"Senator, We Run Ads!": On the persistence of Facebook's strategic paradoxical tensions

Despite the increasing interest in strategic paradoxes, we still lack knowledge of how these tensions persist over time. Based on video data of Facebook’s Congressional hearings in April 2018, we develop a process model of the dynamic persistence of paradoxical tensions. We argue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg embodied four discursive practices—conforming, transcending, generalizing, and rejecting—to stage the management of such tensions. As a result, these practices lead to circles of avoiding and exposing tensions, giving rise to the persistence of the paradox. The main contribution of our paper is a process perspective of persistence that showcases how tensions evolve through an interplay of latency and saliency and, thus, sheds further light on the complex nature of paradoxes and their connection to system theory.