Field-Level Paradox and the Co-Evolution of an Entrepreneurial Vision

This paper examines how entrepreneurs embrace field-level paradoxes in order to adapt and preserve aspects of a field’s past success in the wake of technological change. Drawing on the decline and rise of Swiss watchmaking in response to competition from less expensive quartz watches from Japan, we characterize how field-level paradoxes can foster adaptation after an environmental jolt. Prior research has focused on organizational-level paradox management; by contrast, we induce a set of four paradoxes at the field level: two based in tensions over material aspects of the field (paradoxes of production and profit) and two whose tensions are substantively symbolic in nature (paradoxes of the profession and the past). Grounded in ethnographic interviews, archival data, and immersive field work, our model and findings trace how two actors influential in the evolution of the field—Nicolas Hayek and Jean-Claude Biver—each created an organization that embraced a pair of paradoxes in the material and symbolic realms respectively. Unexpectedly, the subsequent merger of these organizations triggered accommodation of these paradoxes via various dialectics. We advance a novel process whereby leaders who accommodate cross-realm paradoxes and divergent visions can establish templates that allow for field adaptation through sustained paradox.