Between Global Synergies and Local Adaption: How NGOs Deal With Global-local Tensions

Addressing grand challenges confronts organizations with global-local and other paradoxes that can result in paradox knots, where the response to one paradox impacts another. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study of a non-governmental organization (NGO) operating in Uganda, we study how such knots impact paradox salience, that is their visibility and perceived urgency. We elucidate the knotted nature of two paradoxes: a global-local paradox and an identity elasticity paradox. Our analysis shows how the salience of these paradoxes developed inversely as the NGO's response to the global-local paradox amplified the salience of the identity elasticity paradox while its response to the identity elasticity paradox mitigated the salience of the global-local paradox. With these findings we contribute to paradox literature by developing the concept of 'knotting mechanisms' that tie paradoxes together and at the same time impact their salience. We explain how such mechanisms can produce different types of paradox knots. We further contribute to the literature on global-local tension in the context of NGOs by providing a more comprehensive understanding of local adaption of NGOs is not just a reaction to the 'misfit' between global and local conditions, but rather to the paradox knot with the organizational identity elasticity paradox.