Organization and Time 0192894382, 9780192894380

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Organization and Time

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 12/02/22, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 12/02/22, SPi

Organization and Time Tor Hernes

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Tor Hernes 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951378 ISBN 978–0–19–289438–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface The image of Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase fea­ tures the use of cubism to depict movement. Rather than try to depict pure movement in a cinematographic way, Duchamp depicts form in movement through the assembly of cubist spaces. In an interview, he described the painting as a static ‘representation of movement’ (Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 1946: 20). He creates the impression of movement through the intersection of the various body parts as they represent different points in time. The pattern of intersections is complex yet conveys the impression of a moving body. Each intersection is a tangible image of interrelated parts, but together they make up a whole that conveys the impression of a moving body. The intersecting parts express movement, but there is also movement in the body’s orientation. Framed by the sloping staircase, the posture sug­ gests orientation as it emerges from an immediate past toward an immediate future, but so does the nude’s glance. The gaze suggests a turning away from what was during the preceding moments, but it also turns downward, as if the person is concentrating on the step taken in the moment while also expecting what is to come. Much like Duchamp depicts his nude moving in time, we can infer the movement of organizational actors through time from the intersections between parts, each with its own temporality. Actors move with the flow of time while making their own representations of time, of the present, past, and future. As they move through time, they develop traces of the past and emerging representations of the future, which become embedded in their collective temporal structures. These temporal structures may be seen as tan­ gles of intersecting temporalities, some of which are measured, like clock time, others of which are past and future projections in time. Seeing actors through the lens of movement allows us to analyse both their actuality and potentiality. Just as Duchamp drew upon delineated, internally homogenous parts for his representation of movement, we are left with still images, such as events and sequences, to express movement. Bits and pieces of narratives, materiality, actions, and events may, through the lens of time, add up to an integral understanding of movement through time. One of the enduring enigmas in philosophy and science relates to move­ ment through time. It is movement through time that helps explain the

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persistent puzzle of the incredibly complex interplay between organizational change and continuity. Movement through time enables the study of how change and continuity are part and parcel of each other and not separate phenomena, as people often assume. From within time there is unbroken movement of continuity and change. To understand movement as continuity and change, it is necessary to suspend the unbroken movement experienced within time. When actors gaze into the past and the future, the current sense of movement becomes temporarily disjointed. Scholars, however, have tended to mistake disjointedness for permanent separation and have con­ sidered the relationship between being within time and outside of time as an irreconcilable dualism: time as experience, on the one hand, and time as measurement, on the other. This book offers ways to integrate the two views with one another. My own journey through time and particularly engaging with strong pro­ cess views, or becoming views, has taught me that there are ways to bridge the seemingly irreconcilable. I have previously argued (Hernes, 2014) that as scholars we should not shy away from integrating process views and entita­ tive views. This, I think applies no less to time. I feel that if we explore more deeply the intersections among the ideas of organizational scholars who employ process lenses, of process philosophers, and of process sociologists, there is so much more to say about the time-­related challenges that contem­ porary actors face. The realities of practitioners are defined both by process and entities. Practitioners are acutely aware of living and working in a world of movement while they draw up plans and assume that things remain momentarily stable; they are also acutely aware that beneath it all everything is in perpetual movement. Plans, technologies, and actors are mere tools to help people make sense of—and to move on—in a moving world. Here is where both social scientists and practitioners face the task of (re)creating a sense of time as movement with quasi-­stable elements, such as clock time, duration, and ordering. Social scientists and practitioners must creatively establish a sense of movement with whatever pieces they have at hand. It is like using still images to represent a movie. But although still images cannot fully depict the movie, a suitable combination of them may tell us a lot about the movie. The point is not whether we resort to entities but how we do it. Alfred North Whitehead, an influential figure in process philosophy, believed that we may resort to abstractions (or ‘entification’) in studying process as long as we know what we are doing. My own theoretical journey, partly inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s event-­based theory of time, has convinced me that to take a strong process view implies embracing process and entities, linear

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Preface  vii

clock time, and process time. Much the way Duchamp enables the expression of movement through cubism, scholars of time may become better at expressing movement in time by using concepts and labels which, when put together, depict movement although they cannot be movement. Likewise, scholars may become better at this expression by combining the­or­ies of time that were not developed to convey movement but which, when combined, convey a sense of movement. This is how theorizing time may help explain practical phenomena and challenges that practitioners face. This book is an attempt to get as far as possible in creating a sense of time as movement of time, in time, across time, and through time.

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Acknowledgements Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is a unique place of thoughtful, ­know­ledge­able, and intellectually provocative people. Thanks to all of my colleagues who have helped me sharpen my ideas and rethink the rationale for my work. Warm thanks also to colleagues at the University of South-­East Norway (USN), where I hold an adjunct position. I have also benefitted greatly from seminars and conversations at Paris Dauphine University. My indebtedness to colleagues at the Centre for Organization and Time (COT) cannot be overstated. COT includes great people, including Jonathan Feddersen, Miriam Feuls, Mie Plotnikof, Iben Stjerne Sandal, Majken Schultz, and Silviya Svejenova, as well as members of our reading group on time, including Cecilie Kampmann, Sophie Cappelen, Liv Egholm, Joana Geraldi, Sunny Mosangzi Xu, Sofia Pemsel, Vibeke Scheller and Jesper Strandgård. I am grateful for valuable discussions on the mysteries of time with col­ leagues in Denmark and elsewhere, including Tor Bakken, Tima Bansal, Frans Bevort, Blagoy Blagoev, Isabelle Bouty, Eva Boxenbaum, Are Branstad, David Chandler, Robert Chia, Christian De Cock, Ian Colville, Therese Dille, Bill Foster, Raghu Garud, Kenneth Gergen, Antoine Hüe, Anthony Hussenot, Rasmus Johnsen, Joanna Karmowska, Jochen Koch, Sven Kunisch, Ann Langley, Hila Lifshitz-­Assaf, Philippe Lorino, Christina Lubinski, Michael Mol, Fred Morgeson, Kätlin Pulk, Daniel Nyberg, David Obstfeld, Brian Pentland, Madeleine Rauch, Juliane Reinecke, Innan Sasaki, Ted Schatzki, Dennis Schoeneborn, Barbara Simpson, Nathalie Slawinski, Violetta Splitter, Roy Suddaby, Jonas Söderlund, Iddo Tavory, Hari Tsoukas, Anne Live Vaagaasar, Andy Van de Ven, Dan Wadhwani, Matthias Wenzel, Elden Wiebe, and Ansgar Ødegård. I am grateful to Ashleigh Imus for diligent language editing. Thanks to participants in the CBS executive programmes Master of Business Development and Master of Public Governance and to students in the USN School of Business Master programme in Innovation Management for enlightening me on how time highlights practitioners’ dilemmas and opportunities. Thanks also to students at doctoral courses at CBS at more recently at The Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich, for inspiring and insightful discussions.

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x Acknowledgements

Thanks also to my paddling and rowing buddies in the Skovshoved Rowing Club, for sharing the experience of time out on the water as pure flow. A special thanks to Majken Schultz for all those times spent together exploring the mysteries of time. Finally, I wish to extend my gratitude to the late James  G.  March, who advised me to use my own voice, although he might remain sceptical of my arguments. I am grateful to the Tuborg Foundation and the Velux Foundation, who made the project possible through funding of the projects ‘Changing in Time’ and ‘The Temporality of Food Innovation’ respectively.

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Contents List of Figures and Tables

xiii

Introduction1 1. A Review and Foundations of a Framework

12

Introduction12 Social Time 13 Temporal Reach 17 Experience of Time 20 Activity Time 23 Time Structuring 27 Synchronic and Diachronic Time 30 Intertemporality33 Present-­Past-­Future 36 Foundations of a Framework 38

2. Time-­as-­Experience

46

Introduction46 The Passage of Time 50 Experiencing the Passage of Time 52 Shaping the Experience of Time 57 Collectivizing Time-­as-­Experience 60 Experiencing Distant Times 63

3. Time-­as-­Practice

67

Introduction67 Practices as Stretched-­Outness of Time 70 Practices as Reach-­Outness of Time 75

4. Time-­as-­Events

81

Introduction81 The Indivisible Present 84 Eventualization of Practices 88 Singular and Exemplary Events 91 The Intraconnecting of Events 95

5. Time-­as-­Resource

98

Introduction98 Extending from Measured Time 103 Composites of Time 105 Temporal Templates 107

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6. Themes of Interplay

111

Introduction111 Simultaneous Interplay between Experience, Practice, and Resource 113 Transitional Interplay between Practices and Resource 117 Simultaneous Interplay between Practices and Distant Events 120 Transitional Interplay between Practices and Events 123

7. Narrative Trajectory

127

Introduction127 The reflexive shaping of time 128 Configurational Event Narrative 133 Trajectory from Within 138 Narrative as Trajectory from Within 140 Becoming of an Emplotted Narrative Trajectory 143

8. Changing in Time

150

Introduction150 The Fallacy of Forward Causation 152 Experiencing Time in Change 154 From an Influence View to a Confluence View 157 Continuous Change and Trajectoral Folds 159

9. Mattering of Time

163

Introduction163 Historicizing through Materiality 165 Materiality as Translator of Time 167 Predicting the Past and Evoking the Future 168

10. Leading in Time

173

Introduction173 Leading through Pasts and Futures 174 The Leader as Time Symbol 176 Leading in the Present 177

11. A Note on Studying Time in Time

181

Introduction181 Confronting Temporal Distance 182 The Double Post-­Festum Drama 184 Overcoming Synoptic Illusion 186

Afterword189 References Index

191 209

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List of Figures and Tables Figures 1 Connections between time views from the review and time dimensions of the framework

43

2 Retention and protention in temporal experience

55

3 Dynamics of individual and collective temporal experience

59

4 How practices constitute time through stretched-­outness

76

5 Eventualization of practices

89

6 Practices and the becoming of singular and exemplary events

96

7 Translation between temporal templates and practices

110

8 Interrelationships between time dimensions and themes of interplay

112

9 Emplotment and narrative trajectory

138

10 Narrative trajectory of the Gettysburg speech

145

11 Influence and confluence views of events

158

Tables 1 Features of views of time identified in the review

13

2 Time dimensions and levels of analysis

44

3 The four dimensions and their interrelationships

45

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Introduction What is time? How do we use it, spend it? We make a phone call, have lunch, brew some coffee, apply makeup. Time can restart and begin anew, or it can hide entirely, get cut off, disappear. Time is more than what passes between this moment and another one, or the price required to finish a task. It seeds our imagination, and slows down when we’re creatively absorbed. It spurs action, and is bound up with how we press forward with life and with our resolve to make ourselves complete. Weiwei (2020: 82)

This quote from an essay by the Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei points to the dual nature of time as both tangible (such as the duration of having lunch) and intangible (such as that which enables us to press forward with life). Time’s stubborn resistance to adequate and comprehensive def­in­ ition emerges in St. Augustine’s writing exactly the same sentence as Weiwei’s but more than 1600 years earlier: ‘What is time?’(St. Augustine, 1992: 230). The social sciences have commonly expressed time as the answer to questions such as, For how long? How fast? How soon? When? How often? In which order? Such questions have assumed the ontological primacy of time over activity, in the sense that activity is temporal only to the extent that it can be measured. Under the impetus of the philosophy of time, scholars have tried to ask completely different sets of questions, such as, What is emerging now? What is becoming different from the past? How do we enact the future? What connects distant past and future events? These scholars deny ontological primacy to measured time and seek to understand how activity comes to constitute time. Most people may associate the first set of questions, but not the latter, with time. But, as Fine (1990) argued, the former has prevailed over  the latter. This book seeks to explain how both express time through their interplay. The most fundamental problems in organizational research relate to vari­ ous forms of continuity and change, both of which are inextricably linked to time. The flow of time requires actors to enact a sense of continuity while simultaneously giving them the opportunity to effect change. Although the Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0001

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2  Organization and Time

flow of time itself may seem continuous, actors must be creative to enact a sense of continuity by stringing together separate events. This is what the flow of time does to them. They need to be creative ‘on the go’, so to speak. Questions such as what is emerging now, what is becoming different, what does this resemble, how does this reflect the distant past or future confront actors making consequential choices, because the time to react to a situation is always slipping away. This is what Mead, among others, called the passage of time. ‘Passage of time’ may seem abstract and nebulous. But in the world of organizations the passing of time manifests in things such as emerging technologies, vanishing of markets, turnover of personnel, changing climate, and emerging legislation, all of which take place continually. The passage of time manifests in all kinds of ebbs and flows of staff, ideas, experiences, tech­ nologies, and solutions that surround actors. Reflecting on his time as dean of research at a business school, Vaill (1998: 29) noted, [. . .] things did not occur one at a time; no competency could be practiced in pristine singularity. Instead, at any moment I was flowing with the multiple, disjointed time streams of the various projects in which I was involved. Sometimes I had a little bit of influence over the pace and sequence of things in one of these streams, but as often I was ‘playing catch-­up’, ‘dodging someone else’s bullets’, ‘being overtaken by events’, or ‘trying to get ahead’ of a situation.

This quote helps explain why it is important to consider how actors create their own sense of time from what is going on around them. Scholars have often considered time as either external or internal to actors’ worlds (Gherardi and Strati, 1988). This book is premised on the idea that actors internalize external phenomena as part of their experience; therefore, the distinction is largely superfluous. Throughout the history of organizational studies, a ­common assumption has been that organizational actors encounter time as a measure external to them. For example, scholars have discussed how actors cope with the pressure of time generated by shifts in the labour market, the speed of innovation, and the frequency of changes in political legislation. Such forces undeniably influence organizations and need to be accounted for. For example, a market crash happens, but actors interpret the market crash, and it makes different inroads into their temporal trajectories. Whether the market crash comes towards actors from the future or moves away from them into the past, each actor owns it—endogenizes it in the actor’s own way (Hernes and Weik, 2007). As actors move through time, they construct and reconstruct their trajectories, which take on particular meaning for themselves and, consequently, for other actors, such as public institutions,

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Introduction  3

clients, partners, and subcontractors. The underlying idea is that organizational actors create their own time in the sense that all forms of time need to be meaningful to the actors themselves, including the universal notion of clock time. To be sure, they respond to pressure from customers, users, citizens, markets, donors, and the like, and in so doing they slice and chop time to be in sync with the demands of various stakeholder groups. But they orient their own time towards those exigencies through the ways in which they give shape to  their time. I purposely use the expression ‘through time’ to emphasize the agency of time. ‘Through time’ suggests a trajectory that meets contingencies on its way, a trajectory which is continually negotiated and changed as actors meet new challenges and possibilities. ‘Over time’, on the other hand, is analogous to a diachronic view of time and reflects a view of two separate states of affairs that processes pass through in time. The latter view, however, says little or nothing about the actual process of moving between those two states of affairs. Rather than consider what time does to organizations, this book investi­ gates how organizational actors express themselves, define themselves, and understand themselves through the medium of time. The book works from the assumption that time emerges from what they do and then shapes them, in turn, as they respond to external events and define their time. It views actors as architects and observers of their own time; as architects and ob­ser­ vers, they both experience and create their sense of time. Moreover, creating their sense of time implies some degree of choice available to actors, and it implies tools available to them. Instead of viewing time as uniformly applied from the outside, the book regards time as a temporal toolbox from which actors shape their temporal realities, including their ongoing concerns, their past, and their future. In this view, events do not wait to happen; instead, organizations happen to events. ‘Event-­making’ then becomes part and parcel of the ongoing shaping of time that gives sense to organizational actors. The key to thinking more dynamically about time lies in appreciating the interweaving dynamics among the present, past, and future. A fitting ex­ample of how the past and future are fused in the present is in Harvey’s (1990: 108) discussion of Marx’s attack on the use of a mythological past in order to show the way to a different future: How is it, [Marx] there asks, that even at the height of revolutionary ferment, the revolutionaries themselves ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-­honoured disguise and borrowed language’?  (italics added).

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4  Organization and Time

The quote suggests that change relies on a sense of continuity from the past, even when the change marks an abrupt departure from the past. The idea is that the past is a dynamic resource that we carry with us, waiting to be invited into ongoing activity. Actors may address the past through various means and bring it into the present through actualization. But it never or rarely presents itself as ‘that past that was’ but, rather, as an event or set of events that may translate into a different future, which may sometimes be only seconds away, or at other times, decades away. Every actualization of the past takes place in the present and is implicitly or explicitly directed towards the future. When someone tells a story from the past, that person tells the story in order to achieve some effect on the listeners, and that intended effect lies in the future. In fact, some would argue that the intention of telling the story precedes digging into the past for the story. Schütz’s (1953: 15) idea of ‘future perfect’ addresses this phenomenon: All projecting consists in anticipation of future conduct by way of phantasying, yet it is not the ongoing process of action but the phantasied act as having been accomplished which is the starting point of all projecting. I have to visualize the state of affairs to be brought about by my future action before I can draft the single steps of such future acting from which this state of affairs will result. Metaphorically speaking, I must have some idea of the structure to be erected before I can draft the blueprints. Thus, I have to place myself in my phantasy at a future time, when this action will already have been accomplished. Only then may I reconstruct in phantasy the single steps which will have brought forth this future act. In the terminology suggested, it is not the future action but the future act that is anticipated in the project, and it is anticipated in the Future Perfect Tense, modo futuri exacti. This time perspective peculiar to the project has rather im­port­ant consequences.

In other words, the story of the past already had a future before it was told, making the future part of the past of having told the story. But the line of reasoning does not stop there. We may also question whether the future is some isolated event that waits to be encountered. Just as the past is both actualized in the present and futurized, the future becomes not just actualized but also historicized as a future potentiality as it is brought into the present. A future scenario shown on slides in a PowerPoint presentation is a future observed in the present, but as soon as their act of showing and discussing the slides has taken place, actors move on through time, and that imagining of a future becomes an object of historicizing.

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Introduction  5

This shows that being in the flow of time implies relentless interweaving of present, past, and future among flows of on-­going processes. Whereas organizational scholars have pursued these lines of reasoning for the last couple of decades, work remains to be done on how actors activate their temporal toolboxes to effect this interweaving as they move through time. To do so, it is necessary to critically evaluate current theories in order to develop more-­distinct temporal tools. This book outlines five concerns about current theorizing of time and suggests how we may overcome these challenges. The first issue is the tendency to pit different time ontologies against one another. A particularly popular dichotomy is between so-­called clock time, or Newtonian time, on the one hand, and processual, or event-­based time, on the other (Clark, 1985; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). Scholars tend to depict the former time as unchanging, absolute, and mathematical (Adam, 2004: 30), often translated into linear and rational time or quantitative linear time (Hassard, 2002; Hassard et al., 2021). Processual, or event-­based, time is contrasted with the former category and derives from process philosophers such as Bergson, Mead, and Heidegger. In this view, time is all in the event rather than in sequen­ tial measures (Clark, 1985; Hernes, 2014). Scholars have tended to embrace particularly Bergson’s powerful argument about continuous, internalized time as antithetical to spatialized clock time. There is little reason to doubt  the ontological divide among different time conceptions. Yet, Bergson revealed time categories in their pure state, and his notion of durée is an introspective time world lodged in the human mind, just as other scholars have tended to present clock time as a pure category. Organization studies may lean on such models and draw inspiration from  them. But closer scrutiny reveals that some process views of time may not really be all that Bergsonian. Although events are the basic unit of analysis in process views of time, sequential ordering of events may still be meaningful in a processual view. Once scholars accept this view, clock time and event times come to share the notion of sequencing (Perlow, 1999). Naturally, event time is about much more than sequencing. Nevertheless, the divide between the two types of time may not be as deep and wide as ­scholars often assume. However, the void between the two conceptions of time has both widened and deepened such that they have become antinomies. Like magnets, they attract emerging phenomena from either side of the magnetic field to dichot­ omize those phenomena. Bluedorn (2002), in his comprehensive analysis of

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6  Organization and Time

time and organization, distinguishes fungible and epochal time: fungible time is the measured clock-­time equivalent (Chronos), and epochal time is the lived event-­time (Kairos) equivalent. Bluedorn argues that the categories may interact to varying degrees in organizations, but making them interact still leaves them intact. It seems that even in Bluedorn’s thoughtful analysis, the magnets remain in place. Time has been measured, translated, and traded since the dawn of, well, time and no social organized or coordinated system can exist without some mechanism for portioning out time in a more or less standardized form. But this does not make such time purely Newtonian, standardized, and objective. In fact, it can be hard to decide where the objective representation of time ends, and the subjective experi­ ence of time begins. An underlying argument of this book is that the magnets should not be left intact. Incorporating my review of the literature, I argue that it is possible to take the magnets apart and reassemble them in such a way that, rather than dichotomize theories, we can combine them to reveal complex or­gan­ iza­tion­al phenomena through the lens of time. I advocate allowing different time conceptions to exist ‘comfortably side by side’ in organizations, as Adam (2004: 1) formulates. Adam argues against a kaleidoscope view of time in which different conceptions become separated from a diverse reality and isolated from one another. She argues for studying the diversity of time conceptions in practice by letting them sit side by side, so we can see how they may interact. This presupposes that we work with dualities (both-­and) rather than dualisms (either-­or) of time concepts (Adam, 1990). Thinking in terms of dualities requires that we study how they are different but also how they become mutually constitutive. Orlikowski and Yates (2002) made a similar argument, that dichotomizing gets in the way of seeing the fuller picture of how actors enact time in organizations. This book extends the idea of mutually constitutive time conceptions to emerging organizational phenomena. To study different time conceptions and bring them into mutual inter­action, however, it is important to define them while respecting their conceptual origins and uses. For example, the book adopts a different definition of clock time from most other works, specifically the notion of time-­as-­resource. As a resource, time is sequential and includes timing but is not confined to meas­ urement in terms of hours, days, and weeks. This is the reality of practical organizing; practitioners are well aware of different types of time, but they also operate simultaneously with temporal models that have dimensions of different temporal types. Although scholars tend to distinguish temporal

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Introduction  7

types, practitioners may well operate with subtle and complex interplay between different types of time. Hernes, Feddersen and Schultz’s (2020 354) discussion of time and materiality in beer brewing, suggests how two types of time intertwine: ‘Some ongoing flows take place in a given moment, such as yeast acting during fermentation of beer; while others are provisionally terminated, such as barley having been harvested; and others are in preparation, such as bottling of the brew.’ In such cases, the moment to act is a matter of judgement, of intuitively knowing when to act, and of the linear clock time of processes. A second concern relates to the interplay of temporally volatile, fleeting, and momentary aspects, on the one hand, and temporally enduring elem­ents, on the other, which has been poorly dealt with in organizational theorizing. Organizational life is sometimes volatile. Small changes in micro-­level interactions may sway the temporal orientation of collective narratives. As argued by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), collective temporal orientations harbour dominant tones as well as subtones. Although dominant tones may be relatively robust, subtones may be flickers of temporal enactment rather than enduring temporal orientations. Contemporary or­gan­iza­tion­al life comprises both processes of enduring continuity and flickers of temporal experience, both of which sometimes blend into or challenge each other. Currently, few studies address the on-­going interplay between the tem­ por­al­ly ephemeral and the temporally enduring. This concern echoes the era we live in, which is the combined volatility and malleability of time itself. On the one hand, there is the fleeting time of encounters in what Bauman (2000) called liquid modernity, where cities, organizations, and  societies appear as places of encounters rather than durations of tradition and relations. Social media enables encounters and momentary decisions among people and among technologies, producing instanteneity. The making of instantaneity in a social ecology that consists of complex combinations of synchronous and asynchronous interaction produces a social system that may be characterized as evolving from clock time towards ‘click time’. Things are described as being clicks away, the click brings things into the actor’s present and the click defines before and after in the space of a split-­second. On the other hand, there is the preoccupation with distant times, usually represented through enduring events. People populate societies that have generated written and visual records for centuries, and many organizations and institutions that matter today go back decades or centuries as well (see,

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8  Organization and Time

for example, the study by Sasaki, Ravasi, and Micelotta, 2019). For example, Apple Inc., founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, will soon be able to look back at almost half a century of developing and selling products that have shaped what Apple represents today and what it will likely repre­ sent several years from now. On an even bigger scale, the development of the wristwatch industry illustrates how momentary changes may feature during one period, allowing actors to embrace technologies and designs that go back centuries, in order to capture contemporary markets into the fore­see­ able future. In the 1970s, classic manual wristwatches were replaced by hyper-­precise digital watches. In recent years, however, there has been a trend, at least for expensive brands, to present high-­precision, aesthetically designed wristwatches that reflect how they were made more than a century ago. This is about nostalgia, but it is also about combining an old craft with modern techniques and technologies to signal that consumers are buying a wristwatch as an investment in a long future. And then there are emerging future challenges of the world, which seem less distant as the years go by. Here, volatility may perhaps not relates so much to momentary changes, but to a long-­term volatility, which makes pre­ diction increasingly harder for organizational and institutional actors. In previous times the future of the world might seem like an open time horizon that could only be closed through major nuclear conflict. Even though organizations and institutions may be disposed of by re-­emerging in a differ­ ent form or transferring their tasks to other forms of organizing, the time of the planet is another matter and is becoming increasingly defined by metrics and defined tipping points (Ferraro et al., 2015) whose dynamics remains elusive. The time of the planet is rapidly becoming a temporal force in itself. If the scientists are right, there is a slow movement towards an unknown future that can be understood only partially in light of the past. To the extent that actors address this temporality of the planet depends on how they use a range of temporal tools, of which events is one and measured time is another. A third concern about the current theorizing of time and organization is about dynamics. At present, research addresses the mutual dynamics among present, past, and future, which has emerged from decades of scholars ex­peri­ment­ing with increasingly complex models of organization and time. The review below will reveal how views of time in the field have moved through various levels of dynamics; most noticeable is the move from linear time to a present-­past-­future temporality derived from the philosophy of time. During the last decade, studies have emerged which show how actors’ pre­ sent, past, and future may be mutually constitutive (Kaplan and Orlikowski,

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Introduction  9

2013; Schultz and Hernes, 2013, 2019). This development followed from a previous state of the art in which scholars considered present, past, and future but regarded them as separate temporal elements that did not engage in mutual interplay. In other words, they influenced one another but were not mutually constitutive. The current views of temporality consider, for example, that in the present, actors enact pasts and futures, and their enactment shapes the present. In other words, the temporal process is ongoing and recursive. What current theorizing about time should consider is the added effects of actors moving through time, where projections of future events at one point in time become pasts as actors move on. Current theorizing taking the present-past-future dynamics into account considers the dynamics to take place at one point in time, and therefore encounters what I will call the stationarity problem. This book argues for developing a dynamic complexity of time that accounts for both movement through time as actors experience it and their ongoing enact­ ment of the present-­past-­future relationship. Accounting for movement through time is not just analytically a current black box. It is also empirically imperative, because it reflects the unfolding temporal dynamics that actors encounter. A fourth concern is that scholars tend to consider time as a measure exter­ nal to activity and experience, and do not define activity and experience as constitutive of time (Gherardi and Strati, 1988). As I will argue on the basis of the review, activity in the form of practices is itself also a form of time, which does not depend on being measured chronologically to qualify as time. Schatzki (2006a: 1871) appropriately expresses the temporal dimension of practices as providing a ‘stretched-­outness’ of time. Practices are most often studied in terms of clock time, such as duration, speed, rhythm, or timing. That would not be wrong. However, practices also embody their own time, which is situational and actor-­specific rather than universal. This practice-­generated, actor-­specific time is yet to be fully addressed in research and integrated with other time views. People also express time through experience, which is different from measured time. Common views of events depict events as happening to actors (Ancona et al., 2001). However, even if multiple actors observe events, the actors act the events into existence in such a way that the events become part of the actors’ own sense of their trajectory through time. For example, in an analysis of Steinway pianos, Cattani et al. (2017) discuss how distant events in the company’s history are reflected in how artisans still practice the craft that made the pianos legendary many years ago. Distant events are not likely to hold the same significance for, say, Steinway customers as they do for the artisans whose practices uphold the tradition. In this way, actors give events their particular meaning through practices, but also their experience

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10  Organization and Time

of imagining past events in carrying out those practices. In other words, practices and experience establish the events as a form of time which is not external, but internal, to those practices and experiences. To address the concerns outlined above, the book develops four dimen­ sions of time into a comprehensive framework. One dimension of the frame­ work is time-­as-­experience, where one aspect is the temporal experience of being in the now, such as for example the experience of running out of time. Another aspect of experiencing time is the experience of having moved through time. The latter aspect applies, for example, to how people in an organization translate and share their organizational past. A second dimension of time is time-­as-­practice, which reflects how a sense of time is constituted through collective practices. I will discuss practices as constitutive of time as  those practices unfold, but I will also discuss practices as the activity through which actors make sense of past and future events that lie outside their temporal present. A third dimension time developed in the book is time-­as-­events. As they move through time actors construct and reconstruct events as temporary residue of their practices, which become the constituent elements of their shared trajectory through time. Both past and future events are considered to be emergent and in the making, although they differ analytically. A third dimension is time-­as-­resource, which reflects the use of time (experience, practices, events) towards instrumental-­practical ends. Time-­as-­resource is translated into what I call temporal templates, which may include temporal structures, such as routines. Although these four dimensions of time may seem ontologically or epis­ temo­log­ic­al­ly incommensurable, they are more intertwined and mutually dependent than one might think. One way to pursue important questions that scholars are asking about contemporary society is to begin to draw con­ nections among the four dimensions and establish different nexus for differ­ ent questions. Important questions in organization studies, such as those about leadership, continuity and change, innovation, sustainability, and work life and ethics, each demand a different nexus. Whereas scholars have focused on one view at the expense of others, this book attempts to combine different views into a comprehensive theoretical framework from which we may define different nexuses and gain insight into a range of organizational phenomena. At a more abstract level, this book addresses time as both a means and medium of working, leading, and organizing. Scholars in the social sciences have understood time mainly as a temporal measure of activity. But beyond the ticking of clocks, notifications from electronic calendars, and algorithmic future predictions, time remains an elusive phenomenon to most people. If

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Introduction  11

we, for a moment, suspend our notion of time as a measurable quantity of speed or duration, what is left is time as the eternal journey in which we find ourselves. In this journey, time is much more existential than speed or dur­ ation. We may work more or less slowly, introduce longer or shorter breaks, and we may plan our future in a certain way. But time is also who we are, by defining where we came from in the past, where we are headed in the future, and how that shapes the present moment.

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1 A Review and Foundations of a Framework Introduction This chapter outlines eight views of time as they have emerged throughout the history of organization studies. For an overview, see Table  1 In doing the  reviews I have tried to let the field speak for itself and have labelled conceptions of time in terms of how assumptions reflect the various views. Thus, for example, I have distinguished social time from time structuring, because they express different relationships between practices and time, although they both tend to favour events as the unit of time. Social time tends to be a cat­egory that expresses how social activity is organized around certain tem­poral mechanisms, such as events, and gives ontological primacy to events rather than practices. Time structuring, in contrast, gives shape to time by granting more agency at the practice level. Philosophically inspired views of practice go even further and conceptualize time as constituted by practice. Rather than provide a chronological treatment of how time has evolved in the literature, this review places emphasis on how certain views of time that emerged during particular periods are translated into related views during later periods. In the review, I will look for cracks that allow me to develop an integrative view of time. By following the cracks we may be able to appreciate what the whole surface is like, like cracks in a mirror divide the mirror plane in such a way that the reflection is distorted. I look for instance for concepts that scholars use persistently but which have alternative meanings that scholars have pursued to a lesser extent. The review yields two outcomes. First, the four dimensions of time (ex­peri­ence, practice, events, and resource) will emerge from the review, which I develop further in Chapters 2–5. The four dimensions are purposely selected from the review in order to develop an integrative framework of the use of time in organizational research. Hence, the review is limited in scope, as I review works and traditions primarily to the extent that they provide material for establishing the four dimensions. Second, the review aims to Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0002

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  13 Table 1  Features of views of time identified in the review  

Level

Extension from the present Temporal elements

Social time

Collective, intersubjective Collective, intersubjective Embodied, subjective Activity, collective Collective

Within temporal structures

Temporal reach Experience of time Activity time  Time structuring 

Beyond temporal structures, into future Ongoing

Diachronic time Intertemporality

Collective Intergroup, managerial

Present-­focused Within temporal structures Leads up to the present Within temporal structures and future/past reach

Present-­past-­future 

Collective, intersubjective

Into past and future from the present

Sequential events, chronological time Chronological time, events Flows Activity, interaction Chronological time, sequential events Sequential events Chronological time, sequential events Activity, emerging events

show how views of time have moved through different levels of complexity over the past century. From being ‘time-­free’ (Clark, 1985: 35), the field has evolved to comprise increasingly complex models of time, from measured time to more-­complex conceptions of time. Practice and experience emerged relatively recently as ways to conceptualize time. The present-­past-­future view, which has emerged over the last two decades, has enabled more-­dynamic understanding of time and has extended the situated understanding of time. While enabling the definition of four distinct dimensions of time for an integrative framework, this review also indicates the potential for future research to increase the potential of temporal analysis to explain contemporary and emerging phenomena in and between organizations.

Social Time Both the background literature on social time and the use of social time in organizational research are extensive. Organizational scholars have mainly employed the concept of social time mainly to distinguish it from clock time. In ontological terms, social time focuses on events as temporal mechanisms around which social activity coalesces. There is, in other words, an onto­ logic­al primacy of social time over social activity. In sociology, Sorokin and Merton’s (1937) paper stands out as an early contribution to the notion of social time. Their main contribution is to distinguish social time not only

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14  Organization and Time

from ‘astronomical time’ or ‘calendar time’ (Sorokin and Merton, 1937: 615) but also from philosophical conceptions of time introduced by philosophers such as Bergson and Mead. The socially interpretive dimension of time marked a departure from the philosophy of time, which was seen as too mystical, transcendental, or introspective to be of use to the social sciences (Gurvitch, 1964). By going against the Newtonian notion of objective time, Sorokin and Merton’s main argument is that time is socially defined and particular to conventions of social groups. The calendar, they point out, expresses the ‘rhythm of collective activities while at the same time its function is to ensure their regularity’ (1937: 620). Their quote is from Durkheim’s (1915) work on the role of time as temporal segregation between the sacred and the profane, which Durkheim saw as one of the fundamental principles of the social organization of religious life (Zerubavel, 1979; 1987). Schein (1985) would later describe social time as a main defining feature of organizational culture. Although social time has been associated with qualitative studies, Sorokin and Merton did not reject quantifiable features of social time but rejected the idea of social time as pure quantification, ‘homogenous in all its parts, always comparable to itself and exactly measurable’ (p. 622). Such time, they argue, is empty, because it is nothing more than a continuous measure of activity. Social time, on the other hand, is discontinuous, not infinitely divisible, nor does it flow evenly and uniformly (Zerubavel, 1976: 87). Whereas activity is continuous and could be measured using natural or mathematical time, social time is defined as socially meaningful time. A calendar, they point out, suggests continuous time, but it marks events that are socially meaningful and have ‘profound social implications’ (p. 623). Critical dates in calendars disrupt the continuity of continuous, Newtonian time and fill it with ac­tiv­ ities, or practices. In social time, activities, or practices, are principally referred to by their nature (such as rice cooking), which indicates the time it takes without mentioning the number of minutes. The example of rice cooking may also be applied to viewing time as practice, as will be discussed below. Sociologists have extended Sorokin and Merton’s work on social time in different ways. Gurvitch (1964) did so by labelling categories of social time. Various scholars later mentioned his framework. His framework consists of the following categories: 1. Time of long duration and slow decline, 2. Misleading (deceptive) time, 3. Irregular (erratic) time, 4. Cyclical time, 5.  Retardant time, 6. Alternating time, 7. Time overtaking itself, and 8.  Explosive time. Gurvitch’s categories are coherent and describe a turn towards categorization in theories of social time, similar to Roy’s distinctions that include ‘banana time’ among other categories. Lewis and Weigert (1981) suggest an alternative categorization based on levels of social structure,

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  15

which consists of ‘self-­time’, ‘interaction time’, ‘institutional time’, and ‘cyc­lic­al time’, the latter at the societal level. Similarly, Zerubavel (2003), who introduced a way of visualizing historically inferred time patterns in society, extended Sorokin and Merton’s work. Zerubavel contributes to the study of social time by focusing on the temporal shapes of history that inform actors. He discusses social time as an evocation of the past, which is different from the time structures and categories of, say, Gurvitch, which are atemporal in the sense that they do not account for the present, past, and future. Gurvitch’s framework characterizes social time theorizing in its lack of attention to present-­past-­future aspects of time, which Emirbayer and Mische (1998) introduced to sociology in a paper based largely on the work of George Herbert Mead (1932). As scholars of sociology have discussed beginning with Sorokin and Merton (1937), social time has mainly replaced clock time with event time. Clark’s (1985: 40) work represents an important contribution to the understanding of social time in organizational research, which he summed up as ‘time being in events’. Event time was conceived in opposition to clock time, and various scholars have explained how social groups attach meaning to time and communicate the meaning through signs. Adam’s (1990: 42) description of social time illustrates this line of thinking: ‘As ordering prin­ ciple, social tool for coordination, orientation and regulation, as a symbol for the conceptual organization of natural and social events, social scientists view time as constituted by social activity.’ Adam’s description underscores how social time is both about measured time and time as in events. Although organizational scholars have contrasted social time with clock time, social time in sociology has avoided continuous time measures, but it has retained both the notion of time as structure and sequential ordering. Still, sequential ordering of events has dominated history and narrative theory (Ricoeur, 1984; White, 1987). Arguably, Clark’s view of events reflects a broad tendency in the social time view, of events as accomplished, not emergent, and as deriving their meaning from their sequential ordering. Recent works on organizational change have also assumed sequential ordering of events (Langley et al., 2013). The present-­past-­future view of time has since introduced a conception of events as emergent rather than accomplished, as discussed below. Since the 1990s, scholars of organization studies have developed social time to account for the situated and contextual meaning of time. Thus, Hassard (1996: 585) observes that ‘The qualitative dimension of working time is understated, and research is found only in occasional pieces of ethnography.’ Extending from Sorokin and Merton’s (1937) call to depart from

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16  Organization and Time

universal Newtonian time and inspired by works in social anthropology (Gell, 1992), organizational scholars have demonstrated how basic temporal structures differentiate organizations while providing rhythm and form to everyday organizational practices (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). Such tem­ poral structures, although modifiable by organizational actors, nevertheless exist as pregiven structures with regular features, whether considered linear or cyclical. Scholars have analysed how to advance the social nature of time at the individual level in organizational research. Shipp and Richardson (2001), for example, show how individuals navigate different temporal structures as defined by the organization. The social ‘now’ that may trouble social as well as natural scientists is what Ricoeur (1980) called the ‘ “existential now”, the “making-­present,” in­sep­ar­able from “awaiting” and “retaining”  ’ (p. 173). Elias (1992) focuses attention on the social ‘now’ and its role in the evolution of norms in social behaviour. For example, no one should get up and leave the room before the king or queen has left. Einstein, who in 1915 took the understanding of physical time to a revolutionary new level by his general theory of relativity in 1915, apparently was troubled by the notion of the now as a distinction between before and after, telling Philosopher Rudolph Carnap that ‘the experience of the present moment means something special for mankind, essentially different from the past and the future, and that physics cannot describe such a difference’ (Mermin, 2014). Social time considers the present special for humankind and builds symbolic chronological codes for it that serve to hold parts of society together. Such codes enable members to operate from a collective understanding of what comes next. If we delve into organizational activity and ask questions about which notions of time enable people to relate to one another, sequentiality becomes important, as a means not just to know the temporal order of things in terms of norms but also to col­lect­ive­ly accomplish tasks. For example, drawing on Schütz (1967), Clark (1985) makes the point that intersubjectivity in groups relies on a shared sense of sequentiality regarding which actions or acts should precede other actions or acts. In the study of organizations, timing is central to understanding how activities connect to one another (Lantz, 2020). Here, timing is seen more as the right moment to strike in order to follow a stream of activity in a field or market. For example, clothing stores follow cycles of change among trendsetting fashion designers, manufacturing companies strive to keep up with the speed of technological change, hotels and restaurants may react swiftly to compensate for negative ratings on engines such as Tripadvisor, and research institutes and NGOs may work with estimated horizons of global warming. The dichotomy between clock time and event time which largely premises social time tends to obscure the questions: whose clock time and whose

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  17

event time? This dichotomy obscures the question by assuming that clock time is wholly mechanical and in the hands of managers, and events are wholly human and in the hands of workers, as suggested by Roy’s notion of ‘banana time’. Roy’s study shows how a group of machine operators created social events during work hours to combat the ‘social atomization and machine-­tending drudgery’ (p. 165) imposed on them by their work or­gan­ iza­tion. On the other hand, the distinction between clock time and event time has also proven empirically useful. Sellier and Avnet (2014) show how people following clock time are more likely to think that chance or fate control the world, whereas people following event time are more likely to think that things happen as a result of their own actions. But it remains important to understand that clock time and event time are ideal types, and in practice social groups operate with more-­complex models of time, as anthropologists (Gell, 1992) have demonstrated and sociologists (Zerubavel, 1976, 1979; Adam, 2004) have argued. To assume a natural and clear distinction between clock time and event time risks obscuring the ­subtler relationships and dynamics that arise in organizations. The regular 9  o’clock Monday morning meeting, when held year after year, becomes a social event whose meaning derives partly from the fact that it takes place at 9 o’clock Monday morning. People are rested after the weekend, they may have had time to reflect on things that happened during the preceding week, and they may have plans for the coming week. The 9 o’clock Monday morning meeting punctuates the flow of time by marking the end of one week and the beginning of the next. Being organized at 9 o’clock makes it a clock-­time event, but being a marker of the week that passed and the week to come also makes it a social event of temporal significance. In fact, if we further investigate its implications, the meeting may harbour meanings whereby the clockand social-­event-­time aspects become intertwined in ways that a simple distinction between clock and event time does not explain. A similar point is made by Pedersen, Johansen, and Scheller (2021) in their study of waiting time in hospitals, in which they argue that waiting time is not merely described in terms of clock time but has its own colour code. Other time periods at the hospital have other colour codes, which provides them with particular significance to staff who had to organize complex schedules.

Temporal Reach Research on social time has tended to assume that social activity is folded into itself, as it were, and has paid considerably less attention to actors’ orien­ ta­tion into the past or future, an exception being studies of how certain

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18  Organization and Time

patterns or structures of social time have evolved over time, such as Elias’s (1992) study. Nevertheless, actors’ temporal reach, orientation, depth, and horizon are phenomena that have important implications for how we understand actors’ temporal worlds. St. Augustine understood the significance of extending the experience of time from the present. His dilemma was that both past, being already gone, and the future, not yet in existence, are essentially unknown to a consciousness lodged in the temporal present, except through memory and anticipation. In St. Augustine’s thinking, consciousness cannot free itself from its temporal embedding. Centuries later, Mead (1932) made temporal distance a topic of his discussions about being in the flow of time (see Hernes and Schultz, 2020). In his Philosophy of the Present, Mead ex­pli­cit­ly refers to temporal distancing, by which he meant that whereas we can only experience the present directly, we get a sense of the past and future by distancing from the present. Mead shared with St. Augustine the assumption of an immanent relationship between temporal distancing and the ex­peri­ence of being in the present. However, in social science and organization studies, scholars have trad­ ition­al­ly assumed that actors may imagine the past or future without their imagination affecting the present in which they perform the imagining. In organization studies, Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) observed how people at strategic levels of organizations tended to look farther into the future than people at operational levels did. The authors considered the time horizons that provided a sense of predictability, which they measured as the time required to get definitive feedback from the organization’s external environment. Later, strategy scholars examined in further detail organizational planning horizons. Goodman (1973), for instance, reported that most companies worked with 25-­year planning horizons, citing an example of a company which, having concluded that their cash-­flow forecasts indicated huge cash surpluses 30 years into the future, decided to invest in a new growth industry. It appears that some companies at the time assumed such long-­term stability that they believed fairly accurate predictions were possible over a 25-­year duration. In today’s world it would seem curious to make such forecasts, although many companies work with scenarios for 2030 and 2050 to adhere to climate change or, in some cases, to adhere more broadly UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Still, economists grapple with how to develop predictive models for markets. For instance, Rapach et al. (2005) suggest parameters of a model for stock return predictability in which the stability of interest rates over time is a key variable. Their contribution is within an established dis­cip­ line of economic forecasting. Here, the key point is that the main temporal

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  19

assumption of forecasting, reflecting Goodman’s (1973) finding, treats the future as a linear extension of the present, which is implicitly assumed to be a linear extension of the past. The strategy literature’s tendency in previous decades to use time horizons as a main construct reflects the use of strategies to ensure that actors perceive plans, programmes, and performance targets as obtainable (Battistella, 2014; Weigand et al., 2013) from the beginning until the end of a planned period. Thus, research shows that strategic time horizons are often defined in terms of durations, composed as sequential periods or events (Schultz and Hernes, 2020). Whereas philosophers of time have been predominately concerned with the notion of the present, psychologists began early to account for the time orientations of individuals. Strategy scholar Das (1987) noted research revealing individuals who have an inherent orientation towards the flow of time. Of particular interest to Das in his study of managers was individuals’ orientation towards the future, especially how individual managers distinguished the near and distant future. Das’s contribution coincided with several studies of future prediction and planning (Hayes and Abernathy, 1980). Drawing on scenario planning developed by Wack (1986a, b), DeGeus (1988) explained how the Shell company coped with a huge drop in oil prices in 1986. DeGeus’s rendering is interesting because it implies the future as a resource, by portraying it as a possible event moving towards the actors: “And now it is April 1986 and you are staring at a price of $16 a barrel. Will you please meet and give your views on these three questions: What do you think your government will do? What do you think your competition will do? And what, if anything, will you do?”[. . .] As it turned out, the price of oil was still $27 in early January of 1986. But on February 1 it was $17 and in April it was $10. The fact that Shell had already visited the world of $15 oil helped a great deal in that panicky spring of 1986.

In this view, a future scenario is a mixture of creative imagination and realistic inferences about what will happen if a given event occurs. It is a way of performing ‘temporal abduction’ (Feddersen, 2020): moving back and forth between future and present. Seen as a resource, time becomes a malleable tool that enables actors to move back and forth, not just between present and future but also among past, present, and future. Whereas time as measurement is seen as an actuality, time as resource becomes a way to actualize but also to potentialize time as measurement. As a temporal toolkit, time makes it possible for actors to construct organized strategies of action (Swidler, 1986).

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20  Organization and Time

Bluedorn’s (2002) book represents an early contribution in organizational research to argue for the importance of better understanding the dynamics of actors’ temporal extensions into both past and future. He contributed by suggesting the notion of ‘temporal depth’, which he defines as ‘the temporal distances into the past and future that individuals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen.’ Bluedorn (2002: 114). The importance of this contribution is that temporal depth refers to both past and future. Temporal depth has commonly been defined as time horizons, principally by Das (1987), who was interested mainly in strategic time horizons, which are naturally reserved for the future (Schultz and Hernes, 2020). Bluedorn’s point is that strategy research has focused exclusively on the future. The fact that he considers both past and future, not just the future as in much strategy research, arguably invites a more dynamic view of time than what has been found in the more mainstream organizational lit­era­ture. In recent years, organizational scholars have begun to combine tem­poral structures or patterns with temporal reach (Rowell et al., 2016; Schultz and Hernes, 2020). The argument is that by distinguishing time as structure and temporal reach, it may be possible to examine their mutual interplay. For example, long time horizons, such as sustainability goals (which tend to become normalized into ongoing business horizons as Wright and Nyberg (2017) observed), may require that actors meet frequently to remind themselves of the importance of upholding such distant goals. However, even when actors frame distant pasts and futures through ongoing activities, the challenge is to successfully sustain distant futures over time to avoid or­gan­iza­tion­al forgetting (Argote, 2012).

