Primary and Secondary Contradictions

Defining Contradiction

For Giddens (1979), contradiction is “the opposition or disjuncture of structural principles of social systems, where those principles operate in terms of each other but at the same time contravene one another” (p. 141). This definition suggests that contradictions are structurally rooted, function in relation to each other, and yet oppose one another. As they arise through the integration of systems, contradictions lay the seeds for systems reproduction and change.

Research on Communication and Contradictions

Research that applies Giddens’s (1979) notion of contradictions draws on communication, meaning systems, and organization in three different ways. First, studies examine how organizational members interact to make sense of multiple contradictions, often in ways that enable and/or constrain future actions. For example, Canary (2010a, 2010b) integrated structuration with activity systems to examine contradictions in policy implementation. She uncovered the intersection of four types of contradictions: (a) primary ones rooted in deep-level capitalism, (b) secondary ones that arose when a new policy system could not be integrated into an existing one, (c) tertiary contradictions that occurred when a new motive was introduced to the system and altered how organizational members made sense of activity systems, and (d) quaternary contradictions that occurred when the central activities of one system interfered or blocked the accomplishment of another one. Her study demonstrated how systems contradictions served as generative mechanisms for knowledge development through identifying policy priorities. However, contradictions also constrained policy-related actions when participants failed to recognize them or to balance them through resource allocations (Canary, 2010a).

In a similar way, Fairhurst et al. (2002) examined the interpenetration of primary and secondary contradictions in three successive downsizing. Their study of episodic change revealed how people versus profits as a primary contradiction penetrated secondary ones of voluntary versus involuntary layoffs and across-the-board versus targeted reductions in human capital. The study showed how managerial approaches to downsizing over successive periods resulted in low levels of discursive penetration and unintended consequences for the organization.

Also focusing on multiple contradictions, Nicotera, Clinkscales, and Walker (2003) and Nicotera and Clinkscales (2010) set forth 20 contradictory structures that impinged on individuals, work units, and organizations in diversity management. They contended that ethnicity and race as societal structures mediated diversity efforts in organizational systems. When an organization was diverse, it appropriated rules, resources, and practices from societal structures in ways that addressed contradictions, but when an organization was homogeneous and predominately Eurocentric, contradictions from different cultural underpinnings remained invisible and diverse work units experienced communication problems and low morale.

A second cluster of studies on contradiction incorporated Giddens’s (1979) dialectic of control to examine how reciprocal power relationships played out among organizational members and became instantiated in institutional forms (Howard & Geist, 1995). To illustrate, Howard and Geist (1995) focused on discursive responses to primary and secondary contradictions in a corporate merger. Primary contradictions of people versus profits gave rise to secondary ones of stability versus change, empowerment versus powerlessness, and identification and estrangement that were managed through forms of acceptance and rejection of the merger. Ideological positioning then reproduced organizational structures that inhibited autonomy, identification, and change. The dialectic of control also impinged on the management of contradictions in multinational feminist organizations (Norander & Harter, 2012) and in dominant and subsidiary relationships among interfirm networks (Sydow & Windeler, 1998). These studies centered on the critical role that dialectic of control played in shaping interactions linked to stability and change.

A third way that organizational communication scholars study contradictions is through investigating episodes or sequences of change that potentially rupture sociohistorical patterns. Clearly, the Fairhurst et al. (2002) study fits this category, but other investigations incorporate a broad sociohistorical brush to probe the basis of change. Specifically, Olufowote (2008) examined the interfaces of systems of meaning, laws, and special interest groups in the transformation of informed consent (IC), which referred to a patient’s right to understand the risks and benefits of medical treatments. Analysis of contradictions in the IC law revealed a traditionalist discourse in the 1950s that favored the physicians, a liability discourse in the 1970s that catered to administrative entities, and a discourse of decision making in the 1980s that privileged patients’ interests. Contradictions between laws and regulations across sociohistorical periods then led to ruptures that altered medical practices and systems of meaning about IC.

