Paradoxical Condition Research Articles

Whence Paradox? Framing Away the Potential Challenges of Doing Well by Doing Good in Social Enterprise Organizations

Scholars and critics tend to regard social enterprise as a paradoxical organizational form. And yet those who are closest to the apparent paradox in at least two prominent social enterprise industries—fair trade and socially responsible investing—are not inclined to regard their work as paradoxical. How is this so? Drawing upon, and then extending, the sensemaking literature, I argue that practitioners of social enterprise do not experience their working conditions as paradoxical because they frame away the potentially paradoxical elements of their work. Specifically, they employ three frames: looking at the big picture, engaging with potentially paradoxical conditions rather than turning from them, and making favorable comparisons that ease the paradoxical strain. These insights form the basis of a refined model of sensemaking in organizations, which accounts not only for how members of organizations deal with paradox but also how they come to recognize (or frame away) paradox in the first place.

Freedom and obligation in Locke's account of belief

ABSTRACTLocke's account of belief formation poses a number of philosophical and practical difficulties. As John Passmore and others have shown, Locke appears to hold both that belief is involuntary (in the sense that assent is determined by the balance of available probabilities), and that it is in significant measure voluntary (insofar as we are sometimes free to disregard even the most suggestive evidence). In this paper, I argue that Locke's aim was neither to defend an involuntary nor a voluntary conception of belief, but rather to emphasize our God-given obligations with respect to our beliefs, in our paradoxical condition as beings both created and free. Once this perspective is adopted, it becomes clear that Locke's account of belief formation is both internally consistent and (contrary to claims made by Jeremy Waldron) compatible with the requirements of his case for religious toleration. Where this account breaks down, however, is in demonstrating that we do, in fact, have the ability (and not just the duty) to regulate our beliefs – a power which Locke is ultimately only able to establish by appealing to the justice and omnipotence of God.

Investigating the backstage of audit engagements: the paradox of team diversity

Purpose There has been very little qualitative “fieldwork” of audit practice. This is especially the case in relation to investigations into how audit engagements proceed. The purpose of this paper is to engage with audit practice in order to explore and explain the internal dynamics and paradoxical conditions within audit engagement teams. Design/methodology/approach The research adopts a qualitative methodology, framed around an intensive case study that involves several methods of data collection and analysis including interviews, observation and document analysis. The authors observe audit team practices, work programmes and organisation including observations of individual and teams involved in audit engagements. Findings Using the lens of paradox theory, the authors explore the backstage of audit work, where audit teams are challenged with recurring contradictory requirements and opposing demands. The authors provide insight on the complexity associated with inadequate resourcing and planning that tend to stimulate the emergence of paradoxes in audit engagement work in a government audit context. As a result, the authors identify the occurrence of cascading reduced audit quality practices (RAQP) as the teams respond to the paradoxes they face. Originality/value The authors reveal the interlinked and cumulative coping strategies, namely, downplaying responsibility and downscaling audit processes. These strategies are performed concurrently by team leaders and audit members to manage paradoxical tensions. The authors also identified superficial audit supervision as another type of RAQP performed by team leaders.

Dialogismo y dialógicas en trabajadores gubernamentales en Boyacá, en el marco de los Acuerdos de Paz en Colombia

El presente trabajo expone las relaciones entre el concepto de dialógica y las posturas de trabajadores gubernamentales del departamento de Boyacá, que participaron entre noviembre y diciembre de 2017, en un diplomado dedicado a la sensibilización del contexto de transición hacia la paz. Los resultados derivan de la práctica de la investigación acción realizada por los coordinadores del diplomado. Los hallazgos proceden de la fase de construcción de una postura colectiva, ejercicio para simular un proceso de deliberación y participación pública. Destacaron los siguientes temas en la toma de postura: principios y valores familiares, valoración del trabajo colectivo, relaciones de diálogo y comunicación, participación democrática, solidaridad y ejercicio libre de pensamiento y expresión. Se concluye que este ejercicio promueve el análisis de las condiciones paradójicas en que los servidores públicos representan su participación ética, en situaciones de conflictividad social y democrática, favoreciendo su inclusión con agentes de cambio.

