Integrative ambidexterity: one paradoxical mode of learning

Purpose

Organizational ambidexterity brings together the paradoxical tensions between exploration and exploitation. Embracing such paradoxical tensions depends on both separating the poles to appreciate their distinct elements and integrating them to appreciate their synergies. This paper explores integrative ambidexterity that focuses on the synergies between exploration and exploitation and theorizes these as a single, paradoxical mode of learning.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors provide conceptual commentary that aims to expand the attention within the ambidexterity literature from emphasizing separation to further accommodating integration.

Findings

The authors outline that attention to separating exploration and exploitation needs to be complemented with a focus on integration, hence, the notion of integrative ambidexterity.

Research limitations/implications

The authors surface three processes that advance integrative ambidexterity – novelty via memory; agility via focus; and the potential for improvisation. Together, these dynamics enable organizations to achieve an alternative approach to learning and adaptation.

Practical implications

Understanding “integrative ambidexterity,” stressing the synergies between exploration and exploitation, extends the understanding of the nature and approaches to creating learning organizations. The authors three practices offer a potential blueprint to do so.

Originality/value

Previous scholarship emphasized how leaders can separate exploration and exploitation by allocating these learning modes to distinct organizational units or addressing them in different time horizons. However, extant authors have less insight about the integration and synergies between exploration and exploitation, and the organizational factors that advance such integration.

Transcendence through Rhetorical Practices: Responding to Paradox in the Science Sector

Organizations are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated objectives. An important response to such paradoxes is transcendence: the ability to view both poles of the paradox as necessary and complementary. Despite the centrality of transcendence to existing frameworks within the paradox literature, we still know little about its practice. We address this gap by surfacing and analysing rhetorical practices across three science organizations. We outline four rhetorical practices that constitute transcendence (Ordering, Aspiring, Signifying, and Embodying) as well as the underlying features of these practices that explain how they construct a response to paradox. In particular, we show that transcendence entailed balancing the enabling features of focus (paradoxical content/context), time (stability/change) and distance (maintaining/reducing). Finally, we develop a dynamic view of transcendence as a process of oscillation, showing how these practices are bundled together and interrelate to construct moments of transcendence.

Eruptive disseminated porokeratosis associated with corticosteroid-induced immunosuppression

Eruptive disseminated porokeratosis (EDP) is a disease that presents clinically with sudden onset of erythematous papules and plaques, with a ridge-like border histologically represented by a cornoid lamella. We report a case of EDP occurring in a 39-year-old woman 3 days after completion of a 2-week course of oral corticosteroid therapy for an acute asthma exacerbation. The patient was treated with emollients and sun protection. Unlike the more chronic disseminated superficial (actinic) porokeratosis, EDP secondary to immunosuppression from corticosteroid therapy has very rarely been reported in the dermatological literature.