Paula Jarzabkowski
Biographic Data
| ID | 226500 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paula Jarzabkowski |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paula |
| FAMILY NAME | Jarzabkowski |
| SIGNATURE | JARZABKOWSKI P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8674-6628 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 402 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Organizing long duration interdependence in Lloyd’s of London: Persistence in a part-whole paradox of organizing
A critical challenge for interorganizational groups is to organize themselves in a way that balances the interests of the group as a whole and those of individual participants. How interorganizational groups manage these 'paradoxes of organizing' to ensure long-term survival remains, however, unclear. We investigate this phenomenon through a historical case study of Lloyd's of London, arguably the most prominent and long-standing interorganizatio…
That's Not Fair! Navigating the Duality of Fairness in Insurance
Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extre…
Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk
This book is about the critical yet little-known work of “Protection Gap Entities” (PGEs), in disaster protection. Disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks, are becoming more frequent and more intense. These disasters threaten not only life, but also livelihood, causing the loss of homes and jobs that can scar the lives of those affected. Disaster insurance, by providing funds for reconstruction, plays an essential role in li…
Presenting as a chief strategy officer: A discourse-analytical study of elite subjectivities and vulnerabilities
Do elite strategists always project powerfulness in how they talk about their strategy work? Whilst the strategy discourse literature has often assumed that those occupying senior strategy positions project strength in how they negotiate power through discourse, our findings challenge and elaborate this assumption by revealing aspects of vulnerability and powerlessness in how they talk about themselves as elite strategists. Based on the strategy …
An integrative approach to investigating longstanding organisational phenomena; opportunities for practice theorists and historians
We add to the ongoing call for greater integration between organisational and history scholarship. Specifically, we contribute by identifying reciprocal opportunities for practice theorists and historians interested in the unfolding of socio-historic patterns over space and time. Through contrasting two studies of ‘relationship’ in the international reinsurance industry – one an ethnographic, practice-based study, the other an archival, historic …
Routine Dynamics in Action: Replication and Transformation
Contains an Open Access chapter.This book explores central themes in the enactment and coordination of organizational routines, including replication and transfer, ecologies and interdependence, action and the generation of novelty and technology and sociomateriality
Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
The Paradoxical Mystery of the Missing Differences between Academics and Practitioners
Most discussions of academic–practitioner relationships highlight differences, especially with regard to their relative emphases on rigor or relevance. While not disagreeing with such differences, the authors show: 1) several ways academics and practitioners may be similar in their theorizing and practices; and 2) how these similarities have been almost entirely missed in prior scholarship. They suggest the importance of viewing academic–practiti…
Beyond Managerial Dilemmas
This chapter makes the case that institutional and paradox theorists should consider problems stretching beyond managerial concerns and corporate performance to focus attention on the paradoxes that characterize the most deep-rooted and contentious social issues facing societies and economies, suggesting a switch from organizational to institutional paradoxes. To illustrate, two vignettes are described—one focused on the legacy of the University …
“I Am … I Said”
In reviewing identity and identity work literature, two overarching themes emerge that highlight the theoretical potency of viewing individual identity through the lens of paradox. First, while paradox is variously implicit/explicit in extant work, four primary paradoxes of identity usefully emerge that conceptually map the tensional processes of identity work: (1) paradoxes of entity, (2) paradoxes of conformity, (3) paradoxes of temporality, an…
The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Organisations are rife with paradoxes, evident in persistent and interwoven tensions for example between stability and change, flexibility and control, diversity and inclusion, long term and short term, social and financial, learning and performing. This handbook investigates paradoxes across various organisational phenomena and levels of analysis.