Experience of Time The experience of time has been a long-­standing theme among philosophers. St. Augustine lamented the experience of being in an eternal present. Bergson left his mark on the understanding of time with the notion of durée: an introspectively experienced, permeated whole of duration (Abbott, 2001: 216) sheltered from the spatialized time of clocks and calendars. Whitehead (1929) insisted on the epochal nature of being in time: epochs as slabs of duration within which actors experienced time as continuous. Both Whitehead and Mead insisted on the experience of time as events. Nevertheless, in organization studies, scholars did not pay attention to the experience of time as described by philosophers of time, until sociologists,

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  21

drawing on views of time by philosophers such as Mead, Bergson, Heidegger, and Whitehead, published works relevant to organizational research (e.g., Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Fine (1990: 96) makes the point explicitly that ‘The use and experience of time is a central, yet frequently ignored, feature of organizational life.’ Fine argued that until the 1990s, time had been largely applied to studies of efficiency and was therefore perceived as a constraint to be overcome, not an experience in its own right. Shipp and Jansen (2020) concur, arguing that until recently, organizational research has largely neglected the subjective experience of time. Scholars inspired by philosophy began to focus on time as experience, and their work directly influenced organization studies. In a paper on time as experience, Flaherty (2003) uses the term ‘time work’ to analyse the bodily and emotional effects of time in organizations. Drawing on work by philo­ sophers James and Mead, Flaherty focuses on individuals’ activity of organizing stimuli through attention. Stimuli emerge in the flow of time, as ongoing, future, and past occurrences, and individuals enact their temporal ex­peri­ence through the ways they organize these stimuli. This implies that the experience of time is partly selective because we attend to certain stimuli while suppressing others, and in doing so we modify our environment. Critical management scholars do not address the actual experience of time as much as it relates to the power of managers or technocrats to define time as linear only. Postmodernist-­inspired scholars argued against the idea of management knowledge as objective knowledge (Thompson and O’Doherty, 2009). Hassard, Decker, and Rowlinson (2021) point out that in the Scandinavian auto industry, in which sociotechnical approaches have been used extensively, to some degree time structuring was taken from managers and given to members of an autonomous work group. Still, while indicating whether workers had more or less time at their disposal, studies did not significantly address the experience of being part of such groups. Harvey’s (1990) work in human geography and his expression ‘time-­space compression’ became synonymous with the idea of ‘instantaneous time’ (Hassard, 2002). There are different versions of this dilemma in critical studies. On the one hand, Parker (1992) points out how postmodernity offers instantiation and, hence, liberation from grand narratives of history. On the other hand, the market-­driven era of time-­space compression sets off a contested dehistoricized and detemporalized present (Purser, 2002). This, obviously, comes at a high price, as the dominance of instantaneity leads to loss of long-­term commitments, destruction of loyalty, and the inability to delay gratification (Sennett, 1998, in Purser, 2002).

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22  Organization and Time

In the time-­space compression that actors currently experience, Harvey (1990) suggests that time ‘annihilates’ space (p. 241). Specifically, the type of space that time annihilates is the specific, fixed and immovable space found in the modernist era. Modern technologies aim to break down spatial bar­ riers and to make commercial and industrial processes contingent on time rather than on space. Harvey’s argument is similar to Bauman’s (2000) argument about liquid modernity, expressed through the instantiation of social life. Instantaneity, according to Bauman (2000: 119), means ‘immediate, on-­ the-­spot fulfilment, but also immediate exhaustion and fading of interest’. Here lies a problem that St. Augustine analysed brilliantly. If we perceive time in the moment and do not know about the past or future, we are tormented. Living in the present while skiing down a hill is one thing if you know that the time after skiing awaits you, that you will return to your home next week to take up your studies and eventually land a job. Experience of time as irreversibly passing away (Flaherty, 2003) is something completely different. Or if you experience time as plain monotony, boredom takes over because there is no experience of significant difference between what was and what may be. That would be the time of boredom, as Garsten (2008) describes in the case of temporary workers. The world still has factories with assembly lines, but what has changed is that much more value-­creating activity is not bound by space. Whereas time was space-­related for decades, time has left the confines of space to virtually become a space-­free variable. This is illustrated by the following extract from Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002: 923): A key concept here is that of the face-­to-­screen situation, as opposed to the face-­ to-­face situation. Traders work from trading floors located in banks in what are ostensibly face-­to-­face situations in which they are seated close together to be able to observe one another and feel the mood of other traders. Nonetheless, traders are not in a traditional face-­to-­face situation. Traders do not face one another but face their screens, an arrangement that transforms the face-­to-­face situation into, literally, a back-­to-­back situation. This arrangement implements a split in orientation in the interaction order, forcing, on the one hand, an orientation toward the screen that links the physically present person with a global sphere and, on the other hand, a secondary orientation to the local setting and the physically present others participating in it.

In this account the traders communicate in time and their intersubjectivity is formed through the temporal structuring of their screen-­mediated encounters. Not only do they interact in the flow of time, but the immediacy of the

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events at which they interact shape their interactions over time. Inspired by Schütz’s (1967) phenomenology of time, Knorr Cetina and Bruegger point out, ‘Two persons watching the same event are brought into a “state of intersubjectivity” by their experience evidently changing in similar ways, in response to what unfolds’ (p. 921). Schütz also makes this incisive observation about the intersubjective dimension of instantaneous encounters: ‘However, we must remember that the pure We-­relationship of an intersubjective encounter is not grasped reflectively. Instead it is lived through The many different mirror images of Self within Self are not therefore caught sight of one by one but are experienced as a continuum within a single ex­peri­ence’ (Schütz, 1967: 170). To the extent that scholars have brought the instantaneity of time into organizational research, it has been associated with time as experience via human interaction. Human action necessitates reaction; otherwise inter­ action breaks down, at least temporarily (this applies to human–machine interaction as well). Action and reaction make up time but not as the time between stimulus and response. On the contrary, Mead (1934) brought attention to how social interaction involves simultaneous observation and action/reaction, in other words, how recall and expectation fill time during interaction. Schütz (1967) also extensively discussed time experienced through interaction. Although he did not specify the temporal nature of social interaction as such, he was clear about what he called the ‘we-­ relationship’ between persons unfolding through time. The we-­relationship unfolds, according to Schütz, like a shared temporal stream of consciousness in which the interlocutors react to one another’s gestures but are still interlocked in a common stream of consciousness. Their respective streams of consciousness are closed to the one other and can only be guessed at through gestures. While this process unfolds through time by constituting time, it is possible for anyone of the interlocutors to suspend the time they find themselves in and look back in time, such as by thinking about what one person said or did earlier. This, Schütz argues, implies temporarily stepping out of the temporal flow in order to re-­enter it.

Activity Time Sorokin and Merton (1937) make the point that activity (such as rice cooking) is a practice that occupies the time it takes and that the activity itself carries social meaning as a way to express time. The chronological duration of activity, they point out, is of secondary importance. Practice theorists have

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pursued Sorokin and Merton’s point about time as activity, while their ­distinction between Newtonian time and social time resonates with works on social time in organizations. Activity has from the early days of or­gan­iza­ tion­al theorizing been implicitly considered constitutive of time. In their foundational book Organizations, March and Simon (1958) point out that the actual time dimension of organizational programmes (commonly referred to as routines in the contemporary literature) in the sense of measured time was minimal. Instead, organizations emphasized the activities themselves and how they connected through time, such as their sequential ordering. The contemporary routine literature has also prioritized cyclical patterning of practices, including their sequencing, rather than their measured time. Rather than considering time as clock-­based measurement, this view considers time as emerging through practices, again not as measured time but practice as a measure of time. Most people’s daily activities provide them with a measure of time without chronologically measuring their activity. Their activity, or rather their interactivity, is a complex pattern that provides a sense of time, both as it unfolds and as it iterates through time. As Lorino (2018: 71) clarifies in his discussion of pragmatist thinking, reci­procity in action helps people reconsider past acts and conceive their meaning, while action also becomes socially recognizable as it is projected into anticipated futures connected with past experiences. This, according to Lorino, is complex, because it involves addressing others’ past moves and expected responses. Lorino’s explanation of how time is practiced (rather than measured) echoes a distant past. Although Adam Smith does not reflect the same focus on the temporality of practice, he described the production of pins in a factory as follows: One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires three distinctive operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will perform two or three of them. (Smith, [1776]1986: 110)

Scholars increasingly elaborated practice views of time around the turn of the millennium. Another way in which practice became central to thinking about time is through situated views, which illuminate the relationship between practices and temporal structures. Orlikowski and Yates (2002)

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contributed by discussing how, through ongoing practices, actors enact the temporal structures within which they operate. Such works point back to Durkheim’s observation quoted above, about calendars expressing collective rhythm while assuring regularity (Durkheim’s (1915: 11, in Sorokin and Merton, 1937). In recent years, scholars have increasingly focused on the temporal aspects of situated activity, emphasizing the conditions under which actors address events beyond temporal structures in order to transform their temporal structures. Schatzki (2006b) and his concept of ‘the time of activity’ has influenced a philosophically driven strand of practice research in organization studies. This concept is not measured time; it is the time that is constituted by activity. For his philosophy-­inspired stream on time as practice, Schatzki derived part of his work from Heidegger’s work on human existence in which projection through activity becomes a way of being in the world: [Heidegger] develops this interpretation by characterizing being-­in-­the-­world as projecting, thrown being-­amidst entities. Projection, thrownness, and being-­ amidst are the future, past, and present, respectively, of activity. Projection is acting for the sake of a possible way of being. When people act, they do so for the sake of some way of being (e.g. being a successful teacher, being fair) — toward which they come in acting. This projecting–coming toward is the future dimension of activity. Thrownness, meanwhile, is people being such that certain states of affairs and not others matter to them.  (Schatzki, 2006a: 1871)

Schatzki presents a view of organizations as bundles of practices and ma­ter­ ial arrangements, located at what he calls ‘sites’. Sites, argues Schatzki, are not to be confused with spaces. Sites are where practices interact, their nexus, so to speak. Practices, in Schatzki’s conception, define their sites, whereas space tends to be defined as that which physically frames practices. Practices also define time, but just as important as duration, practices define temporal orien­ta­tion. Schatzki’s point is that when people act, they project into a future, which then comes towards them, and he defines this as the ‘projecting– coming toward’ dimension of activity (Schatzki, 2006a: 1871). In this way, according to Schatzki, practices describe a continual ‘stretched-­outness’ of time (Schatzki, 2006a: 1871) between the past and future, as actors continually engage in collective activity. In this view, practices occupy time and, ­consequently, define time. Through understandings, sets of rules, and a ­teleaffective structure, actors collectively share the significance of time defined by practices (Schatzki, 2005). In this view, practices exist prior to measured time. The temporal ‘stretched-­outness’ of practices determines the scope of

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their temporal structure, as practitioners become accustomed to what they should attend to in their immediate future and past. I discuss this further in Chapter 3. The idea of activity time also challenges how we might think about being in the present. In fact, practices make the present come alive by filling it with activity, but they make the present less of a now separated from its immediate past and future. Any notion of time must relate to a sense of now, then, and when. Elias (1992: 59) makes the point that time refers to the when: aspects of continuous streams of activity. He states that in the absence of when, there is no time, because that would be like saying that everything is at a standstill. Standstill signifies no time, because time implies movement. But the present is also an extension of time. As James argues, the present cannot be a temporal knife edge, such as a split second. It needs duration of activity, which makes it the present it is and which becomes translated into a past event as actors move on through time. The present cannot be a point, because without duration we cannot speak about it. It is mathematically impossible to measure speed at an instant because an instant has zero duration, which implies zero distance for measuring the speed. So, whenever we speak of a speed at a point in time, that speed has been measured over some interval. Nor can we describe or discuss a meeting that had no duration in time. Activity time furnishes the present with an extension, which makes James’s (1890: 611) idea of the present as saddleback appealing: ‘The practically cognized present [i.e. the specious present] is no knife-­edge, but a saddle-­back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions of time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearward – and a forward-­looking end.’ A saddleback does not really end anywhere, because it continues through a strap by means of a buckle, which, having made its way half-­way around the periphery of the horse’s body, reconnects to the saddle on the opposite side from where it started. At the same time, it forms a continuation but not in terms of sameness; it is a continuation of activity and experiences that may resemble previous activity and experiences but distinguishes itself from previous activity and experiences. The saddleback is an emerging present, as Mead would call it, but one which also de-­emerges as it is taken over by a new emerging present. In this view, the present becomes the actor’s temporal vicinity, so to speak, the actor’s temporal vicinity made up of sensorial or physical activity. When some writers discuss the now, they seem to convey the idea that we find ourselves in some sort of duration-­less now, ready to project the past into the future. But to give duration to the past and future

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while not giving it to the present is an untenable position. The past and future are, for all intents and purposes, projections, and those projections are made through the activity that constitutes the present. We need to be careful with using the word ‘projections’, though, because the present, past, and future do not just spring out of the present. They also come back to define the present at the same time as they spring out of it, through a simultaneous, ongoing, recursive movement.

Time Structuring The regulative effects of time structuring on human behaviour have trad­ ition­al­ly been an assumption in social science. In his book Technics and Civilization, Mumford (1934) made one of the most incisive arguments for the structuring powers of time. Mumford claimed that the clock, not the steam engine, was key to understanding the modern technological era. But Mumford outlined the clock not just as a means to objectively measure time but also as a device for marking the times of before and after. The clock, like any other chronological measuring device, made it possible not only to determine a sequence of events, which enabled, in turn, the establishment of what came before and what came after; it also measured how much one event preceded or succeeded another event. This, according to Mumford (1934), enabled the emergence of the industrial age of commercial formal or­gan­iza­tions, in which mechanical clocks could be used to regulate collective tem­poral behaviour. The powerful role of time not just as a measure of activity but also as a means to achieve social order cannot be overestimated. Ordering through sequencing was done by towers and their bells before mechanical clocks arrived to measure precise duration. For centuries, towers had been used to mark a city or administrative centre. Since then, clock time has been a term attributed to Newton’s enormous influence on science and society. Clock time, however, is a continuous measure, which is extremely powerful in its own right. The chiming of a bell, on the contrary, is not itself a measure of continuous time, the way a hand on the watch or scrolling of seconds on a screen may be. The chiming of the bell is a now that marks a temporal divide between before and after. The chiming of a bell does not by itself tell us what went before and what comes after. Local customs and beliefs fill in those gaps. As a Norwegian in Denmark, it never ceases to amaze me how everyone seems to react spontaneously to the tinkle of a bicycle bell by immediately giving way. It is a learned, innate response that every Dane seems to be brought up with, which seems to work even in the rowdiest bike lanes in

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Copenhagen. The tinkle of a bell signals that I am overtaking or another bicyclist is obstructing the passage. It says nothing about the measure of continuous time. It simply signals that something is imminent, a signal of  before and after. Like Mumford’s clocks, the bicycle bell is a socially recognized reminder of what is about to happen. Such instances give rise to temporal - and hence social - structuring of society, as shown by Elias (1992). Structured time overlaps to some extent with social time (described above) in that both emphasize the importance of events. Scholars assume that social time structures social activity and that social activity coalesces around certain meaningful events, which are interrelated in such a way they make social interaction meaningful. Whereas scholars have defined social time as events in opposition to clock time, studies of structured time have sought to combine the two into more integrative frameworks of time. Writing from a practice-­based view, Orlikowski and Yates (2002: 685) argue that people in organizations use temporal structures combining clock and event time to give rhythm and form to their everyday work practices. Although it is pos­sible to conceive of time as a structured whole without some time being measured or otherwise accounted for, it is hard to see how such structuring can really become collectively binding and meaningful to people. In the last 20 years or so, scholars have frequently associated measured time with linear, uniform time in the form of clock time or Newtonian time (Dawson and Sykes, 2019). While in his classic on scientific management, Taylor (1911) epitomized the transition from time as practice to measured time, he also took the step into a universe of structured time of events that regulated human behaviour. His book deserves attention because it conveys more than what most scholars take away from it. Scholars most often describe his book in terms of the imposition of uniform Newtonian time in order to regulate effort and to extract maximum gains from optimal use of time. Most references focus on the Newtonian, clock-­time regime ascribed to his study, and for good reason. Whereas his main measures were duration and speed of activity, however, his overall project reflected the workplace as a structured ecology of time. While he focused on time spent working versus idling or resting, he also mentioned the time of coordination, of the organism, of the body, of recuperation of muscles, and of adaptation of skills for tasks. A decisive shift in the analysis of time structuring occurred in the wake of the Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) and the subsequent Tavistock-­ inspired studies of autonomous groups (e.g., Trist and Bamforth, 1951). Autonomous groups, which emerged in various countries

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under the influence of the Tavistock studies and the socio-­technical systems view. Trist and Bamforth’s (1951) study of the longwall mining method and the social dynamics triggered by the transition from small groups to heavy machinery had a clear temporal structure component. At one level, the heavy machinery imposed homogenous time and repetitive tasks. Small groups, on the other hand, would adapt socially mediated temporal structures to the types of problems they encountered. These scholars operated within a temporal ecology which consisted of nexus between social and material temporalities rather than consider time to be purely social or material. Organizational scholars have engaged with temporal structuring, such as in the 2001 Academy of Management Review special issue (Ancona et al., 2001). In their review of time lenses in organizational research, Ancona et al. (2001) emphasize how, through a temporal lens, we have begun to think about processes and practices, how fast they move, their trajectories over time, and their historical positions on the continuum of time. In their overview of the tine literature, they do not examine differences between continuous time and events in terms of structuring of social behaviour, which Orlikowski and Yates (2002) do, by drawing upon a wider range of socio­ logic­al theory. By focusing explicitly on temporal structuring of or­gan­iza­ tions, Orlikowski and Yates pay attention to how actors reproduce the temporal structures that regulate their behaviour while at the same time modifying those same structures. The importance of Orlikowski and Yates’s (2002) contribution lies in their assumption of recursive processes between practices and temporal structures. Rather than work from the notion of temporal structures defined by management, Orlikowski and Yates pursue ideas from structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), according to which structures are enacted through practices. This implies that temporal structures exist insofar as they are enacted and do not exist independent of their enactment. It also implies, as Orlikowski and Yates point out, a reflexive relationship between practices and temporal structures. The word ‘reflexive’ is important because it reflects an assumption that practices reproduce and modify temporal structures, but primarily insofar as those practices are mediated by the structures they reproduce and modify. Recent works have followed Orlikowski and Yates (2002) by analysing the dynamics between temporal structuring and practices (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015; Rowell et al., 2016). These works are important because they integrate different notions of time with one another. Still, when we combine the terms ‘structure’ and ‘time’, some caution is warranted. Structured time has been pervasive in the organizational lit­era­ ture for decades, but it has tended to implicitly assume that time is a chronological backdrop to sequentially ordered events, as reflected not just in the

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early contingency studies but also in later studies of phenomena such as change (i.e., Langley et al., 2013), routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), sensemaking (Weick, 1995), and identity (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991). Dutton and Dukerich (1991) showed how a port authority upheld its identity over a duration of time punctuated by events. As I discuss in Chapter 8, time is commonly used as temporal background in the form of sequential events to explain processes as a foregrounded phenomenon. But rather than view time as a background structure in this way, time as a structure may be a foreground phenomenon in its own right. For example, periodic reviews in organizations have their own temporal structure, which may in  itself make such reviews important drivers of continuity and change, not just temporal backgrounds of continuity and change. In addition, a stronger structural view of time privileges the underlying structuring dynamics of time itself. 

Synchronic and Diachronic Time Most studies of organizations can be grouped into those reflecting synchronic and diachronic views of time. Time as measurement assumes a synchronic view of time. A  certain pace, or frequency of duration, is assumed at one moment in time or during one period. In this view, a certain quality of measured time, such as for example time-­to-­market, is characteristic of that actor and is assumed to be a generic quality of that actor. This is how Brown and Eisenhardt (1997: 7) describe three firms that they studied: ‘In contrast, three other firms (NewWave, Wanderer, Saturn) had less successful portfolios. Their on-­time-­to-­market, on-­target, and on-­schedule performances were, on average, much lower than those of the first three firms, and they reported numerous problems.’ The strength of synchronic views is that they allow comparison of phenomena within the same time frame. Brown and Eisenhardt’s firms could be compared with other firms at other times and in other places. Although a synchronic view is a basic temporal assumption underlying quantitative studies, qualitative research has also frequently used it, either in comparative studies or for considerations of interacting states. Early examples include Emery and Trist’s (1965) relating of organizational complexity to external complexity and Lawrence and Lorsch’s (1967) relating of internal co­ ord­ in­ ation structures to external rates of change. It should be noted that syn­chron­icity is an illusion if anything. Synchronic illusion takes place as analysists

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pretend  that processes take place simultaneously in different places and hence at different times whereas they are made to appear so, more often than not out of analytical convenience. A synchronic view says basically nothing about change. It describes differences between different actors, but not how they change or stay the same as they move through time. If a study measures and compares time—to-­market at different times, we are speaking of a diachronic time view. A diachronic time view, on the other hand, takes into consideration how things change, evolve or stay the same over time. In his discussion about stability Farjoun (2010: 214), for example, analyses how stability and change feed into one another dia­chron­ic­al­ly over time. Examples of diachronic time include studies of the different effects of attempts to influence the speed of activity flows, where speeding up (or down) at one point in time affects what happens at another point in time. Perlow et al. (2002), for example, observed how pacing in an IT project could speed up the project in certain conditions but slow it down in other conditions. In their study of agile software development, van Oorschot et al. (2018) found that both high and low frequencies of iterative cycles of setting deadlines were negative for actors’ temporal performance of projects. Studies such as these typically refer to earlier and later measurements and compare their differences or similarities to other contextual factors, such as technology, organizing structure, or leadership. It is also possible to examine frequency of occurrence over time, which also assumes the use of measured time. A high frequency of occurrence over time may correlate with, say, a high intensity of learning, distinct knowledge directories, and low propensity for change (Levinthal and March, 1993). Poole and Van de Ven (2004: xi) define change as ‘a difference in form, quality or state over time in an organizational entity’, which implies that an observed, measured, or experienced change (difference) stands in relation to the time span chosen. For example, a short time span between two different states will be different from the same difference over a longer time span. Brown and Eisenhardt’s (1997) study of continuous change mentioned above, reflects a different view: they found that what they saw as more-­ successful firms effected time-­ paced change, in which key parameters included ‘time to market’, ‘on target’, and ‘on schedule’. Another example is Nadkarni et al.’s (2018) study of factors influencing different time lags between firms’ announcements and competitors’ responses. A different, more implicit diachronic view relates to qualitative changes over time. A qualitative diachronic view reflects qualitatively different breaks over time. Whereas a more quantitative diachronic view may reveal transitions

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between measured time, a qualitative diachronic view reveals changes other than states of measured time. An early example is Chandler’s (1962) seminal work on changes in the relationship between structure and strategy over time. In the conclusion of his book, Chandler suggests that the development of the American industrial enterprise took place through four distinct chapters: accumulation of resources, rationalizing the use of resources, continued growth, and finally, rationalizing the use of expanding resources, which signals a move towards an integration of strategy and structure. Whereas longitudinal research (Langley, 1999) is often associated primarily with research method, it disguises an important onto­logic­al assumption about time, which is that of forward causality, which I will discuss in Chapter  8. Chandler’s study invites a forward causal reading of the four chapters noted above. Diachronic views underpin in particular studies of change in all its aspects, including change in identity (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991), strategy (Kunisch et al., 2019), innovation (Van de ven et al., 1999), and sensemaking (Christianson, 2019), to name but a few. It is rare for scholars to reveal the assumptions about the nature of time that underpins their diachronic studies. We can briefly mention two such assumptions here. One has to do with the non-­change of time, which is counter-­intuitive if the difference between two state of affairs are compared between two points in time. Comparing two states of affairs at two points in time, however, assumes that what happens at one point in time stays forever that which happened at the point in time. This is what McTaggart called the B-­series of time; the time of events which, once they have taken place, will always have taken place in that way. So, yes, differences between time A and time B are descriptive of change if we do not take into account how, at time B the state at time A appears different because of what has taken place between the two points in time, which makes actors look differently at what happened at time A than they did at time A. By including the change in interpretation of the state at time A we would arrive at a different analysis than, for example, Aldrich’s (1999) discussion of organizational evolution through time, in which time plays no other role than enabling difference to be measured. Another underlying assumption, which is rarely revealed in diachronic studies, is the assumption of forward causation through time (e.g., Gehman et al., 2013; Langley et al., 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013; MacKay and Chia, 2013; Wright and Zammuto, 2013). The underlying assumption of this view is that each event already contains the preceding events, which implies that

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once the present event has taken place, the past is effectively black-­boxed and can no longer change. It is in fact remarkable how many models of organizational change consist exclusively of arrows that point forward in time. I will return to this critique in Chapter  8. Forward causation, commonly presented at forward pointing arrows in diagrams and various ‘process models’ is an assumption of earlier events leading to later events, but without explaining how, at later events, actors make selections from earlier events. For example, people have the possibility to foreground earlier events that took place a long time ago and create backward and forward loops of influence between events in time that are much more complex that what can be shown by simple arrows pointing from one event to the next.

Intertemporality Although Zerubavel (1981) referred to temporally asymmetric worlds in sociology, organizational research did not explore intertemporality more in-­ depth until the last two decades. In the last 20 years or so, organizational scholars have intensified the study of what happens in the meeting of different temporalities in organized settings. I use the term ‘temporality’ to describe actors’ observable patterns in the timing and pacing of their ac­tiv­ities (Rowell et al., 2016; Blagoev and Schreyögg, 2019), including the actors’ temporal orien­ta­tions. On the one hand, scholars assume that actors, whether in­di­vid­ uals, teams, or organizations, embody multiple tem­por­al­ities. Psychological research has indicated that individuals’ decisions depend on whether they consider the short- or long-­term effects of their decisions (Das, 1987). On the other hand, scholars assume that different actors operate with different temporalities. Focusing on intertemporality as an or­gan­iza­tion­al/institutional phenomenon has enabled scholars to theorize various modes of intertem­ porality, where these two aspects are combined to various extents. A feature of early organizational research is that it assumed few modes in which actors’ temporalities interact. Contingency studies, such as Thompson (1967) and Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), assumed that differences in tem­ poral­ities belonged to differences in task, so the problem could be solved structurally. Early studies seem to assume that short- and long-term thinking exist naturally in tension, whereby long-term thinking belongs at the strategic level, whereas lower levels would focus more on tasks and, hence, be  oriented to the short term. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), Thompson

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(1967), and Perrow (1986) described in different ways how authority correlates with controlling resources to alleviate organizations from too much uncertainty. Their views assumed that uncertainty relates to time horizons beyond those that enable rational planning (Thompson, 1967). While recognizing that the long and short terms are associated with different levels of (un)certainty, March (1991) takes a different view of the dynamics between time horizons and uncertainty. Distinguishing processes of exploration and exploitation, he argued that exploration likely creates more uncertainty for the short term and less for the long term, whereas exploitation likely creates more uncertainty for the long term and less for the short term. We might describe this mode as parallelism, whereby temporalities exist side by side to interact when functionally or structurally necessary. Critical theorists, in contrast, see  different temporalities as signs of oppression and seek to explain how actors either thwart time schedules imposed by management or comply but suffer the experience of externally imposed chronological time. Yet, between parallelism and oppression or compliance, multiple modes of intertemporality exist. For instance, Bansal and Desjardine (2014) describe what they call intertemporal trade-offs to explain how firms manage the simultaneous challenge of short- and long-term thinking. What sets this apart from other intertemporal views is that the scholars do not assume that different tem­ poral modes are a priori arranged hierarchically, but they exist side by side, which Nowotny (1992) described as pluritemporalism. Subsequent contributions accounting for broader institutional factors demonstrate how temporal logics influence business and project cycles at different levels. Bengtsson (2008), for example, shows how a logic of cyclical time works in the clothing industry, which is entrained by the cycles of the fashion industry. Her study of the clothing chain H&M shows not only how it complies with the fashion industry cycles but how it manages the interrelationship between product and fashion cycles when extending its network of shops. Huy (2001: 613) argues from a complex view of intertem­porality, noting that each organization can find a dynamic internal change rhythm that allows it to alternate between differently paced changes. These findings see adherence to rhythms as a constraint but one that enables actors to develop different or novel temporal patterns. In some way, this point resembles Giddens’s (1984) point about structure being simultaneously constraining and enabling. It also echoes the use of creativity in jazz, where the groove, the basic tune, enables improvisation. A research stream has focused on how different actors entrain one another into a certain pace or rhythm. Ancona and Chong (1996: 251) defined entrainment as the ‘adjustment of the pace or cycle of one activity to match

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or synchronize with that of another’. They show how the fiscal year is a power­ful means of entrainment. Ancona and Chong (1992) identified three different types of entrainment: tempo entrainment involves pace; synchronic entrainment involves similar pace or cycles; and harmonic entrainment involves similarity of patterned behaviour as observed by an external actor. The project management literature equally emphasizes intertemporality but from the point of view of institutional actors setting temporal standards for others to follow. The concept of entrainment, for example, describes what occurs when multiple actors adjust their respective temporalities to single, often powerful actors, who work as so-called zeitgebers for others (Pérez-Nordtvedt et al., 2008; Jones and Lichtenstein, 2008; Dille and Söderlund, 2011). Other scholars focus less on synchronization and tend to allow a more loosely coupled relationship between actors. Garsten (2008), for example, discusses how temporary work, or temping, is shaped by temporal demands as temps lead a fluid existence, moving in and out of various jobs and meeting timelines in various job contexts, and Blagoev and Schreyögg (2019) show how actors perform temporal de-coupling from established working hours. Pluritemporalism (Nowotny, 1992) has come to the fore in research that considers interplay between temporalities of nature, institutions and or­gan­iza­tions (Bansal and Knox-­Hayes, 2013). This has been occasioned by so-­called grand challenges (George et al., 2016; Howard-­Grenville et  al.,  2019), which relate to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among the SDGs of particular temporal interest are those related to life, health, consumption, and climate. Adam (1995) advocates relating social time as embedded in organizations to, for example, human well-­ being. She also discusses the temporality of climate, which represents cycles that transcend the duration of a human life, and concerns generations. Such discussions are important because they underscore the interplay between the time of the social element and the time of nature in the Anthropocene era. Thus, in this treatment, social time goes from being detached from ‘natural time’ in order to explain the rhythms of social life  to being reconnected to the time of nature but in a different way. Whereas Sorokin and Merton’s (1937) concern was that social time should not emulate natural time, more-­recent works indicate the importance of  reconnecting social time to nature’s own time but without removing social time’s innate features. Instead, these works connect social time to natural time so that social time becomes entrained to natural time. Intertemporality does not necessarily involve direct entrainment, however. Whiteman and Cooper (2011), for example, report on how Whiteman

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36  Organization and Time

observed the ecological sensemaking of an indigenous Cree hunter in James Bay, Canada, specifically how the hunter noticed, bracketed, made, and selected connections among temporal and spatial cues. We can see here how social and natural time may be connected to various degrees. Another ex­ample is how the emerging use of vertical farming in cities abides by nat­ ural cycles of plant growth but in ways that keep parts of nature from becoming farmland. Studies of how actors employ distant imaginaries (Augustine et al., 2019), such as addressing climate change, have enabled some scholars to argue against the separation between stra­tegic management and operational levels of analysis. Slawinski and Bansal (2015) argue that strategic management must be able to think both in terms of the short and long terms in order to tackle distant climate change threats. They found, for example, that three firms ‘[..] juxtaposed time, allowing managers in these firms to simultaneously examine both the short-­term and long-­term implications of climate change, thereby confronting the tension between the two temporal polarities’ (Slawinksi and Bansal, 2015: 538). Intertemporality may be also analysed as translation among multiple tem­ poral­ities. Hernes and Schultz (2020) suggest the term temporal translation to reflect how temporalities are displaced and transformed by actors. Temporal translation may subject the interacting temporalities and their corresponding actors to tensions and ambiguities but may also enable them to seize op­por­ tun­ities to stake out a different future. Works by Wright and Nyberg (2017), Slawinski and Bansal (2012, 2015), and Reinecke and Ansari (2015) have highlighted clashing temporalities within and between or­gan­iza­tions and how these differences challenge translations between actors’ different time conceptions. These works reflect significant differences, however. Wright and Nyberg as well as Slawinski and Bansal address climate change, or sustainability challenges, and use chronological measures to describe different temporalities. Reinecke and Ansari (2015), in contrast, study the interplay between a clock-­ time temporality and a present-­past-­future one. Reinecke and Ansari’s ana­ lysis extends from social time as a construct applied to singular groups to interaction between groups of diverging tem­poral­ities, problematizing the negotiations that occur in intertemporal settings, enabling them to suggest a resolution of temporal dilemmas in the form of ‘ambitemporality’. 

Present-­Past-­Future Present-­past-­future views of time are firmly rooted in process ontology, which rejects the sort of juxtaposition of different times allowed by diachronic

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  37

views of time or social time. For example, whereas a social time view presents the reader with a past of accomplished events that leads to the present (which also involves a diachronic time view), the present-­past-­future view considers the past as an array of facts mediated by attention and in­ter­pret­ation and brought forward to the present (Flaherty and Fine, 2001). Both the order and the hyphens in the expression present-­past-­future are significant. The order is significant in that ‘present’ is the first word, which underscores the assumption of the agency of the present. Whereas the past enables the present to be what it is, the present is also the locus (Mead, 1932) of activity through which actors give the past a certain meaning. Organizational scholars have begun to pay increasing attention to the assumption that actors operate in an ongoing present from which the past and future are constructed and reconstructed. The hyphens in the expression present-­ past-­ future are significant also because it is assumed that present, past, and future are mutually constitutive. While a diachronic view of time represents a step forward from measured time by introducing events as markers of change across time, it assumes forward causality, by e­ arlier events leading to later events. This view is challenged by a present-­past-­future view, which does not assume an exclusively forward movement through time. While a diachronic time view separates events or periods in time, we should not assume that one event leads to a later event, but that they are instantiated simultaneously. While acknowledging that St. Augustine was the first to point out the threefold nature of present, past, and future, philosophers have sought to understand how past and future form part of the present, and have thereby had to explain the nature of the present (Heidegger, 1927; Whitehead, 1929; Mead, 1932; Ricoeur, 1984). While offering widely different conceptualizations of the present-­past-­future relationship, these scholars generally agreed that the past is subject to construction just as well as the future is, and that the construction occurs in the present. Works in the philosophy of time have, in turn, inspired organizational scholars (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Cunliffe et al., 2004; Durand and Calori, 2006; Sandberg and  Tsoukas, 2011; Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Hernes, 2014; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016). A central tenet of the present-­past-­future view of time is that the present is in an immanent relationship with past and future events, as Whitehead (1920) argues, whereby past and future events are enacted in the present. Immanence suggests that events, rather than being separate from one another, permeate one another. As Hussenot et al. (2020) formulate, immanence implies the very definition and configuration of the past, the present, and the future as one indivisible activity. Several organizational scholars have, to varying degrees, drawn on the idea of immanence (e.g., Chia, 1999;

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38  Organization and Time

Weik, 2011; Hernes, 2014; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016). Immanence implies that moments in time connect internally to one another. This means, for example, that while being in one moment of time, one acts with anticipation of what will happen in later moments in time through the activity of the present. Other moments in time may be brought into the current moment, either experientially, through previously lived moments in time, or hypothetically, through possible future moments in time. In a present-­past-­future view of time that emphasizes the primacy of the tem­poral present (Mead, 1932; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Hernes, 2014) past and future exist but as mere dimensions of the present (Deleuze, 2004), although past and future also differ in their degree of determinacy. Importantly as dimensions of the present they take part in its emergence. Working from Whitehead’s work on temporality, Hernes (2014a) suggests that the present is an open and indeterminate event in terms of its outcome until clos­ure. The situation is different for past and future events, which are closed in that people see them as having taken place. Even a future event is treated as hypothetically having taken place (Schütz,1967). This means that past and future events are seen as accomplished events, although they remain open for redefinition and the ways in which they relate. A past event, although over and done with, is brought into the present, and while being brought into the present it takes part in the making of the present. The same goes for an anticipated future event. Bluedorn (2002) was among the first organizational scholars to elaborate the connectedness between past and future in terms of their temporal reach. Following Schütz’ (1967) idea of future perfect and drawing upon the doctoral thesis of El Sawy (1983), Bluedorn discusses how past and future are causally connected. El Sawy showed how executives who were asked to think about past events imagined events further into the future than did executives who first thought about future events. Bluedorn (2002) concludes that looking further into the past enables actors to consider more experiences. This, in turn, makes it logical that actors then may look further into the future because they have more experiential knowledge from the organization’s past. Scholars have yet to investigate tem­poral depth in terms of events and how actors develop understanding of different temporal depths through the lens of events.

Foundations of a Framework The review above suggests how views of time have evolved since some of the early works. The path is anything but straight, and some elements have

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  39

dropped out for then to be retrieved and refined at a later time. For example, activity time views have become more nuanced by addressing how practices are inherently temporal, whereas the bulk of early works considered activity to be exclusively framed by measured time. Some views have been combined, such as the use of practice theory to understand situated dynamics of tem­ poral structuring. The present-­past-­future view, on the other hand, is a newcomer, being a result of efforts over the last decade to draw inspiration from process philosophy. Nonetheless, the field still offers relatively little in terms of integrative studies of time and temporality in organizations. Scholars tend to pursue different time concepts in isolation from one another, and advocate dualisms between views when it would be more useful to dissolve rather than uphold dualisms. For example, although linear and continuous conceptions of measured time still prevail and sometimes pave the way for Taylorist management philosophies, we may alternatively view measured time through the lens of temporal boundary objects (Yakura, 2002) that enable collaboration and communication while showing and enabling differences in temporal structures and between groups. Recent research exemplifies how studies may usefully combine temporal concepts. For example, research in temporary organizations show how we can think about pasts and futures in different ways (Stjerne and Svejenova, 2016). However, Zerubavel’s (1976: 87) point is still valid, that we are not yet at a stage where we consider time as ‘an integral constituent of any social act’ (italics added). Although scholars have applied various temporal lenses, there is still more to be done to account for the temporality inherent in organizational processes. Any process has an inherent temporal aspect, and when actors operate amid multiple processes, they face multiple tem­por­al­ ities (Vaill, 1998). Thompson (1967) noted how organizations consist of activity streams and how managers play important roles in the nexus of such streams. He noted further that ‘because the several streams are variable and moving, the nexus is not only moving but sometimes quite difficult to fathom’ (Thompson, 1967:148). Whereas Thompson did not temporalize streams, McGrath (1990) argued that groups, and consequently or­gan­iza­ tions, should be seen as nested systems and that the nesting of processes would reflect their temporalities. This nesting of processes is anything but neat: ‘At any one time, most groups in organizations are engaged in a messy array of projects, tasks, and steps, operating simultaneously. They are playing several games at once, against different opponents, so to speak’ (McGrath, 1990: 28). This situation is no less common in contemporary organizations, which can comprise multiple and mutually entangled temporary or­gan­iza­ tions, where actors face more deadlines than they can meet (Kremser and Blagoev, 2020).

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40  Organization and Time

If we accept that the multiple streams constituting organizations have intrinsic temporal features, we face the puzzle of understanding the intersections between the temporalities characterizing the various streams. The limitation of McGrath’s contribution regarding temporality is that he focuses almost exclusively on the temporality of ongoing processes, specifically the temporality of work flows as actors confront them in the moment, whereby different temporalities are matched as ‘ “chunks” of time with “chunks” of work to be done’ (McGrath, 1990: 38). Here lies a challenge to theorizing from a more fully temporal perspective. Intersecting temporal streams reveal the dynamics between temporal patterns, routine and non-­routine activities and events, and how punctuations and regularity both coexist and constitute each other (Zerubavel, 1979). But they also relate to actors’ pasts and futures. A temporal structure or pattern in a moment does not tell us more than what it is at that moment. A broader temporal lens enables explanation not only of how things came to be the way they are; it also enables explanation of which aspects of the past and future actors draw on selectively in their production and reproduction of temporal structures or patterns. It therefore becomes important to search in the spaces between different traditions, to combine routine and non-­routine, temporal structure and disruption, and sequentiality and iteration. A second important focus of development is the intersection between the imminent/near and the distant. There are several compelling reasons that scholars should develop theories to explain the temporal complexities of organizational life, one being the urgent need to better explain how actors can balance short-­ term concerns with distant pasts and futures. Understanding better how actors enact distant events through ongoing practices is one way to address the issue while not losing sight of the sequentially ordered events and encounters that form actors’ past and future. The review above reveals how separate literatures have dealt with foci such as activity time, which happens in the present, and temporal reach. But temporal reach, represented by research on the time horizons of organizational leaders, has tended to take a cognitive view. So far, scholars have tended to consider combinations of temporal orientations, such as near or distant or past and future, as attributable to specific actors. Although this assumption is important, it is equally important to understand how actors operate simultaneously with multiple spans of temporal reach. One question, for instance, is how these spans fold into a convergent narrative that accompanies the actor through time. Another question is how actors interpret events of different temporal reach through one another, which invites the concept of immanence mentioned above.

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  41

A third important focus is the combination of time as structure or patterns, on the one hand, and orientation towards past and future, on the other. Temporal structures (Ancona et al., 2001; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015; Rowell et al., 2016) are processes and practices created and used to provide rhythm and form to everyday work practices (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). Orlikowski and Yates (2002) offer the notion of temporal structuring to explain how time is enacted in organizations and how their practices both influence and, in turn, become influenced by tem­poral structures. But whereas temporal structures reflect ongoing and iterative patterns, they also express the temporal orientation of the organization. This definition is consistent with what Rowell et al. (2016) call temporal patterns and temporal orientations respectively. Temporal patterns, they point out, are surface manifestations of temporality, including pacing, rhythm, duration, and ­timing, whereas temporal orientations express how the organization relates to its p ­ resent, past, and future, including the depth of past and future horizons. So far, patterns and orientations have been treated separately, leaving their mutual interplay to be theorised further. A fourth important focus is to extend the level of ‘dynamic complexity’ in analysis. The review above shows how views of time have developed towards increased dynamic complexity since the inception of organizational research. There has been a transition from clock time to social time and events, which has enabled a move from viewing time as objectively measured to socially enacted. A next level of dynamic complexity has emerged through lon­gi­tu­ din­al studies employing sequential views to offer richer analysis than do synchronic views, which describe phenomena such as rhythm, speed, pace, and so forth in the literature on temporal structures. The present-­past-­future view has sought to replace assumptions about sequence (before and after) with relational views and to assign greater agency to the temporal present (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998) than does the sequential view of events implicit in social time. The present-­past-­future view considers actors as engaging and connecting past and future events through ongoing activity, which Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013) call temporal work and Flaherty (2003) calls time work. However, while this view marks an advance from the more classic views of time, it still reflects what we might call a ‘stationary’ view of temporality. By ‘stationary’ I mean that it reflects a situated view of how actors enact their temporality but ignores how a future projection at one point in time takes part in what is evoked at a later point in time. Trajectoral dynamics is implied in what Schultz and Hernes (2013) call an ongoing present or what Aaboen

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42  Organization and Time

et al. (2012: 244) fittingly call a ‘rolling present’, but scholars have yet to explicate how the present-­past-­future tangle is generative of actors’ movement through time. Whereas the present-­past-­future view marks an important transition in time research towards more-­dynamic understanding, it still represents a view of time whereby present, past, and future are both cause and effect, where enactment at one point in time is understood in light of enactments at other points in time. This becomes all the more im­port­ant in view of trajectories defined by actors, which in a sense define them in turn. Trajectories, and particularly narratives trajectories, provide the overall story of how events are interconnected and therefore make those events meaningful to people in different ways. The review above has revealed eight main views of time that have emerged over the course of organizational research (Table  1). The review reveals how some views extend for many years by accommodating novel perspectives and combining with other views, whereas other views emerge as new in relation to time in organizational research. The time structuring view had an early impetus through Taylor’s (1911) work, which has sometimes been oversimplified as being exclusively about measured time. A closer look shows how it is entangled with sequencing of activities, which also informs a practising view of time, while scholars have extended activity time to adopt structural features (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). In a general sense, the different views interweave as the field of organizational research progresses, although the views have retained some of their defining features. In what follows I will argue for a translation of the concerns about tem­ poral research expressed in the introduction to this book and the eight time views from the review into the integrative framework that will be developed Chapters 2–­5 below. These four dimensions of time are developed to create an integrative framework for studying time as a constitutive force of or­gan­iza­ tion­al life. The four dimensions are time-­as-­experience, time-­as-­practice, time-­as-­events and time-­as-­resource. Figure 1 shows how the views of time identified in the above review correspond to the four dimensions of the  proposed framework. For instance, time-­as-­events retains the social time view’s definition of events as accomplished and the present-­past-­future view’s def­in­ition of events as emergent. The four dimensions derive from the review above, but they are not limited to their traditional definitions. For instance, I  expand time-­ as-­ practice from representing understanding of ‘stretched-­outness of time’ to also represent understanding of ‘reach-­outness of time’. The reader will notice that two of the time views (activity and experience) bear resemblance with two of the four dimensions of time in Chapters 2–5 (time-­as-­practice and time-­as-­experience), whereas the other

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  43 Experience of time

Retains bodily experience of time

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Figure 1  Connections between time views from the review and time dimensions of the framework

dimensions of time (time-­as-­events and time-­as-­resource) do not correspond directly to time categories identified in the review. It is important to note that the framework developed in Chapters 2–5 consists of dimensions that are informed by the views of time revealed by the review. Thus, time-­as-­practice discussed in Chapter  3 is an elaborated version of the of activity time in Chapter  1. Figure  1 shows how time-­as-­practice is inspired not just by the activity time part of the review in Chapter 1, but also from other parts of that review. It is important to note that the four dimensions of time are developed to provide a holistic understanding of organization and time from the sub-­ conscious level (ex­peri­ence) via practices to the use of time for collective organizing (time-­as-­resource). The dimension of events is a natural part of such a framework, partly because it is both an emergent elements of time

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44  Organization and Time

and a temporal residue of on-­going practices, and as such connects naturally to the other three dimensions. Also, events are both descriptive of the existential experience of being in time and of imagining distant times, while being in a sense measures of time when considered sequentially. Table  2 shows how the four dimensions relate to levels of analysis. Developing a more integrative view of time entails defining concepts which, together, span different levels of analysis. The managerial level implies decision-­making agency. The collective level implies intersubjective processes of sensemaking through which individuals adjust and negotiate the temporal aspects of their actions. Embodiment is included in time as ex­ peri­ ence and as the individual-­ collective experience of time. A second feature of the framework is that the four dimensions are complementary in relation to temporal complexity of organizations spanning between the momentary and the enduring and between the temporally near and the temporally distant. Table  3 shows how the four dimensions relate to one another. Research has yet to take on the challenge of making time an immanent part of potentially any organizational phenomenon, which is the aim of the proposed four-­dimensional framework. This echoes Hernes et al.’s (2013: 3) point about time and temporality being ‘integral to the experience of being human, as it is threaded through the practices that shape, and are shaped by our day-­to-­day actions’. In order for time to fill that role, it is necessary to conceptualize how  different time conceptions interact in complex and dynamic ways, such as extending from one another, extending into one another, or engaging in various other forms of mutual interplay (see Chapter 6). The basic idea of working with the four time dimensions is to be able to analyse time as ­constitutive of organization and through the interplay between the time dimensions to explain complex organizational phenomena in ways that ­current time theorizing does not readily accommodate. The integrative framework offers an integrative view of time that may enable more complex and dynamic organizational phenomena to be analysed than previously done through the lens of time. Whereas the review above has revealed main conceptions of time that have emerged in or­gan­iza­tion­al Table 2  Time dimensions and levels of analysis Time dimension

Analytical constructs

Levels of analysis

Time-­as-­experience Time-­as-­practice Time-­as-­events Time-­as-­resource

Emotions, assumptions Actions, articulation Sensemaking, enactment Coordination, translation

Individual/collective level Collective—individual level Collective level—managerial level Managerial/collective level

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A Review and Foundations of a Framework  45 Table 3  The four dimensions and their interrelationships  

Time-­as-­ experience

Time-­as-­ Time as experience immediate—or as   accumulated and shared—temporal experience Time-­as-­ Experience practice reflected in underlying assumptions of practices Time-­as-­ Experience is part events of the shaping of the present event Time-­as-­ resource

 

Time-­as-­ practice

Time-­as-­events

Time-­as-­ resource

Experience may Past and future events or may not are experienced in the correspond to present time-­as-­practice

Time-asexperience is conditioned by time-as-resource

Time as stretched-­ outness and as reach-­outness of practices Actors address distant events through the reach-­outness of their practices Practices become routinized and structured into temporal templates

Ongoing practices turn into events with temporal closure

Practices are conditioned by time-­as-­resource

Events both as eventualization of practices and as past and future events enacted in the present  

Events constitute elements of time-­as-­resource (temporal templates) Structuring of time and formatted as temporal templates

research but remain loosely connected in organizational analysis, the proposed framework is developed from elements that may mutually relate in different ways to yield a complex and dynamic view. This view may ultimately provide a sense of temporal movement, analogous to Duchamp’s painting of a nude descending a staircase.

