75 peer-reviewed academic journals from 1986-2013. Specifically, this article aims at complementing previous reviews by addressing four major objectives: a) to analyse the evolution of the number of conceptual and empirical papers over the period 1986- 2013; b) to identify the major key concepts used to explore paradoxes and to rank them according to their impact on the field; c) to explore which key sub-disciplines of organization and management (‘research areas’) have been central to the field of paradox and how they have evolved over time; d) to trace which responses to paradoxes or “coping strategies” have been proposed since Poole and Van de Ven’s (1989) influential article. Using Kuhn’s (1970) stages of paradigm shift, findings are then synthesized by categorizing the literature into three phases: the incubation phase, the exploration phase and the diversification phase of paradox research. Our analysis allows for a more fine-grained understanding of how paradox and related phenomena and their coping strategies have been studied in organisation and management research and enables avenues for further research to be identified