Reinsurance Trading in Lloyd’s of London: Balancing Conflicting-yet-Complementary Logics in Practice
Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic study of reinsurance trading in Lloyd’s of London, this paper makes three contributions to current discussions of institutional complexity. First, we shift focus away from structural and relatively static organizational responses to institutional complexity and identify three balancing mechanisms—segmenting, bridging, and demarcating—that allow individuals to manage competing logics and their shifting salience w…
Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods
Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this article. We first outline the methodo…
Charting new territory for organizational ethnography: Insights from a team-based video ethnography
Purpose- Increasing complexity, fragmentation, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life make "being there" increasingly difficult. Where do ethnographers have to be, when, for how long, and with whom to "be there" and grasp the practices, norms, and values that make the situation meaningful to natives? These novel complexities call for new forms of organizational ethnography. The purpose of this paper is to discuss …
Responding to competing strategic demands: How organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes coevolve
This article develops an empirically grounded process model of how managers in organizations respond to coexisting paradoxical tensions. With a longitudinal real-time study, we examine how a telecommunications firm copes with an organizing paradox between market and regulatory demands and how this paradox influences belonging and performing paradoxes for managers. These paradoxes coevolve over time as managers shift from defensive responses that …
Reconstructing institutional complexity in practice: A relational model of institutional work and complexity
This article develops a relational model of institutional work and complexity. This model advances current institutional debates on institutional complexity and institutional work in three ways. First, it provides a relational and dynamic perspective on institutional complexity by explaining how constellations of logics − and their degree of internal contradiction − are constructed rather than given. Second, it refines our current understanding o…
Strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical resource for enabling multiple interests
The literature on ambiguity reflects contradictory views on its value as a resource or a problem for organizational action. In this longitudinal empirical study of ambiguity about a strategic goal, we examined how strategic ambiguity is used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how that is associated with collective action around the strategic goal. We found four rhetorical positions, each of which drew upon strat…
Strategy‐as‐practice: A review and future directions for the field
This review maps and critically evaluates the rapidly growing body of research in the strategy‐as‐practice field. Following an introduction on the emergence and foundations of strategy‐as‐practice, the review is structured in three main parts, based on the terminology, issues and research agendas outlined in the field. First, the paper examines the concepts of practitioners and praxis. A typology of nine possible domains for strategy‐as‐practice …
Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective
While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarch…
Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach
Strategy as Practice heralds a defining moment in how strategic management is understood. Paula Jarzabkowski's book leads the way in setting out the meaning and implications of this new field. book is the first of its kind to help readers bridge the gap between what managers actually do and organizational strategies. It provides an activity-based framework for studying strategy as practice, with empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of th…
Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use
In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understo…
Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use
In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understo…
Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective
While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarch…
Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach
Strategy as Practice heralds a defining moment in how strategic management is understood. Paula Jarzabkowski's book leads the way in setting out the meaning and implications of this new field. book is the first of its kind to help readers bridge the gap between what managers actually do and organizational strategies. It provides an activity-based framework for studying strategy as practice, with empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of th…
Reconstructing institutional complexity in practice: A relational model of institutional work and complexity
This article develops a relational model of institutional work and complexity. This model advances current institutional debates on institutional complexity and institutional work in three ways. First, it provides a relational and dynamic perspective on institutional complexity by explaining how constellations of logics − and their degree of internal contradiction − are constructed rather than given. Second, it refines our current understanding o…
Strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical resource for enabling multiple interests
The literature on ambiguity reflects contradictory views on its value as a resource or a problem for organizational action. In this longitudinal empirical study of ambiguity about a strategic goal, we examined how strategic ambiguity is used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how that is associated with collective action around the strategic goal. We found four rhetorical positions, each of which drew upon strat…
Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods
Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this article. We first outline the methodo…