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2 Time-­as-­Experience It will go away. Like things go away. Donald Trump (2020) On the subjective side, an acceleration of the speed of life will affect people’s experience of time: it will cause individuals to consider time scarce, feel harried and pressed for time. In other words, people will feel that they can no longer find time to complete the tasks and ac­tiv­ ities most important to them. Wajcman (2008: 62)

Introduction Time-­as-­experience needs to be considered as a time in its own right and not an experiential derivative of time as practised or structured. The experience of time is not a passive response to the time that we are exposed to but an active temporal force in its own right. The experience of time, according to Flaherty, is not subjugated to the experience of the act. This implies that although I may react to a stressful situation, my response may be based on a different experience than what the situation would otherwise dictate. I can, for example, react calmly because I have been in such a situation many times before, and based on that experience I may act as though the situation is not as stressful as it may seem. Fine (1990) offers a telling account of the ex­peri­ ence of time in his analysis of cooks in a restaurant kitchen, which shows how temporal experience intertwines with practices and does not follow its own logic: Anger and tension filled the kitchen — with cooks sarcastic to servers, and servers bothering cooks for their dishes. No one had the time to do things right, including being polite. When one cannot maintain a sense of control, it is difficult to get it back until a lull allows the staff to regroup, to create that temporal niche. The lull never came. One cook claimed that the frustration of nights like that was what he liked least about cooking: Being so busy you can't put the food out [well] . . . .

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0003

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Time-as-Experience  47 You've got to put the food out so fast, you don't care what it might taste like. You put it out for what it looks like. Maybe sometimes you might forget something, put it in there late. You might have to cook it fast, like under a broiler [not in a stove]. [. . .]  By becoming angry one concludes a frustrating event, and provides for an opportunity for the reestablishment of rhythm. Whether this catharsis is effective is less significant than that it is believed to be so. Anger is seen as a means of achieving temporal stability and coping with the behavioral reality of the kitchen. Of course, while anger may have therapeutic benefits for the individual, it also increases the tension in the environment, and may be contagious. What may ­preserve the temporal order for one individual may undermine it for others. (Fine, 1990: 104)

The example shows that there is not necessarily a correlation between the temporality of surrounding processes (moving fast and constantly interrupted) and the experience of time as slow and repetitive. The example shows that not only can time as experience derive from other forms of time (such as practice), but it can operate in multiple ways, even contradicting other forms of time. Bringing temporal experience into organization studies is a relatively recent undertaking, as suggested in the review in Chapter  1. Time is still largely seen as a resource, a quality, a temporal marker of what comes before and what comes after or how fast or slowly things move. Terms such as time orientation, time reckoning, and time structures tend to dominate the literature. But being in the flow of time is about more than measured duration or distancing between events. Temporal experience is about the temporal condition of existence itself, the existence of being thrown into time (Heidegger, 1927). We are thrown into a time that is already there and for us to experience. The experience of time may generate anxiety or energy, ambiguity or certainty, doubt or decisiveness. The contrasting quotes by President Donald Trump and Wajcman (2008) represent the direct experience of time. Both quotes are significant in their own ways. According to a Washington Post article, Trump has been recorded more than 24 times saying that the COVID-­19 virus will go away by itself. He used his political platform to sketch a future of a naturally dwindling danger of the coronavirus, irrespective of what science does to prevent it or how citizens act to prevent it from spreading. There is an element of time-­as-­ experience here, because the message conveys that the virus’s natural dis­ appear­ance is inevitable in the near future and to make people act as though it is going away. The message is all the more political because the so-­called natural disappearance of the virus undermines the role of science in politics

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and may serve to underpin an antiscience evangelical worldview (evan­gel­ic­ als were important for Trump’s re-­election chances in 2020). Wajcman’s (2008) scholarly view reflects an entirely different experience of time, which is a direct feeling of being amidst accelerating processes that leave little or no room for selecting or prioritizing meaningful tasks. She points at an im­port­ ant paradox of acceleration: that if acceleration makes people feel short of time, why does society not offer more free time to spend on other tasks? There are several important differences between the two quotes, besides Trump’s being wistful and political whereas Wajcman’s is straight social science. Apart from one quote being unfounded and antiscience and the other being science based, the two quotes also differ in a temporal sense. Trump’s statement is directed at a possible future event intended to create a sense of time in the present, while Wajcman refers to ongoing reality, which gives a feeling being in an ever-­faster passage of future flowing through the present to become past. The experience of time is an elusive yet fundamental dimension of time. It is particularly important for discussing the contemporary phenomena of quickening pace and acceleration, although, as noted above, even if we observe an accelerating world chronologically Rosa, 2013, it may not stand in a one-­ to-­one relationship with an experience of time as accelerating. An example from the world of temporary organizations is Lundin and Söderholm’s (1995: 439) observation that in temporary organizations, time is ‘always running out’, simply because it is defined as finite from the start. Their observation illustrates how time-­as-­experience is different from clock time, which I discuss below as part of time-­as-­resource. Whereas clock time is a chrono­logic­al descriptor of organizations as temporary and leads to an experience of time as always running out, we cannot describe the experience of time as always running out in chronological terms; it is more like an underlying temporal feeling that pervades individual and collective acts in invisible or visible ways throughout a temporary organization’s duration. The running-­out of time relates also to changes in temporary organizations. Thus, Staudenmayer et al. (2002) define temporal shifts as actors’ experience of changes in rhythm or temporal structure, which, for example, leads to people having more or less discretion over their time. On a different scale, climate change is conveyed through statistics, models, and scenarios. But as Wright et al. (2013) point out, climate change does not affect us much unless imagining it gives us a feeling of profound disruption. This form of time-­as-­experience is both different from and similar to the feeling of always running out of time. Whereas the similarity appears obvious, the difference lies in the feeling of disruption. Temporary organizations

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are disruptive almost by design, whereas climate change signifies for many people disruption from settled ways of living and shifting from experiencing nature’s time as virtually infinite in previous decades to realizing that those ways need to change. Still, it is worth noting that climate change is not itself a disruption but a gradual, persistent force that has been at work for decades, which will likely culminate in disruptive change, although this does not prevent people from experiencing climate change as a disruptive change in the present. We may interpret time-­ as-­ experience along two different dimensions according to the definition of experience. Philosophers of time commonly focus on time as felt through direct experience, and any understanding of time starts with reflection on immediate experience. Direct experience suggests the role of time in phenomenology, described by Heidegger (1927: 29) as ‘that which shows itself ’. Whitehead (1929: 126, 196) described time as ‘perpetually perishing’, by which he meant that the experience of particular duration is forever perishing. Inspired by Shotter (2006) in organization studies, we may call it ‘within time’. Similarly, Ricoeur argues with reference to Heidegger for the importance of within-­ time-­ ness. Within-­ time-­ ness implies a view of time as constitutive of a form of life (Ricoeur, 1980). For Ricoeur, staying within time is primordial because that is what prevents time from becoming ‘flattened out by the linear representation of time as a simple succession of abstract “nows” ’ (Ricoeur, 1980: 62). Heidegger used the expression ‘within-­time-­ness’ to refer to Dasein’s existential experience of the ‘moment’; that which ‘comes into being, passes away, or is objectively present’ (Heidegger, 1927: 338). The moment, therefore, for Heidegger, is part of being within time. Note, however, that the moment is not necessarily eventful. Nothing much happens. The moment is part of being within time. This means that time as movement, as the undercurrent that carries us along, cannot be explicitly articulated, yet we are somehow collectively aware of it. People sometimes articulate it implicitly by saying, ‘well, we are all getting older’, or ‘we have moved on from where we were’. Perhaps because the ex­peri­en­tial dimension of time is rooted in deeper levels of consciousness, scholars rarely debate it in the study of organizations. Still, the experience of time is both real and influential on collective action. A second dimension of time-­as-­experience derives from a different meaning of the word ‘experience’. Whereas the first dimension refers to experience as immediate, the second dimension refers to time as individual or col­lect­ ive­ly accumulated experience. In Scandinavian and German languages, the two types of experience are different labels. In Norwegian, for example, the term for direct experience is ‘opplevelse’, and in German it is called ‘erlebnis’, whereas the term for accumulated experience is ‘erfaring’ in Norwegian and

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‘erfahrung’ in German. The accumulated experience dimension of time becomes a residue at people’s subconscious level, but it manifests socially through social interaction and is sometimes stored in material arrangements. It may invoke Fleck’s (1979) notion of ‘thought collective’, which Douglas (1986) translated as ‘thought worlds’, which bridge the social and the individual levels.

The Passage of Time Most writers seem to agree that in its crude form, time has a flow-­like character, best described as made up of undifferentiated streams. But what kind of flows do we talk about when considering organizational life? What is it that flows? There seem to be at least two major positions here. One views time in its brute form. Time is that which flows through our minds and our bodies, close to what Bergson called inner time. It is the flow that ensures that nothing is ever the same, that everything changes whatever we do. In its brute form, time basically oscillates back and forth, like waves that roll up the beach to then roll back down again. In this crude state, time is constantly passing away from us and coming towards us. This simultaneous bidirectional quality of time harbours opportunities for continuity and change, as they reveal choices for what to retain and what to discard. This is how actors shape time just as time shapes them, or how they create time just as time creates them. As they seize or let go of the movement of time, they define time and, in turn, become defined by time. This makes time different from space, which remains the same if we do not move. Not so with time, which is like a wave that carries us forward, a wave that moves from the past towards the future, and placed on top of this wave, we live in a continuous present. This is the ‘time of the mind’ that has occupied philosophers for centuries. It is also the time of nature, including that of our bodies, as we age and are carried forward in life. I discuss below the important ideas of Husserl and how we can use them to understand the experience of being within time, of temporal immediacy at the level of individual consciousness. The experience of time arises from being in the world of things, of flows, of process. There is the time of nature, such as the moments of planets, ebb and tide, the seasons, and day and night. Nature’s time is cyclical, and beyond the cyclical nature of time is what geologists call ‘deep time’, which is the time of the earth. Humanity has a long tradition in navigating between nature’s time and the time of human organization. 5000 years ago, Egyptians

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brewed beer and in doing so they probably made a transition from nature’s time to their own time. Whereas timing the harvest depended on the time of nature, brewing the beer depended on the timing of actions in response to the maturing of the produce. Moreover, the timing could be quite complex, involving multiple processes, as they could brew up to thousands of litres of beer at a time. Then there is the movement of the universe, explained by the theories of relativity, which suspend the familiar notions of linear, chrono­ logic­al time. This implies that at some deeper level, time is a flow that moves us along together with everything else. We don’t know what this flow is, but we can accept that it exists, without being able to explain its actual shape. Together with Bergson, we can say that we can intuit it as a sort of movement that we cannot articulate in terms of theories, models, or numbers. Movement— as Bergson saw this ‘élan vital’, the forward, unstoppable movement in time of everything in the universe—has no distinctions, no distinguishable elem­ ents. In other words, we cannot grasp it through ana­lysis. We can grasp it, somehow, through intuition, meditation, and introspection, rather than through thinking. Physicists may argue that this relentless passage of time may simply be entropy: the irreversible increase in system disorder. If we heat a liquid in a closed container, its temperature rises and molecules move around faster. However, so does the disorder of the molecules, disorder being defined as the number of possible locations they may occupy. If we then cool the liquid to its initial temperature, the molecules are back to their initial speed. In other words, the temperature expressed through their speed is reversible, but their level of disorder is not. Disorder can only increase whatever is done to the liquid. The result is a cooler but more disorderly liquid. The liquid cannot revert to its previous level of (dis)order. The irretrievably lost ordering of the molecules is referred to as entropy, which applies to any substance and, consequently, to the universe as a whole. In his book The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli asks interesting questions about the ‘actual’ nature of time and suggests that entropy explains ‘actual’ time probably because it is the only seemingly irreversible phenomenon known to science. At a more prosaic level, processes of people, ideas, solutions, and material artefacts that occur all the time constitute the flow of time. In the world of organizations, this means that organizations change as people go ordinarily about their work, as March (1981) subtly observed. Doing what we ordinarily do will change things as we are carried forward by time, responding to problems, opportunities, and challenges as we encounter them. In this case, the flow of time is sort of doing the work of change for us. This would be the

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change of rocks, earth, water, ice, and so forth on the move, as well as animals and plants, as they build up conditioned, cumulative responses to things they meet on their way, in the direction of what Eddington (in Prigogine, 1996) called ‘the arrow of time’. The arrow of time signifies time’s irreversibility. It signifies that as entities move along the flow of time, they perform work that cannot be reversed. It also means that once human consciousness enters the picture, nothing can ever really be repeated, because every act, including an act of recall, will invariably change the experience of being in time in ways that cannot be reversed. This makes time-­as-­experience such an important aspect of time and underlines why the subjective experience of time is important for understanding processes of continuity and change at all levels of organizations.

Experiencing the Passage of Time At this point, I will digress from considering organizations to discuss Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness to better understand the experience of being in the flow of time. Husserl was concerned with the workings of the individual mind when confronted with the world, not with the thoughts of the individual mind but with the phenomenon received by the individual mind. The flow of time is such a phenomenon. Husserl was not the only philosopher who theorized from lived ex­peri­ ence. Bergson’s analysis is perhaps better known and more widespread in the organizational literature. Bergson’s stance against spatial representations of time, such as the clock and the calendar, has conveniently served those who wish to draw attention to the experiential dimension of or­gan­iza­ tion­al life. But Husserl’s treatment of the consciousness of time is potentially useful for theorizing time beyond the individual’s consciousness. It applies to the col­lect­ive level, not as a multiplier of individual experience but as an analogy of what takes place within the individual. What happens in a group, just like any collective, is by no means a replica or the sum of the experiences in that group or collective. Collective experience is constituted by individual experiences but is not reducible to those experiences (Hernes, 2014). The collective level stands in analogous relationship to the individual level. Husserl acknowledges St. Augustine’s brilliant account of being in the moment, while extending from Augustine’s work to discuss the building up of memory, the interplay between the present experience and memory, and conversion into future anticipation. The basic experience of time, according

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to Husserl, consists of perception, memory, and expectation. These three elem­ents, or processes, are mutually constitutive, which basically means that none of them can be considered in isolation from either of the other two. This is an important point: past (memory), present (perception), and future (ex­pect­ation) form a unified whole in people’s perception, and they are indivisible in the present moment. Husserl’s thinking coincides here with Bergson’s treatment of duration, which the latter sees as experience of time devoid of separations between temporal periods that never­the­less remain distinct. They cannot be, as some of the organizational literature implies, separate, discrete periods because they co-­create one another, and the locus of co-­creation is the temporal present, from which actors never escape. This is not to say that the unified whole is shapeless. On the contrary, it contains elements that exhibit degrees of pastness or futurity; some things have taken place and others may take place. Any recollection of something that happened has an element of pastness, and something that is yet to happen, such as the next generation of software, has an element of futurity. Each moment, be it a split second or longer duration, has shades of memory and expectation, and the experiential connecting between them gives rise to different possible shapes. A linear, accelerating shape provides a different ex­peri­ence of the passing of time than does a flat, continuous, ever-­expanding shape. The experience of time that pervades an NGO engaged in climate change struggle likely reflects a shape of time as running out along exponential temperature curves, starting with a baseline temperature at preindustrial levels. Naturally, the point of departure is the now, in which actors constantly find themselves. The present, as Mead (1932: 27) pointed out, is that which is ‘going on’. It is not a vantage point disconnected from either the past or future. It is the time-­ space of practices through which past and future are enacted. Enactment is the primary sensemaking activity, and in a process-ontological view, it cannot reflect on itself. Actors experience the present moment through in­tu­ition and cannot think about the present as such, because it is a moment of sheer becoming, a moment of feeling movement in time. This is where a fault-­line runs through the treatment of time in organizational research. Some scholars represent the present as one of three temporal epochs, or orien­ta­tions, that actors can reflect on in light of how they perceive the past and future (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013; Schipp and Jansen, 2020). The problem is that these studies implicitly define the present as an object of c­ ognition. But scholars of time have posited for decades (and soon centuries) that the present is always emerging (Mead, 1932; Schütz, 1967) and is, first and foremost, the locus of practices that address the past and

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present in ways that provide meaning to those practices. To take a cognitive view is akin to what Nagel (1989) called a view from nowhere because it pretends that actors are disembodied from their practices. This is not to say that reflection does not occur in the present. Although the present is experienced as undifferentiated flows, those flows become differentiable and available to reflection with the closure of the temporal present. The present moment gradually becomes past, or rather, it joins the past because a past is already there, ready to be extended by the present moment and to be modified by the emerging memory of recent events. In this fading phase, what Husserl calls ‘running off, flowing away, or sinking backwards in time’ (p. 49), that experience still forms part of the present while in the process of becoming past. As it fades towards the past, the experience is still retained in consciousness, but it is no longer part of the ‘now’. It is not yet past, and it is no longer part of the now. This act, what Husserl calls retention, on its way to becoming memory, is an important elem­ent of temporal experience because it involves the process of leaving immediate, tentative traces of the now. It is a phase during which experience begins to take on a certain direction. Husserl uses the metaphor of the comet’s tail, where the comet is the present, and the tail, giving a sense of direction to the comet, represents immediate retention but fades progressively into the past as it gets increasingly more blurred. Retention helps keep a certain shape of time in people’s experience, and loss of retention may blur the shape of time, because the experience of time does not materialise into memory. Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-­education camp for more than two years between 2017 and 2019, describes how ex­pos­ure to extreme monotony made them lose their ability to retain their memories. They ex­peri­enced their loss of sense of time as not knowing how long they would be in the camp, which reduced their memory to being almost exclusively short term, to the extent that Haitiwaji even began to forget about her own family languishing back in France (Haitiwaji and Morgat, 2021). If we accept that intuition is at the basis of creativity and, hence, creative change, Husserl’s thinking becomes particularly interesting. One may ask, what is being retained? It may be tempting to assume that it is the immediate, intuitive experience of time which is being retained. Husserl rejects this idea, however. Intuitive experience cannot fade into the past in the same form in which it was conceived, he argues. On the contrary, retention involves modification, and the retained perception is an image of the ex­peri­ ence in the now. Becoming an image is part of becoming past, but it is still not entirely cut loose from immediate experience; it forms part of immediate experience. This means that there is never really a pure, new experience

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because any new experience picks up features from the fading away of the previous experience, which, in turn, had picked up features from the previous experience. There is, then, always a now, but that now will be conditioned by what went before. Whereas retentional modification applies to that which is flowing away, there is also, according to Husserl, an effect of that which is coming into view, or coming towards us. If we view time as coming towards us, we can see impressions as announcing themselves before we sense them in the now. Naturally, this applies to impressions based on expectations, which are again based on previous experience. We may, for example, know a person who habitually reacts in a certain way, and given a certain situation we may an­tici­ pate that she will say something that ‘goes to meet the new now’, as Husserl (1991: 112) puts it. Following Husserl, this suggests a three-­pronged process taking place during any now: protention feeds into the present through a process as coming-towards whereas retention is takes the form of flowing away from the present (see Figure 2). In the middle of this is the now, which is a sort of intuitive source of this three-­pronged experience. On this point, Husserl’s reasoning seems quite similar to that of Mead (1929: 235), who writes, ‘We attach to the backward limit of the present the memory images of what has just taken place. In the same fashion, we have images of the words which we are going to speak. We build out at both limits.’ An interesting point about retentional modification and protention is that together they condition the experience of being in time. However, we are still dealing only with intuition. As the impression reaches the comet’s tail, it no longer lies within the grasp of intuition, but it is in the process of becoming something more tangible. It is in the process of becoming past but not in the same shape as that in which it was intuited. It is now in the process of being shaped into events. When we hear a melody for the first time, we discover it as it moves us along, tone by tone. We may slowly begin to notice a pattern, but the pattern is not complete (at least in most Event becomes part of trajectory of events Present as practices

Forming of memory as event

Retention

Retention influences protention

Figure 2  Retention and protention in temporal experience

Protention conditions future events

Protention

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cases) before the melody has ended. The melody remains a potentiality until it ends, and the present moment has reached closure. When it has ended, we can think of it as a unity, as a whole. Let us imagine protention and retention when we first listen to the melody. In the very beginning, there is little that comes towards us in the form of protention because we do not yet connect separate notes into a pattern; hence, there is only tentative retention. However, later in the melody, the pattern of the melody begins to take shape, and we increasingly practice protention as we build up ex­pect­ations on the basis of memorized pasts about what is coming towards us in time. In analogous terms, the process of retention becomes more de­ter­min­ate. Assume that we listen to the melody again after some time. What has happened since the first time is that the melody has passed into memory. As a memory, it does not come back to us as intuition but as recollection of past experience, which may condition the on-­going experience of listening to the melody. This is where it becomes a bit more complicated, however, because we are actually also listening to it in the now. In other words, we are both listening to it in the now, as a novel experience, while also recalling the melody from memory, which presents itself as reflection rather than intuition. This means that for every coming towards and for every flowing away, there is sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly a recall of a previous listening to the same melody. We may infer from Husserl the gradualness of temporal experience. We can liken it to a ceaseless ebb and flow of experience in time. In addition, he shows how immediate experience also interacts with memory. Memory forms at the tip of the comet’s tail, where the processual now moves into the past and takes the form of events. But we might take his work one step further and examine memory more closely. Memory is not just an isolated now that has morphed into a recognizable event, because an isolated now would not be able to sustain itself in the flow of time. Memory is a pattern that has been experienced, like the melody coming to an end the first time we listen to it or a routine the first time it has been implemented, although the mem­ or­ized experience has a different shape from that of the actual experience. But as experiences multiply, so do memories of those experiences. Memory, then, is a pattern of experiences that makes sense as a totality, as a unity. So, when listening to the melody for the second time, we both experience the directly perceived tone and we perceive from memory the unity of the total ordering of the tones (the melody) as well as the previous occasions of listing to the same tune. The presence of the melody as a totality helps us perform both retention and protention differently from how we perform these when we hear the melody for the first time. Multiplication of memories helps

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develop a richer totality or unified whole, which helps us perceive the melody in its entirety while perceiving directly only two to three tones at a time, as they taper off towards the tip of the comet’s tail.

Shaping the Experience of Time The flow of time makes possible the collective making of traces of events through time. If there were no underlying flow of time, there would be no traces to be made. As I draft these lines, I have, together with millions of people around the world, been confined to working from home because of COVID-­19. We are taking part in an unprecedented global lockdown of economic and social activity. Fewer than three months ago, we were making plans for the year to come, just as the entire economy was based on a con­ tinu­ity of future projections. Then, in the space of a few weeks, the entire order has been thrown into question as people, organizations, and institutions around the world struggle to make sense of an imminent and uncertain future. At present, we do not know what will happen as our world begins to open up. Multiple uncertainties exist, including questions about a cure, vaccine, future waves, immunity, protection gear, and testing possibilities. In an article downloaded today (13 April 2020), Love compares this current situ­ ation to an account rendered by French geologist Michel Siffre, who in 1962 spent months in a cave without a watch. I agree with Love that being stuck at home does introduce a certain senselessness regarding the passage of time. Yet, senselessness does not mean a loss of time; it only means a suspension of time as we know it, tied to other rhythms than what we experience at the moment. What we have temporarily lost is the direction of the time that extends beyond our daily and weekly rhythms. But I would argue that our (we hope) temporary loss of direction, of narrative trajectory as I call it later in this book, is a contemporary experience of time. Experiencing a temporary loss of trajectory represents an acute sense of time in which people, organizations, and institutions search into previous temporal trajectories and begin to imagine different future temporal trajectories. What we need to understand better is the transition from the ex­peri­ ence of time, including that of lost time, to more-­tangible forms of time. St. Augustine (1992: 230) alluded to this transition, lamenting his inability to explain time as the transition from experience to representation, which he felt unable to perform. Ricoeur (1979) attempts to distinguish experienced time and measured or represented time. Representations of time, according

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to Ricoeur, ignore the centrality of the present as an actual now. Nor do these representations consider ‘the primacy of the future as the main orientation of human desire, nor the fundamental capacity of recollecting the past in the present’ (Ricoeur, 1979: 100). Experience underlies representation and analysis, although it is doubtful that we can infer representation or analysis from the experience of time. Much the way sculptors carve a figure out of a shapeless block of material, time (i.e., the places or events) is shaped out of a flow of time, which in its brute form has direction but no shape. It flows from what has been towards something that may become, but it does not in itself specify patterns that connect places, which implies possible different patterns. As certain events and connections between them become meaningful to actors, those patterns form a shape, in the sense of a trajectory of events. Time takes on a shape through actors’ reflexive engagement with their trajectory through time. Flaherty (2003) relates experience to the passage of time, asking the pertinent question, what makes for vari­ation in the perceived passage of time? Arguably, variation shaping is what provides the variation of temporal experience as actors move through time. The shaping of time (an expression inspired by Kubler, need not be explicit. On the contrary, it is likely implicit for many, just as it may strongly influence how processes unfold in and across or­gan­ iza­tions. Recent brain research entertains a similar idea to the shape of time, in which ­scholars study the interactive processes between body and brain to understand how humans ‘sculpt’ (Clark, 2013) the time and space that lie in front of them, or reflexively the future as they move along. Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams contains fascinating scenarios illustrating how different conceptions and, hence, different experiences of time shape social life. Here is a scenario in which future and past are indistinguishable: Philosophers have argued that without a trend toward order, time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening. In such a world, people with untidy houses lie in their beds and wait for the forces of nature to jostle the dust from their windowsills and straighten the shoes in their closets. People with untidy affairs may picnic while their calendars become organized, their appointments arranged, their accounts balanced. Lipsticks and brushes and letters may be tossed into purses with the satisfaction that they will sort them­ selves out automatically. Gardens need never be pruned, weeds never uprooted. Desks become neat by the end of the day. Clothes on the floor in the evening lie on chairs in the morning. Missing socks reappear  (Lightman, 2004: 51).

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In this scenario, people would not feel compelled to act in order to make the future different from the past, as they would experience time as one continuous flow without change. The shape of the time that lies behind and before actors may translate into individual and collective assumptions about time that influence actors’ focus and interactions (see Figure 3). Scholars have pointed out how the age of enlightenment changed people’s view of time from being God’s time to the measurable cyclical time of the universe. But think of the more mundane example of new organizational leaders. Sometimes they announce a new future that will replace the old past, and in so doing, they effectively declare the past dead or replaceable. Sometimes such declarations engender commitment to a completely new future. Other times they lead to employees banding together to redirect attention to the past or to outright attempts to sabotage the new future. These examples show how the shape of time matters through the ways that actors experience it. Time-­as-­experience is implicit rather than explicit, based on intuition rather than reasoning, and exploratory rather than exploitative, which implies that temporal experience enables actors to conceive richer, more nuanced shapes of time, compared to other temporal forms. Smircich and Morgan (1982) provide an example in their analysis of a change process in which management framed an intended change by pointing to substandard past performance, which they believed they could replace with certain measures to produce a better future for the company. The staff, however, did not share

CO

LL

EC

TI

VE

Conscious use of time (temporal models, measures)

Experience (temporal discourse)

Conscious use of time (e.g., planning, modelling) INDIVIDUAL Experience (Sub-conscious assumptions)

Figure 3  Dynamics of individual and collective temporal experience

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this representation of combining substandard past performance with the desired future, and argued that management ignored aspects of the past that might well persist in the future. We can ascribe their insistence to their ex­peri­en­tial ability to perceive more complex forms of time than management’s discourse reflected. Their article shows how shaping of time emerges from the various streams that actors confront, as Knorr Cetina and Preda’s (2007) account of a study of actors in financial markets illustrates: They perform their activities in a streaming, temporal world; as the information scrolls down the screens and is replaced by new information, a new market reality continually projects itself. The constantly emerging lines of text at times repeat the disappearing ones, but they also add to them and replace them, updating the reality in which traders move. The flow of the market reflects the corresponding stream of activities and things: a dispersed mass of market participants continues to act, events continue to occur, politicians decide and decisions have effects. Markets are objects of observation and analysis because they change continually; and while they are clearly defined in terms of prices, news, relevant economic indicators and so on at any given moment, they are ill-­defined with respect to the direction they will take at the next moment and in the less immediate future.

The forms of time that such streams engender cannot be readily predicted. The forms depend on what actors retain from the streams they confront, which depend to some extent on the future they envisage at different points in time. Moreover, such forms are likely to differ between actors that take part in different streams. Although substances may never be able to recall an earlier state, humans, while moving in the direction of the arrow of time, can also look selectively backward along their trajectory. They can look back while moving irreversibly forward and influence what they retain from their past. They may retain something from their distant past which they had not retained earlier, and in doing so, they may stake out a different forward path. Maybe this is what Mead (1932) had in mind when he wrote that the past is both revocable and irrevocable. The past is irrevocable in that it cannot be relived, but it is revocable in that we may imagine it as that past and we may reimagine it again and again. In fact, without this ability, there would be no time and no way to be creative and to effect change.

Collectivizing Time-­as-­Experience The previous sections of this chapter have focused on time as direct ex­peri­ ence. As direct experience, time is phenomenological; it reveals itself in the

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moment. But in organized systems such as organizations, experienced time is not just momentary; time-­as-­experience may also be a collectively experienced form of time, which extends and persists through time. Whereas time-­as-­experience operates at the subconscious level, actors also experience and articulate it collectively. Schütz (1953) points out how experience at the sub-­conscious level transpire at the collective level through talk and gestures He points out how ‘the other's body, his gestures, his gait and facial expressions, are immediately observable, not merely as things or events of the outer world but in their physiognomical significance, that is, as symptoms of other's thoughts’ (Schütz, 1953: 12). Thus, Schütz argues, individuals come to share in a community of time that includes both outer and inner time. Individuals grasp one another’s thoughts while they share in col­ lect­ive plans, hopes, or anxieties of the future; this part of ‘growing old together; they live, as we may call it, in a pure We-­relationship’ (Schütz, 1967: 16–17). Collective sharing of temporal experience takes place in a variety of ways. Ancona et al. (2001: 518) refer to examples of ‘time passing’ and ‘time dragging’  from McGrath and Kelly (1986), which organizational members col­ lect­ive­ly share. An experientially acquired sense of time, transmitted through cultural codes, becomes lodged in people’s memory and becomes part of the tacit knowledge they apply as members of social groups. Behr (2019), in an article in The Observer, offers the following observation, which illustrates the feeling of an open future when United Kingdom’s Brexit process started with a national referendum in 2016, followed by a deadline of 29 March 2019 for the UK’s formal departure from the EU.: But while the clock is ticking, it feels also as if we have been in the final phase of this process for a purgatorial eternity. Logically, it must come to an end eventu­ ally. The world is still turning on its axis and the days are crossed off the calendar in the conventional order. Inside the House of Commons, politics unfolds in a mysterious Brexit twilight zone, where time races ahead yet also stands still. All the logic of an escalating national crisis dictates that things cannot possibly carry on like this, and yet somehow they do.

Elias (1992) points out that time is, first and foremost, a means of collective orientation. Similar to Gell (1992), Elias shows how social groups have turned natural variations into symbolic events. Elias describes how premodern societies used nature as their timing device. For example, the right time for hunting or sleeping would relate to the whims and rhythms of nature. There was not yet any device to punctuate the flow of time into ordered events made by humans to regulate social behaviour. The time that Elias

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describes is an evolving sense of time, acquired through collectivized experience. Elias assumes that it is a mistake to absolutely separate the individual and the col­lect­ive as well as the social realm and nature. Time makes such reasoning especially important because, for example, if we consider clock time as purely mechanical both in its nature and its effects, we may miss the opportunity to understand how the regularity of time becomes socialized and a symbolic constituent of society. We may assume that all collective experience of time is also individual, but not all individual experience of time becomes collective. Therefore, it is important to study the collectivization of time-­as-­ experience. To share individual experience with others requires making one’s individual experience of time available for reflection, because we live through time reflexively but our acts require reflection, and acts are the foundation of social interactions. We interpret, as Schütz (1967) wrote, the acts of others and infer meaning from our observations of those acts, just as others do with our acts. Reflection enables us to suspend the stream of time we currently find ourselves in and turn back on that stream (Schütz, 1967: 47). Schütz (1967:165) points out how the making of the ‘we’ arises from the vivid copresence of humans: Suppose that you and I are watching a bird in flight. The thought ‘bird-­in-­flight’ is in each of our minds and is the means by which each of us interprets his own observations. Neither of us, however, could say whether our lived experiences on that occasion were identical. In fact, neither of us would even try to answer that question, since one’s own subjective meaning can never be laid side by side with another’s and compared.

This is where we shift to temporal experience as accumulated experience, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Actors in­ev­it­ably look back to make sense of what has happened. Weick (1995) has made this a key point about sensemaking: that it is retrospective. Although s­ cholars have suggested that sensemaking is also prospective, they have missed an important point: sensemaking refers to events that have taken place. Prospection, on the other hand, is about enactment, because actors cannot know their future ex­peri­ ence in advance even though they anticipate future actions. Actors make sense of enactment, in turn, retrospectively, although it is not the same enactment as was projected. Weick’s sensemaking theory reaches its limits regarding a temporal view of organizations, however, by not focusing on multiple past events and their interrelationships. As actors thread together past events, they create a temporal pattern that becomes col­ lect­ ive­ ly

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experienced and re-­enacted as they evoke it from the past and translate it into the future.

Experiencing Distant Times I have argued how temporal experience has form that extends it from the on-­going present. It is also important to take a look at the role of distant times in the emergence of temporal experience. While the above discussion addresses the experience of time as passage, it does not enlighten us much on the experience of the extended shape of time into more distant pasts and futures. Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending depicts how a communication between a middle-­aged man and his friend from his university days evokes different aspects of a shared past. After the suicide of a common friend, the main narrator describes how his life unfolded from university days until middle age. His university friend then confronts him with past events of which he had been unaware until then, which change his ex­peri­ ence of the present. The phrase ‘sense of an ending’ captures subtly the novel’s underlying plot. There is no real ending to the novel, but taken together, the various events converge towards a possible ending beyond the novel’s actual events. The possible ending, which hovers over the story, is like one of Deleuze’s (2006) folds: imaginary points that are never actually reached but which nevertheless play important roles in the unfolding of the story. On a more humorous note, Koselleck (2004: 261) recites a joke from the Soviet Union, presumably in the 1950s, in which Secretary Khrushchev, delivering a speech, declared that ‘Communism is already visible on the horizon’. Someone in the audience having asked what he meant by the word ‘horizon’, he replied, ‘Look it up in a dictionary’. Once at home, the questioner looked it up and read, ‘Horizon, an apparent line separating the sky from the earth, which retreats as one approaches it.’ The title ‘sense of an ending’ nevertheless conveys a certain shape of time by inviting the reader to reflect on how the novel’s events may point towards a possible ending. The sense of an ending, in other words, provides an ex­peri­ence of time, which influences the sense readers make of the novel’s various events. Referring to Kermode’s original work, Ricoeur (1979) suggests that once we understand the notion of a sense of an ending, following the story becomes less important. But the sense of an ending is not a conscious, explicit notion. It is an experience that is subjective, affective (Johnsen et al., 2019), and continuous (Pulk, 2016). But because it is an experience of

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time, it is not always consciously available to actors. In their study of inmates serving time in a Helsinki prison, Johnsen et al. (2019) found that the inmates’ particular experience of time as externally given was individually mediated. Drawing on Theunissen’s (1991) philosophy of time, the authors discuss how individuals turn meaningful temporal existence against externally imposed time, as a coping mechanism. People may sometimes create an alternative experience of time to that which is imposed by breaking up the drudgery and monotony, for example, as described in Dostoyevsky’s depiction of life in Russian labour camps, in which inmates staged plays to enact worlds different from that of the camp. Temporal experience may also extend into distant times in different forms. In A Brief History of Time, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking (2011) sketches three scenarios for the unfolding of the universe, each involving a different way of construing the time of the universe. A first scenario is of the universe expending, then contracting. A second scenario is of an eternally expanding universe. A third scenario is of a ‘localized’ universe. Hawking’s point is that how we see the shape of the trajectory of time influences how we calculate time. The shape of the trajectory affects the very conception of how it feels to be in the flow of time. Hawking’s three trajectories each provide a different explanation of the expansion of the universe over time, which I interpret as an eternally expanding universe, a universe expanding then contracting, and a local universe but without borders. The latter alternative reflects a four-­dimensional manifold which signifies the universe. A four-­dimensional manifold, according to Whitehead, is an ‘n-­dimensional figure where each point has its neighbourhood, like in a Euclidian space (one in which points are represented by linear coordinates), but which put together can take on multi-­ dimensional proportions, including a tangled curvilinear form of intersecting and self-­intersecting sets of coordinates’ (Hernes, 2014: 96). Such models appear at first sight to reflect more conscious than sub-­ conscious assumptions because they are used as a basis for numerical calculations. But as argued by theorists within the social construction of science, such as Knorr­Cetina (1999) and Pickering (1984, 1995a), natural sciences embody assumptions about the nature of the phenomena they study, which I assume Hawking’s three models of the temporality of the expansion of the universe are an example of. Such models likely influence scientists’ collective experience of distant times in the sense that the assumptions become part and parcel of belonging to a community that adopts some temporal models over others. It is not likely that they experience distant times as much as the models themselves. Similarly to when a new employee in a company encounters assumptions about the company’s past or future, scientists who join a

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community where time is a parameter experience a representation of time. Pickering makes this argument forcefully; that scientific communities are also communities of practice, which means that ideas and assumptions are intimately related to what people do and say to one another. It is the representation of time they experience in their encounters with their scientific community. Their experience with the models of time become sedimented as subconscious assumptions about time, which influence their use of models and theories in turn. As we know from the study of organizations, any community develops implicit assumptions as well, which serve to influence the assumptions of individuals as a self-­reinforcing process. In organizational terms, an eternally expanding universe suggests an assumption of eternal growth and expansion. It would signify to or­gan­iza­ tion­al members that planning can occur on the basis of an ever-­present market to buy products or services. A universe expanding but then contracting would send a very different signal to actors. It would make them question when they could expect contraction to begin and what the implications might be. A local universe but without borders implies that one would not assume externally measured time but, rather, the organization’s own time to be the most important. Actors would see initiatives for the future in light of what has taken place in the past, and vice versa. Actors would not assess time to market on the basis of universal clock time and best practices in the field but on the basis of the organization’s internal processes. I have referred above to Wright et al.’s (2013) observation about ex­peri­en­ cing climate change, which is arguably at the distant future end of the scale. The scale can, of course, accommodate many different temporal distances as far as organizations are concerned. A startup entrepreneur may frantically try to raise money within a short window of opportunity and may be well aware that if she cannot do so, the entire project is at grave risk. The head of a division in a large company has a different sense of the passage of time, dominated by quarterly reports, yearly earnings, and strategic goal accomplishment. In the latter view, a window of opportunity will close, not so much because opportunities no longer present themselves, but because introducing novelty may break up routines, which are prominent in larger organizations in particular. If we return to the coronavirus example, as I draft this part of the book there is much talk of a new normal, entailing the end of globalism, new patterns of socializing, new economic trends, and various effects of the pandemic on the fight against global warming. People experience more-­distant developments as they interact with one another; they read social media texts and try to create collective accounts of the more-­distant trajectory that

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makes sense to them. Levy and Spicer (2013) illustrate a distant experience of time in their discussion of collective imaginaries, which they call ‘fossil fuels forever’, ‘climate apocalypse’, ‘technomarket’, and ‘sustainable lifestyles’, arguing that these imaginaries provide a shared sense of meaning regarding future complex issues. Levy and Spicer quote Jessop (2010: 344), who used the term ‘economic imaginaries’ to refer to ‘systems that frame individual subjects’ lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or to inform collective calculation about that world. An organizational parallel to a contracting universe emerges in Sutton’s (1987) paper on organizational death, in which he discusses how or­gan­iza­ tion­al members respond to the decision to disband their organization. Sutton observed that the disbanding was irrevocable and unambiguous. He found, somewhat unexpectedly, that members’ efforts remained fairly constant throughout the remaining time and even increased in some instances. Such ‘in-­between time’ experiences somehow connect the present and the distant. The present is the here-­and-­now experience of time passing as undifferentiated flows of momentary impressions, gestures, or images. Then there is the experience of the distant, which is less direct, more abstract, and formed through social interaction over time. Still, the future event triggered im­port­ ant anticipatory activity among the concerned actors. In Sutton’s study, ‘in between’ in a way bridges the present and the distant. I see it as a temporal experience reaching out from the present towards the more distant but where the present is projected as part of the distant and vice versa. The in-­between experience is, in chronological terms, a sort of neither here nor there. It has a shape that bridges the present experience to the distant. Taking this view invites us to question an assumption, which is that how actors enact and consequently experience time matters to them. We read about individuals who, having been informed that they have a limited amount of time left to live, may either resign themselves to their fate and consciously decide to move on with their lives as they have done before, or they may embark on an exuberant, joie de vivre way of living for their remaining time. Between the organizational and individual levels, it matters to the experience of time how actors collectively articulate such bridging. A long view of the future will likely inspire an experience of time as more flexible and malleable, compared to a short view of time. A longer view of time may, for example, allow actors to feel that actions are relatively more reversible, compared to what a shorter view would allow.

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3 Time-­as-­Practice Introduction A while ago I was sitting at a dinner party beside a social anthropologist, who had conducted studies among indigenous peoples in Borneo and Sahel. ‘It’s interesting’, she said, ‘as far as I know, indigenous tradition often does not include a word for time.’ We discussed how time has been practised rather than measured, such as by sowing, harvesting, hunting, and performing cere­monies to maintain a sense of the cyclical nature of things. However, the argument can easily be made that social science has forgotten the broader notions of time and proceeded with time as that which is measured chrono­ logically. It may be falsely assumed that not applying time in terms of a measure of activity is an exotic feature of indigenous peoples, whereas ac­tiv­ ities in organizations only become temporal to the extent that their duration, timing, and rhythm are measured or otherwise gauged from the outside. Lewis and Weigert (1981) bear out this point in arguing that sociologists, when introducing time in their studies, tend to do so in an ad hoc fashion to support their explanations of social behaviour. In other terms, time exists as an external measure rather than as an innate feature of activity. This chapter elaborates the above discussion of how activity constitutes time, to make time-­as-­practice a constitutive element of the theoretical framework. The review in Chapter 1 discusses how people organized before the introduction of clock time to measure activity in detail. But as Chapter 1 demonstrates, activity may constitute time without being measured as time. For instance, Blue (2019) indicates that time is central to theorizing prac­ tices, because it not only enables tracing of development and persistence of practices, but it also allows us to understand how social life is temporally reproduced (Elias, 1992). Unfortunately, it seems that social scientists have forgotten that activity continues to constitute time. Some exceptions to this rule. For example, in their study of managers’ use of mobile phones, Mazmanian, Orlikowski, and Yates (2013: 1344) show how their use of mobile phones constitutes time:

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0004

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68  Organization and Time So, if you’re on a business trip . . . all the time in cabs on the way to the plane, all the times waiting around in the airport, it just lets you be productive. And not ne­ ces­ sar­ ily just socially productive, you can be productive for Plymouth Investments. It just lets you be, it lets you use your time. You’re not just sitting there wasting time anymore.

Note the emphasis on how being on the phone fills time, not how long or how frequently they talk. Instead, they referred to what they said, under what circumstances they said it (excitement, anger, resignation, confidentiality), or who else said the same thing, and so forth. As shown here, time is not always what is measured as time per se, but time can be expressed through what people do together, how they do it, and what that doing expresses. This resonates with Adam’s (2004: 71) point that we cannot limit our understand­ ing of time to that which is measured. We need to look at how time is socially practised through our involvement with the world and how different forms of practice may constitute different forms of time. This invites a time-­as-­ practice dimension of time. The importance of paying attention to what happens during time-­as-­ practice is that the interaction involves a series of micro-­level interpretations and selective responses, closely related to choice, emergence, and uncertainty (Mead, 1938, in Flaherty, 2003). These potentially important processes typ­ic­ al­ly occur in encounters dominated by interactional flows, during which actors remain open to bringing past actions back into the flow as they move forward in time, in what I call elsewhere a living present (Hernes, 2014). Although utterances follow one another in time, people are continuously engaged in observing one another, thinking back on what has been said and looking ahead while they interact. In this way, interaction takes place in time and may be measured using a clock, if need be. But more importantly, as people interact, their interaction constitutes the time they are in. Flaherty (1999) makes this point forcefully. Conducting a temporal reading of Mead (1934), whose work along with that of Schütz (1967) has most influenced scholars on the temporality of human interaction, Flaherty notes that Mead is mute on the subject of duration, i.e., measured time. But while Mead had less to say about time as an external measure, he had much to say about how time figures in self-­consciousness and human interaction (Flaherty, 1999: 6). In Mead’s conception, interaction enacts time because it can always evolve otherwise and, therefore, involves continuous choices between uncertain outcomes as people consider alternative lines of action (Flaherty, ibid.). Time-­as-­practice is where ‘contingencies of the moment’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 962) play out. For instance, George and Jones (2010: 659)

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point out that activity ‘is grounded in what has come before and what is anticipated to come’. We may infer from their observation that it is in com­ bining choice of what has come before and a different anticipation of what may become that contingencies intervene to influence both continuity and change. The past plays a particularly important role in time-­as-­practice because it signifies how practice serves to embody the past and future through interaction. This is a second point in this chapter: how practice serves as the means through which actors address the past and future. The chapter contributes a novel perspective on time-­as-­practice by sup­ plementing ‘stretched-­outness’ with ‘reach-­outness’. ‘Reach-­outness’ explains how actors address distant past and future events through ongoing practices. Whereas stretched-­outness signifies a direct projection from the present to what is to come, a reach-­outness assumes that practices address a future and a past that lie beyond the temporal structures of actors. Hernes and Schultz (2020) make this point in their discussion of how actors sometimes reach beyond ongoing temporal structures towards distant events, which may help them to uphold or transform the temporal structures that frame their ­activity. Schatzki (2006b), on the other hand, contributes the important observation, that the time of activity is closely linked to continuity and the movement of action. Ongoing activity, in other words, furnishes time-­continuity, and therefore is constitutive of time irrespective of whether or not external time measures are applied to the activity. Moreover, Schatzki (2006a) notes, as practice unfolds, it constitutes time by providing a ‘stretched-­outness’ of time (Schatzki, 2006a). The temporal micro-­dynamics of the stretched-­outness is an iterative movement of continually bridging immediate past and imminent future in the present as actors engage in collective activity. Schatzki’s subtle point is important because it highlights how occupying time enables the expression of meaningful activity that consists of actors and their actions. I choose to distinguish time-­as-­experience from time-­as-­practice, know­ ing full well that the two may appear indistinguishable. For example, I may be working at a rapid pace yet feel that time passes slowly. I may repeat a rit­ ual while knowing that it will soon come to an end. There are accounts of how people in concentration camps celebrated birthdays, knowing well that their lives would likely come to an end. In such cases, it would be important to distinguish the practice of time (rituals) and the experience of time. Therefore, I believe it is useful to separate the two categories, at least ana­lyt­ ic­al­ly, for the sake of rich analysis. For example, whereas in Wajcman’s (2008) research the experience of time may overlap considerably with a sense of acceleration, it is arguably useful to allow individuals to experience time that is not directly related to acceleration, as argued above. For example, the

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feeling of terminating an activity or the feeling of transition from one phase to another may not relate directly to acceleration. Other scholars have made this distinction. Lewis and Weigert (1981) distinguished self time and inter­ action time, whereby interaction time is reserved for the social level. Although several scholars have referred to the various ways in which actors experience time, most organizational studies consider time to be consciously or explicitly ­represented through their interactions. Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011) state, in their analysis of the organizational practice literature, that the temporal flow that practitioners experience is largely absent from social science analysis, which would arguably be helped if their interactive practices were taken into account. One ex­plan­ation, as Varela (2000: 268) argues, suggests that time as experience is the ultimate substrate of temporal consciousness: ‘An[other] important complementary aspect of temporality as it appears under reduction is that consciousness does not contain time as a constituted psy­cho­logic­al category. Instead, temporal consciousness itself constitutes an ultimate sub­ strate of consciousness where no further reduction can be accomplished.’

