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Organizational change literature has long described the ways change efforts are designed and executed, with particular attention to where the change effort initiated: whether from the top down or the bottom up. In this paper, we expand this focus and describe how communities external to organizations can also be initiators of change within organizations. Through two examples, the Black Lives Matter movement and Old Coke Drinkers of America, we demonstrate the power of communities outside of organizations for initiating meaningful and lasting change within organizations. We explain that the power of such communities for initiating organizational change is derived in part from their members’ psychological sense of community (PSOC). We propose that scholars and practitioners alike should pay attention to this phenomenon by offering an agenda for developing research on impacts of communities and their PSOC that may affect organizational change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fostered uncertainty and several unforeseen consequences. It has revealed many tensions at individual, organizational, and societal levels, such as in work-life balance, organizational innovation for today and tomorrow, and addressing public health while sustaining economic activity. As paradox scholars, we not only lived these tensions in our daily lives, but we were also inspired to engage the paradox research community in better understanding these tensions. This PDW is to showcase our efforts over the last several months, which resulted in a collection of four papers in the Journal of Management Inquiry, scheduled to be in print in April 2021. Over 40 scholars contributed to short essays organized across the four papers, which included papers on societal tensions, organizational tensions, tensions for individuals within organizations, and a commentary on our overall process. We use this collective achievement as a springboard for further efforts in developing paradox theory and theories on crises more broadly.

The symposium includes four empirical papers that explore how police officers think and feel about their work and their identities. These studies address the implications of traumatic incidents at ...