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Charles Handy, management consultant and visiting professor at the London Business School, has long been interested in the changing nature of work. In his thought-provoking 1990 book, The Age of Unreason, Handy observed that organizations faced discontinuous change as the twentieth century drew to a close. Since traditional ways of thinking were no longer satisfactory to cope with discontinuous change, organizations needed to find new ways of thinking and new approaches to work to cope with it. In The Age of Paradox, Handy expands further on these general themes. In a manner reminiscent of Peter Drucker or Tom Peters, Handy uses anecdotes to show why organizations and institutions must change. At the heart of the book is the concept of paradox. A paradox is a statement or a situation full of contradictions, such as: organizations will become smaller and bigger at the same time, or nothing is as insecure as a secure job.
The book is organized into four sections, "Confused by Paradox," "Pathways through Paradox," "Managing Paradox," and "Making Sense of Paradox." The first section, "Confused by Paradox," lays out nine paradoxes of mature societies. The first is the paradox of intelligence, in which the "means of production," the traditional basis of capitalism, are now literally owned by the workers because those means are in their heads. At firms such as Microsoft, intelligence, not plant and equipment, has become the important new form of property. The second is the paradox of work itself. As menial jobs are exported to developing countries and productivity continues to...