Human RAD52 protein regulates homologous recombination and checkpoint function in BRCA2 deficient cells.

Cancer cells exhibit HR defects, increased proliferation and checkpoint aberrations. Tumour suppressor proteins, BRCA2 and p53 counteract such aberrant proliferation by checkpoint regulation. Intriguingly, chemo-resistant cancer cells, exhibiting mutated BRCA2 and p53 protein survive even with increased DNA damage accumulation. Such cancer cells show upregulation of RAD52 tumour suppressor protein implying that RAD52 might be providing survival advantage to cancer cells. To understand this paradoxical condition of a tumour suppressor protein facilitating cancer cell survival, in the current study, we investigate the role of RAD52 overexpression in BRCA2 deficient cells. We provide evidence that RAD52 protein alleviates HR inhibition imposed by p53 in BRCA2 deficient cells. In addition, we study the role of RAD52 protein during short replication stress in BRCA2 deficient cells. BRCA2 deficient cells exhibit excessive origin firing and checkpoint evasion in the presence of prevailing DNA damage. Interestingly, overexpression of RAD52 rescues the excessive origin firing and checkpoint defects observed in BRCA2 deficient cells, indicating RAD52 protein compensates for the loss of BRCA2 function. We show that RAD52 protein, just as BRCA2, interacts with pCHK1 checkpoint protein and helps maintain the checkpoint control in BRCA2 deficient cells during DNA damage response.

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How national culture influences individuals’ subjective experience with paradoxical tensions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how national culture influences individuals’ subjective experience of tension when confronting paradoxical demands that arise during their day-to-day organizational experience. The paper further explores two types of paradoxical demands (task oriented and relational oriented) and two mediating mechanisms (tolerance for contradictions and harmony enhancement concerns) that exhibit contrary cultural effects. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from a sample of white-collar workers in China and the USA, the authors first inductively generated scenarios with task-oriented and relational-oriented paradoxical demands and then conducted three studies where participants rated the perceived tension from the scenarios. In Study 1, they examined cross-cultural differences in perceived tension and the mediating role of tolerance for contradictions. In Study 2, they primed Americans with proverbs that promoted tolerance for contradictions. In Study 3, they examined the indirect effects of harmony enhancement concerns in China in relational-oriented paradoxical demands. Findings The results found that for task-oriented paradoxical demands, Chinese participants were less likely than American participants to experience tension and the effects were mediated by a higher tolerance for contradictions. Americans exposed to proverbs that promoted tolerance for contradictions also experienced less tension. For relational-oriented paradoxical demands, on the other hand, the authors found no cross-cultural differences, as the indirect effects of a tolerance for contradictions were mitigated by negative indirect effects of greater harmony enhancement concerns. Originality/value This paper demonstrates that culture can influence the tension that individuals subjectively experience when they confront paradoxical conditions, suggesting that individuals learn implicitly how to cope with tensions associated with paradoxes from their broader cultural environment. However, the authors also found different cultural effects within different paradoxical conditions, suggesting that the knowledge that individuals acquire from their broader cultural environment is multifaceted.

