Paradoxes in Practice

The purpose of this paper is to explore how paradoxes unfold in management practices and how moments of relational dialogic, self-reflexive learning can transform these paradoxes into new understandings of the complexities of organizing and management. We work with paradox, not as a label but a lens arising from equivocality and ambiguous organizational interpretations. We therefore apply perspective on organizing that acknowledge the super complex processes of organising and approach research from a becoming perspective. The research findings presented in this paper explores from whit-in the movement from spectator to practitioner in an organizational change process. We focus on moments of dialogue in our research that reach beyond the hegemony of organizational life, inviting new ways of going on, change, differing voices and polyfoni. The focus on moments of dialogue represents a way for us to explore ‘the flux of reality from within’ with the managers. We therefore draw on Bakhtin’s ideas regarding ongoing centripetal (monologic) and centrifugal (dialogic) forces of language and aim to demonstrate how working with language and the awareness of the embodied embedded practices at the same time both constitutes and reconstruct organizational paradoxes.