A few scholars have moved beyond ruptures to examine how episodes of change result in conflict. Contradictions do not necessarily lead to conflict, even though they provide the “fault lines” for struggles to occur. For Giddens (1984), conflict entails opposition of interests that result in active struggles between actors and collectives. If actors are unaware of contradictions, conflict is less likely to occur. Active struggles are also less likely to ensue if contradictions are multiple, highly dispersed, or are repressed.

Two studies on value contradictions examined conflict and organizational change. Meyers and Garrett (1993) focused on the contradictions between profitability and corporate social responsiveness in a boycott of the Nestle Corporation’s sales of infant formula to Third World countries. Analysis of data revealed that confrontations rooted in a value-based contradiction led to reproducing systems and structures rather than changing them. Keough and Lake’s (1993) investigation demonstrated how the sociohistorical context of collective bargaining and the legal regulatory environment created contradictions that contributed to an impasse in teacher-school board negotiations, one that led the board to issue unilateral contracts to the teachers. Hence, both studies found that contradictions led to conflicts that reproduced rather than changed system practices.

Overall, the research on Giddens’s (1979) notion of contradictions clusters into three different threads: (a) responses to contradictions that enable or constrain future actions, (b) the role of the dialectic of control in managing contradictions, and (c) episodes of change as disrupting sociohistorical meanings and/or producing overt conflict. Moreover, these studies explore a range of subject areas—downsizing and mergers, knowledge management, interfirm networks, policy changes, diversity and feminist organizations, boycotts, and collective bargaining; hence, they demonstrate the utility of Giddens’s constructs.

Critique and Future Directions

Despite the importance of these findings, a pivotal critique of this work stems from the early modernist and rationalist assumptions about organizations embedded in Giddens’s (1979) notions of contradictions. That is, contradictions as structural properties lay the seeds for transformations and the potential to rupture the social fabric of organizations; hence, as fault lines, they can disrupt social order and serve as anomalies in the system. This orientation treats tensions and the dialectical interplay among them as disjunctions rather than as the ways that organizing occurs.

Postmodern studies, in turn, view contradictions and tensions as routine practices of organizing; hence, they embrace a logic of difference grounded in the collision of order and disorder, rationality and irrationality, and predictability and unpredictability that characterize contemporary organizations (Trethewey & Ashcraft, 2004). A logic of difference challenges the view that order is a “natural” state of institutions (Cooper, 1986). Rather organizing becomes imbued with contradictions that are often twisted and knotted together in paradoxical relationships (Fairhurst & Putnam, forthcoming). Rather than casting contradictions as structural principles, this approach embraces the interplay between organizing and disorganizing through treating organization as the enactment of dialectical processes.

This approach is particularly appropriate for the study of rapidly changing organizations in an era of globalization. As Giddens (1990) contends, globalization is a dialectical process rooted in the simultaneous displacement and reembedding of actors, the intersection of presence and absence across space, and reciprocal influences between the local and the global. Local transformations reverberate into the global “as lateral extensions of connectedness across time and space” (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). Conversely, distant international events shape local organizing through the speed and scope of communication. Thus, a mediation of the global by the local challenges the durability of any single dominant social system for individuals and institutions (Bryant & Jary, 2001). These developments call into question the very nature of primary contradictions as overarching features of social institutions.

Contradictions in contemporary organizations then are shaped by dialectical processes. These processes call for reexamining our thinking about the ways that communication constitutes organizations. Particularly, scholars need to incorporate dialectical processes into structuration theory and into the four flows model of organization. Researchers could begin by treating time–space distanciation as rooted in a presence–absence dialectic in which the “here and now” of the visible is interdependent with the “then and there” of absent others (Haslett, 2012). Scholars should also problematize order and disorder as integrated tensions that shape how an organization becomes present in distributed actors across time and space. Finally, scholars need to study the local–global dialectic as it interfaces with micro-organizing and organizations as macro-actors.