مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Decision making is one of the fundamental elements of managerial activity: “The work of a manager includes making decisions (or participating in their making), communicating them to others, and monitoring how they are carried out” (Simon, 1987, p. 57). Decision making has attracted scholars’ attention because of its complexity and its consequences (March, 1994). It is not always clear how people or organisations arrive at decisions and therefore decision making “can be mysterious” (Mintzberg & Westley, 2001, p. 89). Decision making represents a central concept in the field of management and organisation research (Chia, 1994).

However, with rare exceptions (e.g. Murphy & Pauleen, 2007; Smith, 2014), decision making has been examined independent of the role of paradox. By paradox we mean “elements that seem logical in isolation but absurd and irrational when appearing simultaneously” (Lewis, 2000, p. 760). It is often expressed in a statement that contradicts accepted opinion or something that is regarded as common sense (Angeles, 1981). And this can be seen from both Eastern and Western perspectives. The reason that discussions of various aspects of decision making underestimate the role of paradox is that decision making research has mainly focused on studying Western settings (Elbanna & Child, 2007). By contrast, Eastern contexts and especially China might be an ideal setting for studying paradox in decision making as paradox has been regarded as a specific feature of Chinese culture (Fang, 2012).

In a general philosophical sense paradox refers to apparent contradiction. In Western philosophy paradox can be understood as “a set of individually plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions” (Bagger, 2007, p. 2). Recently the idea of paradox has received attention from management and organisation scholars (Bloodgood & Chae, 2010; Fredberg, 2014; Smith & Lewis, 2011). These definitions correspond to Yin Yang, the main principle in Chinese traditional philosophy that refers to “entities that are opposed and yet also are connected in time and space as a whole” (Peng & Nisbett, 1999, p. 743). Scholars emphasise the importance of paradox in various aspects of managerial activities and organisational practices and analyse the ways managers and organisations respond to paradoxical tensions (Knight & Harvey, 2015; Murphy & Pauleen, 2007; Richardson, 1995; Thompson, 1998).