Toward a Yin-Yang Balancing Perspective of Relational (Guanxi) Gatekeeping in International Exchange Relationships in China

China is an extremely complex and “insider-controlled” market for foreign businesses. This study offers a yin-yang balancing perspective of international exchange relationships in China. The authors investigate how “relational gatekeepers” play a key role in achieving a dynamic balance between Western companies and local partners in international exchange relationships. In-depth interviews are conducted with 41 business managers based in China, Australia, and New Zealand. Guided by the yin-yang balancing frame, the authors develop four key constructs of relational gatekeeping: the gatekeeper resources of mianzi (insider status) and renqing (insider favor) and the gatekeeper capabilities of zao shi (creating favorable momentum) and ying shi (leveraging favorable momentum). The yin-yang frame provides a process view of business relationships that accepts paradoxical conditions and embraces dynamic network momentum, resources, and capabilities. The study concludes by showing the theoretical implications for network theory and for the field of dynamic balancing and suggests the managerial implications for an international company aiming to engage relational gatekeepers to break into insider (guanxi)-controlled local business networks.

Paradigm or paradox? The ‘cumbersome impasse’ of the participatory turn in Brazilian urban planning

The Brazilian urban reform movement expanded citizen participation in decision-making processes through a policy environment motivated by a right to the city (RTC), a collective development strategy for political transformation. Yet recent events evidence that social exclusion and spatial segregation remain dominant features of the Brazilian city. These contradictions have led planning scholars and practitioners to grapple with misalignment between the reform movement’s paradigmatic goals and its paradoxical failures. We build upon this genre of thinking to assess critical areas of paradigm and paradox in Brazilian planning – insurgent urbanism, informality and knowledge – each of which is rooted in the lesser-understood concept of autogestão for improving the equity of land division through urban planning.1 Although not all inclusive of the issues faced by Brazilian cities, these three categories were selected for best representing how Brazil’s participatory turn established a range of paradigmatic and paradoxical conditions that can help us to understand cities in Brazil and beyond and might better leverage autogestão in the future.

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

In the Time of Plastic Representation

To many men and women of color, as well as many white women, meaningful diversity occurs when the actual presence of different-looking bodies appears on screen. For them, this diversity serves as an indicator of progress as well as an aspirational frame for younger generations who are told that the visual signifiers they can identify with carry a great amount of symbolic weight. As a consequence, the degree of diversity became synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances. Moreover, a paradoxical condition emerges whereby people of color have become more media savvy yet are still, if not more, reliant on overdetermined and overly reductive notions of so-called “positive” and “negative” representation. Such measures yield a set of dueling consequences: first, that any representation that includes a person of color is automatically a sign of success and progress; second, that such paltry gains generate an easy workaround for the executive suites whereby hiring racially diverse actors becomes an easy substitute for developing new complex characters. The results of such choices can feel—in an affective sense—artificial, or more to the point, like plastic. Black representation, as it's been understood in a popular sense, has been dominated by the circulation of mediated imagery yielding deleterious effects for the groups depicted. The fear of the effects of such “poor” representation has resulted in a set of binary, nonscientific, underdeveloped metrics—positive and negative—that constitute a nebulous catch-all system wherein the characteristics that define each pole on the spectrum shift depending on the era and the expectations of the audience. What marks a representation as “positive” or “negative”? Responses are often aligned with class (good job, education, community minded), behavior (hypersexual, well-spoken, “woke”), or with characterizations of character that either successfully assimilate into normative culture or fail to do so. However, such a scale oversimplifies the complexities of black identity that require audiences, pop culture critics, and scholars to invest in screen characters through experiencing nuances developed over time and ironically reinforces the stereotypes that operate as industry shorthand. The rationale for solely demanding plastic representation is understandable as a sanity-preserving tactic that can also build esteem and confidence, but it is not nearly enough. Meaningful, resonant diversity is a more difficult, underdeveloped approach that requires all stakeholders to think harder about what on-screen difference looks and feels like. But if representation truly matters, then it is an approach worthy of pursuit.

