Time and Temporality in Organisations

As the introductory chapter, the first chapter aims to provide the overall framework for the book and open up about the motivation behind writing it. Before introducing the book’s structure and giving an overview of the covered topics, I highlight the need for a clear and explicit conceptualization of time and temporality in organization studies to enable meaningful debates and enhance further development of the field. I briefly introduce the following chapters with their different ontological assumptions and varying approaches to time and temporality.

This chapter focuses on clock time and its role in organizing social life and organizational life. Clock time, rooted in Newtonian physics, stands for temporal realism. From a temporal realist perspective, time is viewed as real, objective, and measurable, while temporality concerns such objective features of time as tempo, speed, duration, frequency, acceleration, timing, and so on. In this chapter, I give a short overview of the emergence of global standardized clock time and its merits as a tool for organizing. I will continue with some of the less positive aspects of the relationship between clock time and the views of reality. I will discuss the importance of clock time in organizations emphasizing its role in coordinating, synchronizing, and entraining activities with different temporal cycles. I discuss some of the potential negative aspects of an unbalanced emphasis on clock time, such as speed, time compression or intensification, and chronocentrism. Finally, I underline some limitations of clock time that may arise if applied in social life.

This chapter focuses on the subjective perception of temporal dimensions of objective time like duration, simultaneity, frequency, sequence, and temporal regularity. The chapter starts with a brief overview of time perception biases, challenges related to estimating durations either pro- or retrospectively, and planning fallacy. I then discuss the spatial metaphor of time and, stemming from that, the question of the direction of the movement of time. Concerning the direction of the movement of time, I explain the ego-centric and time-centric perspectives and their corresponding influence on how we relate to the future, how we perceive our temporal agency, and how we respond to and use time. Next, the chapter discusses temporal focus and temporal depth and underlines the difference between temporal focus and temporal orientation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of time work and temporal agency.

This chapter is grounded in the ontology of temporality. The focus of the chapter is endogenous temporality and subjective temporality as the lived experience of time. I start with a discussion of the lived experience of time, the ongoing nature of temporality, and possible struggles in restoring and maintaining coherent connections to the past and present in the face of unexpected disruptions in the sensed flow of time. While highlighting the importance of the subjective temporality of our lived experience, I aim to avoid being restricted by the ideas of temporal idealism. Therefore, the chapter includes a brief section on temporal idealism before introducing endogenous temporality as a broader concept applicable beside humans to the world, things, events, and relations. I discuss the agency of time and its connection to becoming. Concerning becoming, a distinction is drawn between the realization of possibilities and the actualization of potentialities. The realization of possibilities is viewed as maintaining our trajectory of movement or form of being, while the actualization potentialities indicate a qualitative transformation. Both temporality and becoming require a closer look at the present, and pasts and futures, including the notion of the immanence of time. The chapter ends with the temporal structure of agency.

In this chapter, the subjective temporality discussed in the previous chapter is placed into a broader social context. Therefore, this chapter discusses intersubjective temporality and the socially constructed nature of time. The chapter highlights the plurality of social times. It covers attempts to align objective and subjective time in organizational settings through temporal structures and temporal work. The temporal orientation of activities questions the dominance of the temporal orientation of human actors. Finally, I discuss a multi-layered social time as a temporal context for all social activities, and the mutual interdependencies of all the layers in their becoming in irreversible time.

This chapter focuses on events, time, and their mutual relationship. I will discuss four conceptually different ways the connection between time and events is addressed in organization studies. The first approach analyses events as occurring in reversible structure while connecting through an irreversible process—this approach is based on the ontology of temporality. The second approach views events as signifiers of time. Therefore, time is seen as residing in events, and events are seen as making time visible. This is important for reckoning time in events. While less explicit, I classify it as rooted in the ontology of temporality due to its focus on the trajectories of events. The third approach sees events residing in time. More precisely, it sees discrete and closed events ordered sequentially in linear time bracketed from their pasts and futures. The third approach is based on the ontology of time. Finally, the fourth approach is the events-based view of time, which sees events as time and is grounded in the ontology of temporality. This approach sees the internal connecting of events as a source of temporality and views time as a field of possibilities.

This chapter lists seven challenges related to studying time and temporality. The presented list is not exhaustive but aims to point to the main issues that repeatedly surface when we try to theorize about time and temporality. While this chapter does not analyse empirical challenges related to time and temporality, it does not mean that these are not existing or are irrelevant. The main issues seem to be rooted in general culturally and socially taken-for-granted approach to time, our simultaneous living in and living time, and our deeply rooted spatial thinking. It seems that when thinking about and analysing time, we tend to get trapped in spatial metaphors. Concerning metaphors, I dare to recommend the metaphor of constant weaving and re-weaving as the continuous creation of reality and the field of possibilities.