Add to ORKGPasquale Gagliardi’s essay presents ideas of immeasurable importance to ongoing debates about interpretivism and its role in organization studies. In particular, I celebrate his par-adoxical rendering of the utilitarian and the gratuitous, which reveals his always aes-thetic sensitivities as well as describing some of the ways that paradigms interact. Gagliardi’s choice of the term gratuitous, I suggest, is an application of Rorty’s method of redescription, an intriguing strategy for paradigmatic interaction in its own right. In the end, however, I complain that Gagliardi may go too far when he employs one of the tactics he describes (disguising gratuitousness as useful) to produce a typology of gratuitous things. Ironic or not, typologies ...