Do Paradoxes Prompt Better Attention and Recall? Implications for Publishing and Disseminating Academic Research

In today’s noisy media environment, researchers and the public alike find themselves inundated with information. Yet studies that find their way into high impact-factor journals and into the mainstream media often share a common feature—findings that contain some elements of a paradox. Moreover, paradoxes create surprise in the most seasoned experts, and surprise turns out to be a powerful driver of curiosity, interest, and recall. This study measured the effects of paradoxes on readers’ comprehension of three versions of a news story representing academic research, containing explicit, implicit, and no paradox conditions. After reading, 98 undergraduate students enrolled in a business communication course responded to a question measuring their comprehension of one of the three versions of the passage both immediately after reading and after 3-5 days’ recall, without re-exposure to the passage. Immediately after reading, 95% of readers of the paradox-explicit passage correctly grasped the gist of the study, compared with 14% of readers of the paradox-implicit version and only 4% of readers of the no-paradox version. Moreover, 3-5 days later, 55% of paradox-explicit readers correctly identified the meaning of the study, compared with only 7% of paradox-implicit readers. These findings may demonstrate the effects of incongruity, controversy, and surprise on curiosity and recall. In addition to shedding light on an understudied but powerful phenomenon, these findings offer potentially valuable implications for the reporting of research outcomes to academic journals and to the public via media outlets.

Time-Dependent Nerve Growth Factor Signaling Changes in the Rat Retina During Optic Nerve Crush-Induced Degeneration of Retinal Ganglion Cells.

Nerve growth factor (NGF) is suggested to be neuroprotective after nerve injury; however, retinal ganglion cells (RGC) degenerate following optic-nerve crush (ONC), even in the presence of increased levels of endogenous NGF. To further investigate this apparently paradoxical condition, a time-course study was performed to evaluate the effects of unilateral ONC on NGF expression and signaling in the adult retina. Visually evoked potential and immunofluorescence staining were used to assess axonal damage and RGC loss. The levels of NGF, proNGF, p75NTR, TrkA and GFAP and the activation of several intracellular pathways were analyzed at 1, 3, 7 and 14 days after crush (dac) by ELISA/Western Blot and PathScan intracellular signaling array. The progressive RGC loss and nerve impairment featured an early and sustained activation of apoptotic pathways; and GFAP and p75NTR enhancement. In contrast, ONC-induced reduction of TrkA, and increased proNGF were observed only at 7 and 14 dac. We propose that proNGF and p75NTR contribute to exacerbate retinal degeneration by further stimulating apoptosis during the second week after injury, and thus hamper the neuroprotective effect of the endogenous NGF. These findings might aid in identifying effective treatment windows for NGF-based strategies to counteract retinal and/or optic-nerve degeneration.

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.

Emplotting the Postcolonial: Epistemology and Narratology in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome

The plot of Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome is so complex that there is little consensus among the scholars on what actually happens in the novel. Following in the footsteps of Tagore, Satyajit Rai, Renu, and J.P.S. Uberoi, the novelist dramatizes the encounter between Western science, with its epistemology, and Indian tradition. Ghosh’s novel challenges the relentless West-driven search for knowledge, epitomized by the supercomputer named Ava. Only different epistemological premises, based on silence, can counteract Western rationalism. The literary technique mirrors this preoccupation in that it tells a story from two different viewpoints, one of them remaining silent throughout and emphasizing the agency of narrators. In order to do so, the author must write about something of which he remains ignorant. This paradoxical condition calls for a revision of the traditional writing chart, so that it is necessary to include the figure of the archiauthor behind the traditional implied author. This may explain a reticent narrative that heavily relies on the reader’s intelligence. Furthermore, my narratological reading highlights two themes formerly neglected by scholars, namely that subalterns’ cosmopolitism in the future is rooted in our colonial past and that the interpersonal transference envisaged by the novel merges different people in one body, thus challenging the Western obsession with individualism.

