Reflections: Return Paradox to the Wild? Paradox Interventions and Their Implications

Cunha, M. P., and Putnam, L. L. (2017. Paradox theory and the paradox of success. Strategic Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.l177/1476127017739536) argued that paradox research has fallen victim to its own success. In a race for institutionalization, paradoxes have putatively been removed from their natural habitat and ‘tamed,’ as the search for best practices has decontextualized, abstracted, and reified them. This essay responds to Cunha and Putnam by first cataloguing various interventions based in paradox and, relatedly, dialectics and then addressing the issues surrounding their oversimplification. If, as research suggests, paradoxes are so embedded in the daily actions and interactions of organizational life that they become difficult to spot or are too intertwined in systems of contradictions, how should we be thinking about interventions, including those less inclined to make a deep dive into context?