Macquarie Business School, Macquarie U., Australia
competing demands. We focus on the micro level, that is, on individual decision makers’ experience of organizational paradoxes, to explain why universal tensions that underlie organizing sometimes manifest as decidable choices, and other times as undecidable but generative paradoxes. We contribute to paradox theory by (1) articulating the concept of organizational measurement apparatuses, describing how latent tensions are enacted into salient paradoxes, i.e. undecidable trade-off choices; (2) identifying the factors that determine the undecidability; 3) explaining the persistence of these conditions of undecidability, showing the mechanisms that hinder the detection and correction of organizational conditions producing undecidability.