Indonesian Students’ Representation on Psychology and Social Change: Challenge for Curriculum Progression

As a science, psychology experiences paradoxical condition. There is indeed a recognition that its applications in the educational, clinical, and industrial fields have proliferated extensively in Indonesia. However, there are criticisms that 1) psychology mimics natural science epistemology, 2) the identity of Indonesian Psychology is still in the “status quo”, 3) its role in designing social change is minimal (e.g. “Mental Revolution” movement in Indonesia is considered to be more influenced by Sociology rather than Psychology proponents), 4) psychology tends to prioritize the well-being of the elite (socially-economically) of society, not the poorest. This study used a qualitative descriptive approach to explore the social representation on the perceptions of university students about the contribution of psychology in inspiring them to create social change. Participants of this study were 104 Psychology students (28 males, 76 females; 101 undergraduate, 3 graduate students) in Jakarta, Banten, Westand Central Java, Indonesia. We asked them a) the reason for choosing Psychology study program, b) the meaning of social change, c) the psychological courses associated with social change, d) the social problems urgent to be managed by psychology, and e) what their own plans are in making the change. Generality and uniqueness of the participants’ answers will be discussed so as to generate suggestions for psychology curriculum development that is more contextual, innovative, and empowering in Indonesia.

The Form of Paradox as the Paradox of Form

Written in 1802, Beethoven’s “Tempest” piano sonata is the iconic work of the “wirklich ganz neue Manier” the composer announced right after his traumatic seclusion in Heiligenstadt. Suffused with asymmetries and contradictions, the sonata’s first movement has long attracted the attention of scholars concerned with the epistemic soundness of sonata form theories. Most conspicuously, the absence in the recapitulation of what seems to be on first hearing the main theme generates a formal paradox that challenges the theoretical models devised to analyze sonata forms. This article reinterprets that paradox through the prism of Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of form, formulated in his critique of modern art and literature. In doing so, it recasts Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata and Schlegel’s theory in the light of what I call the paradox of mediated immediacy. It further suggests a genealogical homology between the novel and sonata form to advance a historicized model of musical form that contemplates the material conditions accompanying the consolidation of print culture around 1800. Situated in this context, the “Tempest” sonata serves as a case study for exploring how Beethoven’s reinvention of the piano sonata reconfigured the interface between form and medium, deploying self-referential strategies that both rendered apparent and resignified the mediations entailed by the compositional practices instituted with the classical style. As a result, Beethoven’s piano sonatas came to operate as technologies of the self that became integral to the fashioning of romantic subjectivities. My reading emphasizes the aural experience induced by the form’s asymmetries, and contends that the absence delivered at its structural crux complicates sonata form practices to afford an experience of immediacy that captures in the medium of piano music the paradoxical condition Schlegel reckoned immanent to the modern self.

Image or to image?

Abstract The proliferation of images towards an iconic communication in the hypermediacy of social media, of locative media, of Internet of Things (IoT) on one side and the visualization of real-time data, the deep learning algorithm on the other, question the essence of how reality is perceived, created and the nature and role of images itself. The common understanding of what constitutes an image is related to the representation of things and people. In the context of instant messaging, social media and Big Data, distributed and networked IoT, this seems not to be the case anymore. IoT extends the idea of social media to embrace ‘things’ into the equation, to form something that the author defines as the ‘Thingbook’. The Thingbook generates images of us from the perspective of things and data based on a heterogeneous system of technologies that sense, capture, analysis and learn about the world in real-time. Through this real-time dimension reality oscillates from a representational paradigm to a performative one and to certain extent towards a paradoxical condition. This article will collect evidence of how IoT hypermediacy is increasingly changing communication from linguistic to iconic, and how data visualization and Artificial Neural Networks are changing ways of learning from text to images at the level of the Google Cat Algorithm where Facebook and Thingbook converge. This will look into practices that make extensive use of the image in the immediacy of communication, into evidence of how information derived from sensors is recomposed into images, and, to a certain extent, how the discourse around image and IoT or Big Data questions our concept of image and reality.

