Paradox(a): arts and artists, power, paradox and organized resistance

In the call for this special issue, we asked: how do the arts, artists and artistic work leverage paradoxes to attract popular attention while also going against the grain of prevailing opinion? How might such work critically reflect on the status quo’s embedded power and uncover new expressive possibilities? Paradox theory has emerged as a significant presence in management and organization studies and as a lens inspiring connection with other theories. Paradox refers to persistent and mutually constituting oppositions inherent to organizing (Clegg et al., 2020; Gaim et al., 2024; Smith and Lewis, 2011) that translate into undecidable trade-offs (Berti and Cunha, 2023). These contradictions may be generative or dysfunctional (Berti et al., 2021; Clegg and Cunha, 2021; Cunha et al., 2022) but can also be sources of novelty and synergy for organizations (Smith and Lewis, 2022). In this special issue, we focus on how paradox theory illuminates the arts as both agents of critique and instruments of engagement. People in key positions in networks of power relations often confront others with absurdly paradoxical demands and situations, forming undecidable trade-off decisions (Berti and Cunha, 2023; Gaim et al., 2021), especially when these others are relatively less advantageously positioned in established circuits of power (Clegg, 2023; Berti and Simpson, 2021; Cunha et al., 2022, 2023; Gaim, Clegg, Cunha and Berti, 2022). Artistic endeavors in multiple media can function not only as a celebration of power (Berger, 1972; Warnke, 1993; Golomstock, 1990) but can also “provide an entry point to problematize existing taken-for-grantedness” (Riaz, 2023, p. 1224). Scoping our invitation in terms of the latter and critiquing the impulse to intellectualize or solve what is emotional and deeply human, we invited authors to submit their work on the arts, artists, power, paradox as a phenomenon and paradox work as a process, focusing on the heuristic potential of paradox as a way of revealing and challenging the status quo, through the many techniques of resistance, such as irony (Badham and Santiago, 2023).