Practices as Stretched-­Outness of Time Schatzki’s (2006a,b) theory of practice is particularly interesting for or­gan­ iza­tion­al research because if the way that he considers practices fully inte­ grated into the organizing process. In his view, practices are not merely activity that is framed by organizational structures, but practices are in themselves auto-­organizing processes. Schatzki’s view extends even further, by suggesting that practices have their own temporal structures that are upheld and modified on an on-­going basis. Thus, he argues, practices are action manifolds which have a structure component, which consists of four principal phenomena. Three of these phenomena concern actors’ under­ standing of different levels of action and the practice-­relates rules they apply. A fourth dimension, is of more immediate concern in relation to time-­as-­ practice, is what Schatzki (2006a: 1864) calls ‘teleological-­affective structur­ ing, which encompasses a range of ends, projects, actions, maybe emotions, and end-­ project-­ action combinations (teleological orderings) that are acceptable for or enjoined of participants to pursue and realize’. This passage reflects a view whereby actors are ‘thrown into’ tangles of interwoven practices that may sometimes be experiences as undifferentiated flows (Weick et al., 2005), whereas at other times the actors are able to discern certain events around which practices become structured. I follow Schatzki’s (2002) definition of practice as organized nexuses of doings and sayings, but I depart slightly from his distinction between

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practices and material arrangements (Schatzki, 2006a). Whilst mindful that  I  may be over-interpreting his distinction, believe much is gained by considering practices and material arrangements to be both mutually consti­ tutive and mutually substitutive, at least in part. Pickering (1995b) is quite clear on this point in his discussion of mangles of practice, which he sees as human and material agency being ‘emergently intertwined’ (p. 21) where their contours emerge in the temporality of practice. In other words, we can never really distinguish between human and material agency, although we may be able to observe their respective contours. I am also inclined to follow Barad’s (2013) insistence that we should see materiality, or matter, as intra-­active with practices, not interactive, which would suggest that materi­ ality and practices can be separated to then interact with one another. Barad argues that we should see materiality, or matter, as doing rather than sub­ stance (a thing):‘it should be seen as morphologically active, responsive, gen­ erative, articulate, and alive’ (Barad, 2013: 3). This point becomes especially important when we observe what happens in encounters between people in organizations. Practices are evanescent acts of articulation that actors would forget if they did not inscribe them into more stable forms, such as PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, artefacts, and plans, as well as talk about them in various settings. Remember how, according to Husserl’s theory, retention is key to the forming of memory. Mathiesen’s (2013) ana­ lysis of strategy making in a Danish biotech company is a good illustration of how words and materiality become intertwined with one another and some­ times become mutually substitutive: . . . a projector shines a large colourful word cloud onto the screen. The words have been collected as descriptors of the department. The twenty or so people present sit back and look up at the visual graphic, digesting that this is what they said. Then they begin to correct the image: they argue that some words should be larger; that two or three terms actually mean the same thing; that something is missing, etc. The PowerPoint slide with the word cloud on it feels very strategy-­ like. In the meeting, the department uses the cloud as a “conversation piece” to start a discussion about who they are  (2013: 145).

Whereas practices tend to be associated with what people do, what people say also performs work in social contexts. To consider talk as work is an assumption of pragmatism as James (1906) proposed. Following a pragma­ tist approach implies assessing the effects rather than the contents of what is said. Moreover, what people do and what they say are closely interwoven and mutually constitutive. Imagine someone demonstrating the use of software to someone else. The demonstration is a continuous flow of performing

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actions on the screen and explaining what is going on. The activity is like a rolling immanent movement of linking the past and future to each other in the present. Hence, practices, according to Schatzki (2006a) ‘stretch’ time between past and future as actors continually engage in collective activity. It  is well worth quoting Schatzki on this point, as he explains the practice of  making time come towards actors from the past and future in their copresence: Projection is acting for the sake of a possible way of being. When people act, they do so for the sake of some way of being (e.g. being a successful teacher, being fair) — toward which they come in acting. This projecting– coming toward is the future dimension of activity. [. . .]When something matters to someone, that person’s actions reflect, respond to, and/or are otherwise sensitive to it. It is something given, from which he or she departs in acting. This departing–coming from is the past dimension of activity. [. . .] A person, when acting, is always stretched between that toward which that person is coming and that from which he or she is departing. This stretched-­outness is the opening up of the future, present, and past of activity  (Schatzki, 2006a: 1871).

Similarly, George and Jones (2010: 659) point out that activity makes up the experience of time and ‘is grounded in what has come before and what is anticipated to come’. The past plays a particularly important role in time-­as-­ practice because it signifies how practice embodies the past and future through interaction. In this view, practice carries activity through time on a rolling basis. Schütz (1967) discusses this an at individual level, describing temporal experience as incessant processes of retention and protention. Both Schütz and Husserl belong to the phenomenological tradition and were pri­ marily concerned with the experience of being in the flow of time and the role of consciousness. In a practice view, consciousness is substituted by social gestures, including talk and bodily movement, expressed through materiality. For instance, Adam (1995: 68) describes how in classrooms, ‘times are constituted by a world of shared patterns of interaction and com­ munication, collective knowledge and common expectations’. The past is particularly important in time-­as-­practice because it signifies how practice embodies the past and future through interaction. Beyond being practice sites that carry interaction from one moment to the next and from one les­ son to the next, classrooms are also practice sites that express connections to distant pasts and futures of the education system. The roles of rhythm and timing, not widely discussed in practice research, become especially important in a time-­as-­practice view. Although Bourdieu’s

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work has considerably influenced organizational research, he offers a nuanced discussion of time-­as-­practice not widely recognized in the field, in which he describes the socially regulatory dynamics of practices. Collective rhythm, argues Bourdieu, is particularly important for regulating social life, including social integration and division. His point of departure is the importance of temporal structures represented as collective rhythms and how they are interwoven with social norms and social structure. His detailed studies of Kabyle communities show how social norms related to time and space regulate village life. A frequently occurring expression is ‘everything in its time’, which carries great significance for villagers, not just for conducting their tasks in a coordinated manner but also for leading a virtuous life. For example, There is only mockery for the man who, despite getting up “under the stars” or when “dawn has not taken shape” ('alam) has achieved little. Respect for col­lect­ ive rhythms implies respect for the rhythm that is appropriate to each action – neither excessive haste nor sluggishness. It is simply a question of being in the proper place – at the proper time. A man must walk with a “measured pace” (ikthal uqudmis) neither lagging behind nor running like a “dancer”, a shallow, frivolous way to behave, unworthy of a man of honour. So, there is mockery too for the man who hurries without thinking, who runs to catch up with someone else, who works so hastily that he is likely to “maltreat the earth”, forgetting the teachings of wisdom [. . .]  (Bourdieu, 1977: 162)

Yet, collective rhythm is not an absolute force of temporal entrainment of social life. Here lies Bourdieu’s subtle analysis of time as practice. Practices fill time and constitute time, a point that Schatzki (2006a) also makes. However, Bourdieu argues that whereas practices constitute time by stretch­ ing it out (Schatzki’s expression), practices also draw upon time to enable expression in the context of complex social rhythm. On the one hand, prac­ tices are rule-­bound, such as when they comply with the principles of certain collective rhythms. For example, people give gifts on arrival at someone’s house. On the other hand, practices may also be strategies in that they may be timed or extended to yield certain social effects or responses (see also Swidler, 1986, for a discussion). For example, the practice of giving and receiving gifts en­ables certain strategies, such as by delaying reciprocation, which may, in turn, be interpreted as an exercise of power. In other words, while practices provide tempo, duration, and sequencing to social life and thereby constitute time, by the same token that time also becomes a resource from which actors draw to perform various forms of manipulation, such as

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‘holding back or putting off, maintaining suspense or expectation, or on the other hand, hurry­ing, hustling, surprising, and stealing a march, not to men­ tion the art of ostentatiously giving time (“devoting one’s time to someone”) or withholding it (“no time to spare”)’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 7). It is worth dwelling on the rhythmic aspect of time-­as-­practice and con­ sidering another aspect which relates to the dynamics of rhythm. Viewing time as a stretched-­outness of practices may lead us to overlook the fact that practices entail rhythm, and collective practices entail collective rhythm. Tavory (2018: 117) makes an important observation here, that rhythm plays an important role in enabling actors to think about what happens ‘between situations’. In fact, inserting the aspect of rhythm in time-­as-­practice can help bring to attention the potential importance of rhythm more generally in time-­based theorizing. According to Edward  T.  Hall (1984), who studied multiple different societies over several decades, rhythm is essential to human life, and is part and parcel of structure and process, to the extent that one can question if there is such a thing as an eventless rhythm (p. 180). To Hall, the importance of rhythm simply cannot be overstated. As he suggests, ‘rhythm may yet prove to be the most binding of all the forces that hold ­people together’ (p. 170). When, as Schatzki states, people see time coming towards them as they perform their practices, those practices (and the prac­ tices that move away from them into the past) have a rhythmic shape. Here, the nature of rhythm becomes important. Whereas people commonly see rhythm as regular and regularity is an essential part of rhythm, rhythm exhibits different degrees of regularity and irregularity. Poels et al. (2017) make this point in their study of or­gan­ iza­tion­al change. They found they could subdivide rhythm of a process of change into five different subthemes, which they label emphasis, in­ton­ ation, pace, period, and repetition. Then they subdivide the five subthemes into two dimensions of rhythm, whereby emphasis, intonation, and pace belong to one dimension, and period and repetition belong to another. If we superimpose rhythm on time-­as-­practice, then not only does the pro­ cess of performing time-­as-­practice take on a rhythmic character; actors’ anticipation and recall also become oriented towards rhythms of practices as the practices come towards them from the future or fade into the past. This picture becomes more complex as we allow several layers of (ir)regu­ larity of rhythm. But what is perceived as a rhythm in one place or during one period of time may not be perceived as a rhythm at another place or during another period of time. Some people may perceive a rhythm in modern jazz which others cannot. In organizations, differences in rhythm may be a major obs­ tacle to collaboration or transfer of activities. Taking the point further, we

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may argue that extending and translating rhythm belongs to the very essence of organizing. In order to broaden the focus from the purely situated activity to the translation between practices in different places and at different times, I return briefly to the basic dynamics of organizing. In his writings on practice and organization, Nicolini (2007, 2013) emphasizes the stretching out of practices in time and space, and provides cues regarding what this process involves. ‘Stretching out’ as it is used by Nicolini, is a verbalization of the term ‘stretched-­outness’ of practices used by Schatzki (2006a). ‘Stretching out’ implies the challenges of extending practices from one person to the next, from one unit to another, from one organizational level to the next. It was fundamental to early insights into collective organizing in the early days of industrialization. Adam Smith (1986: 113) observed how workhouses allowed the copresence of actors and, hence, coordination: ‘A country weaver, who cultivates a small farm, must lose a good deal of time passing from his loom to the field. When the two trades can be carried on in the same work­ house the loss of time is no doubt much less.’ Stretching out of practices is no less relevant in con­tem­por­ary society. Whereas Nicolini bundles time and space together, it is worth focusing on the stretching out—the translation—of time-­as-­practice. If practices express time, then the translation of practices is also a translation of time. The full circle is then accomplished, as the transla­ tion of time becomes part of the quintessence of organizing. The translation of time as organizing requires the interplay of different time dimensions. I will discuss briefly in Chapter  5 below how the commodification of time relates to Marx’s work, by which practices are translated into monetary value via clock time. But the translation of time also applies to different communi­ ties of practice and does not necessarily occur via the concept of clock time. We can envisage how, through loops and levels, translation enables organiz­ ing to ‘stretch out’ between actors and thereby constitutes organizing as an integral process of temporal translation (Hernes and Schultz, 2020).

Practices as Reach-­Outness of Time Television footage showed a couple of City fans making aeroplane gestures at their United counterparts – a reference to the Munich air disaster – while seats were ripped up and thrown in the away en­clos­ ure after the full-­time whistle. City said they would look at the CCTV footage to identify the supporters guilty of the Munich taunts and the managers of both clubs condemned the incidents. The Guardian, 2020

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The quote above describes how, during a city derby between Manchester United and Manchester City, City supporters made a gesture to mark the 1958 plane crash outside Munich, in which several United players perished. It illustrates how a physical gesture to evoke an incident that occurred more than 60 years earlier may not only inflame anger but also have legal conse­ quences. Those City supporters performed a practice which evoked a distant event. One may ask, is this time? Yes, it is time because it takes us into the past and present, and in doing so, it reveals something about how present practices reach out to the past. Much, if not most, of what is written about time considers that which hap­ pens in the course of time, that which constitutes time as it happens. Drucker, the great management guru, underlined the pervasiveness of time in man­ agement as follows: ‘Everything requires time. It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time’ (Drucker, 1967, in Aeon and Aguigis, 2017: 310). This reflects a view of time that has long dom­ in­ated the social sciences: that of time being something that exists primarily in terms of on-­going activity, enabling it to be extended, curtailed, sped up, spread out, or compressed in various ways. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, an emerging literature studies how actors, through their ongoing activities, also reach out in time towards more-­distant events. An underlying idea of this literature is that actors evoke the past or imagine future events in ways that make them change how they operate in the present. Chapter 1 dis­ cussed Harvey’s (1990) notion of time-­space compression and Bauman’s (2000) idea of liquid society, both of which characterize the increasing instantiation of time that has emerged over the last 20 years. These argu­ ments and observations are no doubt crucial to understanding con­tem­por­ ary organizational life. But whereas time is seen as increasingly fluid and present-­oriented, it is also becoming increasingly extended to take account not just of distant pasts but also of distant futures. 2050 climate goals are a good example of distant futures, but as we argue in a recent paper (Hernes and Schultz, 2020), ‘distant’ may not necessarily indicate chronological

Practices enable reach-outness towards past events

Practices enable carrying forward from past to future

Practices constitute time through stretched-outness

Figure 4  How practices constitute time through stretched-­outness

Practices enable reach-outness towards future events

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terms. ‘Distant’ may simply refer to that which lies outside the ongoing, regu­lar­ized temporal structures that frame actors’ activities in a given setting. But although distant events may be defined as events that take place beyond the day-­to-­day temporal structures that regulates people’s behaviour, it may not always be easy to draw that distinction in time. Consider, for example, the story about a local 1,020 year-­old shop in Japan. Dooley and Ueno (2020) report how women of the Hasegawa family have made the same sweet snack in the form of rice flour cakes in more or less the same way for the last 1,000 years. The cakes, called mochi, have been sold to people visiting the adjoining shrine, which began as a service to pilgrims. The actors per­ form this reach-­outness into the past through practices honed over centuries: They boiled the rice in the water from a small spring that burbles into the shop’s cellar, pounded it into a paste and then shaped it into balls that they gently toasted on wooden skewers over a small cast-­iron hibachi. The mochi are made by hand and rolled in soybean powder. They are then grilled and coated in a sweet sauce made from white miso paste. The rice’s caramelized skin is brushed with sweet miso paste and served to the shrine’s visitors hot, before the delicate treat cools and turns tough and chewy.

As with many family-­run businesses, the shop has a long past (which the great grandmother of the current operator helps to maintain) but also a pro­ jected future of a generation or more. As I write this part of the book in May 2020, scientists and politicians are arguing about the imminent effects of various measures to contain the COVID-­19 virus. Whereas some countries, such as South Korea, have dem­ onstrated the efficacy of early and widespread testing of cases, others, such as the UK and the US, are taking a gradual approach of social distancing and self-­isolation. Although research on the situation is rapidly growing, actors refer frequently to cases in the near past, such as the SARS outbreak in 2003, and the distant past, such as the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. However, whereas 1918 feels distant, so does the act of relaxing rules and the eventual arrival of a vaccine, projected ten to twelve months into the future. On the horizon is the development of vaccines, which has just started, and people are slowly beginning to realize that the future may not be like life before COVID-­19. More concrete measures, such as social distancing, testing, and overall on-­line teaching, are already being planned for the remainder of the Spring semester. As I read the above the above paragraph drafted in May 2020 in February 2021, many of the anticipated measures have been in place on and off for

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about 10 months. Measures that were anticipated 10 months ago, such as social distancing, closing of shops, online teaching and testing have gener­ ated practices that have ‘stretched’ the 10-­month long period. In other words, reach-­out practices, such as preparing for online teaching, have transformed into stretched-­out practices. In the meanwhile, pharma companies, who immediately implemented R&D practices to create vaccines 10 months ago (aimed at a somewhat distant future then), are mostly past the approval stage and have embarked on the roll-­out stage of their vaccines. The difference between stretched-­outness and reach-­outness in relation to practices may emerge in scholars’ different views of the concept of temporal structures (see Figure 4). Orlikowski and Yates (2002) use a stretched-­outness lens to define temporal structures as describing recurring events and activities. For ex­ample, a temporal structure may be described in terms of pacing, speed, rhythm, and timing of events and activities, all of which may be seen as qualitative variations in practices instead of clock time measures. Hernes and Schultz (2020) as well as Rowell et al. (2016) consider activities and events as necessary elements of temporal structures but add that events and activities also have temporal orientations. In other words, recurring events, for example, such as strategy workshops, perform temporal structuring not just by being scheduled at certain intervals (stretched-­outness) but the tem­ poral reach they represent, such as members engaging in collaborative prac­ tices to define five-­year strategies (reach-­outness). Hence, the events and activities of temporal structures also embody temporal orientation, such as quarterly reports being oriented three months into the past as they relay information about the nature, duration, and sequence of activity in those preceding three months. Knorr Cetina (1999) illustrates eminently this point in her analysis of large experiments in physics, which run for more than 20 years, but in which ­people still think beyond the horizons of the experiments: Experiments come in generations, but participants think beyond them. The communitarian ontology involves temporal orientations toward the "life" (time) of an experiment and simultaneously toward future generations, especially the one succeeding a currently planned, constructed, or running experiment. The notion of genealogical time can perhaps capture this double orientation. Participants not only think beyond the lifetime of their current experiment, they also organize activities that point beyond it and involve themselves in these activities. Such activities, just a trickle at first, nonetheless begin long before serious planning is pursued. In fact, preparatory work for the next experiment may begin at or before a current experiment is deigned ready to go ahead.  (Knorr­Cetina, 1999: 187)

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The reach-­outness of practices may also be subtle and implicit, residing in almost seamless dynamics between social interaction and material artefacts, as Beunza’s (2019) analysis of the practices of Wall Street traders illustrates: My observations at Todd’s desk had made clear that statistical arbitrage was not a  purely solitary endeavour, as he combined algorithms with social cues and ­conversations with other desks. These allowed him to exclude some stocks from the book that his algorithm traded, or stop his algorithm altogether. (Beunza, 2019: 1825)

Beunza’s analysis is particularly useful for understanding the interplay between practices and materiality in defining practices as reach-­outness of time. The materiality described by Beunza is expressed through algorithms, which become a medium through which distant events are enacted through actors’ practices. The materiality of algorithms enables reach-­outness and provides a platform for social interaction through, for example, conversa­ tions. Finally, an example of temporal ‘reach-­outness’ of practices through materiality is Apple chief designer Jonathan Ive’s description of how Steve Jobs would ‘read’ the company nearly every day by inspecting models of various products in the design lab: When Steve comes in, he will sit at one of these tables. If we’re working on a new iPhone, he might grab a stool and start playing with different models and feeling them in his hands, remarking on which ones he likes best. Then he will graze by the other tables, just him and me, to see where all the other products are heading. He can get a sense of the sweep of the whole company, the iPhone and iPad, the iMac and laptop and everything we’re considering. That helps him see where the company is spending its energy and how things connect. And he can ask, “Does doing this make sense, because over here is where we are growing a lot?” or questions like that. He gets to see things in relationship to each other, which is pretty hard in a big company. Looking at the models on these tables, he can see the future for the next three years.  (Isaacson, 2013: 346)

The use of algorithms, and other forms of materiality such as models, are intertwined with what people do and, therefore, extend from practices and very complex ways to address the future. It is important to focus on what practices address in their reach-­outness. The answer here is ‘events’. The past and future consist of events, which actors bring into the present through practices. As part of this process, practices perform two functions. One is to

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address distant events and make those events meaningful to actors. If, for example, the actors perform an operation that either repeats an age-­old prac­ tice (such as making an instrument) or is an exercise of a future operation (such as an emergency operation), the events they address become meaning­ ful to them through their collective practices. The powers of practices to give meaning to distant events is substantial, as the above-­noted incident at the Manchester United vs Manchester City match illustrates. Adam (2004), for example, notes how in studies of ancient rituals how people perform dances as part of a scheduled ritual while simultaneously evoking the gods’ eternal existence. Levi-­Strauss (1955: 431) suggests that practices sometimes have origins in myths, what he calls ‘mythological time’. Mythological time relates to events beyond historical time, which is made meaningful to performers in the present. Practices serve to make the myths meaningful to those who per­ form the practices. Another function of practice as reach-­outness is to enable distant events to give shape to the present, which is of importance for studying innovation processes. Hernes and Pulk (2020) show, for example, in a study of a ship design and construction company, how actors held regular meetings during the construction phase to monitor progress and solve problems. Although the regularity of the meetings is important, also important is that the partici­ pants from various functions know that the next meeting is oriented towards solving issues that lie before them. In other words, the meetings not only occur regularly but also project the construction into the next phase. Hernes and Pulk (2020) also report how the company staff held product design ses­ sions to generate ideas that might be realized some time in the future. Aiming for eventual application inspired the actors to think outside of the box, by using materials and engaging in activities markedly different from their ordinary workday context. The activities were clearly directed towards possible events sometime in the future when the market situation would allow them to turn one or more of their wild ideas into reality. An interesting aspect of the study by Hernes and Pulk is how practices are shaped differ­ ently depending on the nature of events addressed through those practices. The problem-­solving meetings during the construction phase of vessels were structured to allow for practices to address concrete solutions directly, such as discussing concrete measures to make sure that parts could be installed in the right order. During the product development sessions, on the other hand, the participants were asked to envisage situations that would require entirely novel technologies, which explains why they engaged in more creative prac­ tices than what actors did during problem-­solving sessions aimed at solving imminent problems.

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4 Time-­as-­Events Introduction ‘Event’ is a concept used almost indiscriminately in the literature but whose meaning remains vague. Hardly a paper or book is published without the use of ‘events’ to denote an occasion or incident. Somehow, the concept has become shorthand for anything that happens in time or space which is not going on continuously. People tend to get off track, however, when they try to make sense of the concept of events. Common questions are, when do events take place, or how do we know that an event is taking place? When events ‘take place’, they are more like non-­events in the sense that actors do not yet know how, whether, or what kind of events the situ­ations will become. This view of events differs markedly from how organizational studies commonly view events. With regard to the sociology of time, works of economic sociology such as Beckert’s (2016) refer extensively to events but tend to assume that events wait there to happen to actors. In organization studies, the view of events as happening to actors characterizes Ancona et  al.’s (2001: 648) rendering, in which events ‘don’t just transpire every day; they occur at specific times throughout the day’, which also reflects a view of events as exogenous to actors. Such events, according to Cooper (1976), are events that are seen out of the corner of our eye. They do not lie in front of us, nor do they lie behind us. They simply happen as a result of ‘objective chance’ (Cooper, 1976: 1004). The answer to questions, such as, when do events take place? or how do we know that an event is taking place? is that that events do not take place; they become. They concresce, to use Whitehead’s (1929) term. To concresce implies emerging to become that event. Philosophers of time tend to argue that events are time; there is nothing to time beyond events. This view is consistent with the discussion in Chapter 2, where I draw on Husserl and the image of the comet’s tail to suggest how events emerge from activity in the present. A view of events as simply happening invites actors to judge whether events are good or bad, and if those events lie in the past, people may well consider them irrelevant to the future. In contrast, a view of events as emerging invites entirely different questions, such as how actors may see past events Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0005

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differently in order to view a different future. In the first view, actors select and then judge events to be relevant or not. In the second view, events are a means to move on in time and to create a sense of one’s past and future. People often assume that, on the one hand, there is the present, which is a flow-­like phenomenon, and on the other hand, there are events that may be observed from the present. This is partly right. But events do not come out of nowhere. They emerge from on-­going practices. This point is important, because it emphasizes how actors, as they move on in time, retain processes as events. It directs attention at how events are also given shape through the activity in the present. Taken together, these two points tell us that time-­as-­practice—as that which constitutes the present—is interwoven with time-­as-­events. Events derive from practices in the present, and events are addressed through practices in the present. They emerge through an­tici­pa­tory practices, are experienced, and then recalled in a continual movement of on-­going practices. How we view events has important consequences for understanding organizational continuity and change. The organizational change literature has associated events with occasions in which substantial change is decided, planned, or otherwise triggered by, for example, improvisation. Such events have come to be seen as disruptive (Orlikowski, 1996) and, hence, are part of a view of change as disruptive. This view of events, however, tends to make them more eventful than they really are. Events are a means to make time a medium through which actors define their trajectories through time (Hernes, 2017) as they define their movement from past to future. In ana­lyt­ic­al terms, events enable time to be organized into parts of varying duration that can be assembled and connected according to their particular eventness. Eventness, however, is not a matter of size or importance but of distinction. An event becomes an event by distinguishing itself from the ongoing flow of time. In comparing the duration of marriage ceremonies between American-­ European and the Hopi tribe, Hall (1984) observes that whereas in the American-­European culture a modern marriage ceremony typically lasts less than a day, in the Hopi culture it involves 26 different events spanning an entire year. Whereas the difference in duration is interesting, probably more so are the respective eventnesses of the two ceremonies in the sense of the distinction it marks between unmarried and married life. Whereas a time view understands events as isolated happenings, in a temporal view events are inherently co-­constitutive; they become interrelated through the activities and processes that constitute the events (Hernes, 2014). Translated into the language of temporality, this means that actors at any time find themselves in the becoming of an event. It can be the sending

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of a simple email, a conversation, a meeting, or a more extended process, such as a project. How an event of the present eventually takes shape depends on how it becomes an event through connections with past and future events. For example, a discussion using a PowerPoint presentation, which projects future activities, turns the PowerPoint presentation into an event. The ac­tiv­ities of discussing, debating, or negotiating through the presentation’s ma­teri­al­ity make it into an event at which actors imagine parts of the future. This ex­ample shows how there is no defined duration of events. Instead they are defined by their eventness (Bakhtin, in Cunliffe et al., 2004) defined as distinctiveness. Talking at a planning meeting may allow actors to imagine big events in the form of breakthrough innovations that potentially last for decades may make the talk distinct, although its distinctiveness (eventness) will likely change over time. Events are phenomena that actors can use to describe collective action and structure and to provide identity and shape to processes. Without events, time would be reduced to more or less undifferentiated flows working in endless loops, because events are the time that comes towards and goes away, the essential temporal flows that constitute life. Whitehead took the notion of events to its ultimate limit by seeing any entity as events. Whitehead’s rad­ ical idea is that events constitute entities (Hernes, 2014). Entities are the events that characterize the entities. A violin is all the events, including all the encounters between various entities that went into making it, selling it, playing it, and listening to it as that particular violin. Organizational scholars have pursued this line of reasoning, that individuals and groups may be represented as patterns or clusters of events. It is consistent, for example, with Weick’s (1979) argument that groups are described by the acts that occur within the group. As acts or patterns of acts persist over time and become interlocked, they are grouped by the use of events in order to be available for retrieval or analysis. The concept of events is a necessary tool to understand everyday activity. People often frame ongoing activity by events that have a start and an end, such as the predefined ending of a business meeting. The very fact of events having beginnings and endings encourages people to focus their interactions on achieving settlement before the encounter ends. By nature, events are a means for practitioners to temporally group ongoing activity to create agency for change, particularly through face-­to-­face processes (Hendry and Seidl, 2003; Hernes, 2014) when people share, extend, or contest one another’s views (Boje, 1991) while being aware that the event has a definite end. Compared to the usual flow of activity in organizations, events can be viewed as time-­ space compressions (Hassard, 2002) of social processes and human experience,

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in which interactions converge on selected issues while being temporarily closed off from ongoing operational routines (Hendry and Seidl, 2003). At events temporally bounded by beginnings and endings, defining the boundaries of what is and is not part of an experience (Shipp and Richardson, 2021) can be challenging. However, Hendry and Seidl (2007) point out that actors’ perceived temporal restriction of events makes the activity of the event develop differently than it would if the event could continue in­def­in­ite­ly. Events are also a means for actors to refer to past or future activity. When people act, their acts are framed by a current event, which implies that when they address distant past and future events in the present, the nature of the practices in the present influence not just which distant events they address, but also how they make sense of those events. This chapter’s primary aim is to explain a process use of events, as becoming-­ phenomena. The chapter emphasizes the difference between events as ­happening to actors and events as enacted by actors. From there, the chapter describes three different views on events. Events as unique happenings, or singular events (Hernes and Schultz, 2020), exhibit qualities that make them symbolic. Events as representative happenings, or exemplary events (Hernes and Schultz, 2020), represent epochs or achievements. Both these types of events emerge from eventualization of practices taking place in the present.

The Indivisible Present Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations. So, just as it is nat­ural to say that we perceive spatial distances and other relations between objects (I see the dragonfly as hovering above the surface of the water), it seems natural to talk of perceiving one event following another (the thunderclap as following the flash of lightning), though even here there is a difficulty. For what we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Imagine a meeting in which people discuss a possible strategy for the coming year. People engage in direct conversation. The interaction is filled with words and gestures. Perhaps they make use of PowerPoint presentations as well, which have graphs and bullet points on them. Once the meeting begins, they

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are aware that they must make some progress by the end of the meeting, for example in two hours, but they do not know what the meeting will actually produce in terms of an agreed course of action, although some may want to pursue certain agendas. During the meeting, they stay mostly on course by sticking to the agenda. This is not easy, since impressions and ideas from other past encounters may at any time enter the discussions. A two-­hour meeting is an immensely complex process, filled with words, glances, and gestures. It is also temporally complex, because although actors may experience it chronologically in the sense that every word, glance, or gesture is preceded by another word, glance, or gesture, the people in the meeting refer back and forth in time. Someone, for example, refers to something that was said earlier in the meeting in order to put the meeting on a different trajectory. Someone may connect something said in the present to what has been said earlier, which makes people see things differently altogether, and there may or may not be sufficient commitment to collectively explore a solution that is different from what was done a few moments earlier. What has then happened is a disruption caused by someone short-­cutting the process, which the actors experience chronologically. Such a situation is common. Although people experience time as succession, the past of successive moments is not necessarily configured as succession in people’s consciousness. This means that although our temporal experience may occur as successive instants, when we think about those experiences, we do not picture them as successive moments. We picture them in a narrative form in which events have specific antecedents and c­ onsequences, in which events have their own stories. The meeting is a combination of successive moments and attempts to retroactively recombine moments to enact the remaining future of the meeting. Whereas each moment, however fleeting, is a present in itself, that present is an individual experience. However, we do not subscribe to col­lect­ive experience as the sum of individual experiences. The collective temporal experience is a temporal whole, a totality that evolves during the meeting. The idea of time-­as-­events rests on the idea that the present is a unitary experience. During the present experience, people have difficulty separating parts of the meeting from one another and search for a pattern to define the meeting, much as they search for a pattern that defines a melody the first time they listen to it. Every ‘new now’ occurs against the background of a collective sense of direction through time. This temporal whole may have a chronological duration of a few hours, but more important, it is a collective experience which, although having a beginning and end, is much more than that. It is an

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ongoing experience of enacting that which has gone before the meeting and that which may come after the meeting. It is one of many instances that make sense in light of a tail back into the past and a projection into the future. The collective experience, which actors will retrospectively refer to as ‘that meeting’, is in the becoming throughout the meeting. Moreover, the inter­actions taking place are particular to that meeting. For example, ‘Mary said. . .’ refers to what Mary said at a stage of the meeting. However, in order for someone to say, ‘Mary said’, there must be some degree of collective ex­peri­ence that spans the entire meeting to that point when the person says, ‘Mary said’. This collective experience of togetherness in time, within the constraints of the meeting’s chronological beginning and end, is what en­ables Schütz’s (1967) idea of (temporal) we-­ness. What makes the meeting an event is that people can refer to it later as that meeting. It becomes an event by becoming a ‘discernible unit capable of narration’ (Koselleck, 2004: 106). Multiple meetings and other types of events may become narrated as belonging to a trajectory of events. They can be referenced and provide a collective sense of being in time. This is not the flow of time, which we cannot articulate, but collectively created traces in the flow of time. If the flow of time does anything at all, it enables the collectively created traces. If there were no underlying flow of time, there would be no traces to be made. Aristotle’s point was precisely this: no movement, no time. Augustine’s chief accomplishment was to distinguish temporality from time, by disentangling temporality as the ongoing construction in the now from the unstoppable and unidirectional flow of time. Augustine stated that the present, which is described by what he called attention, is constituted by the past (memory) and the future (expectation). To Augustine, however, neither the past nor the future are in any way real, because they represent that which has been (and can, consequently, never be retrieved) and that which is not yet. Hence, the only real present is the present, of which neither past nor future can be part. While neuroscientists have for decades explored the length of a present moment as the human brain experiences it, philosophers have debated whether it makes sense at all to speak of a duration. To speak of the duration of the present creates logical obstacles, since a duration implies a before and after, and every subpart of that present would also have a before and after, which would lead to an infinite regression towards a present as a point ­without duration, thereby negating the very idea of the present as duration. Aristotle concluded this already. Being in the present, he argued, implies being between the past and future. He formulated it as being where the past ends and the future begins. Applying his logical method to time, he carefully

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built the premises of his reasoning on the assumption that for each and every present, there can be only one past and one future. Hence, he reasoned, one cannot divide the present into subparts, because, for example, if we divide the present into two halves, the future of the first half would come before the past of the second half, which contradicts the assumption of only one past and one future. Here lies a fundamental insight of Aristotle: the indivisibility of the temporal present. The issue of division of time is central to the phil­ oso­phy of time and may be traced to Zeno’s parables, such as the race of Achilles versus the tortoise. The nondivisibility of the present has been a basic assumption of later philo­sophers of time as well. It does not make sense to state a duration of the present in terms of measured time, but it does makes sense to define the present as a continuous unity of temporal experience (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). In Hernes (2014), I discuss the concept of the ‘living present’ borrowed from Deleuze (2004). In the living present, I argue, actors experience time as undifferentiated flows. In meetings, for example, discussions move back and forth as people may go back to things said earlier, to project the flow of the meeting in a different direction. This is what I call ‘temporal float’: the ways that actors may bring forward, reuse, repeat, and re-­define utterances, gestures, and images in the flow of exchange (Hernes, 2014: 86). A main idea underlying this reasoning is that during interaction in the present, people experience time in its crude form, which is interrupted as the encounter comes to an end. As the encounter ends, the temporal float is no longer possible because the interaction through which it was possible no longer exists. People may then refer to things that were said, but they can no longer shape the remainder of the meeting the way they could while the meeting was ­taking place. I discuss in Hernes (2014) how, once an encounter has reached closure, it attains the status of an event. Before closure, it was an event in the making, but the outcome was not settled before closure, at which the encounter becomes ‘that encounter’. Becoming an event means that once closure is reached, people can talk about the encounter and can bring it into other living presents as a particular event associated with actors and outcomes. Moreover, it enters event formation, which we may see as a structuring of events in time (Hernes, 2014: 75). The process of distancing from the present is relevant for the dynamics of life in organizations. As actors ex­peri­ence the temporal present as flows, they strive to extend those flows into the past and future, and as part of their sensemaking they assign flows to events. As mentioned above, Mead explains how experiences in the present do not occur as delineated events but may begin to crystallize as events as they fade into the immediate past. Much the same argument may be made about the future.

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The above discussion underscore how the making of the meeting as an emerging event occurs through social interaction. Simpson (2009) notes how Mead located social interaction in the flow of time, where the social act is a conversation of gestures through which social meanings are constructed, reinforced, and disrupted. This, Simpson argues, is how events and experiences of continuity are ‘intricately interwoven and synthesized through human conduct’ (Simpson, 2009: 1337). In this view of social acts as a process interwoven through time, it does not make sense to divide the meeting into temporal segments as it is unfolding, because any partitioning would sever the interlaced interactive processes back and forth in time during the meeting and consequently distort the the temporal experience of the meeting as a whole.

Eventualization of Practices The above discussion suggests how time flows from an indivisible present to take the form of events. We are witnessing here the eventualization of time-­ as-­practice. Much of what scholars have written about time in organization studies assumes that time-­as-­experience is synonymous with event time, which stands in opposition to clock time. This literature overlooks how the experience of time in the present takes the form of events as the present wanes into the past. At the same time, although actors experience time as flow as they perform practices in the present, they address past, con­tem­por­ ary, and future events through their practices. Some organizational scholars (e.g., Hussenot and Missioner, 2016) have studied how that occurs, but much more needs to be done on this question, because it will help explain in more detail the interactive dynamics of phenomena that organizational scholars have observed, such as evoking the past (Schultz and Hernes, 2013) and temporal work (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013). Whitehead came close to articulating this process through his concept of immanence, whereby events, including current ones, connect internally with one another (Hernes, 2014). Whitehead’s assumption is that the present event becomes an event as ­processes at that event connect immanently with processes of other, past, con­tem­por­ary, and future imagined events. In social systems such as organiz­ ations, however, although actors connect with other events through their interactions, the eventness (Bakhtin, in Morson, 1991) of the event is not settled until after it has taken place and will change with the flow of time. When using the term ‘eventualization’ (see Figure 5), I assign a double meaning to ‘eventual’. The first is that when leaving the present, practised time turns into events. Events emerge from the raw experience of time as

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Time-as-Events  89 Living present Past Integration of events with existing events

Future Eventualization of present-aspractices

On-going practices

Future event enactment through practices

Figure 5  Eventualization of practices

undifferentiated flows in an indivisible present (Hernes, 2014) that are provisionally grasped as they unfold, which is illustrated by the above example of a meeting. The provisional grasping is not entirely without a sense of direction, though. We can see it more like ongoing processes of collective im­pro­ visa­tion, much the way that Barrett (1998: 613, 618), an experienced jazz player, describes how musicians probe possible novel patterns among streams of ongoing activity, Improvisers enter a flow of ongoing invention, a combination of accents, cymbal crashes, changing harmonic patterns, that inter-­weave throughout the structure of the song. They are engaged with continual streams of activity; interpreting ­others' playing, anticipating based on harmonic patterns and rhythmic conventions, while simultaneously attempting to shape their own creations and relate them to what they have heard . . . In order to “comp” or accompany soloists ef­fect­ ive­ly, jazz musicians need to be very good listeners. They need to interpret o ­ thers' playing, anticipate likely future directions, make instantaneous decisions in regard to harmonic and rhythmic progressions. But they also may see beyond the player's current vision, perhaps provoking the soloist in different direction, with accents and chord extensions.

Such improvisation also conditions ongoing temporal experience. Hatch (1999: 93) also observing jazz in action, notes, ‘As the past is invoked with the playing of a head, so too is anticipation of the improvising to come, thus the future is invited into the present via expectation created by recollection of similar experiences in the past.’ Importantly, as actors strive to extend those flows into the past and future, they assign those flows to events. For example, Weick et al. (2005) describe how actors extract events from undifferentiated flows. Mead (1932) explains how actors continually encounter streams of experiences in the present which do not occur as delineated events but may begin to crystallize as events as they wane into the immediate past. Drawing on Schütz (1967), who describes how projections of future events are woven into the present, we may argue that a similar process occurs in the formation of future events.

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The second intended meaning of eventualization of time-­as-­practice is as an eventuality. This meaning offers an alternative to the common belief that events wait there to happen, that people more or less stumble over them like bumps in the road. Understanding events as happening reflects the assumption that once events happen, they remain those same events forever. This assumption does not, however, account for how an experience, although it becomes an event, may become a different event as we move through time and the event makes incursions into novel experiences. Something that philo­sophers of time have in common regarding events is their belief that events are never really actual, but they are always a potentiality to be actualised. In a temporal view, actualization happens through practices. To see a thing as an actualization of potentiality is a premise of a process ontological view of organizations (Hernes, 2014). Instead of waiting there to happen like bumps in the road (Bateson, 1972), events are emergent and become per­sist­ ent events through actors’ practices as they move through time. Sometimes a minor experience or discovery is barely noticed but becomes part of a more consequential event at a later stage. Studies of innovation processes repeatedly demonstrate this phenomenon. The famous Post-­it® note took about 12 years to materialize from when Art Fry and Spence Silver started tinkering with ideas at dispersed locations of 3M (Garud and Karnøe, 2010). At the time of its conception, if we define that as the time of developing the technology’s early stages, it was not yet a product; it was more like a nameless solution to a particular set of problems. It was eventual, something in the making, which became the events of the Post-­it® 12 years later, and even 12 years later it only hit the market. It was not yet the Post-­it® note seen almost everywhere in homes and in offices. This underscores why eventualization of time-­as-­practice signifies not just the becoming of events but of eventual events. The transition from ongoing practices to events is important because it is through that transition that questions of continuity and novelty become settled. We  may thus argue that what Emirbayer and Mische (1998) call the agency of the moment is actually the agency of the moment as it becomes an event. In Husserl’s conception of retention and protention, discussed in Chapter 2, he does not discuss the selection of what is to be retained. Maybe that is lo­gic­al in a consciousness view of time. But in sociomaterial settings such as or­gan­iza­tions, which have to move collectively forward in time, selection becomes crucial. The fate of organizations may be decided in that very t­ransition because in that transition, certain streams of interaction become crystallized into events, whereas others may, at least temporarily, become forgotten. As a routine business meeting to monitor progress draws

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to a close, actors agree on adjustments, and as the meeting becomes an event, it forms continuity with what went before. The following quote is taken from Orr (1998) shows how distancing from the present can be complex and continuously changing as people shift attention between the here and now and events in the past or future. At the restaurant, Tom, Jim, and Joan, three of the four members of the sub-­team, are talking about what to do with the technical specialist, Sam, who will be with them later in the week. The idea is to try to use his expert assistance to clean up machines that have been chronically troublesome, although the bad machines change from week to week. This reminds Tom that Sam had been with him the last time he had a service call on one of the machines he had visited the previous day. Then he tells Jim that the two machines at that account are still being heavily used, although less so than they had been. Jim responds that he and someone else had been to another of their problem machines not long ago for a crashing problem. This provokes a general discussion, because this machine has had recurrent crashing problems, and the usually suspect components have been replaced several times. In this instance, they were replaced again, even though the symptoms that usually lead to replacement were absent. This case reminds Joan that after she replaced a set of components, Sam and Susie discovered that the new ones were defective and were causing additional problems.  (Orr, 1998: 16)

Throughout the conversation, remarks are oriented towards the present and the past or future, such as when Tom says, ‘Then he tells Jim that the two machines at that account are still being heavily used, although less so than they had been.’ Tom telling Jim occurs through interactive talk in the present, which expresses something about the two machines that have been less heavily used in the past. Here we are witnessing acts that occur from streams of activity and experience to events, such as ensuing discussions about replacement of machines.