Ações empreendedoras na gestão pública: análise do Programa Crédito Solidário (PCS) em um município do sul de Minas Gerais

One of the current trends in the Campo de Publicas is the inclusion of entrepreneurship subject in the discussion on the public policy formulation and implementation. This kind of thinking came from the understanding that with the globalization process it was necessary for the public sector to adapt to changes through a more flexible management that could respond to society’s demands. This research aims to analyze, from the beneficiaries’s point of view of the Programme “Programa Credito Solidario” (PCS) in a town in the southern of Minas Gerais State, in levels of economic, social and political emancipation of those who benefit from this public policy. It becomes clear how this type of action represents a process of implementation and formulation of public projects in a paradoxical condition, because at the same time it promotes new alternatives for the development of small business from the Economia Solidaria (Solidarity Economy), it alters to be rather weak in a context of economical, social and political emancipation of beneficiaries.

The Long Conjuncture

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Durham NC and London, Duke University Press, 2015, 319pp; £16.99 paperbackJames Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution, New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 314pp; £21.99 paperbackOur history is destined in this chapter to go backwards and forwards in a very irresolute manner seemingly, and having conducted our story to tomorrow presently, we shall immediately again have occasion to step back to yesterday, so that the whole of the tale may get a hearing.-Vanity Fair (1848)'Intimacy' has become a busy term in contemporary cultural theory with few signs of agreement about its endlessly contestable meanings and usage. While some critics would still locate it primarily within the most highly personalised 'zones of familiarity and comfort', 'intimacy' frequently invokes what Lauren Berlant has concisely described as 'the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes spaces.'1 So, in Jurgen Habermas's classic account of the 'surreptitious hollowing out of the family's sphere' by the predatory powers of states and businesses, a paradoxical condition of 'fl oodlit privacy' is all that remains.2 Lisa Lowe's ambitious new book is a reminder of the deft footwork now required of anyone attempting to negotiate this tricky terrain. In The Intimacies of Four Continents she aligns herself with postcolonial scholars like Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, or Nayan Shah who have each provided a distinctive take on how 'the intimate sphere of sexual, reproductive, or household relations' served as 'a site of empire'. But, in the next breath, Lowe fi rmly differentiates her project from theirs as one that aims rather to open up what she calls 'a economy of intimacies' in which geographical distances are radically foreshortened by highlighting the close historical and conceptual relations between changing categories of labour and eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury struggles for emancipation (pp17-18). From Lowe's perspective, our common-sense notions of 'intimacy' can no longer be said to ground the inner self-certainty of the modern individual or of liberal individualism more generally; instead, the limited cultural forms that interiority and domesticity characteristically take must ultimately be viewed as the obscured or unrecognised product - in the most literal sense - of the colony's specifi c work in sustaining, not to say constantly re-creating, the metropolis or imperial centre that once brought it into being. In her introductory remarks, Lowe turns to Foucault, characterising her study as 'an unlikely or unsettling genealogy of modern liberalism' that will pave the way for 'a historical ontology of ourselves', an analysis of the categories that continue to defi ne who we are and allow us to refl ect on what we might still become (p3). This formulation sits uneasily with the residues of a Marxist theory of ideology that sometimes informs the structure of her arguments, regardless of her critical observations on the shortcomings of the Western Marxist tradition.On the one hand: slaves, sharecroppers, convicts, day workers, debt peonage, indentured labour; on the other: freedom, utilitarian discipline, free trade, and liberal governance. Rather than striving for a synoptic overview, Lowe engages with the problem-space of liberalism selectively, exploring the links between these twinned poles of hegemony and domination through a series of well-chosen case studies that not only revisit the colonial archive, but also extend that archive to include works of fi ction and autobiography, as well as major political treatises and long-term changes in decor and fashion. In so doing she seeks to identify key episodes in the emergence of a postabolitionist political and economic world-system, what one might call the long conjuncture defi ned by Britain's unprecedented industrial presence and virtually indestructible sea power as older mercantilist economic ideologies were increasingly swept away by liberal notions of free trade. …