“Senator, We Run Ads!”: On The Persistence of Facebook’s Paradoxical Tensions

Abstract

Despite the ongoing interest in studying organizational paradoxes, we still lack knowledge of how and why these paradoxes persist over time. Based on a critical discourse analysis of video data of Facebook’s Congressional hearings in 2018, we develop a process model of the dynamic persistence of paradoxical tensions. We argue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg mobilized embodied four discursive practices—conforming, rejecting, transcending, and generalizing—in an attempt to create complexity to conceal Facebook’s strategic tensions. As a result, these practices led to circles of resolving, exposing, and concealing tensions, giving rise to the persistence of the paradox of the company’s business model. Based on Luhmann’s systems theory, our study contributes to the theoretical advancement of the dynamics of the persistence of paradoxes that showcases the evolvement of tensions over time. Doing so, our study advances the knowledge of the persistence of paradoxes and extends the literature on paradoxes in system theory.