Singular and Exemplary Events There is a relatively small kernel of knowledge that is clear, distinct, and consistent in itself. This kernel is surrounded by zones of various grad­ations of vagueness, obscurity, and ambiguity. There follow zones of things just taken for granted, blind beliefs, bare suppositions, mere guesswork, zones in which it will do merely to “put one’s trust”. And finally, there are regions of our complete ignorance. Schütz (1959: 78)

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More than a decade ago, I was driving through Central Europe. I was pulling out from a petrol station onto a road with a steady stream of cars driving at relatively high speeds. Suddenly, in a split second, I discovered a car coming towards me, in my lane, at high speed. I instinctively veered into the rescue lane. The incident probably lasted no more than a fraction of a second. A fraction of a second, and I would most likely not be writing this book. Nor would anyone else in the car have survived the crash. Strangely, I remember vividly the driver from that fraction of a second, his black hair and his black moustache. I remember that he had at least four people in his car, maybe five, perhaps his family. And I remember his car, a green Opel. That split second, that brief moment during which our lives were hanging in the balance, has stood out for me in all its rich detail all these years later. Recalling it fills me with a mixture of fear and thankfulness for being alive. But recalling the event is not limited to retrospection. The event has made me more cautious. In other words, recalling the event today also gives it a prospective role in my consciousness when I drive my car. I am unaware whether it always makes me more cautious, but I know that it makes me more cautious when I bring forth the event to the present moment through reflection. If I recall the incident while driving, I have a sense of having recalled it many times before. An interesting question is why the incident, although it lasted a split second, stands out in my memory. Naturally, I remember it because we nearly lost our lives during that split second. But the vividness of detail makes it a unique event. The traffic incident exemplifies a singular event (Hernes and Schultz, 2020) because it stands out in its clarity of detail. I may remember many other events that have emerged during my several decades of driving, but they stand out less. They tend to represent many other events, which is why we call them exemplary events in Hernes and Schultz (2020). The distinction is inspired in part by works in cognitive psychology by Trope and Liberman (2003, 2010), who distinguish between what they call high-­ construal-­level events and low-­construal-­level events. High-­construal-­level events tend to be described in simpler and more abstract terms, whereas low-­construal-­level events tend to be described in more-­complex and concrete terms. An interesting fact about Trope and Liberman’s theory is that high-­construal-­level events tend to be distant, while low-­ construal-­level events tend to take place in the near past or future. It is not surprising that recent events are described in more concrete terms than are distant events. What is more surprising is how distant events are described more in terms of their essential features. This would seem counterintuitive to many people who think that events that fade into the more distant past or are imagined in

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the distant future would seem more blurred than if they were recalled from the near past or imagined in the near future. What Trope and Liberman imply is that there is blurring at different levels. We can recall more details of events that happened yesterday than events from ten years ago. Yet, an event from ten years ago may stand out more in our memory because we retain a few essential features of that event. Following this line of argument, it is possible to imagine that as events fade into the past, they transform through a process of essentializing. From vivid details recalled with near-­total clarity, events gradually take on more essentialist features, which do not necessarily detract from their vivid features. However, essentializing does not imply lack of ambiguity. As Cappelen and Strandgaard Pedersen (2020) show in their study of a culinary movement in Istanbul, Turkey, actors may operate with various levels of ambiguity in creating a shared understanding of distant past events. The authors specify that actors may operate with ambiguity of origin, artefacts, or ownership. The interrelating of events matters for how we understand the process of essentialization of singular events. Their essentialization evolves as they connect to multiple other past and future events that emerge as actors move through time. Most other events become connected to singular events through association. Hernes and Schultz (2020) call these exemplary events. We use the term ‘exemplary’ because they may be associated to singular events from the same or from a completely different period. Launching a new beer brand, for instance, involves numerous exemplary events that represent the process of launching beer brands. Those exemplary events may also be associated with selected singular events in the distant past that the actors associate with the new brand (Hatch and Schultz, 2017). In the years since that traffic incident, I am more likely to be cautious when I think back on the incident, but I do not always think back on it. Whereas the original event a decade ago stands out in its clarity of detail, all other traffic events are fuzzier in their detail. They fade into my memory as having taken place and are often forgotten forever. What sets them apart from the original is that they have features that are more exemplary than the original has. When I encounter such incidents, they stand out as belonging to a group of near-­accidents. This does not make such incidents any less important than the type of incident. Association is a term that resolves the problem of sameness that Schütz (1967) raised. Schütz asks a question of ontological importance: in a world of flux where nothing ever stays the same, how can we account for sameness? It is, of course, an age-­old problem, which St. Augustine confronted in his writings on time and which other philosophers of time address, such as by

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suggesting that the past can never be revisited and, hence, never repeated. If every experience is unique, we confront a world that is forever unknown to us. The assumption here is temporal; even repetition of an identical act under identical conditions will not be the same as the previous act(s) because it is a recurrence (Schütz, 1959: 79). In other words, an identical experience cannot be the same because every repetition adds a new past of one extra occurrence. Here is where Schütz, drawing on Husserl, states that the events we expect are not unique. They cannot be, because that would presuppose that we knew them in advance, which we cannot. Instead, the uniqueness of future events that allows us to anticipate the future are the kinds of events that we expect. They are events that we associate with other events. This is consistent with Whitehead’s thinking that events do not replicate one another but are represented in one another. In other words, they fold into one another through association. If we understand the world surrounding actors as formations or structures of interrelated events, we avoid the problem of sameness, because every emerging event emerges through association with other events. Its features manifest through the ways that they relate to other past or future events. Organizational research has also made use of singular future events. Singular future events do not abide by the same criteria as those of singular past events because they do not offer the same degree of evocative clarity. Scenario planning is an example. In the original work of Wack (1985a,b), scenario planning is a way for actors to envisage multiple possible futures, to mitigate harmful contingencies or to exploit long-­term opportunities while translating those contingencies or opportunities into actionable strategies. In two 1985 Harvard Business Review articles, Wack discussed basic features of scenario planning, in which he sought to dispel ideas that scenario planning is merely about making future projections. That, he argued, would provide information about possible future events but would do nothing to influence managers’ mental models: ‘scenarios must come alive in “inner space,” the manager’s microcosm where choices are played out and judgment exercised’ (Wack, 1985b:140). Kahn and Wiener (1967: 6, in Amer et al., 2013: 23) describe scenario planning as ‘a set of hypothetical events descriptive of alternative futures resulting from various chains of trends and policies, which enable actors to move back and forward between the present and the future’. Scenario events are virtual yet real. They are a means to come to terms with a future that people cannot readily predict or know in advance but may understand (MacKay and McKiernan, 2004), which requires elab­or­ate processes of analysing events in the external environment to deduce actionable options within the organization (Wack, 1985b).

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The Intraconnecting of Events Events derive their features from being related to other events through the principle of immanence, derived from Whitehead (1929). Events are, as Whitehead writes, created through immanence, which implies that they connect intra-­actively. Interacting implies that events remain separate, which enables the establishment of causal relations among them. Intra-­acting, on the other hand, implied in Whitehead’s treatment of time, assumes that events connect internally, as Barad (2013) might say, which implies that they connect through what goes on at those events. This is what enables analysis of how, when actors anticipate future events, they make that event part of the practices in the present. Immanent relating implies that events connect internally and not through their external features, i.e., by what is going on within those events rather than what characterizes those events. For instance, a distant event is brought into focus through ongoing practices, which, in Mead’s terms, constitute the material of the present, in other words, the materials through which actors enact past or future events. But actors do not enact past and future events only through the materials of the present. They also interrelate them through various materials of the present, including material artefacts. It is possible to envisage an ecology of events in which singular events remain more central and enduring, and exemplary events derive from singular events, but evolve or become replaced as actors encounter new experiences. Figure 6 below shows in a simplified way how singular and exemplary events are addressed and interrelated through practices in the present. A conventional approach suggests that events are related to one another by the stretch of time that sets them apart. This implies several things, the most important being that there actually is a stretch of time between events, which assumes that events exist as discrete temporal entities. We can describe events through their relative location in time, much as we can describe islands relative to one another by their respective coordinates. In addition, we may describe events by their chronological duration, as we may describe islands by their surface area in terms of metres or kilometres. Along this Newtonian timeline, we may string events together across varying spans, and establish causalities on the basis of before and after or how long before or how long after. This allows grouping of events, for example because they belong chronologically to the same period. But here lies a problem. Spatial entities, such as islands, have contours that describe their limits. But if we treat events like islands in the flow of time, we

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Past

Exemplary events

Eventualization of practices

Present

Future Event enactment through practices

Singular events

Figure 6  Practices and the becoming of singular and exemplary events

run into serious problems. When we are in a conversation, we recall events, such as other conversations, but we do not define those other conversations by the length of the period that lies between them or by their length. Certainly, we may say, for example, ‘I had a lengthy conversation with X about a year ago’, but that would be mere contextual information. What we recall is what was said during other conversations, and in the actual conversation, snippets of what was said at other times are woven together. We are creating a conversational event with materials from other conversations, and what we relate is not so much chronological durations or dis­tan­cing but what Schütz (1967) calls the ‘kernel’ of the conversational events. Schütz (1967: 126) distinguishes the kernel and fringe of events, in which the kernel refers to a perceived essence of an event that is carried forward and connected to other events. So, while the weaving together of snippets from other conversations occurs, the actual conversation (event) comes into existence based on the nexus of kernels of past conversations. According to the principle of immanence, actors bring a past or future event into the present, and in so doing they actually establish the making of the present event as it draws to closure. In this view, even though the events may be chronologically distinct, they take part in one another’s making on an ongoing basis. This means that although the future act has not yet taken place, its workings are not just anticipated in the current act, but the anticipation of the future event also takes part in the making of the present act, as actors work with ‘anticipatory sense’ (Shotter, 2006: 585) of what is to come. This means that the current act is not just about anticipating what is to come, but the anticipation of what is to come takes part in shaping the practices that make up the current act. A main implication of Schütz’s temporal conceptualization of actions and acts is that because the act is anticipated, it cannot be seen as a purely future state because it comes into effect before its realization. Instead the anticipated future state accompanies the actions towards its accomplishment even though it preceded the actions. In a counterintuitive sense, the anticipated future actually forms a past to the actions. This is why Schütz was loath to consider what he called foresight and hindsight as located squarely on two different sides of the present event. The

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driving incident-­turned-­event is still becoming ‘that’ event in my consciousness. I am making something new of the event every time I invite it into my consciousness. Sitting in my living room, I may think back on it and reflect on how lucky we were not to have died in the accident. While I drive my car, the event may enter my consciousness as a flash warning. What this means is that the impact of the event is recreated in the present as I drive. An immanence view invites a multidirectional view of events, according to which they become interrelated back and forth in time. In this view, events are not causally connected, but folded into one another, as mentioned above. I will pursue in Chapter 8 below a discussion about the fallacy of assuming forward causality between events, which follows from Newtonian-­inspired social science and remains strongly anchored in the field of organizational research. A forward causality implies that past events lead to the present event, which, in turn, leads to future events. It conveys the imagery of an eternal forward cascading of effects in time. The causality resides in A leading to B leading to C. For obvious reasons, it also implies that for B to take place, A needs to be terminated, and for C to take place, B needs to be ter­ min­ated. Such a line of reasoning leaves out of the equation whether a previous event is sufficient or necessary, or both, for a succeeding event to take place. We assume simply, for example, that a shot in Sarajevo led to the First World War. This form of causality is common in organizations. In fact, Levitt and March (1988) argue that simplified or arbitrary causality drawn between events is common in organizations and may even become decisive in processes of change. Levitt and March attribute this to biases, as organizational members act as his­tor­ians of their own past, ceding to the temptations of drawing convenient causal maps between events.

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5 Time-­as-­Resource Introduction Time-­as-­resource involves commonly the use of material artefacts to translate practices into collectively shared structured patterns of actions. Among the earli­est recording devices of time are water clocks, which people used for more than 12 centuries bc. Water clocks, could tell time within 15-­minutes’ ­accuracy (Cotterell et al., 1986). While people used water clocks to regulate temple rituals scheduled to be performed at certain hours, agrarian rhythms and rituals still ruled the world of activity outside places of worship. In ancient Greece, more-­precise water clocks would be used centuries later to track time in the judicial system so that plaintiffs could be given the same amount of time to present their cases (Lewis and Donaldson, 1850). The water clock was then replaced by mechanical systems in the Middle Ages, as the Benedictine order, which comprised more than 40,000 monasteries around Europe in the Middle Ages, made the transition to mechanical clocks (Mumford, 1934). From regulating selected parts of religious and administrative life, clocks became pervasive regulators of rhythms in larger organized systems. From the muffled sound of drops of water in water clocks, time became centuries later manifested in bell towers with mechanical clocks connected to bells for everyone to hear, installed in towers for everyone to see. Mechanically driven clocks offered a scope for measuring duration with some accuracy. Whereas on-­going time became subject to measurement on a wider scale as a means to impose social rhythm, the future has equally been treated as a measurable entity for centuries. Adam (2004: 126) points out, for example, that while interest and credit existed for more than 5,000 years, going back to Babylonia, the Christian Church legitimized the practice of trading the future, which is what interest rates are about. When interest is charged on a loan, it puts a price on the fact that the lender will have to wait a certain amount of time before being fully repaid. This relates to the idea of discounting, which means the borrower pays a fee for the fact that the lender does not receive the money in hand and must wait for it. In this view, money is effectively

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0006

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charged for the waiting time, and the rate is calculated on the basis of the waiting time in terms of clock time. It also what is referred to as ‘future want’ or ‘deferred gratification’ in economic sociology. Works in economic sociology going back from the nineteenth century have considered the emotional or cognitive effects on actors of imagining the value of a future want while being in the present (Loewenstein, 1992). The measurable effects of the time’s extension into the future have effects on the present. When rates and duration are calculated as working backward from a future point in time, they become an object of negotiation as they lay the foundations for what actors do in the present, individually and collectively. In the present, roles are distributed, short-­term plans are made, and resources are deployed, in response to the projected future. The three dimensions of time discussed in Chapters 2–4 are based on assumptions of a direct relationship between actors and their existence in the flow of time. This is the most common preoccupation of philosophers of time, particularly phenomenological philosophers. Time-­as-­practice assumes that time constituted by practice is the time of the actors performing that practice. The same goes for time-­as-­experience and time-­as-­events. The experience of time belongs to the actors. They may share it to create a sense of temporal we-­ness (Hernes, 2014), but the experience is assumed to belong to the we. Time-­as-­events assumes that actors enact past and future events while, at the same time, their enactment in the form of practices is an event in the making as their practices become eventualized. Time-­as-­resource departs from the other three dimensions by representing the abstraction of time from actors’ worlds of practice or experience. I use the term ‘abstraction’ to underline that streams in the flow of time are translated into tangible entities, such as interest rates. Clock time, in this view, is a resource that is deployed in order to achieve certain ends. The underlying idea is to avoid the pervasive assumption of clock time as the main notion of time under which other forms of time, such as experience, are relegated. Instead, I view clock time as a resource that is abstracted from day-­to-­day activities, which can then be translated, stored, and applied elsewhere or at another period to condition social activity. Although scholars have tended to limit time-­as-­resource to quantitative, continuous, i.e., measured time, I argue that it also includes event-­based time. However, events in a time-­as-­resource view differ somewhat from those that emerge from the flows in which actors are embedded. In the time-­ as-­resource view presented here, events are standardized, institutionalized, and routinized occasions that actors recognize as such across organizational

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and institutional boundaries. There is strong evidence in the organizational literature that events structured into observable patterns of events, derived from activity, may be translated and applied elsewhere. Geiger et al.’s (2020) study of firefighters in Hamburg exemplifies how, through training, actors apply certain patterns, or templates of events, durations, and ordering during emergencies. However, when scholars have limited time-­as-­resource to measured time (Hassard, 1996), they have done so to distinguish measured time from social time and have argued that social time belongs to the group in question, while clock time is objective and universal. A similar argument is made by Shipp and Jansen (2020) in drawing a distinction between ob­ject­ ive and subjective time. As pointed out earlier in this book, rather than ­separate social and measured time, we should investigate how they are translated into one another, as both are indispensable for the functioning of social groups. Taylor’s scientific management exemplifies how time was abstracted from practice through clock measurement. Once the time of practice was translated into tables and charts, it could be used in various ways. It could be used to calculate incentives and norms for performance of certain tasks (Hassard, 1996). It could also be used to plan and coordinate operations that depended on the activities of several people. In other words, it could be used as a ­timing device. Without disagreeing with critical scholars who have emphasized the exploitative and manipulative aspects of the objectification or commodification of time, I suggest that abstraction/objectification/commodification is necessary for any organizing process. Similar to how Latour (1990) argues that materiality keeps society together, I argue that time-­as-­resource enabled by abstraction from temporal experience and practice is what keeps ­organizations together. It is the only way for actors to translate temporal aspects of activity into other settings, which means that it is the primary means of stabilization and, hence, change. If we do not carefully attend to the very process of abstracting, objectifying, or commodifying time as events or practice, we risk losing the op­por­ tun­ity to develop an integrative theoretical framework of organization and time. I purposely use the verb forms to signify that abstracting/objectifying/ commodifying goes on all the time, and that it works both ways: from practice to resource and from resource to practice. What other scholars have called Newtonian time or clock time, which may be called measured time, is better represented as time-­as-­resource, because measured time is a chronological tool of continuous time that actors employ for various aims, including the timing and sequencing of tasks. Time-­as-­resource suggests that we should not see duration, commonly referred to as clock time, in isolation from

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sequencing and timing. A sequence of events is measured by ordering events into before and after in more or less complex patterns, even if clock time is not applied. Time-­ as-­ resource derives from temporal structure, expressed through clock time or events and used or created by people to give rhythm and form to their everyday work practices (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002: 685). It also resembles the definition of temporal patterns formulated by Rowell et al. (2016: 309) as the ‘observable positioning of activities and events with respect to time and to one another’. Time-­as-­resource has an ostensive aspect. Examples could include ostensive routines as Feldman and Pentland (2003) define as a contrast to performative aspects of routines. Whereas a performative aspect comes close to the embedded social acts of performing routines while in the flow of time so to speak, the ostensive aspect comes closer to standard operating procedures that extend more or less unaltered throughout time. As Feldman and Pentland (2003: 101) state, ‘This ostensive aspect may be codified as a standard operating procedure, or it may exist as a taken-­for-­granted norm.’ Feldman and Pentland’s idea of codification is important, because it describes the transition between practices and the template that constitutes time-­as-­resource. The social sciences view the term ‘resource’ differently, depending on which perspective authors take. Critical writers tend to view resources as that which are in the hands of leaders, administrators, or managers to achieve their goals, often without regard for their employees’ well-­being. Previous writers who have commented on time-­as-­resource have confined the link between resources and actors’ goal orientations by arguing that ‘time can be viewed as a resource to be managed in the pursuit of organizational ob­ject­ ives’ (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988: 303). Bluedorn and Denhardt extend their argument by noting that ‘In modern organizations, time is considered one of several scarce resources, one to be measured and manipulated in the interest of organizational efficiency and effectiveness.’ Ancona et al. (2001: 515) make a similar point: ‘The industrialized West's construction of time as clock time enables the commodification of labour, because time is viewed as a resource that can be measured, standardized, used, bought, and sold.’ Finally, Kunisch et al. (2017: 1046) argue, ‘As time is an important and scarce resource—­ especially when experiencing a fast-­ changing external environment—we can expect that it must be actively managed during strategic change.’ None of these works are wrong about time as resource. When I receive a cost estimate from a local builder, the time schedule is part of the estimate, in terms of the number of work hours to be spent on the job, the beginning and end, and the duration of the work. The time estimates are also likely part of the

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builder’s business goals, who needs to ensure both that the different contracts are executed sequentially without too much idle time between them and to prevent too much overlap between contracts. In other words, although ­scholars have sometimes described time as a scarce resource (Zerubavel, 1976; Starkey, 1989), resources should not be described exclusively in terms of scarcity. A resource like a hammer also has a shape, which gives it potentiality, even if it can be used only sparingly. There is a danger of over-­linearizing measured time, which happens particularly when scholars pit clock time against ‘process time’, which, they point out, is event-­based. When we linearize time too much, it may become too much of a measure rather than a resource that actors apply in organizing processes to collaborate and move forward in time. As I suggest in this book’s introduction, scholars have sometimes gone too far in pitting linear against processual and supposedly event-­based time, making the former overly linear and the latter overly processual. By excessively linearizing time, we risk losing sight of its sequential features necessary for social collaboration and integration. Describing a practice involves duration expressed as linear time but also a sequence of operations, as any operations manual confirms. Description of a practice will also reveal how sequence and duration intertwine. Their intertwining manifests fully when actors collaborate and depend mutually on the timely completion of one another’s activities (Eskerod and Vaagaasar, 2014). For example, in multiactor projects, actors sometimes depend on everyone completing certain tasks before embarking on the next phase. In that case, clock time expressing duration or speed intertwines with the sequencing of activities defined by common deadlines. Time-­as-­resource underscores how time may influence interrelationships in multiple ways. Garud and Karnoe (2001) discuss how Schumpeter the­or­ ized entrepreneurship as a process of reconstituting existing resources to create new ones. Time would surely feature among such resources. One example is the use of robots or artificial intelligence to substitute for operations performed by humans. Garud and Karnoe also point out how actors draw upon rules and resources to enable interaction. An example would be plans and schedules performing the role of boundary objects between actors not just to facilitate their interaction but also to define their identities and roles. Marx saw time as resource in the way that time can be leveraged and consequently traded. Several scholars have mentioned the profundity of Marx’s thinking about time (e.g., Harvey, 1990; Adam, 2004). Adam, for example, points out that Marx did not write about time per se but that his notion of value and commodification applies to time and, in his case, workers’ time. For a

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product to acquire a certain value (its exchange value), it needs to be valued in terms of production cost, which relies on the time workers spend manufacturing the product. To translate the cost of production into exchange value, the time spent in manufacturing needs to be quantified in terms of a ‘decontextualized, abstract exchange value’ (Adam, 2004: 38). This illustrates well have time-­as-­practice may be translated into time-­as-­resource and vice versa.

Extending from Measured Time Most works on time and organization list measured time as a dominant parameter for understanding the temporality of organizations. Much of the power of measured time lies in its perceived precision (which is not to be conflated with accuracy). Minutes and hours give the impression that the flow of things is controlled. In some cultures, conveying precision is a form of social control. There is not necessarily a rational reason why a two-­hour meeting should start exactly at the agreed time and not five minutes later. However, starting at the precise time conveys control that extends beyond rational explanations, as March repeatedly pointed out. Precision of timing is a symbol of precision and, hence, control. Bluedorn and Denhardt (1988) cite Moore’s (1963: 19) observation that the influence of time on human and organizational processes was achieved by ‘marking off precise units and thus tends to heighten the awareness of, and the significance of, finite boundaries.’ While Taylor developed time measurement to the extreme, today’s just-­in-­ time production systems are managed in just as minute terms as Taylor envisioned. But beyond the symbolic powers of precision and neutrality, measured time is also a means by which actors achieve collaboration and communication. When critical management scholars (Hassard, 2002) have focused on measured time, they have associated it with objective time, tracing it back to Newton’s view of universal time. Clark (1985: 36), for example, went as far as saying that Newton ‘mistakenly’ defined time as continuous and therefore objective. Clark makes the point that time is in events and is therefore social in nature. In a similar vein, Reinecke and Ansari (2016) point to Einstein’s theory of relativity as an actor-dependent and contingent view of time. Such arguments may be misleading, though. Although events form part of the space-­ time-­ continuum occasioned by the work by Einstein and other ­theoretical physicists, they still worked on the assumption of light travelling at constant speed. Einstein did actually find notions such as the present and

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before-­and-­after ‘troubling’ in the sense that they could not be accommodated by the natural sciences, as mentioned Chapter 1. An alternative to focusing on how time differs between physics and social life is to focus more closely on how measured objective time becomes differently constructed by different social actors. It is not surprising that social groups and organizations construct objectively measured time differently. Measured time holds different meanings in different cultures, but different cultures attach different meanings to the same measured time. In Denmark, where I live, when friends are invited for dinner at 7 pm, it is considered appropriate to arrive exactly on time, whereas in other cultures arriving on time for a dinner invitation is considered inappropriate. There can be extreme differences between different organizational settings, which transcend the symbolic role of measured time. Weick and Roberts’s (1993) study of pilots landing on aircraft carriers shows extreme situations in which tenths of seconds matter. Such situations are obviously much more compressed than almost any other situation in most organizations. The chain of events lasting a second or two in one situation may resemble one lasting days or weeks in another situation. Still, it does not make much difference to the pilot landing on an aircraft carrier to know that people perceive time differently in offices hundreds of kilometres away. What matters more is to study the boundaries between different manifestations of measured time that actors negotiate. Translation between different forms and levels of measured time is im­port­ ant for a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of time facing practitioners. Yakura (2002) made a major contribution by coining the concept of temporal boundary objects, which, she argued, are located in the bound­ ar­ies between groups. For example, time sheets or forecasting tools are a means to coordinate different functions in organizations, without requiring people’s agreement. Yakura’s argument is important, because she emphasizes not only the coordinating roles of temporal boundary objects but also the fact that such objects define the identities of adjacent groups. The analytic potential of the idea of temporal boundary objects lies in the possibility of following chains of translation between different modes of measured time. Yakura was inspired by Star and Griesemer’s (1989) seminal work on boundary objects, which, according to Star and Griesemer, enable participants of different political, scientific, or social orientations to operate consensually. Boundary objects such as plans or designs, they argue, may form robust media of collaboration across functional borders, without actors’ explicit agreement on the exact meaning of those objects. Similarly, temporal boundary objects, according to Yakura, enable different groups to orient their different ‘time standards towards common measures of time. This would in

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turn make time concrete and negotiable for different groups of people’ (Yakura, 2002: 956). While Yakura’s contribution is significant, we can extend it further in two ways. First, in process views over the last two decades, it is too restraining to locate singular temporal boundaries in groups. While we can define groups in terms of the temporal boundaries within which they operate, groups are continuously exposed to other possible temporal boundaries and defined by how they reach out to such boundaries. One could argue that groups are defined not just by their temporal boundaries but also by the ways in which they negotiate different sets of temporal boundaries. A second point relates to the definition of practice. Yakura refers to the practice of applying tem­poral measures, ‘how timelines are used in practice’ (Yakura, 2002: 957). In the framework proposed in this book, practice is not limited to the practice of applying time. According to practice scholars such as Schatzki (2006a), practice is not primarily related to measured time, but measured time may be one of the dimensions of time that emerge from practice. Temporal boundary objects may, in this view, become objects of translation between practice and measured time. As objects of translation, they work both ways. On the one hand, local practices are translated into measured time, to then become a means to coordinate practice. On the other hand, temporal boundary objects are a means to translate from standard measures into situated practices.

Composites of Time I have chosen the following terms randomly from approximately forty papers presented at the sessions on organization and time at the EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) colloquium in Hamburg (held online) in 2020: event, rhythm, speed, entrainment, pace, time horizon, distant past, distant future, present, temporary organization, nostalgia, strategy, narrative, history, temporal structure, timing, continuity. We could call each term a real-­life phenomenon in its own right, to be used or measured as a resource. Together, the terms tell us about the complexity and dynamics of time in organizations. But each term is only a label that covers for multiple entangled processes. Hassard, Decker, and Rowlinson (2021), for example, point out how Durkheim (1915 69) argued that ‘collective time’ is the sum of procedures which interlock to form the cultural rhythm of a given society: ‘The rhythm of collective life dominates and encompasses the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; consequently, the time that is expressed dominates and encompasses all particular durations’ (Durkheim,

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1915 69, in Hassard et al., 2021). Hassard et al. point out how ‘for Durkheim, therefore, time is derived from social life and becomes the subject of col­lect­ ive representations: it is fragmented into a plethora of temporal activities which are reconstituted into an overall cultural rhythm that gives it meaning’. This point, which is consistent with the work of scholars such as Ricoeur (1984), is key to developing more-­holistic models of the role of time in organizations. When I use the term ‘resource’, it includes the dimension of time (which includes clock time or events) that works as a ‘stock or reserve available to meet a need’ (Chambers, 1988). This definition summarizes, in my view, a central property of such time as a measure and a means that actors mobilize to enable organizing across space and time. To appreciate the composite nature of time, we must appreciate that measured time is also symbolic, and symbolic time also abides by aspects of measurement. Although scholars have emphasized the linear measurement aspect of time as resource (Adam et al., 2002), we must not forget that any organizing process relies on certain activities taking place before or after other activities, and the logic of before and after, although expressed through clocks and calendars, is an important social mechanism. This underscores why it is a mistake to limit clocks and calendars to continuous or linear time. Before the mechanical clock was invented, villagers had clear ideas about the sequential ordering of activities that would help keep them fed and healthy. Not only that, but villagers, such as those in Bali, used calendars that tracked sequencing and duration as well as symbolic events. Geertz (1973: 390) describes vividly how villagers in Bali, aware of the passing of time, exchange gestures in the passing present, the ‘synoptic now’, which signify the broader sociotemporal ordering of their existence. This sociotemporal ordering is based in calendars, ‘their cultural machinery for demarcating temporal units’ (p. 391), whose function, according to Geertz, is not so much about measuring the elapse of time but about expressing intellectual, social, and religious distinctions. In a comment on Geertz’s discussion, Gell (1992) notes that the Balinese not only exercised complex calendars for centuries but also that large portions of Balinese society used such calendars. Similarly, Adam (2004: 109) describes the sophistication of the Mayans’ calendar, with its interwoven chronological and symbolic times: Adam (2004: 81) confirms this: Quite clearly, the cyclical, atemporal time of myths, rituals, art and sacred architecture cannot be contrasted in a meaningful way with the linear time or “timelfullness” of chronological dating and clock-­time, which is the taken-­for-­granted base on which the classical dualistic analyses were constructed.

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Adam discusses how the Mayan ritual cycle comprised of complex and interwoven temporal units, used to express both functional and symbolic time. The Mayan calendar comprised 52-­year cycles, which provides a perspective of how rhythms of social life take on life-­long proportions. In Western so­ci­eties temporal markers, such as bells, were used in medieval times to announce important events, such as assemblies, sermons, enemy attacks, or natural threats such as fire (Eriksen, 2003). Such events, however, were as much social as they were clock events. With the arrival of mechanical assemblages, the bells rang every hour and symbolized chrono­ logic­al time as an independent system with its own events. This time system, with its own l­ ogics, became not only pervasive but also invasive upon human activity. One way to understand time-­as-­resource is to define it in terms of how it is applied. Hassard (1991: 116), for example, points out how time emerges as a resource in three different ways in organizations: ‘(1) the need for schedules, i.e., for reliable predictions of the points in time at which specific actions will occur, (2) the need for synchronization, i.e., for temporal co­ord­in­ation among functionally segmented parts and activities, and (3) the need for time allocation, i.e., for distributing time so that activities will consume it in the most effective and rational way.’ Still, time-­as-­resource is a highly complex tangle for most actors. As Bateson (1979) argues, the tangled reality is not ac­cess­ ible in its entirety, and practitioners and analysts alike adopt simplified forms of analysis. For a start, events in time-­as-­resource are in themselves tem­por­ al­ly complex and do not abide by conventional dualisms in organizational research. Much the same goes for measured, continuous, time, which intersects with events at multiple levels.

Temporal Templates The sequencing of time refers to multiple before-­and-­afters, can have a complex shape, as Perlow’s (1999) study of engineers in a company shows. Perlow observed how individuals established shared, interdependent work patterns in response to external demands on their time. The Mayan calendar was extremely complex, and so are time maps of some modern organizations. They are both sequential but have different shapes. Therefore, timing does not necessarily imply linearity. Cyclical time has a linear dimension in the sense that one event leads to the next, but it is nonlinear in that events ­reconnect iteratively. Shi and Prescott (2012) provide a good example of how tangled, different types of time-­as-­resource may unfold in their study of how

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different combinations of activity rhythms, timing, and entrainment generate different outcomes of interfirm acquisitions. As illustrated in the example of beer brewing (Hernes et al., 2020), sequencing is not confined to linear ­chronology but relates also to templates for interdependent practices. One way to extract different forms of time-­as-­resource from their complications without oversimplifying is to consider different forms of time-­as-­ resource as temporal templates. I borrow the concept of temporal templates from Bobick and Davis (2001), who used the concept to analyse how bodily movement can be represented and recognized from a series of recorded positions in their study of computer vision. A temporal template is a regularized set of movements. It consists of still image positions but associates each still image position with a particular movement represented in vector form. This enables templates to describe composite sets of interdependent processes characterized in terms of recognizable qualities such as sequence, duration, speed, timing. For example, timing matters significantly for the shaping of templates. Another study, carried out by Turner and Rindova (2018) shows how recurring action timing was central to the development of specific routine performances among garbage handlers in San Diego, California. In their analysis, Turner and Rindova show how sequence-­based patterning takes part in more-­complex internal tem­por­al­ities that unfold within routines. Their analysis points towards routines being nested although projected as sequential patterns when used as a basis for coordination. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, time-­as-­resource involves often the use of material artefacts. Consider, for example, this extract from Knorr Cetina’s (1999) study of laboratory work, which illustrates how practices are codified into protocols, which enable the practices to be translated across time and space: Work on this level is sequentially organized in terms of steps and substeps-­ processing programs summarized as laboratory protocols. Those protocols which have been tried and mastered become part of the laboratory's capital. They are sought after, obtained as favors from other labs, and taken along by scientists who change laboratories. The protocols determine the details of object-­oriented processing-­which objects to join in chemical or biological reactions, how long to subject them to a treatment, what temperature to use, etc. Protocols specify the many steps, substeps, and sub-­substeps of manipulation through which work should proceed  (p. 86).

In temporal terms, templates may be rhythmic. In fact, Bluedorn (2002: 146) refers to what he calls ‘rhythmic templates’. Such templates may be assemblies

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of selected snapshots of highly complex rhythms. They represent patterns that are dynamic and more complex than what the templates may depict. Zerubavel (1976, 1979) brilliantly illustrates the dynamics and complexity of rhythm in his analysis of time structuring at a hospital. He sees rhythm as tangible and foundational yet loosely coupled. Some rhythms are more foundational than others and tend to entrain other rhythms, such as annual planning and budgeting. But a foundational rhythm may interact with other rhythms only sporadically and unpredictably. Here lies the subtle­ ty in Zerubavel’s thinking: rhythms as interacting in patterned yet spor­ad­ic and loosely connected ways. Hüe (2021) adds nuance to the concept of rhythm. Whereas we may think of rhythm as regular and symmetric, Hüe points out that rhythm actually consists of irregularities and asymmetries, a point that Poels et al. (2017) emphasize. There is a sense of regularity to rhythm, but that regularity may be complex and implicit rather than simple and explicit. Not every standardized temporal measure is linear. It can, for example, be a measure of timing, as pointed out above, in what McTaggart (1908: 460) called ‘before and after’. The before and after is key to temporal ­templates. When people see time as a resource, they may give it a complex shape with many ‘befores’ and ‘afters’, configured to reflect a certain type of process. Blue (2019: 923) convincingly argues that the time dimension of practices, understood as rhythms and configurations of practices, reproduce social life as the practices are repeated in sequences and combinations that exhibit various forms of temporal connections. Temporal templates can also be agreed, negotiated, translated, or exchanged over time and space, as multiple befores and afters make up temporal templates of interdependent practices. A schematic representation is shown in Figure  7, which suggests how ­temporal templates (on the left) serve as codification of practices. Practices may be codified in a variety of ways, but in most cases using measures, such as frequency, duration, speed, or timing. Codification may also be a means to commodification of practices, such as when products or services are to be sold or accounted for. The arrow shows translation, which implies transition of sets of practices to other organizational contexts. In other contexts, temporal template are used to condition on-­going practices. I discuss the concept of translation in more detail in Chapter 6. Temporal templates do not represent the actual temporal dynamics that actors face but are recognizable by specific labels, although they consist of continuously evolving, interconnecting, and intersecting sets of activities. As routines connect into more-­complex wholes, they constitute increasingly complex temporal patterns of changing iterations not readily decomposed

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Codification of practices into temporal templates

Practices

Temporal template conditions practices in other contexts

Practices

Figure 7  Translation between temporal templates and practices

and measured. Transition is important because while embedded (and embodied) in the flow of time, actors perform practices without explicit attention to the templates into which practices are codified. The templates typically become important during times of crisis, uncertainty, conflict, or ambiguity regarding what to do next. Lanzara (2016) offers a particularly nuanced account of how practices coalesce into templates, which transform into hybrids and composites, which, he writes, are not always elegant, but he emphasizes that the apparent stability of such templates may be deceptive. Although they may possess great stability and resilience when taken as a whole, they may always be modified locally. Lanzara notes that the distinction between transient constructs and durable structures is often not clear in that ‘transient structures may be less transient than we imagine, and durable structures are less durable than we usually assume’ (Lanzara, 2016: 232).

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6 Themes of Interplay Introduction The four dimensions of time discussed in Chapters 2–5 form a basis for an integrative theoretical framework of organization and time. I have chosen the word ‘framework’ to describe how the four dimensions serve as four poles around which processes evolve and intersect. The main idea of this chapter is to illustrate how the four dimensions may take part in different forms of interplay, which I label themes of interplay. Figure 8 below shows schematically how dimensions and themes of interplay are interrelated. There are multiple ways to conceptualize the interplay of the four dimensions, and I leave it to others to explore the multiple forms of interplay. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive, I will discuss selected themes of interplay that can be explained in light of the framework. It is important not to think of evolving interplay as a process occurring between two separate, delineated, and stable entities. This would be like viewing two people interacting, producing various outcomes, but neither of them changing through the interaction. Whereas the outcome depends on the interaction taking place, the people do not experience change in the sense that their dispositions are not influenced. As each person moves to another context in which they interact with different people, it is as if the previous interaction did not occur. In contrast, evolving interplay as defined here implies that different time dimensions in mutual interplay constitute and reconstitute one another. There is simply no way that a time dimension can change or stay the same way in the absence of interaction (or even intra-­action) with other time dimensions. I am suggesting a processual interplay in which the interaction shapes the interacting entities. In this view, the two people’s interaction constitutes them; it is not merely something they pass on to each other. Their minds and bodies become inscribed with the interaction taking place; therefore, they cannot remain unchanged by the interaction. Each will inevitably emerge changed, as their interaction is inscribed into their minds and bodies. This means that evolving interplay is not limited to separate entities (such as time conceptions) interacting. Instead, evolving interplay becomes

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0007

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Time-aspractice

Time-asevents

Different forms of transitional and simultaneous interplay between time dimensions

Time-asexperience

Time-asresource

Figure 8  Interrelationships between time dimensions and themes of interplay. Time dimensions serve as poles around which processes evolve and intersect

the mutually constitutive dynamics that define and shape those entities from one moment to the next. This reasoning is ancient and is rooted in process philosophy and is a dominant view in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). Note that this view does not reject the notion of entities or categories. Entities are real in the sense that they are what Whitehead called ‘categoreal’. They exist as members of categories, which enables others to relate to them. But they still come into existence as those entities through contingent interplay. We may consider evolving interplay in two different ways. Through transitional interplay, time conceptions form transitions to one another in that one emerges from the other as actors move through time. For example, time-­as-­ practice enables the emergence of events, as discussed in Chapter 5. Actors experience the present as what Weick calls undifferentiated flows; translated into what this book calls time-­as-­practice, those flows or practices crystallize into events as they fade into the past, just as future events flow into the present in the form of practices. Or actors consider future events, and when they find themselves amid those events, they play out those events in the ­present through practices, which then mutate into other events in turn. A second form of interplay is what I call simultaneous. Simultaneous interplay suggests that one dimension of time supplants another but may not necessarily replace it. This form is simultaneous in that the first dimension extends the second while the second continues to operate. For example, the commodification

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of  time found with Marx implies the substitution of time-­as-­practice for time-­as-­resource. This commodification describes both a substitution and a displacement. The translation of time into resource both remains in place, as reflected in methods of management, and it is displaced to other contexts, such as the marketplace, where workers’ time is converted and traded for goods. Simultaneous interplay may leave the interacting time dimensions in place.

Simultaneous Interplay between Experience, Practice, and Resource Fine (1990: 107) offers an insightful account of the simultaneous and often chaotic interplay between temporal experience and practice in restaurant kitchens: ‘When work is too slow one is continually reminded of clock time; there is no “durée.” [. . .] Time is transfixed when things are going well, but has an omnipresent, oppressive character when there are either too many external demands or not enough.’ Although scholars such as Fine (1990) and Flaherty (1999, 2003) discussed temporal experience as part of social theory, the interplay of temporal experience has not been systematically pursued in organization studies. When these scholars have brought temporal experience to the fore, they have often drawn a direct, exclusive connection between experience and practice. However, as the quote above suggests, the connection between experience and practice may be more elusive than commonly assumed. Flaherty argues that one should not assume a one-­to-­one relationship between experience and actions but that ‘A particular aspect of experience may or may not lead to consummation of the act’ (Flaherty, 1999: 7). It would be fair to say that neither can there be a disconnect between the act and experience, and that we should, instead, investigate how experience and practice interact through evolving mutual interplay. I sometimes go to a neighbouring park here in Denmark, where I climb a hill multiple times for exercise. I sometimes struggle to keep track of the number of climbs, especially as I grow increasingly tired and the count runs high. The first five times are quite easy to track as I keep reminding myself of the order of the climb I started with, then reminding myself again during the descent before I start a new climb. In a sense, I let the practice fill the time without resorting to any means of clock time. From the fifth climb, however, things become more blurred as I tend to lose count of the number of climbs completed. This worsens as I approach 15–20 times. This occurred until some time ago, when I devised a technology for tracking the number of

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climbs by placing five twigs on the ground, then moving a little stone around the twigs so that each time I returned to the bottom of the hill, I moved the stone to another twig. In this way, I did not have to keep track while climbing up and down. Unknowingly, I had created a clock-­time measure, which I had no idea would influence my experience of time while going up and down the hill. I created it simply as a means to help me keep track. But I soon discovered that my very basic twig clock did more than simply serve as an aid; it began to define my experience of time. It did so in two ways. First, I began to anticipate the position of the stone as I was descending the hill. Whereas before installing my little twig clock, I had a strong sense of being within the movement for every step I took, I now began to shift more attention to reaching the clock to move the stone one step further. The twig clock became a point of arrival and departure as it became the point that I was moving towards and away from every time I turned to go up the hill again. A second consequence of intro­du­ cing the external counting method was that as I grew tired, the question was not so much ‘how do I keep going’ as ‘will I reach the twig clock?’ In other words, the new experience of time became a sort of conversation between my body and the external measure, mediated by my consciousness. Strangely, after I introduced the external measure in the form of the twig clock, it ended up adding stress to my fatigue, which was entirely unanticipated. I began to feel tired according to the number of climbs indicated by the twig clock almost to the extent that my fatigue became defined by the twig clock count. The next time I did the same thing a couple of weeks later I decided not to surrender to the twig clock’s definition of my sense of time and level of fatigue. Every time I thought about the twig clock, I forced myself to focus on being in the flow of moving up and down the hill and on being aware of every step that I took. After a while, I felt that the experience of time became more like a process of interplay between my consciousness of being in the movement and the clock, which I checked into for every turn. As I became more aware of being part of simultaneous interplay between two dimensions of time, I was able to keep them both in my mind, choosing when to foreground one or the other. In this way, I was able to balance the two time dimensions and even sometimes play them against each other. When analysing interplay between forms of time, scholars have focused primarily on how different experiences clash or become dominated by clock time (Scheller, 2019). Time-­ as-­ practice and time-­ as-­ experience interact simultaneously, and time-­as-­resource may simultaneously frame them both. Time-­as-­resource takes shape through the various ways that time is forged into templates that serve as structuration devices. Chaplin’s movie Modern

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Times brilliantly renders the simultaneous interplay of three dimensions of time, with Chaplin as a mechanical assembly line worker struggling feverishly to keep pace with mechanical components on a ferociously fast conveyor belt. Chaplin invents different ingenious ways to keep pace. The feeling of desperation shows on the faces of his coworkers, who seem to have found a way to cope before Chaplin enters the stage. The relentless speed of the conveyor belt is pure Tayloristic clock time employed for the maximum exploitation of workers. The simultaneous interplay of the experience of time expressed through the workers’ anxiety and the ongoing attempts to cope by being as efficient as possible exemplify how we can understand experience and practice as separate yet mutually intertwined time dimensions framed by time-­as-­resource, here in the form of clock time. Another example of transitional interplay is Roy’s rendering of banana time, which are breaks introduced by workers to break up the drudgery of factory work, to take their minds off the continuous monotony. Banana time is the time of a certain practice: Banana time followed peach time by approximately an hour. Sammy again provided the refreshments, namely, one banana. [. . .] The banana was one which Sammy brought for his own consumption at lunch time; he never did get to eat his banana, but kept bringing one for his lunch. At first this daily theft startled and amazed me. Then I grew to look forward to the daily seizure and the verbal interaction which followed.  (Roy, 1959: 162)

Whereas factory work did and often still does cause boredom, more-­recent studies of time (Nowotny, 1992; Wajcman, 2008; Rosa, 2013) have concentrated on phenomena such as speed and acceleration. A common argument is that the pace of contemporary work is quickening, leading to various types of reactions and counterreactions. Nowotny points out that not only do people quicken their pace, but they also struggle to find time for themselves. A model of interplay between time-­as-­experience, practice, and resource may further enrich such analyses. For example, it may help us analyse how actors experience the change in pace as change. The fact that ­scholars empirically measure the pace as increasing does not automatically imply that actors experience it as quicker. A quicker pace is, first and foremost, a clock-­ time measure of work activity. The experience of time may or may not relate to a quicker pace. People may quicken their pace even though they do not experience time as particularly pressing. Or if they do experience time as pressing, they may resort to various means other than increasing their pace of activity. Blagoev and Schreyögg (2019), for example, show how people

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working extreme hours resort to temporal uncoupling by detaching their organizational rhythms from broader societal rhythms. In that case, actors introduce a practice-­based experience of time to shift away from the experience of time induced by societal rhythms, so that practices could help them establish a different temporal experience. When the dominant experience of time relates to the imminent shape of time, practices are shaped accordingly. Drawing on Luhmann’s notion of episodes, Hendry and Seidl (2003) point out how the bracketing off of formal and informal social encounters influences how actors structure their inter­ actions temporally. In Luhmann’s theory, if the time available for communicating or deciding is infinite, there is no need for temporal structuring. But every encounter is temporally structured because there is an inevitable backstop. The temporal float (Hernes, 2014) cannot go on forever. Eventually, it needs to be interrupted, which inevitably brings provisional closure to the interaction. Therefore, beyond the temporal float, participants in an encounter experience time as coming to a provisional closure. They have a shared experience of time, which affects how they interact. One example illustrating this point is Lifshitz-­Assaf et al.’s study (2020) of makeathons, which are temporary organizations of extreme time-­space compression (Hassard, 2002) in which participants must create collaboratively, from scratch, novel solutions within 72 hours. In this case, participants received a defined problem and access to a wide variety of material resources (3D printers, laser cutters, wood shop, mechanical and electrical equipment and supplies) to build a working product in 72 hours (Lifshitz-­Assaf et al., 2020). Such an organization rapidly runs up against challenges of temporal structuring. Dille et al. (2019) call this type of situation the challenge of the temporal double-­bind, which happens when there is diminishing time in which to implement changes that keep accumulating from the beginning, causing participants to face the problem of midpoint transition (Gersick, 1989). Gersick’s point about midpoint transition is interesting here because it derives from a study of problem solving among student groups, during which the researchers observed that for some reason, problems tended to become particularly acute beyond the midpoint of the time allotted to the problem solving. Lifshitz-­Assaf et al. explained a similar phenomenon from a different angle. When participants during the makeathon faced high levels of ambiguity about which solutions to pursue, they broke out of their habitual temporal structure and spontaneously created new ones for the remainder of the time. This amounts to thinking about the multiplicity of time, where time-­as-­ experience may interact with other time dimensions in multiple ways. It may or may not derive from certain practices, and it may trigger change in

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practices or uncouple from patterns of on-­going practices. A similar variety of connections may take place between on-­going practices and time-­as-­ resource, which may even be mediated by time-­as-­experience.

