The purpose of this article is on the one hand to investigate paradoxes caused by the
collision between rationalities of top management HRM strategies and local ones at the
level of line managers, and on the other, the responses to them. A grounded-theory
approach is used on empirical material from a university hospital and a dozen of high
quality hotels. The study has shown that hospital HR staff and hotel directors respond to
paradoxes by translating. A conclusion is that when repeatedly having to cope with these
paradoxes, a special skill is developed, the skill of translating top-down strategic
decisions into alternatives that fit different local conditions. The paradoxes, which the
line managers responsible at the local level could otherwise not handle, are thus
manageable thanks to consciously developed translating skills by hospital HR staff and
hotel directors. These translations work as stimuli to strategy implementation when there
is trust between translators and those who must execute the strategies, i.e. the line
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