| Summary: | Organizations at the boundary of two fields are often required to meet contradictory but interrelated demands. While transcendence – accepting both sets of demands as necessary and complementary – has been shown to be an important response to such paradoxes, achieving it places significant cognitive and behavioural strain on managers. Despite the importance of ‘both/and’ approaches for the survival of pluralistic organizations, we still know little about the practices that managers resort to when initial efforts to achieve transcendence break down. Through a longitudinal study of a joint venture created by two parent companies in distinct fields, we demonstrate that managers can address otherwise insurmountable paradoxical tensions through an emphasis on the interplay of their temporal structures. By deconstructing competing demands into their respective temporal qualities of temporal depth – defined as the span into the past and future that they typically consider – and temporal horizons – measured by the frequency of milestones within this span – managers can process paradoxical demands in novel ways. Through a process of temporal reflexivity, managers on both sides were able to negotiate a new, shared temporal depth that accommodated the temporal horizons of both sides. We show that this process enabled managers to achieve a form of quasi-transcendence, in which opposing demands were accommodated though not fully accepted as necessary. This allowed the organization to satisfy competing demands where conventional approaches to paradoxes could not be sustained.
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