Transitional Interplay between Practices and Resource In the above chapter I use the term ‘temporal templates to underline how they travel across time and space. The term ‘templates’ may be read as rigid patterns that are applied as such. But a template is a model that can be translated in the sense that it can be transformed, displaced and adapted. When we apply the template to a fluid reality, there is no way of knowing whether reality conforms to an original. The template is a means of translation between temporal realities, rather than an original to be displaced. We may think of the difference between a melody and a groove. A melody may be copied exactly and recognized as such even when played on a different instrument. A groove is an underlying, evolving core in a jazz tune that is recognizable but never quite the same, as musicians use it as basis for improvisation. Practices may be considered a groove that travels via various forms of resource, where the resource is the melody. Practices transition—are translated—to a template in one place in order to be translated into practices in another place. In Chapter 1, I mention intertemporality as interacting temporalities associated with different actors. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) and Thompson (1967) discussed how different organizational functions or levels exhibit different time orientations. More recently, scholars have studied tensions between short-­ term and long-­ term concerns (Slawinski and Bansal, 2012, 2015; Wright and Nyberg, 2017). While these insights are important, they do not explain how different time structures or templates travel within or between organizations. Scholars sometimes assume that local time structures are entrained to corporate cycles or rhythms (Perlow, 1999). Entrainment goes on all the time and is a powerful way to explain the convergence of time structures throughout organizations. But entrainment is never absolute. On the contrary, what appears as entrainment may just as well contain a measure of temporal uncoupling (Blagoev and Schreyögg, 2019). Temporal translation is a way to analyse the dynamics by which practices move and are transformed between organizational settings. Nicolini (2007: 890) notes that characteristic of the ‘new economy’ is the ‘emergence and increasing diffusion of new distributed temporal and spatial working arrangements’. Such diffusion, however, relies on translation of practices (Nicolini, 2013). Translation, a term that sociologists of translation (Callon,

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1986; Latour, 1990) use to signify the simultaneous displacement and transformation of phenomena such as practices, applies at multiple levels of organization. Hernes and Schultz (2020) extended the concept of translation to temporality to explain how actors, translate between temporal structures and distant events through situated activity. When one individual adopts a practice as she collaborates with another individual, she simultaneously displaces the practice from her collaborator by performing it and transforms the practice for her situation. Here lies the quintessential task of organizing. In this view, every process at all levels of organization is effectively a process of translation. Temporal translation (Hernes and Schultz, 2020) offers a way to theorize how practices are both local and influenced by practices elsewhere, via the circulation of temporal templates. For example, at the local level, people adapt to centrally created time norms by using performance target measures. Whereas a performance target measure may be a simple template, the adaptation may be far less simple. Not only may actors adapt the pace of practices, but they may combine and time practices to suit the local context. What makes translation possible is that actors can imagine the two levels into each other. At the local level, actors interpret their adaptation into the template of performance measures. This is how displacement happens: an actor responds to a performance target measure elsewhere in the organization. Local actors can also structure their templates to correspond with the performance targets. This does not imply compliance. Translation may also occur in the form of partial uncoupling as actors associate themselves weakly with the rhythm set by the temporal template. Geiger et al. (2020) provide an instructive account of how time-­as-­practice may transition into time-­as-­resource. In their ethnographic study, they show how firefighters in Hamburg, Germany train for interventions. During their practices, they develop certain limited sets of routines, which enable them to mobilize routines, defined by the authors as temporal patterns, which is synonymous with the idea of temporal templates I suggested in Chapter 5. The authors show how, when challenged by nonanticipated events during interventions, the firefighters resort to standard patterns or templates. Fire brigades exemplify a paradox of organizing. They are a high-­reliability, fast-­response organization, but to cope with extremely uncertain situations in which each deployment is different (Geiger et al., 2020: 8), they rely on highly standardized and, presumably, slowly evolving sets of routines developed through long periods of practice. The example of firefighters, which has strong parallels with surgical teams in hospitals, police squads, military

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operations, and many other types of intervention units, exemplifies how time-­as-­resource moves from one setting to another, transforms in that new setting, and is leveraged to solve specific problems. It is a resource waiting to be employed, and the analysis of firefighters shows how actors keep alive a temporal pattern in the form of a routine through a practice they use when they face a situation requiring time to be compressed and reconfigured accordingly. Their study contrasts with Weick’s (1993) seminal paper on the tragedy at Mann Gulch, where several firefighters perished in a situation where the appointed leader’s practices did not translate successfully into collective practices. Weick describes, as prelude to the intervention, how team members, who had practised at different times and different places in the past, came together at the same time and place to face the Mann Gulch fire: ‘The crew at Mann Gulch have routine, habituated action patterns, they come together from a common pool of people, and while this set of individual smokejumpers had not come together at the same places or times, they did come together around the same episodes of fire’ (Weick, 1993: 632). In Mann Gulch 16 members of a fire-­fighting crew parachuted to put out a forest fire. According to Weick’s summary of historical data, the fire was originally characterized as a ‘10 o’clock fire’, meaning a comparatively harmless fire that could be surrounded and isolated by 10 a.m. the next morning. However, the evolution of the Mann Gulch fire from a 10 o’clock fire to a deadly out-­of-­ control wildfire was rapid. The gist of the Mann Gulch story is that as the fire rapidly approached the firefighter crew, Dodge (the team leader) realized in the spur of the moment that due to the fire’s size and rapid approach, they had no chance of putting it out or running to safety. Dodge radically adapts a pre-­existing practice that he had encountered as part of his own training: starting an escape fire. However, the members of his crew did not understand what he was trying to do, as they had not been trained for a situation where a fire could not be put out. They ran for safety, but most of them perished in the flames that caught up with them. The Mann Gulch case is illustrative of a situation where collective sensemaking breaks down, which is Weick’s conclusion from his analysis. Applying the perspective of this book, it may also be a case of breakdown of translation of practices. When Dodge lay down, he effectively prescribed a template of actions which could not be readily fitted into the experience of the other team members. In the Mann Gulch example, Dodge was new to the team, which may imply that he was not perceived as a ‘significant other’ that they could relate to in a crisis situation. In their analysis of transitions from practices to templates for action, Kremser

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and Blagoev (2020) extend such a focus by posing questions about how actors’ actions are recognized as appropriate by significant others. Their explanation is useful for understanding how iterative transitions may exist between practices and templates via the roles that people hold in the organization. They also point out the potential existence of what they call ‘temporal ripple effects’ (Kremser and Blagoev, 2020: 12), the temporal ­patterning of one routine that indirectly patterns other routines.

Simultaneous Interplay between Practices and Distant Events I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means ‘hiding place’. In my time it is still unfinished though work began in the 20th century when I was just a child. Work would be completed in the 22nd century long after my death. Onkalo must last one hundred thousand years. Nothing built by man has lasted even a tenth of that time span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization.  If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest lasting remains of our civilization. If you, sometime far into the future, find this, what will it tell you about us? Michael Madsen: Writer, Director, Narrator, Into Eternity

Onkalo, the nuclear waste storage site in Eurajoki, Finland, is the subject of an award-­winning documentary directed by Michael Madsen. In the docu­ men­tary, titled Into Eternity, administrators and scientists reflect on the challenges of storing nuclear waste hundreds of metres underground in Finland. They ask themselves, what happens if, having emerged after another ice age 60,000 years from now, another civilization of people with machines and tools come across this repository and it is still radioactive? The people responsible for the storage site see it as their duty to make it as unlikely as possible that the waste from the twenty-­first century would contaminate future civilizations that might drill into the storage thousands of years from now. The main story is about how to safely store nuclear waste underground for an extremely distant future, more than 60,000 years from now. In the documentary, the technologists envisage people arriving in what I have described as singular events. As discussed in Chapter 4, singular events are characterized by what Trope and Liberman call high-­construal-­level events. Such events are typically described or recalled in simpler and more abstract terms than low-­construal-­level events, which tend be described or evoked in more complex ways. High-­construal-­level events 60,000 years into the future

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may involve questions, such as, What insights do these people have? What is their level of technology? What instruments will they have? The problem the people at Onkalo face is not so much technical; it is to ensure the safety of people at that time by alerting them to the dangers represented by the stored nuclear waste. The problem may seem somewhat bizarre but real nevertheless. The documentary points out that humankind has never encountered this challenge before, except perhaps in the building of the pyramids as vaults to protect ancient Egyptian rulers. The two challenges are analogous rather than similar, but a parallel is the challenge of eternal protection against future visitors/intruders, who may not know what they encounter. The example shows how one may go back a long way into the past in order to see far into the future, which is a common strategy for coping with problems: search for solutions in the past, even if the problems were different from the one faced at the moment. In this case, they look back 5,000 years to search for cues regarding a scenario more than 60,000 years into the future. Important questions relate to how actors imagine distant futures but also the practices through which they envisage future events in the in the present. Beyond a certain point, the human mind cannot distinguish different tem­ poral distances, and a certain point in time may be in the relatively near future. Companies’ strategic time horizons constitute that point in time, which means that the organizational actors struggle to distinguish periods that go much beyond the next three to five years. Beyond that time horizon lies the grey zone, which an executive interviewed for one of our projects called the future time period beyond the strategic time horizon. In the grey zone, she said, it is hard to predict what will happen. She meant that prediction was difficult because they struggled to predict when and in which order certain events might take place and, hence, how those events could be expected to influence one another. In a sense, she echoes Spinoza’s argument (cited in Loewenstein and Elster, 1992, p. IX), that the space beyond tem­ poral structures with which we are familiar may seem empty and that chrono­logic­al distance in that empty space of time may not make sense to us: We can only distinctly imagine distance of time, like that of space, up to a certain limit, that is, just as those things which are beyond two hundred feet from us, or, whose distance from the place where we are exceeds that which we can distinctly imagine, we are wont to imagine equally distant from us and if they were in the same plane, so also those objects whose time of existing we imagine to be distant from the present by a longer interval than that which we are accustomed to im­agine, we imagine all to be equally distant from the present, and refer to them all as it were to one moment of time.

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Spinoza’s observation implies that for temporal distance to be meaningful, it needs some content in terms of markers, such as events, that enable us to appreciate temporal depth. It also implies that density of experience may not be enough and that we may need to understand events and their relationships of temporal depth in more­complex ways than simply placing them at different intervals along a time axis.  In the absence of prediction, the future must be enacted through practices. Wenzel et al. (2020) ask the pertinent question of how futures are practiced in organizations, coining the expression ‘future-­making practices’, which they define as sets of practices in simultaneous interplay, through which actors produce and enact the future. The word ‘through’ is vital in this context. It resonates with Mead’s (1932) idea of the distanced past or future being understood through what he called the materials of the present, as mentioned above. It also resonates with Whitehead’s idea of immanence, discussed above, and the expression ‘intraconnecting’ of events. Using the expression ‘through time’ instead of ‘across time’ distinguishes it from sequential views, which are more suited to analysing different practices that exist at different points in time. Practicing future events is all the more important in view of current debates about the role of organizations and, consequently, the role of or­gan­ iza­tion­al theorizing in relation to the climate threat. Climate goals are distant in relation to the strategic time horizons within which organizational actors normally operate. Whereas some scholars suggest the importance of imagining distant climate challenges (Levy and Spicer, 2013; Wright et al., 2013), imagining such challenges can only have the desired impact if it results from practices that enable actors to get a bodily feel of the distant future in the present. Inevitably, this is where the time-­as-­experience also gets to play an important role as arbiter between practices and distant events. Hernes and Schultz (2020) make the point that much theorizing about practice and tem­ poral structures has focused on how practices uphold and, hence, modify temporal structures. They suggest that studies try to explain how actors, through ongoing practices, not only uphold and modify temporal structures but also how those actors address distant events through ongoing activities. We could add, that those practices also depend on a collective temporal experience if they are going to effectively address the distant future and, indeed, also the distant past. I find it appropriate, in line with scholars in the strategy-­as-­practice field (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007), to use the expression ‘practising’ the future rather than imagining or predicting it, mainly because collective decision-­making is about doing things together, such as talking,

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not just about a people sitting around a table imagining distant events. Therefore, one needs to handle concepts such as time horizons with considerable care. Scholars such as Das (1987, 2006), for example, base their findings on individual time horizons, which is very much a cognitive measure. But in a performative view, the cognition of individuals is of less importance than the collective enactment through ongoing practices. The Onkalo example illustrates how imagination of very distant events plays out through talk and activities whereby the distant events become an ‘as-if ’ framing of on-going practices.

Transitional Interplay between Practices and Events If we always live in the present and experience and enact pasts and futures through present activity, it becomes necessary to address past and future events through activity in the present. But in order for that to happen, present activity needs to translate into events. In Chapter 2 above, I discuss Husserl’s use of the expression ‘comet’s tail’, which he uses to visualize the fading into the past of present experience. We can imagine the present as the core of the comet and the past emanating from the present as the comet’s tail. Any encounter between two or more people will leave immediate traces, which may fade from memory or be retained for future use. It can be chit-­chat in the wake of a meeting or follow-­up emails. The comet’s tail, in Husserl’s thinking, is the phase in which individuals retain an experience in their consciousness. In this temporal process of collective retention, actors work to forge what has happened into events, although actors may not be explicitly aware they are doing that. Varela (2000: 267) describes this as mobile time horizons slipping towards an immediately past present: ‘Then it plunges further out of view: I do not hold it just as immediately, and I need an added depth to keep it at hand.’ What actors keep in consciousness, however, is not just what went on in the present that just passed. Discussing Husserl’s work on inner consciousness and time, Zahavi (2010: 321) argues that the retention does not mean so much retaining the actual contents of the passed present as a sense of what has just passed. It may seem reductive to apply Husserl’s individual consciousness theory to collective situations, but I believe drawing a parallel is justified, without pretending that collective processes are aggregates of individual consciousness processing. Instead, I argue for a parallel between what goes on in individuals’ inner consciousness and in collective processes. Research in psychology has demonstrated how practices may not turn into events. Individuals may live in a perpetual present without the ability to

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construct a time trajectory into the past or future, which, I infer, comes from inability to retain experiences over longer periods of time. Such research shows how behaviour in the present relies on the ability to retain experiences over longer periods of time. The story of Henry Molaison illustrates how living in the present leaves a short trail of retention, which never materializes into events that can be recalled. Molaison underwent surgery on 25 August 1953 after several severe epileptic seizures. The brain surgeon, William Beecher Scoville, thought he could improve Molaison’s quality of life and possibly prolong his life by removing the so-­called temporal lobes, the part of his brain that was thought to be related to the epileptic seizures. As it turned out, Scoville inadvertently removed the part of the brain’s network that ensures memory formation. Consequently, by removing these parts, the surgery condemned Molaison to an adult life of near-­total amnesia. From then on and until his death in 2008, Molaison could remember only that which had happened in his life until the op­er­ation, which occurred when he was 27 years old. Other than that, his memory span amounted to no more than thirty seconds, so that he could recall only what had taken place in the last thirty seconds. The incident is described in a fascinating book by Professor Suzanne Corkin, who performed and directed much of the research on Molaison. What made Molaison’s case so unique, according to Corkin, was that the rupture from being a cognitively normal human being to an amnesiac was so clear. Corkin remained close to Molaison throughout the rest of his life, but although they spent countless hours together for forty-­six years, whenever she returned to his room after having left it for more than thirty seconds, he had forgotten who she was. Molaison was one of the few people who spent most of their life in a permanent present tense. Unlike Molaison, actors in organizations constantly produce events from their collective experiences, which may be evoked and recombined in the flow of time. However, as in the case of Molaisen, the connection between practices and retention as events may be elusive. The literature has not sufficiently addressed the ongoing event creation from flows of experience, and how event creation is a contingent process that lies beyond the control of leaders or managers. This omission is all the more serious because this is  where explanations lie regarding how change and continuity occur in organizations. Processes in the present are ongoing practices, such as storytelling (Boje, 1991) and doing things together (Orr, 1998), which make up the stuff of organizational life as it is transformed into and becomes absorbed by ­habits (Lorino, 2018), routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), and programmes (March and Simon, 1958). Authors have discussed both ongoing processes in the present and events, which emerge at a temporal distance

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from the present. There is a gap here, however. If events emerge in the wake of the present, they cannot logically emerge out of nothing. Recall St. Augustine’s point that in order for future to become past, there must be passage in time, and that passage can only occur in the present, which is filled with practices (a point that St. Augustine does not make). It is that passage that gives rise to events. However, the organizational literature has not extensively addressed that passage in much detail. Nonetheless, by focusing on the transition from time-­as-­practice to events, this discussion becomes possible. Whereas actors remain in the present, the previous present takes the form of one or several events. When we look back, we perceive previous encounters as bundles of events. All those little events are crystallized streams of interaction that begin to form once each meeting is over. It is impossible for anyone to recall every little thing that went on in a meeting. Instead, we prod­uce proxies of the meeting in the form of certain things that people said or reactions to the showing of an artefact. Recall Zahavi’s (2010) point above that what is retained is a sense of what took place. Like rocks that stick up from the flow of water in a river, those events linger on after meetings, to be recalled later, and sometimes they become significant in the meeting along with other past or future events. Actors carve those bundles out of the flow from the present and memorize them as they move on in time. An episode such as a brainstorm session consists of open-­ended streams of experience and interaction. From the composite of those streams, actors carve out ensuing time. But memories cannot develop in the absence of a projected future, because actors give memories shape by what they intend for the future— hence, Schütz’s (1967) point that any act towards the past becomes an act towards the future. The transition to events from ongoing practice may happen in different ways. As Varela (1990) stated, the time horizons of present experiences are mobile fringes, which eventually let go of the present experience retained as a sense of what happened. Retention is not just about retaining a sense of what has taken place. The retention that takes place in the temporal flow of the present focuses intentionally or unintentionally towards the future. Thus, Zahavi (2010) argues that past-­oriented retention has an element of intentionality. The question is, how is the past intended? Intending the past requires reflection. We treat our emerging past as an object the moment we reflect on it (Zahavi, 2010: 330). If the past is intended, which implies that it is modified from the passed present in that the past present is retained as an event, its intentionality may eventually be directed towards the future, or rather, towards the future via the past, like a bent arrow. Another question is: how is the past-­future transition performed through practices in the present? We

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are concerned here not merely with how such transitions happen on an on-­ going basis is a way of ensuring continuity, but how actors connect qualitatively different past and future events through their practices. Such practices need to contain an element of creativity and improvisation, because they address very different past and future scenarios simultaneously.

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7 Narrative Trajectory History is ephemeral, but the tellers of history and their subjects are not free to elaborate arbitrary fables. They are obliged to tie new interpretations to ones that have gone before. The links may well be contested, but they are a reminder that we seek not only to construct a clever story but also one connecting us to a chain of coherence that began long before us and will continue long after us. March (1996: 287)

Introduction This chapter introduces the concept of narrative trajectory to guide the ana­lysis of time dimensions in relation to their interplay. Trajectory is a particular shape of time. Narrative is a particular way to express a trajectoral shape of time to render it intelligible, malleable and sharable for actors, as theorized by Ricoeur in particular. There are multiple other shapes of time, but for organizational theorizing the notion of trajectory is particularly useful. Trajectory signifies a movement through time which is continually enacted and expresses both continuity and change. Trajectory is a shape of time that is implicitly assumed in the present-­past-­future view, because it expresses movement from the past into the future that is forever emergent and subject to change. In the conclusion of Chapter 1, I suggest that the present-­past-­future view, while representing an important step towards a fuller understanding of organization and time, still represents what I call a stationary view of time, leading to a view of time described by Ricoeur (1980) as a series of static presents. The present-­past-­future tangle helps explain how the three temporal elements, making up what Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 970) call the ‘chordal triad of agency’, evolve through mutual interplay. However, where the present-­past-­future view reaches its limits is when we wish to explain how the chordal triad moves through time. Time, as Bergson (1922: 5) formulated it, is a past that ‘gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’. But if the past swells as the future advances, the advancing future becomes part of the swelling past, in turn, which implies Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0008

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that there will always be parts of the past that risk becoming immersed in the advancing future. Remember that any act of evoking the past in the present implies future projecting, and vice versa. This follows from the assumption of the three temporal elements being inextricably linked and, therefore, mutually constitutive. This, in turn, implies that each instant of future projection becomes past to the next instant, and the previous evocation of the past adds to the subsequent evocation of the past. In other words, actors are continually in the process of accomplishing a present that becomes the future’s past in some form or other. This is a level of dynamic complexity that underpins organizational life but has yet to be properly addressed in or­gan­iza­tion­al theorizing. Although we may understand actors’ journey through time as fuelled by ongoing or intermittent processes of redefining the past and future in the present, a fundamental question is, what connects actors’ choices into a ­recognizable trajectory through time? This, I argue, is the role of narrative, which becomes a particular way to express the emerging temporal trajectory. The temporal trajectory is continually narrated by actors, enabling them to navigate between the time coming towards them and the time ­flowing away from them. Without reflexive shaping enabled by the narrative, the momentary instantiations of time will lack a sense of direction and a sense of where the actors are positioned along the trajectory. With the added e­lement of emplotment, narrative trajectory as discussed in this chapter, offers a step on the way towards solving the problem of stationarity in time theorizing.

The reflexive shaping of time Although poetry alludes extensively to time as a force of life or death, or­gan­ iza­tion­al research has been relatively silent on the more existential aspects of time. Time as existence implies that time is a way of being in the world. Expressing an ending, a beginning, a transition, or continuation is a way to give time a metaphysical shape beyond the temporal dimensions. Social science and organizational scholars such as Adam and Bluedorn have alluded to the more existential aspects of time. Adam (1990: 70) refers to rhythmicity as ‘source of life and form’. Adam’s expression signals that time is about more than time-­as-­practice, measurement, experience, or events. I have only lately realized the importance of rhythm as an existential dimension of time. In many discussions of time, scholars place rhythm alongside pace and

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dur­ation, but I believe it deserves a study of its own, liberated from simplistic notions of rhythm as simple and monolayered patterns that people merely followed (Hüe, 2021). Rhythm is also part of narrative as the meaning of being in the world (Heidegger, 1927). Bluedorn (2002: 42) uses the term ‘sotto voce’ to describe how time is more than a measure and is intrinsic to the meaning of being in the world. Adam and Bluedorn echo philosophers such as Bergson (1910: 100), who states in his book Time and Free Will that ‘Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when the ego lets itself live’. The shape of time is usually given in the form of a trajectory. Trajectory subsumes the four dimensions while locating their interplay in time. Locating their interplay in time is a step towards solving the stationarity problem which poses a limit to the ability of temporal research to explain more-complex phenomena in organizations. I refer in Chapter 2 to Kubler’s book The Shape of Time. Kubler, however, emphasizes materiality as that which gives shape to time, whereas I prefer to view shaping of time as active, on-going, situated, and foremost, reflexive, activity. Shape does not need to be t­ angible, but still be recognisable and be a source of temporal experience. I refer also in Chapter 2 to Hawking’s (2011) ‘shapes’ of time as assumptions underpinning the evolution of the universe, which may be as expanding-­contracting, eternally expanding or localised. Temporal shaping gives time a level of meaning that transcends time-­as-­ experience, events, practices, resources, or any other form. The shape expresses time but is qualitatively different from the time conceptions that lie at the base of time. In its most crude form, trajectory of a defined shape is a recognizable story that is temporal in nature, such as the example from Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending discussed in Chapter 2. The sense of an ending expresses an aspect of being human. As Ricoeur (1984: 52) argues, ‘time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (italics in original). This argument is profoundly consequential because it suggests that when given a shape time becomes not only communicated and understood but also negotiated and contested (Levy and Spicer, 2013) as a way of life. Shaping time is about making time comprehensible, real, consequential. It is about giving a shape to time that makes time an object of conversation, action, negotiation, tensions, and creativity. People may often talk about activities, events, and periods, without necessarily relating those activities, events, and periods to one another within an intelligible whole, which would provide meaning to those activities, events, and periods.

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When they do relate them, the relating is more likely to be tentative than affirmative, variable than constant, fleeting than enduring. Yet, in spite of the appearance of disconnection, people strive to create coherence, and the coherence is the underlying narrative. The statements below are selected from Kaplan and Orlikowski’s (2013) paper on temporal work. I have selected these quotes to illustrate different ways in which time may acquire a emerging and collective defined shape. The decision was hard because it was the first time anyone in CommCorp had cut back on photonics investment. They had made cuts in other areas, but optical had been relatively untouched. The challenge is going to be, what are the technology projects to support an op­tic­al infrastructure for what the market and the industry is now versus what the market and the industry was. Cutting the program was difficult because Lightwave project leaders were from the old school of ‘give me a pot of money and let me go.’ [They are] basically taking work that had been patented in 1995 and tweaking it. The technologies include existing and ‘x factor’ technologies that won’t come out for a few years. It is a planned market extension for existing business products. “his company has always been bad at access. [. . .] Access requires a different mind-­set. Carriers want to provide converged services [. . .], and Multiservice is the key bridge tech because it allows interoperability.” Your customers will not initially accept the new technology. You have to evolve to it. We need to move up the value chain fast, and we need to change fast. What if all that crap we were spouting in 2000 comes true in 2005? The new rules pretty much screw us. So, business models will change.

From the examples, we can see how the various statements, while expressing different temporal aspects, also connect gradually give temporal shape the company. It is clearly a reflexive process of giving a shape to time through situated activity and letting that shaping condition the activity in turn. Every quote expresses a temporal orientation or, rather, a com­bin­ation of orientations, which adds to the depth of the temporal shape of the organization. For example, the quote ‘This company has always been bad at access’ suggests

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that it has been bad at access continuously though the past and continues to be bad today. The quote ‘Carriers want to provide converged services [. . .], and Multiservice is the key bridge tech because it allows interoperability’ suggests a combination of a projected set of acts in the future (‘Carriers want to provide converged service’) and a current capability (Multiservice) that may help accomplish that. Although the quotes do not mention the past, present, or future, they all include implicit references to the present, past, and/or future that the actors recognize as such. There is a ongoing shaping of time hidden in the text that makes the various utterances comprehensible to those involved, without which the meaning of the statements would not be the same. Things have taken place, other things are happening at the moment, and some things will take place in the future. Exactly what has taken place, what is taking place, and what may or will take place in the future are subject to selection and interpretation that is both conditioned by an emerging tem­ poral shape and which gives added depth to that shape in turn. Of course, this is all part of storytelling, which Boje (1991) calls the preferred currency of sensemaking in organizations. But it is a particular kind of storytelling because it expresses time as shape and not just things happening in time. We may to some extent, read the four dimensions of time into the quotes. For example, the quote ‘[They are] ba­sic­ally taking work that had been patented in 1995 and tweaking it’ contains practices. ‘The decision was hard’ refers to a past event. ‘We need to move up the value chain fast’ expresses temporal experience in the form of rapid acceleration of time. Temporal shape is expressive of a metaphysical level of time, which Schütz (1967) called a higher synthesis of time and Ricoeur called narrative, both of which signify a level of time beyond its various elements. At the level of synthesis or narrative, time becomes an integral unit of ex­peri­ence, meaning, and analysis. As an integral unit, time becomes a level beyond its constitutive elements. For example, Ricoeur refers to Aristotle’s notion of plot, insisting on the verbal form emplotment. Aristotle described genres of drama, such as tragedy, which consists of the following elements in succession: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement or resolution. There is no explicit mention of time in this description, but the order conveys drama. In other words, if we witness a process that unfolds in this manner, we may interpret it as a drama and consider the order of elem­ ents may be derived from the label ‘drama’. A business meeting may result in a climax that was building up during a process of interactions. The climax would then be a turning point, followed by actions, followed by a tentative resolution, in a way that the people present may interpret according to the

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plot of a drama. In this way, the narrative structure becomes a thematic bridging between events and each event occupies a place in a story of the unfolding. The story does some of the analytical work for us, just as it helped those present connect events through a narrative shape. Although they came from two different fields, historian-­ philosopher Ricoeur and sociologist-­philosopher Schütz arrived at a similar conclusion about time as locus of meaning, not merely as a means of action or in­ter­pret­ ation. Ricoeur (1984) advanced narrative as an alternative means to gain historical understanding. In his view, actors move through time by means of their narrative, and reading their narrative is a way to gain access to their history. Schütz (1967), on the other hand, advanced what he called a higher synthesis of temporal experience on the basis of phenomenology. Extending from Husserl’s thinking, Schütz worked from the direct experience of being in time. Nevertheless, in a similar vein to Ricoeur, Schütz was not content to simply understand the various conceptions of time (e.g., events, duration, past, future, present) but was concerned with formulating the basis for being in time, moving through time. It is worth paying close attention to this passage from Schütz (1967: 75): But there is yet a higher stage of unity within experience. This stage consists in the gathering of separate Acts into a higher synthesis. This synthesis then becomes an "object" within consciousness. What was polythetic and many-­rayed has now become monothetic and onerayed. We now have a configuration of meaning or meaning-­context. Let us define meaning-­context formally: We say that our lived experiences Ei, E„ . . . , E„ stand in a meaning-­context if and only if, once they have been lived through in separate steps, they are then constituted into a synthesis of a higher order, becoming thereby unified objects of monothetic attention.

If we substitute Schütz’s ‘polythetic’ and ‘many-­rayed’ with the four dimensions of time developed in Chapters 2–5, the monothetic and ‘onerayed’ becomes his higher synthesis, which, following (not without risk) Ricoeur, we may understand as the narrative articulated through acts of emplotment. This means that we may analyse the four dimensions as constitutive of the higher synthesis. But, as Schütz (1967: 75) also points out, we need to maintain a distinction between the dimensions (his lower categories) and the higher order synthesis: Meanwhile we will keep very clearly in mind the distinction between con­fig­ur­ ations of meaning and lower-­order configurations such as that of simple attention

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Narrative Trajectory  133 to experiences and that of duration itself, the configuration which makes my ex­peri­ences "mine." [..] Configurations of meaning, let us remember, consist of meanings already created in more elementary acts of attention.

Ricoeur’s notion of narrative is close to this view, as he argues that narrative is that which follows the actor through time. In other words, the trajectory through time defines the actor whereas the narrative follows the actor through time and provides followability of the various events of connecting present, past and future through time. I will dwell on Ricoeur’s theory below as a way to explicate narrative as one particular way of giving shape to time.

Configurational Event Narrative The most notable attempt at theorizing the shaping of time is probably done in narrative theory, which has been applied by multiple organizational ­scholars. I will in the following discuss in more detail Ricoeur’s con­fig­ur­ ation­al narrative theory, which helps explain how different dimensions of time may be brought into interaction within an emplotted narrative that provides the higher synthesis that Schütz wrote about. More often than not, people think of narratives as stories that are told, and stories tend to be of the  type, ‘that happened, which occasioned that, which finally led to that’. This is what we may call a sequential-­events narrative. Thus, the word ‘narrative’ often implies a beginning, a middle part, and an ending. A literary view draws on narratology to impose narrative structure on stories as a means of analysis, and this view has been applied to or­gan­iza­tion­al analysis, such as strategy. When Barry and Elmes (1997) show how actors may understand strategies through narrative analysis, they draw on Scholes (1981: 205) def­in­ition of narrative as ‘the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time’. Events in a narratological view are ordered sequentially. Thus, for example, a tra­gedy and a comedy exhibit different event sequences. A sequential event view also serves his­tor­ ians when they relate how the past has unfolded to become history. Organizational scholars have adopted a different view of narrative (Cunliffe et al., 2004; Cunliffe and Coupland, 2011; Dunford and Jones, 2000; Maclean et al., 2014), which consists of narratives as a means by which actors express a collective sense of moving through in time from past to future. This is what we may call a configurational-­events view. It is configurational because actors do not relate events as appearing in sequence but in con­fig­ur­ations

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that give those events meaning in relation to one another. They configure events to take account of their past while resolving the issues that lie before them. In this view, the sequential order of events matters less than the ways they are meaningfully strung together. Configurational narratives indicate how past and future events connect to one another such that they tell a recognizable, intelligible story about where the organization or group emerges from and where it is headed. Such narratives provide not just direction but also legitimacy, accountability, and collective identity to members, and the narratives are enacted (Pentland, 1999) as temporal maps of tra­jec­tor­ies. They help actors establish socially validated connections among present, past, and future events, whereby the connections are seen as plausible (Ricoeur, 1984; Vaara et al., 2016), intelligible (Czarniawska, 1997), and coherent (Cunliffe et al., 2004; Pentland and Feldman, 2007). Actors may articulate such narratives through storytelling but also through other means of communication. Sonenshein (2010), for instance, shows in a study of change processes how management constructed narratives from actual events the organization faced, to depict its future trajectory. This view of narratives is inherently temporal (Wiebe, 2010) and synthesizes various streams of events, some of which lie in the past and others which are anticipated in the future, into a collective sense of trajectory. Such a view also invites thinking about how narrative attempts to bring into play both actuality and potentiality, where the potentiality of the present is extracted from the actuality of the past and the emerging actuality of the future. Thus, narratives rely on imagination and creativity in the construction of event tra­jec­tor­ies that appear meaningful to actors and provide a basis for action. In this view, narrative trajectories do not simply represent the order of events but are open to more-­complex patterns that provide a sense of temporal order and meaning (Suddaby et al., 2010), notably by enabling simultaneous focus on the parts and the whole (Polkinghorne, 1988) and the particular temporal meaning of linking them. Taken to its logical conclusion, St. Augustine’s predicament in his Confessions, in the fifth century AD that ‘the past is no longer and the future is not yet’, would have actors move through time without any form of continuity (and hence change), exposed to the fateful forces of external contingencies or the will of God. In his treatment of narrative and time, Ricoeur (1984) rescues St. Augustine from this painful scenario by carefully arguing that narratives provide actors with a way to move through time from one present to the next, with pasts and futures represented through narrative and enacted through emplotment. Ricoeur’s view of narrative helps bridge the present,

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past, and future by including them in an intelligible structure that actors bring with them on their journeys through time, and which reminds them of which journey they are on. Thus, Ricoeur opens a novel, dynamic dimension of temporality that organization studies needs, by paying attention to the followability of narratives through time but without losing sight of the overall narrative. Emplotment (Ricoeur, 1984) indicates the meaning of a narrative. The idea of plot was first mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he gives ex­amples from Greek tragedy and comedy of different narrative plots. In the organizational field, one such plot may be a persistent idea of organizational growth rooted in a founder’s core ideas about what the company should be about (Schein, 1983). Another example of a plot may be the atrophy attributed to excessive formalization, which leads to decline. Zerubavel (2003) suggests how plots, such as progress, decline, evolutions, rise, and fall, may underpin historical narratives. We can think of various plots for or­gan­iza­ tion­al trajectories, such as growth, dominance, closure, or death (Sutton, 1987), opportunity (Beckert, 2016), or change (Barry and Elmes, 1997). However, note that emplotment, in Ricoeur’s narrative theory, is a verb and therefore denotes process rather than outcome. Emplotment, Ricoeur emphasizes, implies composition (1984: 33), and composition implies working with known materials but without ever knowing the exact outcome. Emplotment may be recognizable over time through synoptic accounts. Ricoeur insists on the situated acts of emplotment, which he describes as the grasping together of localized (my term) events. The situated enactment of events occurs in response to various contingencies, most often an imminent future problem or opportunity that actors aim to address. Dealing with that problem or opportunity implies looking into both the future and past for events that describe their course of action, which comes to define what they do in the present. Ricoeur offers an elegant event-­configurational explanation of narrative, in which his notion of emplotment becomes central. As mentioned, the most common tendency is to assume that moments follow one another sequentially, like beads on a string, guided by the plot. This would mean, however, that some beads could be removed, and the shape of the string would still be more or less intact. Moreover, each event would be complete before the next event takes place. As Whitehead (1927) would say, that would correspond to thinking of moments as simply happening, but one of Whitehead’s basic assumptions is that ‘There is nothing which “simply happens”. This belief is the baseless doctrine of time as “pure succession” ’ (Whitehead, 1927: 38).

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Here, Whitehead criticizes the idea that time simply passes and that we are mere observers of time passing. He does, however, say that this is what happens, but while our observations occur in the flow of time, we also shape what happens in the flow of time. In other words, in addition to observing directly that which is happening, we perform causalities by actively relating different moments in time to one another, moments which do not necessarily follow from one another. The stringing together of events is intentional and aims to enact a future, which may lie seconds, weeks, or months away. When an energy company narrates how it moved from extracting and refining fossil-­based fuels to the use of renewable energy sources, that story is told intentionally to convince employees, clients and authorities of a profound and innovative change in orientation. Note that it could have been otherwise, which means that the stringing together is partly based on choice between different possible tra­jec­ tor­ies of events, each of which would be telling a different story. This line of reasoning implies that a singular trajectory forward in time as actors live through various events may result in multiple different presentations as different actors string together events differently. Actors have different voices because they emerge from different trajectories through time. For narrative to occur, according to Pentland (1999), there needs to be voice, and voice is what provides lived events with a deeper sense of meaning and continuity. But a narrative may express multiple possible shapes, which is why I suggest that actors engage reflexively with the shaping of their trajectory. The on­going work of reflexive shaping enables them to get a sense of where they find themselves along the trajectory as well as the time that comes-towards them and the time that flows-away from them at various events along the trajectory. Ricoeur leaves the sequential dimension of time intact while including a configurational dimension, which he connects to the world of practice and action. He seeks a temporal form of narrative that enables narratives to follow actors through time, but he also assumes that as actors configure time to cope in the moment, that coping becomes part of their trajectory through time. His definition of narrative aims to capture historicizing in the sense of capturing the past as it was as well as fiction, imagining what the future may be. The two, he argues, may be combined into a configurational narrative, by which he means that narrative as form configures temporal experience. Ricoeur reasons as follows: Actors move through time. This is not the constructed time of events but the inevitable journey through time in which we all find ourselves. As actors move through time, they encounter experiences which becomes stored as events. The experiences/events are cumulative and sequential. As the events become the stock of experiential knowledge

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lingering in the actors’ past, actors feel the need to organize them so they can help actors make sense of novel experiences/events. They may frame novel ex­peri­ences/events in the light of their previous experiences, but here is the point: not in light of their sequential experiences, because that would assume that they reproduced their succession of events, which would impose linearity on their voyage through time. The linear before-and-after succession of experiences through time serves as a reservoir of experience from which actors construct non-linear temporal configuration to deal with novel ­experiences or events. This makes the shifting between sequential and nonsequential time an important part of Ricoeur’s narrative theory. Such shifts may be explained by Ricoeur’s use of the term ‘mimesis’. He distinguishes three l­evels of mimesis. The reproduction of the linear experience of successive events is Mimesis 1. It is the knowledge emerging from past experience and culturally embedded. It includes knowledge of events, actors, and symbols. This is how history tends to be written, narrated as the sequential ordering of significant events. But again, actors cannot move through time with a copy of sequentially lived events, because such a copy will not allow them to project a future that is different from the past. Instead, they need to redescribe reality so that it remains faithful to their historical experiences while enabling them to project themselves onto a novel future. This is what Ricoeur calls Mimesis 2: a redescription of reality in the form of a heuristic structure that encapsulates both the lived past and the possible future. Here, a configurational event view enters the picture. The configuration of events travels with the actor through time. Ricoeur’s important contribution to a more dynamic understanding of time lies here: the conversion or translation from a sequential movement through time to a living assembly of events that enable actors to move through time while evoking selected past events and projecting novel future events. This also implies that the ­configurational event narrative has an imitative nature en­abled by poetry (here Ricoeur draws on Aristotle), as we acknowledge that the poetic rendering of reality is a creative yet faithful redescription of reality. The event ­configuration as narrative enables the narrative to follow actors through time, for which Ricoeur uses the term ‘followability’. And because future events can never really be given in experience, they must be imagined. Moreover, because event configurations, while true to the past, exhibit combinatory possibilities, there will always be an element of creativity in the connecting of events within the configuration. Here, the notion of emplotment becomes important. Emplotment, according to Ricoeur, signifies the act of grasping together, in the sense of grasping together events (see Figure 9). Like a pulsating organism, the narrative is

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138  Organization and Time Present–past– future Past: Sequential configuration

Future: sequential

emplotment

Figure 9  Emplotment and narrative trajectory

enacted repeatedly in different ways, which enables it to be upheld and, hence, made followable but also changeable. When actors select and reconfigure events to solve an issue, that reconfiguration becomes an emplotment of those actors’ historical narratives. In other words, it is not the narrative as such that becomes followable, but the situated emplotment activity which reveals the historical narrative. Emplotment becomes the narrative core that not just accompanies actors through time, reminding them of the present, past, and future of their trajectories, but which also provides sustained meaning to events that emerge to constitute the actors’ trajectories through time. In his analysis of how actors at the Federal Reserve made sense of complex and ambiguous environments, Abolafia (2010) shows how they constructed plots from past events to anticipate the future. Grasping together the configuration of events through emplotment is what gives a unique profile to actors’ trajectory through time. Note that grasping together is a verb, which suggests that the narrative is continually in a state of becoming. This means that it is always in need of reproduction and that it is always liable to change. Mimesis 3, the last level, concerns the integration of the imaginative or fictive perspective offered at the level of Mimesis 2 into actual, lived ex­peri­ence. It includes reading the narrative and making it reality through practices. In this way, the configurational arrangement turns sequences of events into a meaningful whole which becomes embedded in actors’ worlds of practice as series of sequentially ordered practices.

Trajectory from Within When I have brought up the notion of trajectory, however, people have sometimes not readily abandoned the idea of trajectory as a physical movement through time, like that of a tennis ball. To many people, a trajectory is marked by a series of points in time and space through which an object passes. The natural sciences have traditionally sought to impose a direction on time by viewing it as a forward surge to then be retrieved as history but in a continuous forward movement. They have traditionally assumed a

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symmetric relationship between the past and future, which enables two other assumptions. The first is that processes are reversible, meaning that time can be turned back, and under the same conditions the same future materializes. A second assumption relates closely to the first, which is that if an experiment is well done, it may be replicated under identical conditions elsewhere and lead to the same results. Prigogine (1996) sought to undermine this assumption of time, arguing that natural systems are subject to contingencies, just as human systems are, in which actual choices may not conform to a given pattern. Following the view of time as ir­re­vers­ible, then, Prigogine points out how the unfolding of processes involves both determinism and probability (Prigogine, 1996: 69). This is how physical particles may experience time and how the assumption of their experience of time shapes human reasoning about issues such as caus­al­ity, probability, and even choice, to the extent that choice exists in natural systems. According to the common understanding of the word, a trajectory passes through numerous points given by their coordinates in a spatial system, most often in two dimensions. Those points of passage are also determined by certain outside factors, such as the force and angle of projection, weight and form of the object, and air resistance. In other words, given the outside factors, each point of passage is a natural continuity as expressed through external coordinates. There is no reason to question the continuity because it is given by the surrounding system, which has produced an expectation of what the trajectory would be like. No one will likely object to this presentation of trajectory, which is readily proven empirically. A tennis ball abides by a universal system of spatial coordinates, and the point in time at which it is observed indicates its pos­ition along the trajectory. There is, however, one problem. A tennis ball is inert matter. The sheer momentum of its movement carries it from one position to the next. It does not need to know where it is because its movement abides by the law of symmetry (Rogers, 2004). Its movement could be reversed and yet be the same. However, a creature endowed with consciousness travelling on the tennis ball would experience a continuous movement but would be wondering, ‘where am I, how far have we come, and where do we go from here?’ Whereas the tennis ball’s movement may be inferred by spotting it at various points along a predefined trajectory, a creature with a consciousness lives inside the trajectory. Inside the trajectory, the creature exercises memory and ex­pect­ ation. Unlike the tennis ball, the movement of our conscious creature cannot be symmetrical because memory and expectation are ontologically different. Memory is a recall of how something was, and anticipation is hypothesizing where to go from here and both could be different depending on the choices

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made. In the Newtonian conception, the trajectory is there, but in this conception the trajectory is here (Rogers, 2004), and the here ­travels with the creature throughout the trajectory. The here, however, cannot be gauged from a distance. Nor is it given the way the unconscious tennis ball is. Whereas in the Newtonian conception, the events take place like a string of beads, to borrow from James (1890), in the ‘here’ conception the beads are the string, not as separate events but as intersecting and intersected events. Events are not represented as points along a trajectory in which the tennis ball’s passage through the events determines movement. Instead, in this latter conception, movement is in the events. Yet, also in this latter conception, there are no gaps between the events. Instead, the creature on the tennis ball experiences the trajectory as a continuous changing movement of reconnecting events. The creature exercises the agency of the present, but it is a continual present through which future and past are translated into a sense of trajectory. This trajectory is not determined before it is over as the creature looks back on it. While it was going on, it was all contingent. This latter view of trajectory makes events primal and time and space dependent on the event and the ways that other events are constructed and co-­constructed. Perhaps the tennis ball without the creature follows the same physical trajectory as the tennis ball with the conscious creature attached to it. But we assess sameness only in the same frame as the physical coordinates. From within the trajectory, nothing is ever the same, although there may be correspondences. Although scholars in organization studies have expressed dislike of Newtonian conceptions of time and space, the Newtonian version of the tennis ball trajectory described above bears considerable resemblance to many studies of how actors move through time. The attractiveness of longitudinal studies has spurred scholars to pinpoint passages in trajectory that aim to show how and when change takes place. They see change, similar to movement in the above discussion, as the transition from one point to the next, Newtonian style. Much like the unaccompanied tennis ball, events are given as points of passage that record change and continuity. But that is not how the trajectory is experienced from within as it happens, although actors may describe it as such in retrospect.

Narrative as Trajectory from Within As argued above, although the present-­past-­future view marked an im­port­ ant step towards more dynamic views of time, we are still left with the

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question of how the present-­past-­future dynamics travel with actors as they move through time and continually participate in shaping their trajectories. This I  call the stationarity problem of temporal theorizing. Viewing the present-­past-­future as a tangle in which the present, past, and future form a mutually constitutive relationship is an important step. A next step is to conceptualize how this tangle moves with the flow of time as perceived and experienced from within the trajectory. Given that the tangle implies mutually constitutive dynamics between the present, past, and future, those dynamics create the past for the future situation of the tangle. These dynamics are demanding to both observe and record, because they entail different present events over time, as Feddersen (2020) demonstrated. As they move along the flow of time, actors give shape to their presents, pasts, and futures. There is a double dynamic going on, because the shape they give to their presents, pasts, and futures defines them, in turn. Narratives tie past and future events into wholes that exhibit meaningful patterns to organizational members. The whole, according to Ricoeur (1984), works like a storyline or a plot that ties events and actors together. Narrative also exhibits exploratory abilities. As Cunliffe et al. (2004: 65) point out, narratives not only inform actors of their past but also provide them with the means to invent the future. The converse would also hold: that by anticipating a set of distant future events, actors can invent the past by exploring past events that have not previously been part of their narratives. Narratives are arguably power­ful precisely because they are inherently incomplete, which encourages actors to investigate novel events and possible connections between them. Narrative trajectory enables actors to imagine different plausible paths between the past and future and to forge a collective story that transcends actors’ individual trajectories. The story goes that when Israelis and Palestinians met to negotiate the Oslo agreement in the 1990s, they could initially agree on one thing: that their children would not endure the amount of suffering they had. Such a common nexus along their respective trajectories helped them moved towards a tentative agreement about a shared future. Narratives are purposely both closed-­ended and open-­ended, which enables actors to understand them while allowing possibilities for showing alternative ways from the past via the present into the future. And while strategies are almost exclusively oriented towards the future, narratives include both the distant past and future. Actors do not merely move along in time, but as they move along they give shape to the trajectories they pursue; they enact their trajectories continually. Such an approach does not consider time as a predefined entity or resource but as an ongoing emergent condition from which actors cannot readily

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escape. A company may decide to delay a product, but it cannot escape from the fact that time moves on, and the situation tomorrow may well be different from that of yesterday. Actually, the way the company left it yesterday gives shape to what may come tomorrow, without ever determining what may come, even if they planned purposely for it. This situation approximates Shotter’s (2006: 591) observation that, ‘[Temporal wholes] require a special kind of understanding which takes their temporal ‘movement’ into account, a historical understanding, an understanding that entails, not an in­stant­an­ eous ‘getting the picture’, but an understanding that consists in an unfolding movement’. This is why is it important to consider the trajectoral shaping of time as a reflexive process whereby shape is created by actors’ enactment for then to condition their enactment in turn. There is a parallel here to the tem­ poral reflexivity assumed by Orlikowski and Yates (2002) in their discussion of temporal structuring. There is a difference, however, in that trajectoral shaping takes account of actors’ movement through time, whereas their the­ or­iz­ing assumes implicitly temporal stationarity of actors. Introducing the notion of temporal trajectory signifies the possibility of dynamically combining the near and distant futures in organizational ana­ lysis. I have not yet defined what ‘near’ and ‘distant’ refer to, but for the time being, let us say that they serve two different purposes. The near past and future serve the purpose of familiarity with past and future actions. They serve the purpose of relating, of comparing, of extrapolating the present or an immediate act with what has been or what may take place. The near past and future enable responses to questions such as, ‘if we do more of this, will that lead to more of that’? At a different level of abstraction, they offer to actors the possibility of inferring direct causalities. This is presumably why companies tend to operate on the basis of quarterly reporting and annual forecasting. I do not know why this horizon has become so prevalent other than the fact that it is institutionalized through mechanisms that apply to public companies and is required by law in many countries. The distant past and future, in contrast, serve a different purpose, because they cannot be compared readily with the present or an immediate act. Distant pasts and futures stand out by themselves without the need for comparison. They entail typically singular events which, drawing on Trope and Liberman’s work in Chapter 4. Time, in this case, is constituted by events, which involve actions and acts, so we can say that increased distance involves more densely connected occasions of experiencing. In a young and rapidly growing company, for example, perhaps only a handful of people can look back at lived experiences in the very early stages, which, in chronological terms, have occurred only a few years earlier. This is what Dornfeld and

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Thielhelm (2016) show in their study of an online retail company in Russia that grew exponentially, from a handful of people to 4000 staff, in about five years. Needless to say, most of the staff had spent fewer than five years in the company, and they could not really relate to the time of the company’s founding. But any narrative trajectory is as yet unfinished. It is an emerging trajectory of recognizable and plausible events strung together as a meaningful whole, a whole that conveys an ever-emerging story through time but without a beginning or end. Any starting or ending is provisional. Any narrative trajectory embodies actuality and potentiality, by showing a direction and the potential continuation of the trajectory.