Charting new territory for organizational ethnography: Insights from a team-based video ethnography
Purpose- Increasing complexity, fragmentation, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life make "being there" increasingly difficult. Where do ethnographers have to be, when, for how long, and with whom to "be there" and grasp the practices, norms, and values that make the situation meaningful to natives? These novel complexities call for new forms of organizational ethnography. The purpose of this paper is to discuss …
Organizing long duration interdependence in Lloyd’s of London: Persistence in a part-whole paradox of organizing
A critical challenge for interorganizational groups is to organize themselves in a way that balances the interests of the group as a whole and those of individual participants. How interorganizational groups manage these 'paradoxes of organizing' to ensure long-term survival remains, however, unclear. We investigate this phenomenon through a historical case study of Lloyd's of London, arguably the most prominent and long-standing interorganizatio…
An integrative approach to investigating longstanding organisational phenomena; opportunities for practice theorists and historians
We add to the ongoing call for greater integration between organisational and history scholarship. Specifically, we contribute by identifying reciprocal opportunities for practice theorists and historians interested in the unfolding of socio-historic patterns over space and time. Through contrasting two studies of ‘relationship’ in the international reinsurance industry – one an ethnographic, practice-based study, the other an archival, historic …
Routine Dynamics in Action: Replication and Transformation
Contains an Open Access chapter.This book explores central themes in the enactment and coordination of organizational routines, including replication and transfer, ecologies and interdependence, action and the generation of novelty and technology and sociomateriality
That's Not Fair! Navigating the Duality of Fairness in Insurance
Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extre…
Presenting as a chief strategy officer: A discourse-analytical study of elite subjectivities and vulnerabilities
Do elite strategists always project powerfulness in how they talk about their strategy work? Whilst the strategy discourse literature has often assumed that those occupying senior strategy positions project strength in how they negotiate power through discourse, our findings challenge and elaborate this assumption by revealing aspects of vulnerability and powerlessness in how they talk about themselves as elite strategists. Based on the strategy …
Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use
In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understo…
Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach
Strategy as Practice heralds a defining moment in how strategic management is understood. Paula Jarzabkowski's book leads the way in setting out the meaning and implications of this new field. book is the first of its kind to help readers bridge the gap between what managers actually do and organizational strategies. It provides an activity-based framework for studying strategy as practice, with empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of th…
Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective
While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarch…
Strategy‐as‐practice: A review and future directions for the field
This review maps and critically evaluates the rapidly growing body of research in the strategy‐as‐practice field. Following an introduction on the emergence and foundations of strategy‐as‐practice, the review is structured in three main parts, based on the terminology, issues and research agendas outlined in the field. First, the paper examines the concepts of practitioners and praxis. A typology of nine possible domains for strategy‐as‐practice …
Strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical resource for enabling multiple interests
The literature on ambiguity reflects contradictory views on its value as a resource or a problem for organizational action. In this longitudinal empirical study of ambiguity about a strategic goal, we examined how strategic ambiguity is used as a discursive resource by different organizational constituents and how that is associated with collective action around the strategic goal. We found four rhetorical positions, each of which drew upon strat…
Responding to competing strategic demands: How organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes coevolve
This article develops an empirically grounded process model of how managers in organizations respond to coexisting paradoxical tensions. With a longitudinal real-time study, we examine how a telecommunications firm copes with an organizing paradox between market and regulatory demands and how this paradox influences belonging and performing paradoxes for managers. These paradoxes coevolve over time as managers shift from defensive responses that …
Reconstructing institutional complexity in practice: A relational model of institutional work and complexity
This article develops a relational model of institutional work and complexity. This model advances current institutional debates on institutional complexity and institutional work in three ways. First, it provides a relational and dynamic perspective on institutional complexity by explaining how constellations of logics − and their degree of internal contradiction − are constructed rather than given. Second, it refines our current understanding o…
Charting new territory for organizational ethnography: Insights from a team-based video ethnography
Purpose- Increasing complexity, fragmentation, mobility, pace, and technological intermediation of organizational life make "being there" increasingly difficult. Where do ethnographers have to be, when, for how long, and with whom to "be there" and grasp the practices, norms, and values that make the situation meaningful to natives? These novel complexities call for new forms of organizational ethnography. The purpose of this paper is to discuss …
