On January 4, 1966, a major accident occurred at an oil refinery at Feyzin in South-East France. Although this event has been recognized as a watershed in the history of French industrial hazards regulation, little has been studied about the oil industry’s response. The period following the disaster saw an initiation into public relations for the leading figures of the young French oil industry, concurrent with the energy transition that was happening in Western Europe. Most of these leaders continued to hold executive roles in the same companies during the following decades and capitalized on these experiences to communicate on environmental issues. While many oil historians have focused on either a global or a national scale, this contribution proposes a multi-scalar approach to scrutinize how oil companies crafted their communications in the chosen territories for refining and petrochemical activities. Focusing on these areas enables us to emphasize that levers of consent to industrial activities are phenomena that are constructed in lived spaces where frontline communities have to cope with petroleum-based industry’s ordinary risks.

Organizational actors face multiple paradoxical tensions that are not only intertwined with one another but also nested across different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Despite their importance, little is known about how such paradoxical tensions are interpreted and managed by organizational leaders. To explore this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews and collected multilevel data from 38 respondents, including corporate executives, team leaders, and managers in the Pakistani telecommunications sector. Through an interpretive phenomenological analysis of participants’ lived experiences, we developed a multilevel nested paradox model. This model revealed four paradoxes nested both within and across levels: task efficiency and employee well-being, individual interest versus institutional interest, ethics and profitability, and empowerment and accountability. The tensions arising from customer demands, followers’ expectations, and organizational requirements lie at the intersection of the levels occupied by followers, team leaders, and corporate executives. Our model shows that tensions at one level exacerbate tensions at other levels, and through this transmission process, paradoxes generate a constellation of paradoxes. The study’s model suggests that leaders manage these nested tensions by applying a combination of splitting and integration strategies, dynamically sequencing and distributing responses across levels. This study contributes to the underexplored research on paradox multiplicity and deepens the understanding of paradoxes as a meta-theory. We also highlight several important theoretical and practical implications of this research.