Becoming of an Emplotted Narrative Trajectory The case of the conscious creature travelling with the tennis ball brings hopefully some light to the experience of temporal shaping from within a narrative trajectory. As mentioned previously, my critique of the current status of temporal research is that it assumes stationary present-­past-­future dynamics. It leads us to believe that between this non-­moving subject and a  future event is an empty space waiting to be filled by past and future projections. However, that temporal void is not entirely empty. It is already emplotted, and that emplotment conditions the present-­past-­future dynamics, which fuels and modifies the emplotment that guides it. The iterative mutual processes between present-­past-­future projections and emplotment provide the shape and substance of the narrative trajectory. Incorporating emplotment in the analysis enables questions to be asked, such as, what happens when unexpected ex­peri­ences intervene to upset the present-­past-­future tangle? Actors continually find themselves in an immanent present-­past-­future tangle but one that is exposed to change amid continuity. Things are about to be purchased, deadlines are about to be met, or decisions are to be made about investing in new technologies. This time tangle is more than a list of things to do, however. It also has an orientation, a direction in time. The very moment we think of the future, the future has already begun. The emerging, imminent thoughts have already set us on a path leading towards a more distant future. And as their future begins, so does their past. The above discussion, schematically summarized in Figure 9, has brought emplotment into narrative trajectory. Emplotment, as Ricoeur (1984) pointed out, enables followability of the narrative through time. The narrative trajectory accompanies actors through time, whereas the emplotment

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enables followability of the narrative. Followability, however, does not apply to a static, or even a particularly stable narrative. Emplotment is an emergent possibility for the narrative to connect through its various events. Being emergent means that it can both change and be continuous. Narrative, the underlying storyline that runs through events, and which is evoked through emplotment in the present, fills the v­ irtual gap between the future that has already begun and the future that is projected, just as it fills the gap between the immediate past and more distant past events. I will conclude this chapter by illustrating how narrative trajectory and emplotment may interact with different time dimensions, drawing on Zeitz’ (2013) illustration how President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is still in a process of becoming ‘that speech’, and American democracy is still on a temporal trajectory, as the recent presidential election illustrated. I will draw on the notions of singular and exemplary events developed in Chapter 4, but whereas I left the two types as categories in Chapter  4, here I discuss how events become subject to processes of singularization and exemplification. Taking a narrative trajectoral view enables us to interpret particular events as undergoing different processes of singularization or exemplification as the emplotment occasioned by the Gettysburg Address evolved through time. The Gettysburg battle, which took place on 1–3 July 1863 between the Union and Confederate forces, marked an important turning point in the American Civil War. The Union forces won the battle, with huge casualties on both sides. Lincoln was invited to make a speech to dedicate the new national cemetery of Gettysburg. His speech, on 19 November 1863, is famous for its brevity (less than three minutes) but also its profundity, which, however, was lost on many people in subsequent years. The speech has been described as the most important in American political history. Yet, the speech adopted the importance it holds today not because it stood out as particularly important at the time but because it has become a singular event in the narrative trajectory of American democracy. The analysis below suggests how it evolved from exemplary to singular, to then become a different singular event. Figure 10 below illustrates the becoming of a narrative trajectory, mediated by the emerging and changing emplotment. The speech event’s initial emplotment was about freedom and thus, rights. The battle was an event in the recent past that Lincoln leverage during his speech to set the scene for a future narrative trajectory. He appealed for the dead soldiers not having died in vain in view of what the future should hold. This is how the speech ended: But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have

Speech celebrated as message of equal rights

Speech celebrated as message of military victory

Speech emerging as political statement event

‘Then Lincoln rose to give a few remarks.’ ‘A search of 15 major American newspapers from 1864 through 1889 yields just a handful of mentions of the Gettysburg Address.’

Singularization of the speech as part of feminist movement

Exemplary events singularize MLK’s speech

Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1963 and Joe Biden’s 2020 Gettysburg speeches as examplary events singularizing Lincoln’s and MLK’s speeches

Luther King’s 1963 speech emerges as an event to echo Lincoln's speech

‘In New York, proponents of women’s suffrage opened a meeting with recitation of the speech, followed by a lecture on “The Next Steps in Political Reform.”’

‘Readings of the Gettysburg Address became an obligatory part of Memorial Day celebrations at public schools, municipal ceremonies and regimental reunions.’

‘Such events became commonplace, as many Northerners—their moral memories faded and their racial prejudices hardened —slipped into ideological amnesia.’

Singularization of the speech through municipal school practices

Series of interconnected exemplary events

Memorization of the battle through commemorative practices

Speech seen as exemplary political event by media

By the 1890s, however, when the Gettysburg Address finally entered America’s secular gospel, most people conveniently forgot what Lincoln actually attempted to convey in his brief remarks.

Figure 10  Narrative trajectory of the Gettysburg speech

Political strengthening of emplotment at events

Modern era strengthening of emplotment of rights and freedom at singular event ‘I have a dream’

‘Reemmplotment’ of speech as marking a trajectory of freedom and rights through practices and events

Emplotment of speech as marking victory through practices at events

Emplotment of freedom and rights

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146  Organization and Time consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It is quite possible that Lincoln himself did not anticipate the making of such a momentous event. Presumably he made many similar speeches, and it is paradoxical how such a short speech whose significance became more or less forgotten, ended up becoming such an important event. Although people later saw the speech as one of the most important in American political history, Lincoln might have prepared it as mere remarks aimed at re-­election; therefore, we may see his speech as an exemplary event in the making before the speech took place. It was to be a speech not unlike several other speeches, as indicated by Zeitz’s renedring: ‘For Lincoln, the dedication of the national battlefield cemetery was politically loaded: It offered an important op­por­tun­ ity to convene with Northern governors and newspaper correspondents who would prove critical to his re-­nomination fight the following summer.’ This illustrates how emerging events are essentially open as they happen, and how, as they are practised (such as making a speech), their role in the narrative trajectory remains to be settled. Their role as singular or exemplary events is defined through successive processes of events. But even those roles evolve gradually and may even replace one another, as the discussion below shows. Nevertheless, formation of a narrative trajectory occurs, and events evolve into their respective roles as part of a trajectory while simultaneously giving shape to that trajectory through the emerging emplotment, which is likely enacted differently by different actors. In terms of the four time dimensions discussed in Chapter 2–5, Zeitz’s rendering of the historical trajectory of the Gettysburg Address illustrates how practices turn into events, which may become singular or exemplary and evocative of other events while providing a basis for emplotment of the narrative trajectory. It also shows how evocation may change with changing practices, such as when acts of the Civil Rights Movement begin to occur alongside the battle’s commemoration. And it shows how an event remains an event while changing meaning (the Gettysburg Address remained an important

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event while its meaning changed), thereby conditioning later events, such as Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech where he immortalized the phrase ‘I have a dream’. Readings of the text reveal how it was less about victory and more about equal rights. ‘Although, at the time of its delivery, the Gettysburg Address—in which Lincoln signalled a new moral turn in the war—was widely understood.’ (Zeitz, 2013), the battle became commemorated through annual rit­ uals to mark the battle as a victory for the North, rather than what it stood for. Lincoln’s intended emplotment of a narrative trajectory of freedom and social rights was replaced by an emplotment of winning the battle during commemorative practices: As memories of the war faded in the 1880s and 1890s . . . Americans adopted a new ritual of Blue and Gray reunions, in which aging veterans relived their battlefield achievements. . . . Such events became commonplace, as many Northerners — their moral memories faded and their racial prejudices hardened — slipped into ideological amnesia. The Civil War was no longer remarkable for what it accomplished, but for what soldiers did on the battlefield.  (Zeitz, 2013)

Beyond Lincoln’s circle, several soldiers had understood what they were fighting for. Soldiers’ letters and diaries written during the war suggest that they understood the message intended by Lincoln. However, scattered and eventually lost or forgotten letters did not turn into connected events with the agency necessary to collectively evoke the meaning of Lincoln’s speech. In the years following Lincoln’s speech, newspapers did not describe it as the speech that it eventually became and when the speech gained in visibility, the actual meaning of his remarks was not widely understood. A search of 15 major American newspapers from 1864 through 1889 yields just a handful of mentions of the Gettysburg Address. By the 1890s, however, when the Gettysburg Address finally entered America’s secular gospel, most people conveniently forgot what Lincoln actually attempted to convey in his brief remarks. Even in Montgomery, Ala., where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as Confederate president, the local paper thought it unremarkable.  (Zeitz, 2013)

Nevertheless, the speech became subject to attention through rituals at municipal schools, where it was read aloud in classrooms. Such events are exemplary of a certain type of events that was institutionalised in the school system. We can imagine how the event they addressed, however, became increasingly singularized as Lincoln’s message became increasingly known

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and the symbolic importance of the speech increasingly recognised. Singularization, as mentioned above, implies a shift towards more-essentialist features of events. The on-­going emplotment of the speech through school practices helped the speech remain in public consciousness during a period when it might have been forgotten altogether, as newspapers did not refer to its mesage: Ironically, the speech became famous just as America forgot what it meant. Readings of the Gettysburg Address became an obligatory part of Memorial Day celebrations at public schools, municipal ceremonies and regimental reunions. But of the hundreds of newspaper articles noting its public recitation, very few stopped to dwell on the text’s original meaning.  (Zeitz, 2013)

A second process of practices and events took place through feminist movements, which addressed the speech as a symbolic and significant event of liberation and freedom. It was read aloud during meetings of women’s suffrage movements. It is likely that members of such movement could readily identify with its appeal to freedom and equality and that at such meetings, members might well experience strongly the distant event of the Gettysburg speech. Being activists, they might also use the speech as part of the emplotment of their own movements’ trajectories towards ­gender equality. To be sure, not everyone stripped the document of its broader implications. In New York, proponents of women’s suffrage opened a meeting with recitation of the speech, followed by a lecture on ‘The Next Steps in Political Reform.’ (Zeitz, 2013)

The increase in civil rights movement throughout the 1960s brought the 1863 speech into perspective, as the intended emplotment of rights and liberty of the speech came increasingly into focus. The 1960 witnessed un­pre­ce­dent­ed engagement among different social groups in activities to civil rights. It would take several decades before the modern civil rights revolution compelled most white Americans to reacquaint themselves with the ideological aspects of the Civil War. In so doing, they would come to rediscover a speech that was first forgotten, then remembered and finally, a century after its delivery, understood. (Zeitz, 2013)

The reference here is to Martin Luther King and his 1963 ‘Gettysburg Address’. Whereas events referred to above, such as at classes at schools and

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meetings in the feminist movement, remain exemplary events, Luther King’s speech marked another event that became singularized until today. It suffices to mention ‘I have a dream’ and most people will recognize the source of the quote. The largely forward temporal orientation of Lincoln’s speech was evoked retrospectively by Luther King, but simultaneously turned towards the future through the words ‘I have a dream’. Later speeches referred to Lincoln’s speech to reproduce it as an important event in the narrative trajectory of American democracy. In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson evoked the 1863 Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg. And in running as the Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden chose Gettysburg for a speech that Avlon (2020) hailed as his best: Overlooking the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Biden invoked the reconciling leadership of Abraham Lincoln and committed to healing our house divided: ‘We can end this era of division. We can end the hate and the fear. We can be what we are at our best: The United States of America.’

In Figure 10 I have only included practices, events and experience from the four time dimensions. Time-­as-­resource might have included various sig­ nifi­cant features. Acts at the local level, such as the soldiers’ com­mem­or­ation, the speech by Lyndon B. Johnson, or actions of the Civil Rights Movement, have their own recurring temporal properties, such as timing, durations, and rhythms (Adams, 1990) that were repeated from year to year.

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8 Changing in Time Introduction The word ‘change’ must surely rank among the most used and least the­or­ized— and hence least understood—concepts in the social sciences. I teach change to practising managers, and what I ask them how they understand change, they first express surprise at the question, then hesitate to offer an answer. Yet they are surrounded by discourse on change. Much of what is written about the ever-­increasing rate of change is either empirically imprecise, based on shallow assumptions about the nature of change, or fuelled by considerable hype about the promise of disruption, the fourth Industrial Revolution, or robotization of the economy. The problem is that change does not actually take place at the time we think it does. There is every reason to think that during events that are associated with change, actors experience a strong sense of continuity. It is therefore unproductive to think about change without at the same time thinking about continuity. What one experiences as continuity at one time may, when viewed retrospectively, be seen as change. And what one experiences as change at one time may, in hindsight, be perceived as continuity. Phenomena such as the sharing economy and so-­called disruptive technologies pose considerable challenges to actors in the private and public sectors. Disruptive change is a change in time. It signals a disruptive de­part­ ure from previously accepted practice to what may become a completely different practice in the future. There is nothing really new about this. Widespread disruptive change has occurred many times before in modern history. Still, transport companies face the challenge of driverless vehicles. Banks are fa­cing the challenge of nonfinancial actors offering payment ­methods. Hotels face the challenge of private individuals offering accommodation to travellers. Publishers face the challenge of Amazon. Public military armies face the challenge of private military armies. Conventional funding methods face the challenges of crowdfunding. The meat industry faces the challenge of vegan and vegetarian alternatives. Contrary to previous management concepts, notions such as the sharing economy and disruptive

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0009

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technologies cannot be seen as mere fads. They may be labels, but they are real in their consequences. They pose challenges for all kinds of organizational and institutional actors. Change management scholars might well argue that in order to confront disruptive change, actors should become something else. All the actor needs is a bold vision of disrupting the present and of suppressing the past that did not deliver on change. All they need to do is cut the moorings from the past  and, by some Houdinian feat, escape the shackles of the present. Unfortunately, that is neither practically nor theoretically feasible. A hotel cannot become a version of Airbnb by forgetting its past, even if that might seem strategically advantageous in the long run. Such a view is rooted in a particular view of freedom; the idea of the corporate leader being able to more or less feeely choose between strategic alternatives. Strategic choice theory assumes that freedom of choice lies in choosing among options that lie before the actor. A booming intellectual industry of strategic choice since the 1980s, building on rational choice theory in economics, assumes that free choice is based on choosing freely from options the external environment offers to the organization in the form of markets, competitors, technologies, or institutions. But there is another way to look at choice, explained more than a century ago by French philosopher Henri Bergson. An eminent philosopher of time, Bergson argued that people exercise their free will by exploring their ex­peri­ ence of being in time, emerging from time, and enduring through time. This exercise of free will is not about actors choosing between options that lie outside of them but (re)exploring the temporal process by which they have become who they are and what they may become. According to Bergson’s thinking, actors coping in a world of disruption involves not so much searching for disconnected strategies but, rather, dipping into their own temporal trove of experiences and events which include the past, present, and future (I will return to a discussion about Bergson and free will in Chapter 10). The hotel may rediscover a sense of ‘airbnbishness’ that has lingered inconspicuously in the past and may become a viable way to cope with a future markedly different from the past dominated by conventional hotels. Exercising this form of ‘strategic choice’ implies engaging the dynamics of linking the present, past, and future as a process that takes place through time. A host of other organizational phenomena are lodged in actors’ temporal experience, but accessing this temporal trove requires the development of more-­dynamic models of time than what has dominated in the field. In this view, the past is not a mooring to cut loose, nor is the present anywhere close to a shackle. On

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the contrary, the present becomes the ongoing locus of generating cre­ativ­ity, change, and continuity by translating novel pasts and futures into one another. I argue in this chapter that the dichotomy between continuity (stability) and change is no longer helpful, and more-­complex models of continuity and change are required. I see continuity and change as complementary concepts that describe how organizational actors move forward in time while retaining a sense of continuity with their past. This chapter translates the conceptual development of temporality from previous chapters into debates about organizational continuity and change. It introduces the idea of epochal continuity, to build on the common notion of ongoing continuity.

The Fallacy of Forward Causation Imagine going to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread. You open and close the front door of your house. You walk down the road until you get to the ­bakery. You enter, you order a loaf of bread, you pay, and you return home. During that half-­hour operation, you moved forward through time. It is not possible to leave the house before you close the front door, nor is it possible to enter the bakery before you walk there. The whole operation adhered to a forward sequential logic of events. However, this logic of events is sometimes confounded with causality. If we use causal analysis to review going to the b ­ akery, it implies that each operation led to the next. In causal language, it implies that each event is both necessary and sufficient for the next event to take place. Here is where mixing forward movement in time and causality becomes a problem. Leaving the house was necessary in order to take the road to the bakery, but was it sufficient? Surely multiple roads could have been taken. Nor did leaving the house necessarily imply going to the bakery. In other words, there are many ways in which the event of leaving the house could have led to taking a different road. And similarly, the event of closing the front door could have been occasioned equally by many antecedent events that were necessary but not sufficient for it to occur. Theoretically, even the door itself is assembled through numerous antecedent events that made the door possible, going back to the act of someone cutting the trees for the door’s fabrication. The point is that many events are necessary for the next event to take place, but none of them is sufficient. Therefore, the logic of caus­al­ity cannot explain how you ended up at the bakery. This is the crux of the argument by Allport (1954), who has influenced scholars on time and temporality, especially those who have theorized events

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as time, including a few organizational scholars (e.g., Morgeson and Hofmann, 1999; Morgeson et al., 2015). Allport was a scholar of social psych­ology who, from the 1920s on, engaged questions of time, choice, and determinism. Allport’s basic argument is that any event has antecedents that could extend indefinitely into the past, which he called the ‘regressus pyramid’ (Allport, 1954: 286). However, the antecedents would not be able to explain why we do what we do in the present because there is no way to know, among the myriad connections among events, which events led to what. Forward causation’s inability to explain what happens in the present demands, according to Allport, that we think differently about the direction of causality. For this reason, his work is key for thinking of time in terms of events. He might point out that during the walk to the bakery, many micro-­ acts took place and many thoughts ran through your mind in a continuous flow, without any distinct breaks in which everything stopped to then begin again. Yet, although you experienced this continuous stream, in order to explain what happened you cut through the trajectory and group it into meaningful parts, which may be called events. Those events, according to Allport, were defined by encounters between entities, such as your body and the door handle. Although there were many micro-­events involved in opening and closing the door in which things could have turned out differently, such as checking that you have the key in your pocket, turning the knob, pulling it shut, etc., those micro-­events are subsumed in the encounter with the door. Splitting the overall operation of going to the bakery into events is necessary to understand not just how it unfolded but how it could have unfolded differently. In fact, it is by also trying to understand how it might have unfolded differently that we can understand why it unfolded the way it did. By splitting it into events, the unfolding of the operation becomes comprehensible through the connecting of the events, which brings us back to forward sequencing and causality. Allport argues for why forward causality cannot explain an operation (he uses the example of a boy going to fill a glass of lemonade). Instead of explaining the process in terms of sequences of events, Allport resorts to the concept of structures of events. Events become connected into structures of events. These structures are not sequential but cyclical. Moreover, structures, although they may appear sequential from the outside, consist of events folded into one another in the present. Along each step on your way to the bakery, you have in mind all the other events, which means that some that were future events become past events in the same event structure (Danner-Schröder, 2020). Past and future events comes towards you to plausibly form the overall event of going to the bakery. Thus, Allport argues, structures are wholes

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of contemporaneous or concurrent events (Allport, 1954: 287). Hence, he concludes, explanations of why we do what we do lie in what he called the approximate ‘here and now’ rather than in the distant. Allport’s refutation of forward causation reveals the flawed assumption of earlier events as both necessary and sufficient causes of certain later events that follow. Assumptions of forward causality through time are widespread in the organizational literature, particularly in the organizational change ­literature. Conventional views of time would suggest that the traffic incident I describe in Chapter 4 had an impact forward in time, that it led to successive reminders of the need to be cautious on the road. They might also consider the strength or duration of the event in order to gauge its effects forward in time. That would be a forward type of causality that assigns force in the initial events, which then reverberates through successive events, like waves rippling out from where a stone hit the water. But the near-­accident I had years ago does not impact all my driving. It lies there is a resource to be selectively brought forward to the present when I drive. Moreover, it is brought forward in response to a situation that I anticipate, such as when I am about to overtake another car. It can also be brought forward if I have been in a situation that might have become dangerous, in which case it is strung together with another past event to emplot my narrative trajectory as a driver.

Experiencing Time in Change The above discussion suggests that what may be seen from the outside a trajectory as causally related events may not be experienced as such from within the trajectory. Change researchers draw a distinction between being within time and being outside of time. In this view, those who observe change from the outside are not those who are part of the change process as it happens. External ob­ser­vers register differences between multiple states of affairs, as they observe it from their standpoint. But their standpoint is not that of those who undergo the change. The difference between the observers of change and those ex­peri­en­cing change is that those who observe the change have the privilege of simultaneously comparing two states of affairs at two different times. The difference is not necessarily between two physically different observers. Actors who find themselves within time as change is happening may later become external observers to their own trajectory as they look back and compare different states of affairs throughout their own

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trajectory. When those who experience change from within time compare two previous states of affairs to reflect on the change between those two states of affairs, they do that reflection through the practices they perform in the present. At every point, those experiencing change can only look back through the temporal prisms in which they find themselves at that moment in time. This is why their interpretation of change between two points in time may be very different from the interpretation of someone who looks at the organization from the outside. Experiencing something as change requires a feeling of difference. Mead (1938: 347) refers to disruption, or interruption, as a basis for experience. Without disruption, ‘there would be merely the passage of events’ (Mead, 1938: 346), and mere passage does not constitute change. Mead defines change as a change that persists: ‘Stating the position generally, until there occurs an interruption in the act such that a certain content in the field persists while other contents shift, there will be no lasting content and no lasting experience’ (Mead, 1938: 347). At the same time, Mead also points out that that, ‘There is a tang of novelty in each moment of experience’ (Mead, 1929: 239). But the point is that although people experience disruption at a certain point in time, that does not mean that change happens at that same point in time; it means that the change experienced in time may not correspond to the change over time (Feddersen, 2020). This happens because people commonly perceive change as taking place according to a ‘from-­to’ logic. We look back and say that something changed from one point in time to another point in time. However, once that observation is about to occur, the time of changing is already left behind. In other words, change is observed post-­facto. Still, many writers assume that change happened when it happened. However, the bad news is that it did not happen ‘when it happened’ because change never takes place when it takes place. Change never stops, never finishes. At best, actors look back on their trajectories through time and recognize folds along that trajectory, just as they may envisage trajectoral folds to come. This point is important because it addresses a shortcoming of change research. Change research has tended to attribute a period of change to a ­particular event, but this is an oversimplification of how actors not only ex­peri­ence change but reflect on it as they move through time. People have a sense of something changing, but that is in time as experience. In a previous book (Hernes, 2014), I quote from Erik Larson’s book Devil in the White City, which describes preparations for the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. Imagine you are there. Would you consider this a distinct moment of change? Probably not, but you might feel that you were part of something in the making.

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156  Organization and Time All the architects, except Sullivan, seemed to have been captured by the same spell, although Sullivan later would disavow the moment. As each architect unrolled his drawings, “the tension of feeling was almost painful”, Burnham said. St. Gaudens, tall and lean and wearing a goatee, sat in a corner very still, like a figure sculpted from wax. On every face Burnham saw “quiet intentness”. It was clear to him that now, finally, the architects understood that Chicago had been serious about its elaborate plans for the fair. “Drawing after drawing unrolled,” Burnham said, “and as the day passed, it was apparent that a picture had been forming in the minds of those present-­a vision far more grand and beautiful than hitherto presented by the richest imagination.” As the light began to fade the architects lit the library’s gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats. From the street below, the top floor of the Rookery seemed aflame with the shifting lights of the jets and the fire in the great hearth. “The room was as still as death,” Burnham said, “save for the low voice of the speaker commenting on his design. It seemed as if a great magnet held everyone in its grasp.” The last drawing went up. For a few moments afterward the silence continued. Lyman Gage, still president of the exposition, was first to move. He was a banker, tall, straight-­backed, conservative in demeanor and dress, but he rose suddenly and walked to a window, trembling with emotion. “You are dreaming, gentlemen, dreaming,” he whispered. “I only hope that half the vision may be realized.” Now St. Gaudens rose. He had been quiet all day. He rushed to Burnham and took his hands in his own. “I never expected to see such a moment,” he said. “Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?”  (Hernes, 2014: 146–7)

The event described here was part of a series of events that enabled Chicago to emerge as a more notable city than it had been before it hosted the world fair. The world fair became a striking example of advanced architecture and technology. Still the experience in the above situation may be alike what Mead (1938) refers to as ‘timeless spaces’; in which there is an absence of interruption. As Mead explains, ‘Change involves departure from a condition that must continue in some sense to fulfil the sense of change from that condition’ (Mead, 1938: 332, italics added). The architects preparing for the Chicago Fair did not know how things would change, because they had not yet acted upon their experience of things changing at the moment described in the above passage. What came to be seen as an interruption in retrospect was not so much an interruption as a temporary suspension of on-­going activity at the time it took place. We may see it as a temporary break of con­ tinu­ity, which quickly led to a reestablishment of a different continuity. Again, Mead (1929a: 239) argues, ‘Without this break within continuity, continuity

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would be inexperienceable. The content alone is blind, and the form alone is empty, and experience in either case is impossible.’ We may infer that the ‘break within continuity’ suggested by Mead means a break in what frames an act or event, not necessarily a change in the act or event itself.

From an Influence View to a Confluence View From the above discussion about causality, we can infer that what happens from within a trajectory is a continual coming-together of past and future events in the present that explains plausible outcomes of interacting events rather than forward causality between events. We then saw how change can only be a process in the making, where events are not readily experienced as markers of change as they happen. Moreover, if we juxtapose two of the time views from Chapter 1; the diachronic view and the present-past-future view, we may arrive at a confluence view of events. A confluence view, as opposed to an influence view, assumes that events take place at different points in time and that they are made confluent of a third event, which emerges in the present. Assuming that coming-towards of past and future events is defining of temporal experience, it is striking how process models contain arrows that almost exclusively point from the past via the present to the future. For example, in their introduction to the AMJ special issue on Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management, Langley et al. (2013) emphasize the connecting of events through time via various types of activity. Their introduction and several papers of that special issue (e.g., Gehman et al., 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013; MacKay and Chia, 2013; Wright and Zammuto, 2013) indicate a view of change unfolding through forwarding chains of events (Langley et al., 2013: 10). When studies present a forward movement in time, they show the influence of earlier events on later events of activity. MacKay and Chia (2013: 222), for example, show how events of activity fed into one another through processes of ‘unintended consequences’, ‘man­ager­ ial coping’, and ‘creative adaptation’. A forward (or influence) view of events describes a situation in which the past has influenced the present and the present influences the future. Within an influence view, each event is based on a preceding event, which implies that once the present event has occurred, the past is effectively sealed and presents itself as ‘dead history’; it can no longer play a role in later events. Consequently, the process of anticipating the future while reconsidering the past is analytically black-­boxed into the event’s influence on subsequent events. The assumption is that the past is gradually absorbed into the present

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as actors anticipate the future. In this view, synoptic change occurs through an accumulation of micro-­level changes (Weick and Quinn, 1999) that accumulate through time. A confluence view, in contrast, considers how both past and future events of activity shape present events (see Figure 11 below). In this view, change may occur when actors connect different past and future activities, which lays the groundwork for both change and continuity. A confluence view of events has inspired organizational scholars in recent years (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013; Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016). For ex­ample, Schultz and Hernes (2013) relate how, as part of a turnaround process, managers at LEGO Group in Denmark retold the story of how the artisan founder, decades earlier, had obliged his teenage son to retrieve wooden ducks from a place of shipment to add two layers of varnish in order to meet the founder’s unwavering quality standards. The story, although not about any extraordinary activity directed towards change at the time it occurred, was used by LEGO management to leverage selected past events to project a future trajectory, based exclusively on LEGO’s renowned quality bricks. In a confluence view, all events are nexus events between the past and future, and because they are nexus events they harbour potential for combining continuity and change. Aristotle argued that temporal nexus events are far more consequential than events that are simply part of a linear progression because the former combine events that have occurred and those that will occur. A temporal nexus is not merely an empty gap between events but an event that becomes constitutive through the ways that past and future events are brought into the temporal nexus (Hernes, 2014). Contrary to much literature on organizational change, such events involve everyday activities. What enables them to generate change while being enactive of continuity is not that they involve especially powerful actors who execute change. Instead, the ac­tiv­ities at such events enable organizational continuity and change by forming a synergetic nexus with past and future activities, some of which may be far removed in time from the actual

Forward movement of causation (influence view)

Past-future emergence (confluence view)

Event 1

Event 2

Event 3

Event 1

Event 2

Event 3

Figure 11  Influence and confluence views of events

Event 4

Event 4

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event. At such events, actors can reach selectively into the past and future along streams of events and combine events to meet challenges that lie before them. That selection also reveals the emplotment of their narrative trajectory, discussed in Chapter 7. It is furthermore consistent with Mead’s (1932: 27) definition of the present as that which is ‘going on’, which he attributes the passage of time. This view defies the causality implied in mainstream works because caus­al­ity suggests that events are separate from one another and remain sep­ar­ated, such that the prior events influence subsequent ones under all conditions.

Continuous Change and Trajectoral Folds Early research on organizational was oriented towards the idea of change as decisive shifts from one state of equilibrium to another. The view goes back to when organizational scholars were inspired by organic systems research, which focused on how systems sustain and reproduce themselves amid changing environments. Hence, views of organizational change were, until the 1990s, inspired by works in biology. Papers by Romanelli and Tushman (1994) and Gersick (1991) advocated this view, explicating a punctuated equilibrium view of change. In a punctuated equilibrium view, change happens during a concentrated period to disrupt a state of equilibrium, for a new state of equilibrium to then emerge. These works treated change as something unique, significant, and resulting from planning by managers. Gersick (1991), for example, asked how such change could be planned so that organizations could keep up with changes in the external environment. Weick and Quinn’s (1999) contribution was to subsequently contrast episodic change (which has common traits with punctuated equilibrium) with continuous change. In the 1990s, scholars such as Orlikowski (1994, 1996) and Brown and Eisenhardt (1997) criticized the punctuated equilibrium view and associated views of change as exclusively planned and substantial, arguing for change as a more gradual process of connected minor changes. Scandinavian studies of reform in public sector organizations (Brunsson and Olsen, 1990) suggested still more-­complex relationships between different forms of change, indicating the loose coupling among managerial intentions, change, and practice. Inspired by practice-­based views, Orlikowski’s work coincided with works on routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003), which enabled her to theorize change from the embedded actions of actors at different organizational ­levels. Tsoukas and Chia (2002) draw on these works on practiced-­based perspectives and change, to develop a theory of change rooted in process

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ontology. Their process ontology view derives from works by philosophers Bergson and James, and a main tenet is that change is all there is and if there is anything called stability, it is the temporary recognition or expereince of ‘the organization’. Tsoukas and Chia basically turn the change-­versus-­stability debate upside down by arguing that (a sense of) stability emerges from on­going, continuous change, and not vice versa. Scholars often do not articulate explicitly how their view of time and temporality underpin studies of everyday activity and organizational change. A dominant view consists of seeing activity as continuous through time. In this view, the activity in question is ongoing; it has no starting or end point, and it is not divided into temporal segments. This view sees everyday activity as the very embodiment of continuous change (Feldman, 2000; Orlikowski, 1996; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Remember the similar point made above about time-­as-­practice and how activity itself expresses time, and that activity does not need to be measured by clocks or calendars to be experienced as time. We can say much the same about the perception of continuity, as being an experience of indivisibility. In this view, continuity tends to be associated with the emergent, gradual, evolving, cumulative, and everyday nature of change, found in problem solving, improvisation, practices, and routine work, and this continuity is associated with continuous change (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Weick and Quinn, 1999), situated change (Orlikowski, 1996), or additive change (Cornelissen et al., 2011). Different conceptions of continuity underpin this view. Whereas Tsoukas and Chia (2002: 571) refer to ‘indivisible continuity’, i.e. an unbroken stream of acts and events, others see it as changing iterations occurring within short time horizons, such as the change that takes place within the time gap between planning and implementation (Moorman and Miner, 1998; Weick and Quinn, 1999). Common to the conceptions of continuity is that they imply activity or events that follow from one another while also interpenetrating one another. However, continuity is not necessarily limited to carrying on existing practices. Continuity stems from the Latin word ‘continuare’, which means ‘to join together’, unite’, as well as to ‘continue’ (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, 1988). The joining together, or uniting, may be viewed as occurring across spans of time, such as by bringing together disparate events from across the temporal trajectory. This point bear resemblance to Ricoeur’s configurational narrative discussed in Chapter 7. In this view, con­tinu­ity is not restricted to a seamless stretched-outness of activity but is understood as the act of joining, of connecting and associating selected parts of the past and future with one another. This view of temporality has two main implications.

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First, it assumes that acts of continuity potentially involve creativity and are not limited to carrying on a similar practice, but do not exclude it. Second, this view does not limit the temporal span across which practices are brought forward. The practice may be the iteration of routine cycles (Feldman et al., 2016) or may involve bringing forward a distant practice that occurred decades earlier (Hatch and Schultz, 2017). Understanding continuity depends on whether we consider actors locked in the flow of time or whether they can suspend that flow of time. As the Preface to this book mentioned, a persistent challenge is to theorize actors both as being inescapably in the flow of time and temporarily stepping out of the flow to make sense of the past or future. Mead (1932), for example, saw the becoming of events as a continuous movement forward in time but suggested that retrospection enables the establishment of transitions in the trajectory. Establishing transitions is a way to create a sense of continuity between different periods of time. The organizational literature offers several examples of how actors may bring practices forward from the past to form continuity to the future. For example, Chreim (2005) shows how managers drew upon past metaphors to create continuity in large-­scale mergers. Knorr Cetina (1999) discusses how actors may record and postpone certain events for future resolution, whereas Hatch and Schultz (2017) describe how at the Carlsberg Group, actors brought past artefacts and events into the present and aligned them with future aspirations. Stigliani and Ravasi (2007) show how historical artefacts drawn from corporate museums reminded stakeholders that their corporate identities would endure in periods of significant change in their markets. These examples resonate with ideas in the philosophy of time, in which continuity is enacted by bringing forward ‘trajectoral folds’ from the past into the present. A trajectoral fold is a point in time where the trajectory is interpreted has taking a different turn from the past into the future. A fold contains both a point of inflection and a change in the direction of continuity as represented by the temporal trajectory. I borrow the term ‘fold’ from Deleuze (2006), without in any way pretending that my use of the term does justice to his discussion. A fold is different from change, by indicating movement through time. Trajectoral folds may be ascribed singular events, which, in the actors’ experience mark change in direction between preceding and succeeding streams or clusters of events (Hernes and Feuls, 2022) Before the appearance of the iPhone, Apple was not the same as after its appearance, and the iPhone also entailed a singular event. Steve Jobs related, in a television interview, how they had originally planned to develop a tablet, which became the iPad, that would incorporate touch-­screen technology. But during one of their tablet

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development meetings, as one member of the team wanted to make a call with his mobile phone and complained about all the redundant buttons, a discussion emerged about the possibility of making a phone instead of a tablet. That led eventually to the launch of the iPhone in January 2007. The iPhone ex­ample fits the idea of trajectoral folds and continuity because although it marked a break, it also constituted a powerful event of continuity. The original Apple Macintosh computer introduced in 1984 was known for being equipped with a mouse; it had icons and a built-­in drive station. We can see the iPhone and the Macintosh as two folds on Apple’s trajectory that mark change but also a strong sense of continuity represented by minimalism and intuitive design. Linking trajectoral folds are acts of creating a sense of continuity. For organizations existing in flux of change, the most difficult is not necessarily the choice of change, but the choice of continuity. Linking trajectoral folds requires the use of events, the threading of events into a narrative trajectory of continuity and change. In organizational research, change has tended to be theorized in a time-­as-­resource view. Time has been seen as a sequential flow of activity or events and change has been interpreted as disruptions between events or sets of events. This is evident in models that consider change as a forward movement in time only, as discussed above. Trajectoral folds, on the other hand, consist of events which connect locally into a changing direction of the narrative trajectory.

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9 Mattering of Time ‘Your Marines live in tents. That’s how I know you won’t be here long.’ An elder in Helmand Province of Afghanistan, to Marc Chretien, Senior Department advisor to the American Forces.  (Gibbons-­Leff, 2019)

Introduction To define time as purely human or social, or as objective or subjective, misses the performative role of materiality in the making of time. I have discussed in Chapter  5, how time becomes a resource as practices become inscribed into material objects, such as charts. But the materiality of time is not limited to material objects that are used to measure chronological time. Materiality may embody time without any reference to chronology. Materiality may embody events, inscribed through practices. When I walk down a cobble­ stone path in a Mediterranean village, I may imagine people walking on those same stones a thousand years ago or more, being on their way to the fish market, coming home from the fields, going to see a friend, or being on their way to a romantic date. This is how the path becomes that particular path as I walk down the path, feeling the worn and uneven cobblestone under my feet. Just as time happens to humans, time also happens to ma­teri­ al­ity, in the sense that it becomes that particular materiality when moulded and remoulded through social practices over time. In this way, materiality ‘does time’, as argued by Hernes, Fedderson, and Schultz (2020). The argument that materiality does time may seem obscure, but think of someone going to a museum. An object in front of the person is, say, from the 1930s, making it older than a similar object from the 1940s and more recent than an object from the 1920s. In this case, the object becomes a marker of time, its function being to show how that type of object has changed from the 1920s through the 1940s. In this view, the object becomes a measure of chronological time divided by decades. But decades are an arbi­ trary measure applied for the contemporary observer’s convenience. During the 1930s, the 1920s was hardly as distinct a decade as it is in 2020. And in Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0010

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the 1930s, the 1940s had not yet come into existence and could hardly be seen as a distinct decade. The point is that the observer’s emphasis, strongly influenced by the classification of objects in the museum, turns the objects into markers of certain eras in which they belong. However, those eras are chosen and defined chronologically for retrospective convenience, not according to what was experienced as the time trajectory during those eras. Now, rather than looking at the object through the lens of time, try to look at time through the lens of the object. Try to imagine how the object took part in organizing activity in a distant past and how, in turn, it became organized by activity. Imagine, for example, how a radio assembled a family in the 1950s before the era of TV sets. The voices emanating from the radio and the ­imagination of the visual reality behind those voices made up the family’s ­collective sense of reality. Through the lens of a radio, we can understand the time that was lived collectively. We can come closer to understanding how those gathered around the radio experienced that time. But it can also tell us something about how time was organized among those present. For instance, was it a typical Saturday night occurrence, or did it happen on the spur of the moment, or both? Here we come to the next point: imagining how an object embodied and organized time in a distant past occurs in the present, now, many years later. The imagination takes place through the materials of the present (Mead, 1932: 29), the process of imagination consists of distancing from the present to the distant, and temporal experience consists of this instant time travel into past or future. The time of materiality comes to light through sociomaterial practices, which makes the meeting between materiality and practices an important focus of investigation and theorizing. Practices, according to Schatzki (2006a), are organized nexuses of doings and sayings. Two people cooking together perform a bundle of practices, and the bundling they share as their collective cooking is the nexus that defines their practice. Here lies a conceptual chal­ lenge, however. How do we account for time in the practice of cooking? Time may be purely social, for instance time as measured or reckoned by those who do the cooking, such as when they intend to serve the meal, or in recall­ ing that their grandparents used much the same recipe or technology. But that would be a purely human reckoning of time. Whether conceived as time-­as-­resource (how long will this take) or time-­as-­events (our grandpar­ ents used the same recipe 50 years ago), the time reckoning passes via the intersubjective process of applying human-­centred time. However, materiality pervades cooking, just like almost any other practice and comes to define time in complex ways as the very object of practices. It is impossible to imagine any act, performed or spoken, which is not expressed

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through the materiality of the produce, equipment, or recipes. It is therefore necessary to consider materiality as an integral part of practices; as intra-­ active rather than interactive, as Barad (2013) argues. Whereas scholars have widely viewed materiality as a means to represent or to measure time, a dif­ ferent view is of materiality as embodying, as expressive of, time. Drawing on Barad (2013), Hernes, Feddersen, and Schultz (2020) turn the question around. Instead of asking how materials are defined by time, they ask how do materials do time? As I walk down the path of the Mediterranean village and I imagine distant times of activity, emotions and experiences, that im­agin­ ation is transmitted through my bodily contact with the cobblestones. When people and materiality become mutually entangled, their relationship becomes intra-­active. They are not closed to one another, but remain open through iterative processes of mutual becoming, Matter is substance in its iterative intra-­active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. It is morphologically active, responsive, generative, ar­ticu­late, and alive. Mattering is the ongoing differentiating of the world. Matter plays an agentive role in its ongoing materialization.  (Barad, 2013: 17)

This chapter discusses materiality as time. It includes a discussion of time and materiality in the study of organizations, including how views have evolved over time. The main argument is that whereas materiality has com­ monly been used to measure or otherwise mark time, it also embodies time (Barad, 2013). Material temporality invites both the dimensions of experi­ ence and events. As actors interact over different types of materials in the present, they can envisage material aspects of distant past or future events through materially mediated interaction. As recent works suggest, ma­teri­al­ ity has properties both for evoking the past and enacting the future.

Historicizing through Materiality Theorizing the past has traditionally been reserved for historians, whose task has been to (re)discover features of the past on the basis of epochs. Rowlinson et al. (2014) argue from a standpoint of history as known and often estab­ lished through searches of archives. It is quite logical to turn to historians when we theorize the past. Business history scholars (Rowlinson et al., 2014; Wadhwani et al., 2014) typically addresses distant pasts while focusing on the appropriate periodization of the past, partitioning history into manageable chunks (Jordanova, 2006, in Rowlinson et al., 2014). Historical analysis,

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which Rowlinson et al. (2014) sort into what they call corporate history, ­analytically structured history, and ethnographic history, focuses primarily on developing a reliable narrative about the past based on sources contem­ porary with the events elucidating historical context, including temporal considerations of the present, past, and future at the time. Organizational research, for example, has examined corporate museums in order to reveal how organizational actors store but also retrieve parts of their past. Nissley and Casey (2002) argue that corporate museums serve to create a memory from the past, and explore how meaning can be extracted from those arte­ facts. Danilov (1992) argues that corporate museums may also enhance employees’ pride in the company and preserve the past. Still, analyses have so far tended to underspecify the actual role of the qualities of materiality when actors search in their past. Blagoev et al. (2018) argue that research has not vigorously considered that the qualities of ma­teri­ al­ity may be decisive for how actors search in their past. They draw on Gibson’s (1986) notion of affordances, coined to better understand how humans’ ability to interpret or use objects depends on what objects offered them in terms of what humans aim to achieve. The affordance of an object, argued Gibson, is not limited to the object’s physical and practical use. Instead, affordances make for a more-­complex and intimate relationship between humans and objects, enabling humans to learn from the objects and share that learning with other humans. Hence, Blagoev et al. argue that historical objects are more than mere pas­ sive objects from the past. On the contrary, they argue, we need to under­ stand how objects in general and historical objects in particular are potentials for action (a point they borrow from Robey et al., 2012). The potential of historical objects is dual, they argue, as they both constrain and enable remembrance of the past. Affordances may be described as the combined effects of enabling and simultaneously constraining what humans may evoke from the past through the use of material objects. They also argue that whereas material objects have commonly been relegated to the role of ‘trig­ gers or containers for stories’ (Humphries and Smith, 2014: 478), it is im­port­ ant to study how traces of materiality exist in all memory forms (Schultz and Hernes, 2013) that serve to bring the past into the present. For example, the human body is the materiality of telling stories, and as such, the human body travels through time, inscribed with stories. Some scholars have sought to understand the roles of materiality in actors’ search into their past. Hatch and Schultz (2017) tell the story of how the ­people at Carlsberg Group were inspired to use a century-­old motto inscribed in granite to relaunch a novel brand of beer. From their study of the LEGO

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group, Schultz and Hernes (2013) discuss how what they call memory forms may differ regarding how they help actors search into the past. Memory forms are broad categories of means by which past events may be brought forward to the present. None of the three categories (textual, material and oral) should be seen in isolation from one another. Material artifacts become those particular material artifacts when they are accompanied by stories, just as stories may be accompanied by material artifacts to become those particular stories.

Materiality as Translator of Time As translator of time, materiality expands its role from being a marker of time. As marker of time, materiality is tied to the notion of time-­as-­resource. But translating time is different from marking time. Translating time implies displacing and transforming time from one frame to another and involves to a larger extent events. I purposely use the terms ‘displacing’ and ‘transform­ ing’ as applied by Callon (1986) and Latour (1990) in the sociology of trans­ lation. Their significant contribution was to show how organizing processes occur through the mutual translation among humans, social systems, and material objects. To some degree, these scholars provided a pragmatist solu­ tion to the perennial conundrum in organizational studies of how to con­ vincingly explain what makes disparate actors work towards common aims while preserving the actors’ differences, including their differences in tem­ por­al­ity. Whereas scholars of the sociology of translation have not focused on the translation of time or temporality (Hernes and Schultz, 2020), we can address precisely this question by studying how material objects translate time. The four dimensions developed in this book, practice, experience, events, and resource, may serve as dimensions among which translation takes place. One way to translate time is to displace time practised or time experienced into material objects, which, in turn, displace time practiced or experienced into another dimension of time. When reading an important email from a colleague, we may think about the time that the colleague spent preparing and composing that email. The email is the material means of translating the colleague’s efforts into the time we spend reading the email. The materiality of text is commonly used to understand how written accounts help actors evoke previous events. In discussing the memory forms, Schultz and Hernes (2013) argue that written text serves as interpretations of the past which are transferable across time because of the standardized format of text. Written

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words and symbols in budgets or plans have a similar meaning over time, which makes it possible to use text to project oneself back in time. Organizational scholars have not attended to the topic of temporal dis­ tancing through materiality to any great extent, but it may become of greater interest given the burgeoning literature on time. As often occurs with the social sciences, the literature offers cues. Owen Matthews’ account of his British father’s correspondence with his Russian wife-­to-­be during several years’ absence from each other illustrates how they translated their shared experiences into texts through letters. They translate their times spent together into text, which, as it is read, becomes the time of reading and, in this case, turns the present of reading towards past events and experiences: The minutiae of the nine months my parents spent together in Moscow survive because over six years of forced separation their conversations were all relived, in great detail, in their later letters. Almost every minute and day of their few months together was revisited and turned over, lovingly, like a keepsake. Every little tiff and conversation and lovemaking and walk was played out in Mila's mind, replayed and discussed, words, sentences remembered and analysed, produced like living proof that it was not all just a dream, that for a while they really had a home, had each other. [. . .] In many ways, it seemed to her that the life represented by the stream of letters was more real than her interactions with the live people around her. 'I have no present, only a past and a future if I can believe in it,' she wrote. [. . .] But there came a point, quite early in their epistolary relationship, when they began to put so much of their lives into their letters that the recording of the experience overtook the experience itself, the material became too huge, the process of turning it into history began to rob them of their present. (Matthews, 2009: Location 2618, Kindle edition)

Mathews’ example is one of temporal translation across space and time, space being the space between London and Moscow and time being, first, the lag between writing and reading and, second, the translation of directing the present reading towards events and experiences of the past. Temporal translation across space is, of course, also facilitated by inscription into ma­ter­ial devices, especially as the time of practices is displaced and trans­ formed to other parts of the organization.