Reinsurance Trading in Lloyd’s of London: Balancing Conflicting-yet-Complementary Logics in Practice
Drawing on a yearlong ethnographic study of reinsurance trading in Lloyd’s of London, this paper makes three contributions to current discussions of institutional complexity. First, we shift focus away from structural and relatively static organizational responses to institutional complexity and identify three balancing mechanisms—segmenting, bridging, and demarcating—that allow individuals to manage competing logics and their shifting salience w…
Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods
Ethnography has often been seen as the province of the lone researcher; however, increasingly management scholars are examining global phenomena, necessitating a shift to global team-based ethnography. This shift presents some fundamental methodological challenges, as well as practical issues of method, that have not been examined in the literature on organizational research methods. That is the focus of this article. We first outline the methodo…
The Paradoxical Mystery of the Missing Differences between Academics and Practitioners
Most discussions of academic–practitioner relationships highlight differences, especially with regard to their relative emphases on rigor or relevance. While not disagreeing with such differences, the authors show: 1) several ways academics and practitioners may be similar in their theorizing and practices; and 2) how these similarities have been almost entirely missed in prior scholarship. They suggest the importance of viewing academic–practiti…
Beyond Managerial Dilemmas
This chapter makes the case that institutional and paradox theorists should consider problems stretching beyond managerial concerns and corporate performance to focus attention on the paradoxes that characterize the most deep-rooted and contentious social issues facing societies and economies, suggesting a switch from organizational to institutional paradoxes. To illustrate, two vignettes are described—one focused on the legacy of the University …
“I Am … I Said”
In reviewing identity and identity work literature, two overarching themes emerge that highlight the theoretical potency of viewing individual identity through the lens of paradox. First, while paradox is variously implicit/explicit in extant work, four primary paradoxes of identity usefully emerge that conceptually map the tensional processes of identity work: (1) paradoxes of entity, (2) paradoxes of conformity, (3) paradoxes of temporality, an…
The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Organisations are rife with paradoxes, evident in persistent and interwoven tensions for example between stability and change, flexibility and control, diversity and inclusion, long term and short term, social and financial, learning and performing. This handbook investigates paradoxes across various organisational phenomena and levels of analysis.
Routine Dynamics in Action: Replication and Transformation
Contains an Open Access chapter.This book explores central themes in the enactment and coordination of organizational routines, including replication and transfer, ecologies and interdependence, action and the generation of novelty and technology and sociomateriality
Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox
Disaster Insurance Reimagined: Protection in a Time of Increasing Risk
This book is about the critical yet little-known work of “Protection Gap Entities” (PGEs), in disaster protection. Disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks, are becoming more frequent and more intense. These disasters threaten not only life, but also livelihood, causing the loss of homes and jobs that can scar the lives of those affected. Disaster insurance, by providing funds for reconstruction, plays an essential role in li…
Presenting as a chief strategy officer: A discourse-analytical study of elite subjectivities and vulnerabilities
Do elite strategists always project powerfulness in how they talk about their strategy work? Whilst the strategy discourse literature has often assumed that those occupying senior strategy positions project strength in how they negotiate power through discourse, our findings challenge and elaborate this assumption by revealing aspects of vulnerability and powerlessness in how they talk about themselves as elite strategists. Based on the strategy …
An integrative approach to investigating longstanding organisational phenomena; opportunities for practice theorists and historians
We add to the ongoing call for greater integration between organisational and history scholarship. Specifically, we contribute by identifying reciprocal opportunities for practice theorists and historians interested in the unfolding of socio-historic patterns over space and time. Through contrasting two studies of ‘relationship’ in the international reinsurance industry – one an ethnographic, practice-based study, the other an archival, historic …
Organizing long duration interdependence in Lloyd’s of London: Persistence in a part-whole paradox of organizing
A critical challenge for interorganizational groups is to organize themselves in a way that balances the interests of the group as a whole and those of individual participants. How interorganizational groups manage these 'paradoxes of organizing' to ensure long-term survival remains, however, unclear. We investigate this phenomenon through a historical case study of Lloyd's of London, arguably the most prominent and long-standing interorganizatio…
That's Not Fair! Navigating the Duality of Fairness in Insurance
Insurance serves as a social good, providing financial protection against disasters whilst operating within a profit-driven market. This dual role highlights the complex intersection of social and commercial interests, raising a fairness puzzle often portrayed as a trade-off between solidarity and actuarial fairness. Insurance organisations adhere to actuarial fairness by setting insurance premiums proportional to each individual's risk. As extre…
Management and Organizational Studies (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social science (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Positive economics (5 works)