Meet Camille Pradies, a Professor who embraces paradoxes to make sense of the world’s complexity

Camille Pradies , Professor

Uncomfortable situations, irreconcilable polarities, contradictory demands: Camille Pradies, Professor at EDHEC, has made paradoxes and ambivalence the focus of her research, a subject for her teaching, and a framework for understanding an increasingly complex world.

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1 Jun 2026

When, in 2023, Camille Pradies published “With Head and Heart. How emotions shape paradox navigation in veterinary work” in the prestigious Academy of Management Journal, it marked the culmination of work she had begun fourteen years earlier.

It was 2008 and, having completed her MBA and spent two years in the German agri-food industry, Camille secured a place on the PhD programme she had been aiming for, at Boston College. “They were highly regarded for their qualitative methodology and for research into identity and the meaning of work, particularly Michael G. Pratt, whom I was fortunate enough to have as my supervisor,” she explains. There she discovered the concept of ambivalence, which she now describes as the coexistence of positive and negative, sometimes conflicting, evaluations of the same object.

“I’d read an academic article about the need to rethink resistance to change in organisations through the lens of ambivalence: how people who appeared to be resisting might simply be ambivalent about a situation that combines opportunities and challenges,” she explains. “And I really liked this idea of moving beyond the adopters/resisters dichotomy, so much so that I wanted to explore the subject further in my research project.”

This is how she first set foot in the veterinary world and began an in-depth study of a clinic that she would follow for over a decade. “I’m talking more about paradoxes today - that is, two opposing yet interconnected elements that persist over time,” she explains. When faced with the most financially disadvantaged clients, unable to afford the cost of treatment, how does the vet manage these seemingly contradictory elements: on the one hand, the business imperative of running their practice; on the other, the moral imperative of saving an animal, with all the emotional implications that entails?

For someone who describes herself as deeply ambivalent, this close examination of ethical tensions within organisations very quickly became a central theme of her research. Her thesis, defended in 2014, examined the impact of regulatory change on issues of identity among French veterinarians, or how this group of professionals had to reinvent themselves in the face of the planned financialisation of their profession at the time of the transposition of the European Services Directive.

Alongside this early work, she attended the EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) conference in 2010, which featured a programme on paradoxes for the first time. It was love at first sight: she joined a community that was then in its infancy, bringing together researchers passionate about this emerging field. Over the years, she took on the roles of editor of the community newsletter and co-organiser of several research groups.

“Wendy Smith, from the University of Delaware, and Marianne Lewis, from the University of Cincinnati, did a tremendous job of building a community around paradoxes at a time when the subject was more than just a niche interest,” she explains. “This collective effort gave rise to many wonderful ideas: during the Covid pandemic, for example, around fifty of us worked together to produce a series of articles based on the idea that paradox theory could help people cope with this unprecedented situation.”

In recent years, paradoxes have become extremely popular. Whilst there were only a handful of articles on the subject in 2010 in leading management research journals, the topic generated around a hundred by 2025. “It’s a very promising theme because it can be applied to any context,” she suggests. “It’s a way of revealing and then analysing the tensions and complexity within a system. But it’s also a way of thinking about and rethinking many realities. Once you start to see them, you very quickly see them everywhere!”

Camille joined EDHEC in 2014, initially as an Assistant Professor of Management, then as an Associate Professor, and finally as a Professor in December 2025. In the courses she has developed from scratch, notably Paradoxical Thinking in Executive Education and Managing Complexity at Bachelor’s level, she encourages students to move beyond problem-solution logic to learn how to decipher and manage the grey area of paradoxes.

She is one of the first researchers to have developed tools and exercises for teaching this theory and applying it to leadership in a practical and interactive way. “With my Bachelor’s students, I start with topics covered in the press that are open to debate, such as work as a passion, generative AI in the workplace, digital nomads, or Gen Z in the workplace, and I ask them to help their classmates understand the paradoxes at the heart of these topics. They take charge of their class’s learning, which forces them not only to identify and understand the paradoxes, but also to find ways for their classmates to experience and grasp them ,” she explains. “They come up with highly creative formats such as role-plays, Cluedo, Jeopardy, debates… which, in turn, feeds into my research on how to teach paradoxes. These are situations that are inherently uncomfortable for both the individual and the group. But play allows us to develop a mindset that embraces these contradictions, bringing them to light without seeking to resolve them.”

Beyond veterinary medicine and teaching about paradoxes, Camille has also explored these aspects in the coffee industry, British water and forestry management, and social entrepreneurship, a field she is currently researching as part of a European grant. “I look at how individuals and groups manage the contradictions associated with their roles on a cognitive and emotional level,” she summarises.

An interest she has cultivated for over 15 years, which has also enriched her greatly on a personal level: “Reflecting on paradoxes encourages us to take a step back from issues that are presented as polar opposites: teaching versus research, private life versus professional life… Paradoxes are a threshold concept: once you’ve learnt it, you can never unlearn it. It’s a way of seeing the world that permeates everything you do and encourages you to view tensions with greater detachment and nuance.”