Predicting the Past and Evoking the Future When actors in organizations or institutions search into the past, the true nature of that past may be secondary to their preoccupations. The actors are,

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in fact, more likely to base their search into the past on what they want to achieve in the future (Suddaby et al., 2010). Although they may think back to events or practices during a certain epoch, the epoch is secondary to the more pressing concerns of the future and the present. To take the argument further, they are not actually looking at the past per se but at something from the past that they think might be useful to investigate with the future in mind. They are more likely to be temporal bricoleurs than historians, because they may be far from certain about what they are looking at; sometimes they are not even sure what they are looking for. People sometimes mistakenly contrast the past with the future as the past being that which is known and may be readily accessed and revealed in its true detail, whereas the future is unknown. An important tenet of thinking processually about time, however, is that the past’s original nature is irretriev­ able and open to choice. Any recall of the past is, as Bergson, stated, a coun­ terfeit, a point that was made in the discussion about Ricoeur’s idea of mimesis in Chapter 7. Still, it needs to be defined sufficiently well to serve as a basis for thinking about the future. In some cases, the past is an event that stands out, such as the storming of the Bastille at the start of the French Revolution. Although historians might differ as to the actual unfolding of actions, the event itself stands out as significant and symbolic, significant because it triggered many other activities that eventually led to the downfall of the king, and symbolic because the storming also became a metaphor for the rising masses taking on the establishment. Such events are singular events, described in Chapter 4, that actors easily evoke in many different set­ tings and apply metaphorically (translate) to many different situations. Such events can be retrieved and reproduced with some degree of accuracy because documents exist that describe them in sufficient detail. Although the actual unfolding or activities surrounding singular events might be pulled into question, the ‘kernel’ of the past events, as Schütz (1967: 126) called it, remains. One would think that retrieving old ways of making things would be fairly straightforward in our era of high tech. Unfortunately, this is not so. Even applying the most sophisticated technologies today does not guarantee the reproduction of seemingly simple past technologies. For example, Atkins (2016: 55) describes how even an apparently straightforward substance like milk from a past epoch may evade precise definition because its components have changed over time: Here we come to a key point in milk’s biography. It was so frequently adulterated with added water that trust was low and a great deal of regulatory and scientific effort was expended in controlling the supply and judging whether it had been

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170  Organization and Time tampered with. On average in London in the 1870s milk contained about 25 per cent of added water and the consumer was justifiably cynical about ever being able to purchase the real thing  (Atkins, 2011: 75).

Hence reproduction of past materiality escapes precise definition, because the def­in­ition of something that seems as obvious as clean water has changed over the years. Such factors, argues Atkins (2011), make the materiality of food central to how it is produced and managed. Yet, the argument extends beyond the materiality of food. It indicates the importance of searching for materiality from distant times. Indeed, Atkins refers to Callon’s (2005) argument that economics has generally undervalued and under-­conceptualized material qualities. Blagoev et al. (2018) make a similar argument. As a source of past knowledge, ma­teri­al­ity, most often represented as past or historical objects, represents an ambiguous and uncertain search. Past materiality is not neces­ sarily something that actors learn from but something that is an object of investigation and exploration. Whereas affordances may play a role, a past object’s affordances cannot be known. In most cases, they are part of the dis­ covery, not just of a material past but also of a possible material future. The process of selecting and defining past and future events as a basis for the present-­past-­future configuration is controversial, because selecting and defining from past and future relate to questions of organizational identity. In particular, bringing the past into present experience may be challenging, risky, controversial, and unreliable. Organizational controversies play out in social settings, which is why their settlement is more like quasi-­resolutions. During the last ten years, I have crossed the French Alps five times on a four-­ week hike from Geneva, Switzerland to Nice on the shores of the Mediterranean. Since the first time, in 2010, I have spent the night at the same hut in the Vanoise National Park every time. During my first visit at the hut, I took a photograph of the then one-­year-­old son of the couple run­ ning the hut. During my latest visit to the hut, in 2019, I showed the couple the photo that I had taken of their son in 2010. The wife said that she recalled my visit nine years earlier. She recalled some details about my visit, but she was wrong about other details. However, while I was correcting her on some details, I realized that my own recollection of the visit had omissions as well. It dawned on me that what had kept the memory alive was not so much the visit nine years earlier but the visits in between, during which we had enter­ tained a partial memory of the initial visit. We most likely paid attention to some memories and not to others, so while some memories were suppressed and others refreshed, the recollection of the initial event changed slightly from one visit to the next. My first visit in 2010 would most certainly not

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have been remembered had it not been for the visits during the intervening years, which had served to preserve but also distort the memory of my first visit. Nevertheless, as I was leaving the hut on a July morning in 2019, I real­ ized that we had both been wrong about the details of my initial visit. Organizational actors differ in their ability to articulate their trajectories through time, but the articulation of their trajectories is important, because it enables them to make different plausible connections between the future and past. Apple is an actor that has been able to articulate its trajectory, in part due to Steve Jobs’ fascination with minimalism and Bauhaus architec­ ture. If we take the 1984 Macintosh computer and the 2007 iPhone as two events along the Apple trajectory, we see obvious resemblances if we have some knowledge of the Apple story. The two events connect into a shared narrative expressed as a trajectory of events, which helps explain the per­sist­ ence of the iPod and the much more short-­term existence of Apple products with dark surfaces and many buttons. The concept of events as constituting trajectory underscores the fact that the artefacts the Macintosh and the iPhone are syntheses of multiple streams of events that involved moments of negotiations, decisions, and choices which could have turned out otherwise. There is no way the Macintosh event could have anticipated the iPhone, nor is the iPhone a direct descendent of the Macintosh (see also the discussion about Allport (1954) and forward causality in Chapter 8). Still, the two are connected through their material temporalities (Hernes et al., 2020), which reveal both continuity and change. On multiple occasions, social interaction and the use of material media, such as PowerPoint presentations, mock ­models, and many others, have connected dispersed events in the past and future (Schoeneborn, 2013) and have indicated where actors come from in time and where they are headed. None of this would have happened in the absence of the ability of materiality to embody time. But such analyses tend to be made retrospectively. Actors often do not know what to expect when they search into their past and sometimes they don’t even know what they are looking for. And sometimes the past holds surprise that changes how they enact the future. In Hernes et al. (2020), we report on how scientists at the Danish Carlsberg Group tried to recreate a beer brewed 130 years earlier. Their attempt followed construction workers’ discovery of old bottles on the old Carlsberg site. The Carlsberg scientists engaged in an elaborate process of tracing the composition of the old beer by recreating the yeast used and cultivating crops based on seeds obtained from the Global Seed Vault at Svalbard. They eventually recreated the brewing process, using raw materials close to those used 130 years earlier. The process was not so much about reproducing a 130-­ year-­ old beer as about

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reproducing exactly that beer. Although the exactness would not be a key issue for consumers, the authenticity of the substance was a significant issue to the scientists involved. This is why they considered the whole process risky and the outcome relatively unpredictable. They would, no doubt, produce a beer that would resemble beer as it was brewed in the old days, but would it resemble that exact beer? Nevertheless, producing that beer was vital to them as scientists. Their uncompromising search for the authentic brew turned out to be beneficial for the future of Carlsberg. Although they did not know it at the time, their search for the old brew, which involved growing ancient crops, meant they could use their results for future brews. Furtermore, as Carlsberg was embarking on a distant green future strategy, they could apply knowledge about the crops, which at the time were grown organically, for future brews. It turned out that the original brew paved the way for the devel­ opment of a new type of mainstream beer, brewed on (almost) ori­gin­al yeast.

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10 Leading in Time Introduction In Time and Free Will, Bergson (1910) relates the subjective experience of time to the ability to act freely. This should be of interest to any leader or practitioner. Leading through so-­called disruption or through the will to change for a better world inevitably involves the exercise of freedom. However, Bergson defines freedom not as the absence of constraints; he argues that freedom is not about making one choice over another. His rad­ ical take on freedom relates, instead, to his view of time. This remarkable line of argumentation results in a compelling discussion of the relationship between temporal experience and the exercise of free will. In his treatise, Bergson (1910) starts by discussing common thinking about spatiality and time. He dwells on the experience of moving from one psychic state to the next, and the idea of experiencing those two states as separate from each other. This, according to Bergson, is the logic of space. Space may be divided into two parts, and when those two parts are added to each other, they form the initial space. This is not possible with time because time is about movement. Unlike space, movement through time cannot be divided and reassembled because movement through time is indivisible. When we treat time as divisible, we ususally divide it by material means, but that division is pursued mainly cognitively. Here, Bergson distinguishes time as inner experience and time as measured duration. Time as inner experience, he argues, can only take place through moments of time permeating one another. A succession of moments sep­ar­ated from one another, argues Bergson, leads effectively to a perpetual feeling of being in the present because one moment is assumed to lead to the next but without being part of the next moment. This is where Bergson discusses free will. If we view time as separate moments strung together causally, we risk becoming automatons. We get used to abiding by chains of causality through time that we reproduce. The way out of this spatially informed temporal straitjacket and the way to exercise free will, according to Bergson, is to look into our indivisible present-­past-­future process. Thus, exercising free will emerges from understanding the indivisible whole that marks Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0011

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movement through time. I read Bergson as arguing that free will emerges from grasping the richness of one’s temporal experience. The richness of temporal experience, however, has a certain shape, as I have argued above. It is also possible, I would argue, to distinguish the crude experience of time, the experience of imminent time, and the experience of distant times. There is something here for leaders who want to effect change in order to take on new challenges. Leaders are often expected to change organizations (Weick and Quinn, 1999) in the sense of introducing visible changes in structure, performance, products, or processes. Yet, as I argued in Chapter 8, we cannot readily s­ ep­ar­ate change from continuity. When people have considered the two sep­ar­ate­ly, it has been because they attribute different ontologies to change and continuity. Most accounts of change assume that continuity signifies carrying on with current practices, making change an obvious antithesis to con­tinu­ity. But if we consider continuity as joining together practices from different epochs, continuity becomes an active resource, which effectively becomes a process of change. This is a form of continuity not in opposition to but part and parcel of change. While this form of continuity is not often mentioned explicitly when leaders effect change, many leaders whom I have encountered through executive teaching are acutely aware of the importance of leveraging the potential for change by creating such a sense of continuity. This is important for at least two reasons. One is that the past contains knowledge which, when translated into a different future, may prove im­port­ant for the direction of change, as illustrated in the above example from Carlsberg. Another reason is that people in the organization are more likely to commit to change in the future that includes parts of the past to which they have contributed, even if those parts are significantly transformed as they are translated into future opportunities.

Leading through Pasts and Futures Still, taking on temporal leadership presents its own challenges. In a paper on founder-­based organizations, Schein (1983) argues that whereas in the early phases of development and growth, founders strongly influence the organizational culture, bureaucratic routines and norms increasingly take over as the organization grows beyond a certain size. Founders usually create compelling stories about what the company or institution should achieve, and those stories sometimes become history. Some founders keep the ­compelling story as a developing history. For instance, Martin et al.’s (1998) study of The Body

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Shop shows how Anita Roddick, the founder, maintained a compelling story as history throughout the time that she led the company. Although conventional views would see the future as the supreme tem­poral arena for exercising leadership, it could just as well be the past. However, whereas the future holds shared possibility and opportunity, the past is sometimes controversial and contested because it defines the meaning of what has been, and what has been has conditioned a sense of collective identity. It is first and foremost the agency of the past in defining current identity that makes it controversial, paradoxically more controversial than the future. In their study, Lubinski and Wadhwani (2020) show how two German com­pan­ies, Siemens and Bayer, engaged in political power games in late colonial India, including the appropriation of national goals rooted in a historical movement for independence from colonial rule. It  may seem paradoxical that the past, being unrepeatable, should be so controversial, but as stated above, practitioners are perfectly aware that the definition of the past has implications for defining the future. It therefore matters how the definition of past events serves to assign glory or shame, importance or banality, or relevance or irrelevance. Perhaps most importantly, the past expresses a causality that the future has yet to demonstrate, which adds to the rhetorical powers of the past (Suddaby et al., 2010) to influence the future. Reconstructing the past is about showing which events led to which outcomes. This makes the past element of the trajectory particularly important and explains why questions about whose past should be retained and for what reasons become crucial. The ownership of past causal connections becomes a key driver for what the future may look like. Events define past experience and future opportunities. People understand events, as argued in this book, through the ways they relate events. To the extent that events stand out, they fall into the category of singular events, which tend to exhibit essentialist features. These essentialist features make them readily recognizable and suitable objects of communication. By meaningfully tying events together, leaders may help give shape to narrative tra­jec­ tor­ies, which frame change processes. This point is important given that change processes may stand a better chance of succeeding when framed by meaningful narratives. Bartel and Garud (2009) illustrate the importance of leaders couching innovation processes in narratives, by demonstrating how narratives can depict past innovations and project future innovations in a manner that avoids some of the conflict that strategy-­based change sometimes engenders.

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The Leader as Time Symbol In The Denial of Death Becker (1973) argues that what distinguishes humans from other species is our ability to think in terms of symbols. Symbolic thought makes us aware of ourselves in a larger human system, which extends in time and space, making our role in that space-­time extension an object of desire. Consequently, humans celebrate immortality and honour those who symbolize immortality, hence the need to endow leaders with immortality, according to Becker, such as manifest in the embalming of Egyptian pharaohs and in twentieth-­century political leaders such as Lenin. In drawing on Becker’s book, Solomon (2019) argues that followers praise leaders who appear as guarantors of the followers’ immortality. Such leaders emerge typically during unsettled times of heightened anxiety levels. Leaders may also raise anxiety levels, such as what Trump did during his 2016 election campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as potential rapists and terrorists. Solomon’s point is that leaders such as Trump attract people because they show the kind of defiance and courage that symbolize the collective immortality project. Under such circumstances, leaders such as President Trump emerge by providing hope among people who dread the end of their immortality project. These examples may sound extreme, but like all extreme examples they foreground aspects that are part of the more mundane world but not easily noticed. I have in mind not immortality but leaders as symbols of time. Leaders are praised for symbolizing the future when they articulate a hopeful future. But leaders themselves may also symbolize more-­complex tem­por­al­ ities. During research at the Norwegian ship design and construction company Ulstein Group, I was told in an interview that their late founder frequently insisted on investing in development for the long term. I had a temporal perspective at the back of my mind when conducting the interviews, and I had assumed that the founder, having led the company through ups and downs over several decades, would often refer to the company’s past. I was surprised to hear that he actually did the opposite and talked per­sist­ ent­ly about the need to think of the future instead of the past. Looking through the data, I realized that he did not need to bring up the past because he was the past. His temporal leadership became all the more important because, on the one hand, he represented the past as a leader, having led the company from being a medium-­sized company to a world leader in that industry; on the other hand, he could point to a future for the company that made sense in relation to the past through which he had steered the company. This observation combines with two of Schein’s (1983) observations of

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founders, first, that they create history in organizations through their reactions to critical incidents through time, and second, they adhere to long-­term time horizons. Scholars and practitioners have made multiple attempts to show how the future will be different. These endeavours are essential, but people wrongly assume that because the future will change, all we need to look at is the future. An underlying argument of this book is that it is futile to try to cope with a different future without looking into the past and creating a present in which actors recreate their trajectories. However much it will seem counterintuitive to most readers, changing the future demands changing the past. A changed past may accompany actors into a different future. Still, it is worth keeping in mind that the past may prove harder to change than the future. Changing the past may demand significant patience, persistence and even courage, as different groups are likely to support different versions of the past. Spending such efforts may be worthwhile if we assume that a novel future passes via a novel past.

Leading in the Present A few years ago, at an airport in Greece, a former special forces officer told me of how, when they planned dangerous missions, they would construct very detailed plans with various contingencies. He emphasized the im­port­ ance of sticking to the plan no matter what while simultaneously being able to switch to alternative courses of action in certain predefined events, if ne­ces­sary. They typically worked in small teams, in which everyone had detailed knowledge of all other team members’ behavioural patterns. He emphasized the extreme routine-­based nature of their missions, whereby one mission would almost seamlessly spill over into the next. They seemed to operate exclusively according to a logic of continuous change, whereby the short-­term continuity from one mission to the next, interspersed with training sessions, provided the temporal span for their operations. When I asked him about the possibility of longer-­term temporal spans represented, for example, by traditions, he responded by saying that most if not all their routines had much deeper temporal roots, and that they were also aware that they actually brought forward traditions that spanned much longer periods than did the mission-­to-­mission time span. In other words, while they were immersed in the immediacy of actions, they were also aware of being part of both a greater time span involving history and tradition and a longer future of carrying on history and tradition.

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Leading in time is very much about getting social commitment to a certain patterning of events. According to Smircich and Morgan (1982), leaders emerge, especially in more unstructured systems, by virtue of the ability to create a sense of meaning. In a temporal view, creating a sense of meaning and thereby becoming a leader, implies threading together past and future events in such a way that people commit to the broader narrative. The usefulness of Smircich and Morgan’s argument is that meaning does not n ­ ecessarily follow from leadership, but vice versa. Leadership follows from meaning creation. I closely relate leading in the present to what the ancient Greeks called Kairos: the time to strike, the right, critical, or opportune moment, which has elements of time-­as-­resource. The strategy literature has extensively studied the topic of timing. Kunisch et al. (2017) mention that the strategy literature associates timing with the awareness of the so-­called right time to act. Applying a temporal perspective does not detract from the importance of timing in leadership, but it does introduce the social and material tem­ poral worlds with which leaders need to contend. Strategy research mostly sees time from the outside of actors’ worlds and, therefore, tends to see windows of opportunity defined by the environment, most often the market. In other words, timing relates to a gap in time created by other actors or external circumstances, which actors wait to seize when the moment is right. The strategy literature also assumes there is a right moment to strike. In other words, the gap in time that opens towards a unique opportunity appears obvious and unambiguous to the actors. Still, management is in many ways a temporal process through and through and is never really owned by anyone (MacKay and Chia, 2013); ­seizing an opportunity offered at a certain moment in time is left to the discretion of managers, who are responsible for maintaining organizational readiness to act when an opportunity arises. If we take a more reflexive view of time, whereby we assume that actors work in their own time, we can better approach some of the complexities of the process of timing. We can understand, without taking individual leaders or managers out of the equation, that their decisions are channelled through structures, and decisions about time must contend with the temporal structures in place. When managers perform timing, they act through those parts of the temporal structures over which they have some discretion. The extent to which timing resides in the actions of individuals depends on their discretion over their temporal structures.

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Nowotny (1992) makes the point that planning the future occurs in a present overloaded with choices that must be made. If this is an accurate representation of planning and strategizing, then planning in the present is an intensive process of not just selecting paths to pursue but also deselecting paths that might have been pursued. If we add the assumption that any process of future anticipation also involves looking into the past, we face the idea that the present of planning comprises not just processes of prediction but also intensive processes of negotiating the meanings of futures and pasts with multiple actors. This is no minor accomplishment by any standards. It turns planning activity into an event, or series of events, threaded by recursive processes of imagining and enacting different past-­to-­future and future-­ to-­past trajectories. It stands in opposition to views of planning as fixed images of the future rather than in terms of the work that went into defining that future. Such views are underpinned by an implicit theoretical assumption, that planning is something that is done; then actors sit back and wait for the future to happen, to then judge the rightness or precision of the plans. An important contribution of organizational research is to provide leaders with models they can use to better understand their options, dilemmas, and opportunities. Much of what scholars write is based either on quantitative studies or qualitative studies with so-­called process models. Quantitative studies are useful because they provide statistical probabilities of outcomes of certain choices. As much as such studies are useful for broader mappings or legitimize established theoretical models, it is hard to see how they help practitioners, who operate in the flow of time and who either make choices for instant execution or store them for later. Either way, the flow of time intervenes between cause and (re)action. As Bateson brilliantly observed, causal laws become obsolete when time intervenes, famously remarking that ‘The “if . . . then” of causality contains time, but the “if . . . then” of logic is timeless’ (1979: 63). Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011: 342) offer a related criticism of causal models in studies of practitioners: The causality that concerns practitioners—what to do, in this particular situation, to achieve the results they wish—is not included in the propositional statements offered by contingency models. Buchanan’s (1999) change manager, who must handle an awkward colleague, Weick’s (2001) Mann Gulch smoke jumpers, who confront a huge fire mistaken initially for an ordinary one, and Badaracco’s (2002) loan officer, who must make up her mind as to how to proceed with a serious accounting irregularity she has discovered, are all faced with issues of timing and

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180  Organization and Time tempo, about which they get very little help from timeless propositional statements of the type, “The chance of success improves when intervention and participation are used to install a decision and declines when edicts and persuasion are applied, no matter what decision context or situation is being confronted.” (Nutt, 2001: 46)

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11 A Note on Studying Time in Time Introduction In earlier days of organization theory, scholars viewed time as a means to understand what distinguishes organizations from one another and from their external environments. This is principally a structural view of organiza­ tions, and comes close to what Chia (1999) calls a correspondence view. A correspondence view implies that the shape of the organization, including its practices, routines, and policies, relates to corresponding processes out­ side or inside organizations. Time plays an important role in correspondence views because it is a measure well suited to distinguishing processes or organizations from other processes and organizations. Time, in this view, is reduced to simultaneity, a bit like Newtonian physics was based on the idea that actors in different locations would observe a simultaneous event within the same frame of time reference. If we take the status of simultaneity as an assumption or variable in the study of organizations, we would, inspired by physics, consider that actors compress the organization’s trajectory into a state in which the system pivots around a stationary present. A correspondence view based on the assumption of simultaneity has given rise to powerful schools of thought, such as contingency theory and new institutionalist theory. The contingency theory of organizations (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) is rooted in a view of organizations adapting to their external environments, whereby actors in the organization seem to act upon the world outside the organization. This and related views, such as in or­gan­iza­ tion­al ecology (Hannan and Freeman, 1989), new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), and evolutionary organization theory (Aldrich, 1999), are based on a logic of correspondence between states (Hernes, 2014), whereby time plays primarily the role of measuring similarity or difference. These approaches invite analyses of whether things happen or not, rather than how things unfold in time and across time (Feddersen, 2020). Assumptions of sim­ ultaneity tend to suppress the role of time and, not least, the experience of time. Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011: 342), for example, state unequivocally, ‘The exclusion of experienced time is clearly seen in the propositional

Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0012

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statements included in contingency models of explanation, so popular in management research.’ A correspondence view is particularly powerful because it can be quanti­ fied. Thousands of articles are published each year, providing quantifiable relations between entities and phenomena. For obvious reasons, the com­ parisons are not very useful unless the entities and phenomena compared are implicitly or explicitly located in the same period of time, because cor­res­ pond­ence demands that entities and phenomena are causally related, to then be placed in the same time frame. The causality we are discussing here is of the type ‘if we do this, then that will happen’. Multiple studies aim to identify statistically valid influences between entities and phenomena on the basis of such causality, and the only way to do this within the boundaries of statistical validity is to ignore that the entities and phenomena belong in different time frames. This is not to say that the studies reckon with no time lag; any cause and effect are separated by a time lag. However, the studies do not assume that the time lag, or the flow of time between the two, does any work. Put differently, the work done by the flow of time does not exhibit agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Obviously, the problem of quantitative stud­ ies is that they become propositional by formulating causalities on the basis of a method which, by not taking time into account, does not actually meas­ ure causality.

Confronting Temporal Distance Various scholars have pondered the difference between time and space. A  fundamental difference is that although space can be divided, making it impossible to be in different locations at the same time (although this is con­ tested in theoretical physics), actors’ lived time cannot be separated for then to reassembled. Actors perceive past and future events through the temporal experience of being in the present, from which they cannot escape. This was amply discussed by Mead (1932), whose main assumption was that actors are forever embedded in the present. The importance of this assumption cannot be overstated, because it tells us that actors can never escape from within time, yet they historicize their past through their present activity as though they are external observers to their past. This is particularly the case in organizations, where recalling the past is done through second-­hand accounts. When researchers enter the picture, they seize actors as they step out of the flow of time, and what researchers then get access to is the actors’ historicization rather than their observations of what happened.

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While studying and theorizing time and temporality, we often confront questions about distinctions between the near and distant past or future. Hernes and Schultz (2020) work from the idea that the distant (whether past or future) reflects events that lie beyond actors’ habitual temporal structures and requires reflective thinking rather than reflexive action. In our empirical studies, we have asked practitioners about what they see as distinguishing the temporally near from the temporally distant. During interviews that Majken Schultz and I conducted at the Carlsberg Group in Copenhagen in the spring of 2017, managers described the importance of taking a long view both of the past and the future. A central theme in our interviews was an engraving, the so-­ called golden words left by the Carlsberg founder, J. C. Jacobsen, in 1892. The text is basically a motto for Carlsberg to relent­ lessly search for the best quality of beer possible. Many readers might ask themselves, and rightly so, what’s the big deal? A founder espousing and then engraving a motto which resembles thousands of other mottos around the world to always pay attention to quality? Yet, when we asked in 2017 if actors ever really evoked the golden words and if they held any real significance, we were told that, yes, people evoked them frequently and they were meaning­ ful. We still did not know about the importance of the long view, however. Going back to 1892 def­in­ite­ly represents a long view, but would it matter if the company had espoused the same motto in, say, 1992 or 2012 instead of 1892? We posed the question to them, and it appeared to be a question they had not considered. One of the interviewees suggested that the words were important simply because they had endured as a symbol of what they stood for in practice. Again, enduring a hundred rather than, say, 30 years does not make all that much sense. But enduring over a time period that contains many different events does make sense to people. Lasting a hundred years s­ ignifies enduring periods of success, technological change, and wars. It signifies the passing of generations and of changes in ways that people have lived. When actors look back on past events from the present, they construct a causality that transcends the conditioning of the event from which they look back. In other words, the conditioning may have been necessary for the cur­ rent event to emerge, but it is not sufficient to determine the contents of the current event, as argued in Chapter 8. This means that even if we had full knowledge of the preceding events, we could not predict the unfolding of the current event. As Joas (1997: 177) points out in his analysis of Mead’s work on time, it is precisely the novelty of the emerging event that makes it impos­ sible to deduce the present event from a causal chain extending into the past. That does not prevent actors in the current event from constructing his­tor­ ic­al trajectories of past events, however. Mead sides with Dewey in pointing

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out that ‘events appear as histories which have a dénouement’ (Dewey, in Mead, 1932: 18). By this, Mead means that actors construct historical trajec­ tories retrospectively in the present, which confers a certain ‘sense’ upon the transitions between events over time. By looking into actors’ temporal trajectories we may better understand the dynamics by which actors become their own historians and the significance they attribute to events and experiences that make up their temporal trajec­ tories. Such questions also reveal how the ways they narrate the shapes of their pasts and futures make them who they ‘are’ and consequently influence how they act in conducting their day-­to-­day business.

The Double Post-­Festum Drama Following from Mead’s line of reasoning, if actors are in the flow of time and if they make distinctions in the past or future as their own historians, it means that they allocate meaning and significance to past and future events at a time when they are in neither that past nor future. If we consider the past, we can say that the significance of an event becomes settled retro­spect­ ive­ly. I have made this point several times in this book, but it takes on par­ ticular significance in light of studying processes that occur in time. I argue above that change does not actually happen when it happens. People go about their work and solve problems, which may eventually generate change (March, 1981). They make sense retro­spect­ive­ly to understand what went on, in order to understand why they arrived where they are at the moment. This is fully consistent with Weick’s (1995: 25) maxim, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say.’ This is the time of the first post-­festum (after the party). Actors access past events after they took place, making them, in a sense, historians of their own past but also architects of their own past. I use the word architects thinking that they give a shape of their past that enables them to build a narrative that extends into the future. Multiple studies, such as studies of innovation pro­ cesses, have shown this, that actors realize the significance of a discovery after they make it. As numerous studies show, activities that eventually led to change were not themselves intended to bring about change at the time they occurred. Mazmanian et al. (2013), for example, found in their study of how professionals used mobile devices that through their use, the professionals were unintentionally and collectively enacting change that went beyond the immediate effects of their use. Studies show how, as actors find practical

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solutions, change sometimes ensues, as actors elsewhere in the organization or at a later time see how solutions may be more consequential for change than they thought at the time of developing the solution. The result is that although actors direct everyday activities towards solving imminent and local problems, those solutions may prove transformative at levels and ­locations well beyond those of the actors themselves. Hence, although, according to Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 994), ‘contingencies of the moment’ are at play, but the actual impact of those contingencies is unknown at that moment. But actors do more retrospectively than recognize the importance of an event. They also establish sequential causation among past events. Arriving post-­festum involves establishing what made it that particular party. People want to know what caused what; therefore, they develop causal maps to explain the result. This is well known from organizational learning theory (Levitt and March, 1988). Hernes and Pulk (2020) observed in a study of a naval design and construction company how, years after an everyday meeting had generated significant change, people at the company were still puzzled by how that could happen. Still, they did establish their causal maps, which helped us as researchers to establish a timeline of events. It was largely their causal reconstruction, which had become a standard narrative within the company, that made us curious enough to try to explain what had happened during that change process. Such maps may have a hidden or implicit causal­ ity. It is rare to hear someone say that one event caused another. Still, when people establish sequences, it implies that they assume events to be causally linked, even though the causality may be left ambiguous by the actors themselves. This is the time of the second post-­festum. As researchers, we normally arrive after the actors have established the retrospective accounts and cau­ salities. Most often, research needs to uncover a past of which the main informants or the analyst do not have personal experience. In fact, it may be hard to uncover the facts of past events from those who were present, even though organizational members have recalled and retold those events many times. Organizational scholars, unlike ethnographers, who seek to discover layers of stable and recurring patterns will try to uncover specific processes or threads that lead to something. Organizational research has always contained, and will likely contain, an important aspect of agency along some trajectory in time that explains one set of outcomes over others. Unlike social scientists who focus on enduring differences between populations, or­ gan­ iz­­­ a­ tion­ al scholars do not enjoy the luxury of uncovering some

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underlying trait, which can then be applied to explain behaviour among groups of organizations. Here lies the dilemma, which is that when things occurred, the organizational researcher was probably not there, and even if the researcher was there at the time that something important happened, it is unlikely that the most pertinent factors surrounding the instance were recorded, because the researcher would be in the same time as the actors studied. In other words, the researcher would not be likely to anticipate the eventness of the events studied. Nor could the actors tell the researcher at the time of the event how that particular event would be consequential, although they might have a hunch that something would happen in the wake of that event. In sum, organization research is, to some extent, a process of two levels of historicization. The actors that researchers study are historians of their own past because they need those histories to move into the future. Researchers can only access actors’ past by historicizing those actors’ historicization, but this leaves out the process by which those actors arrived at their historiciza­ tion from moving in the flow of time. Remember Mead’s point, that as we move through time, we experience an ever-­emerging present. ‘Emergence’ is an important word because it signifies gradualness without discernible dis­ tinctions. And gradualness is important because it implies that we do not register distinct transitions between events. This means that when turning to the past, we work with the actor we study to introduce distinctions which were not there as they moved through time. The past becomes a reconstruc­ tion viewed through the experience of being in the present, from within the flow of time in the present. The present in which we find ourselves with actors becomes, following Mead, the materials through which they recon­ struct their past.

Overcoming Synoptic Illusion As stated above, actors establish their sequential causal maps. Those causal maps are their perceived longitudinal stories. Longitudinal studies became important because they could reveal events over time that enabled re­searchers, together with the actors, to establish causalities that helped to explain phenomena defined by the researchers. This corresponds to the ‘if . . . then’ that Bateson (1979) wrote about, which effectively treats events through a lens of simultaneity, as in ‘things happen when they happen’. But it also corresponds to what Bourdieu (1977) calls synoptic illusion: the illusion that practice and analysis of practice abide by the same time frame, as a pro­ cess of ‘mysterious ordering mysteriously reconstructed by the analyst’:

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A Note on Studying Time in Time  187 When one discovers the theoretical error that consists in presenting the the­or­et­ ic­al view of practice as the practical relation to practice, and more precisely in set­ ting up the model that has to be constructed to give an account of practice as the principle of practice, then simultaneously one sees that at the root of this error is the antinomy between the time of science and time of action, which tends to destroy practice by imposing on it the intemporal time of science. The shift from the practical scheme to the theoretical schema, constructed after the event, from practical sense to the theoretical model, which can be read either as a p ­ roject, plan or method, or as a mechanical programme, a mysterious ordering mysteri­ ously reconstructed by the analyst, lets slip everything that makes the temporal reality of practice in process.  (Bourdieu, 1990: 81)

Practitioners do not need to worry too much about synoptic illusion, because they are in the world of practice and, as stated above, they leverage causal maps to move on with whatever they are doing. They practice in time and they historicize over time (Feddersen, 2020). What is a possible future at one point in time conditions the past for the following present. The conditioning past that led to the present becomes redefined in light of the present. The redefined past becomes part of the novel conditioning past of the emerging future. In other words, we are looking at temporal loops of conditioning moving back and forth between past and future, always passing through a changing present. These loops, however, are not loops of causal determinacy. They are not, as path dependence theory assumes, ‘driven by mutually inter­ acting variables that generate feedback loops and non-­ linear dynamics’ (Garud et al., 2010). Instead, experiencing the sim­ul­tan­eity of a past flowing away and a future coming towards them, actors enact their trajectory in the present. The simultaneous passage between past and future may make actors apply a combination of creativity and persistence. Overcoming synoptic illusion requires that researchers distinguish between over-­time and in-­time dimensions of temporal research (Feddersen, 2020). Conducting real-­time observations of collaborations between entre­ preneurs in urban development, Feddersen advocates investigating the inter­ play between over-­time and in-­time dimensions of a process. Although this may seem relatively straightforward, Feddersen’s study reveals the challenge of tracing the enactment of events in time while abstracting the temporal pattern over time that results from the temporal relations between events enacted in time. As he shows, this implies that for each event observed, the over-­time pattern is different because of the in-­time dynamics. In other words, the analysis is not readily presented as one picture but as a changing picture over time, each one showing different in-­time dynamics.

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Given this conundrum confronting researchers of perpetually being in a different time frame from those they analyse, it seems primordial that adapted methods are developed not just for study and analysis but also for presentation of analysis. Others have argued against snapshot analysis (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002), which assumes that movement can be divided into separate time segments. Movement, these scholars argue, is not ad­equate­ly depicted by using snapshots. I would argue otherwise and accept that movement is composed of parts. My rationale is that practitioners also draw upon parts, such as when they insert distinctions between events to establish provisional causal maps that help them move forward in time. In this way, parts come to constitute a sense of movement without being movement.

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Afterword What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can ­comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. St. Augustine (1992: 230)

The title ‘Afterword’ may seem misplaced in a book that takes a process view of time, but it is meant as a temporary ending directed towards that which is yet to come. It is meant to be an ending with an inside seen from the present and an outside seen from a future yet to come. I developed the framework suggested in this book to offer an integral view of time in organized settings. Following Adam’s (1990) suggestion to see time conceptions more as dual­ities than as dualisms, I have discussed how four different dimensions of time may be defined and dynamically related to one another and how they may be seen as mutually constitutive. I have also tried to describe how transitions occur between time conceptions and how they evolve from one another and into one another. Finally, I have included the level of temporal shape to suggest how events along pasts and futures may be combined, to explain more fully how actors move through time by constructing narrative trajectories. But every time we draw a line between what is and what is not, the whole is transformed in ways that were neither anticipated nor readily understood. Once we take a present-­past-­future view, the regularity of a sequential time view fades into the background, and once we take a sequential time view, the agency of the moment becomes blurred. But these are both not visible to the eye but, perhaps, in the form of what Zerubavel (1981) called hidden rhythms I believe that hidden rhythm is not meant to signify some deep structure that harmonizes everything but is the intersection between tem­ poral streams of activity that exhibit both regularity and interruption and where interruption clarifies regularity, and vice versa. In this view, regularity Organization and Time. Tor Hernes, Oxford University Press. © Tor Hernes 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894380.003.0013

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is an achievement enabled by irregularity, just as continuity is an achievement enabled by change. This view is relevant for contemporary organizing in which actors continually find themselves flowing with multiple, disjointed time streams of multiple projects (Vaill, 1998). Living at intersections between time streams requires that actors improvise, even in the seemingly most stable of contexts. Still, this would probably not have satisfied St. Augustine, in many ways the progenitor of temporal theorizing. St. Augustine addressed what is called an aporia: an irresolvable inner contradiction of time. He asked the question, given that time does not exist beyond the momentary present, how, then, can time be accounted for? His point was that if the present occurs to then be gone, how could time be measured over a duration that transcends the present? Most people will likely discard this as an irrelevant problem statement. We live in the flow of time and we measure time; hence, the problem is solved in the practical world. If we did not solve it, the world as we know it would never have emerged. But St. Augustine points to a more fundamental problem, as Ricoeur (1984) noted, which is the problem of actors and observers being in different time frames. Actors become historians of their own pasts and architects of their own futures. It is the time of their own making, which feeds into their lived time to be shaped by that lived time in turn. Organizational research needs more studies of the underlying, recurring and fragmented dynamics of time. An identified sequence to explain a certain change may satisfy the researcher, reviewers, and journal editors. Whereas its veracity may not be questioned, it is incomplete in that it does not account for the dynamics during those events, in which actors make some choices and suppress others. The sequential view is a straight line along the depiction of the before and after of events, whereas a fuller account would reveal more of the zig-­zag-­shaped pattern of events that played out during the actors’ lived time. Some events in this pattern were not brought into actors’ future projections. They were some of the doors never opened, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot. But doors never opened are also part of the journey and may be just as real components of actors’ temporal trajectories as are doors that were opened. A complicating factor is that whereas actors perform in a zig-­zag logic of events, they tend to straighten the zig-­zag pattern into a before-­and-­after straight line, which, in turn, feeds into the zig-­zag pattern of lived time. This was the conundrum which St. Augustine described and to which organizational research might usefully pay more attention. Still, being an aporia, it may remain irresolvable, and compromises may be found in simulacra, similar to the use of cubist art to express movement, as done by Duchamp.  

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Index Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t” and “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. abstraction of time  99–100 acceleration  46, 48, 69–70, 115–16, 131 activity/activity time  13t actuality 19 actualization  4, 90 actual time  23–4, 51 affordances  166, 170 agency of time  2 allocation of time  107 ambitemporality 36 arrow of time  51–2 astronomical time  13–14 ‘banana time’  14–15, 17, 114–15 being outside of time  154–5 being in time  42–3, 142, 187 direct experience of  10 experience of time  20–1 indivisible present  86 passage of time  51–2, 55 bidirectional quality of time  50 boundary objects  104–5 B-series of time  32 calendar  24–5, 52, 106 calendar time  1–2, 13–14, 72 causality  139, 142 see also forward causality causal maps  185–8 changing in time  150, 162 continuous change and trajectoral folds  159, 162 experiencing time in change  154–7 forward causation fallacy  152, 154 influence view and confluence view  157, 158f chordal triad of agency  127–8

click time  7 climate  36, 48, 122 clock time  2, 5–7, 9 clocks  52, 106 see also mechanical clocks collaboration and time-as-resource  103 collective time  10, 105–6 commodification of time  100, 167 configurational event narrative and emplotment  132, 134, 138f confluence view  157, 158f consciousness of time  52, 123 contingencies of the moment  68–9 contingency theory  181–2 continuity 7 changing in time  150 from the past  4 internalized time  5 see also continuity and change continuity and change  1–2, 10 changing in time  152 interplay 111–12 trajectoral folds  159, 162 correspondence view  181–2 cyclical time temporal templates  107–8 time-as-resource 106 deep time  50–1 diachronic view of time  2, 157 qualitative 31–2 quantitative 31–2 disruption 150–1 leading in time  173 time-as-experience 48–9 time in change experience  155 distant past  1–2, 20, 23–4, 40

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210 Index double post-festum drama  184, 186 dual temporality  136–7 duration 9 emplotment and configurational event narrative  132, 134, 138f entrainment 117 entropy 51 ephemeral time  7, 127 epochal time  5–6, 20–1, 84, 152 events  9–10, 12, 82–96 experience of time  20–3 forward causation fallacy  153–4 immanence  142, 183–4 singular and exemplary events 93–4 symbolic events  84 time-as-practice 69 see also event-based time eventualization of practices  88, 91 exemplary events see singular and exemplary events flow of time  5 collectivizing time-as-experience  61 double post-festum drama  184, 186 eventualization of time-as-practice  88–91 experience of time  22–3 indivisible present  86–7 narrative trajectory  141 passage of time  50–2 trajectory from within  141 undifferentiated flows  112–13 forecasts  18–19, 104–5 forward causality  31–3, 36–7, 97, 152, 154 free will  173 frequency  31, 69 functional time  107 fungible time  5–6 future 8 double post-festum drama  184–5 emplotment and narrative trajectory  142 eventualization of time-as-practice evoking  168–9, 171–2 imaginaries  36, 66 narrative trajectory  143 near future  47–8, 121 reach-outness in time  77, 79–80 temporal reach  19–20 see also present-past-future future perfect  4, 38

Gettysburg Address  145f, 147, 149 Hawthorne studies  29–30 historicization  165–7, 186–7 immanence eventualization of time-as-practice  88 intraconnecting of events  96–7 narrative trajectory  143 individual-collective experience of time  44t, 49–50, 59f indivisible present/indivisibility  84, 87, 160 inner experience, time as  50, 61, 173–4 instantaneous time  21–3 intertemporality 13t, 33, 36, 43f, 117 intraconnecting of events  95, 97, 122 intuition  53, 55–6, 59–60 irreversibility of time  51–2 leading in time  173, 180 leader as time symbol  176–7 pasts and futures  174–5 present  177, 180 lens of time  6, 44–5, 163–4 linear time  5, 38–9 quantitative 5 structured time  29 temporal templates  109 time-as-resource  102, 106 liquid modernity  7, 22 longitudinal research  31–2, 41 long-term thinking  33–4, 36 longwall mining method  29–30 marking time  167 materiality of time  6–7, 163, 171–2 historicizing 165–7 translator of time  163–4, 167 Mayan calendar  106–8 mechanical clocks  98, 107 memory historicizing through materiality  166–7 indivisible present  86 passage of time  52–7 mimesis 137–8 Molaison, H.  124 moving through time  2–3, 5, 8–9 mythological time  79–80 narrative trajectory  41, 127, 149 combinatory qualities  141

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Index  211 emplotment  143, 148 emplotment and configurational event narrative  132, 134, 138f exploratory abilities  141 immanence 143 trajectory from within  138–40 natural time  35–6 Newtonian time  5 non-change of time  32 objective time  99–100, 103–4 ontologies of time  5, 12–14 oppression 33–4 pace  2, 30–1, 41 reach-outness in time  78 parallelism 33–4 passage of time  1–2, 50–2, 65 experiencing  52, 56–7 indivisible present  86 shaping experience of time  57–8 passing of time  1–2, 30–1, 53, 61, 106 past 8 accumulated past  135 historicizing through materiality  165–6 predicting  168–9, 171–2 suppressing 151 temporal reach  20 planning horizons  18 pluritemporalism 35 practices 9–10 activity time  23–6 and distant events: simultaneous interplay  120, 122–3 and events: transitional interplay  123, 125–6 eventualization of  88, 91 reach-outness in time  53–4, 60, 79 stretched-outness of time  70, 74–5 studying time in time  181, 187 transitional interplay with resource  117, 119–20 practice theory  38–9 present distant times, experiencing  66 double post-festum drama  186 experience of time  20–2 forward causation fallacy  152–3 immanence 183–4 ongoing or rolling present  41

passage of time  54–5 see also present-past-future present-past-future  3–5, 8–9 eventualization of time-as-practice  88–9, 91 intraconnecting of events  96–7 narrative trajectory  127–8, 131–2, 133, 140–1 process models  32–3 process ontology  36–7 projection 25–7 protention  55–7, 55f, 72 punctuated equilibrium view  159 reach-outness of time  45t, 68–9, 75, 80 reckoning of time  47 retention 54 rhythm 9 temporal templates  108–9 rituals  98, 106–7 routines  101, 118–19 scenario planning  94 sensemaking 62–3 sequencing and sequential time  5–7 activity time  23–4 social time  15–17 structured time  27–8 temporal templates  107–9 time-as-resource  100, 102, 106 shape of time  12, 63, 116–17, 129–30 simultaneity  181–2, 186 singular and exemplary events  91–94 emplotment and narrative trajectory  143, 145–6 time-as-events  84, 91, 94 singular time frame  142, 144 social time  12, 13t activity time  23–4 intertemporality 35–6 social ‘now’  15–16 structured time  27 temporal reach  17–18 space  22, 38, 121 speed 9–11 time-as-resource  102, 105–6, 108 stationary view of time  41, 127–8 stretched-outness of time  9, 45t activity time  25–6 reach-outness in time  77–8 time-as-practice  68–70, 74–5, 76f

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212 Index structuration theory structured time  12, 13t, 27, 41–2, 43f experience of time  21 interplay  116–17, 122–3 social time  15 time-as-experience 47–8 studying time in time  182, 188 double post-festum drama  184, 186 simultaneity 181–2 synoptic illusion  186, 188 subjective time  99 sundials 98 symbolic time  106–7 synchronic views  30–1, 41 synchronization 107 synoptic illusion  186, 188 Tavistock studies of autonomous groups 29–30 teleological-affective structuring  70 tempo ,  73–4, 179–80 temporal abduction  19 temporal depth  38 temporal distance  17–18, 91, 122 temporal float  90–1, 116–17 temporal orientations  41 temporal patterns  41, 118–19 temporal reach  13t, 17–18, 20, 40, 43f temporal structures  13t, 38–41 activity time  24–6 interplay  116–17, 122–3 social time  15–16 temporal reach  20 time-as-experience 61 time-as-practice  68–70, 72–3, 76–8 time-as-resource  101, 105–6 time structuring  27–30 see also structured time temporal templates  107–110, 117–20 temporal translation  117–19 temporal uncoupling  117 time-as-events  81, 97 eventualization of practices  88, 91 indivisible present  84, 87 intraconnecting of events  95, 97 singular and exemplary events  91, 94 time-as-experience  9–10, 12–13, 46 collectivizing 60–3

direct experience  49–50 distant times  63 interrelationships and interplay  112f passage of time  50, 56–7 time horizons  8, 17–20, 38, 40 changing in time  160 interplay  121–3, 125–6 leading in time  176–7 narrative trajectory  183 time-as-resource 105–6 time lags  31, 182 timeless spaces  156–7 time maps  107–8 time of nature  50–1 time-as-practice  12–13, 67, 80 foundations of framework  29, 42–3, 43f, 44t, 45t narrative trajectory  128–9 reach-outness in time  68–9, 75, 80 stretched-outness of time  68–70, 74–5, 76f time-as-resource  10, 98 composites of time  105–7 foundations of framework  12–13, 42–3, 43f, 44t, 45t interrelationships and interplay  112f leading in the present  178 materiality of time  167 measured time, extending from  103, 105 temporal reach  19 temporal templates  107–8 time-as-experience 48 time sheets  104–5 time-space compression  21–2, 76–7, 83–4, 116–17 time-to-market 31 time views, connections between time work  21, 41 timing 9 trajectoral bends and continuous change  159, 162 translation of time  74–5, 163–4, 167 unique happenings  84 universal time  103–4 water clocks  98 working time  15–16