Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies 9780198870715, 019887071X

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Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

PE RS PECT IVES O N PRO CESS OR GANIZATION ST UD IES Series Editors: Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is an annual series, linked to the International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, and is dedicated to the development of an understanding of organizations and organizing at large as processes in the making. This series brings together contributions from leading scholars, which focus on seeing dynamically evolving activities, interactions, and events as important aspects of organized action, rather than static structures and fixed templates. Volume 1: Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing Editors: Tor Hernes and Sally Maitlis Volume 2: Constructing Identity in and around Organizations Editors: Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 3: How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies Editors: Paul R. Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 4: Language and Communication at Work: Discourse, Narrativity, and Organizing Editors: François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 5: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations Editors: Raghu Garud, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 6: Organizational Routines: How They Are Created, Maintained, and Changed Editors: Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Claus Rerup, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 7: Skillful Performance: Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence, and Expertise in Organizations Editors: Jörgen Sandberg, Linda Rouleau, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 8: Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life Editors: Moshe Farjoun, Wendy Smith, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 9: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View Editors: Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas Volume 10: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Editors: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Edited by

Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

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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 © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 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: 2020949460 ISBN 978–0–19–887071–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.001.0001 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.

List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1. Core constructs in historical organizational studies

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5.1. Progression of the structure of events through actual events

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7.1. Example of a page planner from Local News101 7.2. Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy

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8.1. Quality assurance at Alpha

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8.2. The development of the quality routine at Alpha

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8.3. Temporality shaping routine patterning

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13.1. Analytical codes and categories

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13.2. A framework of organizational memory work

247

Tables 5.1. Some core concepts of the events-based approach

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7.1. Overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events

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7.2. Deadline production vs. flowline production

105

8.1. Data structure

123

12.1. Objective structures of the field before and after privatization

227

13.1. Industry and financial characteristics of sample firms

244

14.1. Examples of historical metanarratives

269

List of Contributors François Bastien is an Assistant Professor at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria. His research interests include organizational theory, identity, and culture. His objective is to better understand the complexity of identity within First Nations organizations in Canada and all over the world. William Blattner is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, USA. He is the author of Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999) and Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2006). Diane Ella Németh Bongers is Associate Professor at Universtity Paris Nanterre as well as a coach for student entrepreneurship. Her research is oriented towards organizations having a citizen-centered vision of business, and has a focus on philosophy, practice, and processes. Isabelle Bouty is Professor of Organizational and Strategic Management at the University Paris Dauphine PSL, in Paris. Her research explores the relationships between the individual, collective, and organizational levels in organizational and strategic processes within processual and practice approaches. Her research has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Human Relations, M@n@gement, and Management Learning. Lena E. Bygballe is an Associate Professor and Head of Centre for the Construction Industry at the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business School. Her research interests lie within themes related to innovation processes and

inter-organizational relationships, particularly using the construction industry as an empirical setting. Arne Lindseth Bygdås received his PhD in Strategy and Management from NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), and is currently employed as senior researcher at the Work Research Institute at OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). His research interests include knowing and learning in organizations, organizational creativity and innovation, practice-based research, and or­gan­iza­tion­al becoming. Diego M. Coraiola is Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus. His research focuses on strategy and change. He is particularly interested in the role of symbolic resources in the creation, perpetuation, and transformation of organizations, markets, and institutions. His work has been published in contributed volumes and journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Business History, and Management Learning. Stephanie Decker is Professor in Organisation Studies and History at Bristol University. After completing her PhD in history at the University of Liverpool in 2006, she held postdoctoral appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School. Since then she has held academic posts at the University of Liverpool and Aston Business School. William M. Foster is a Professor of Management at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. His primary

x  List of Contributors research interests include rhetorical history, social memory studies, service learning, and business ethics. His work has been published in books and in journals such as Journal of Management, Journal of Management Inquiry, Business History and Journal of Business Ethics. He is the Editor of Academy of Management Learning and Education and serves on the Editorial Review Boards of Organization Studies, Academy of Management Review, and Business History. Aina Landsverk Hagen received a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oslo for her work on collaborative creativity among architects in Oslo and New York. Her MA was based on fieldwork in Teheran, Iran, researching feminists, freedom of speech, and youth agency. She worked in several media outlets as a desk journalist and copy editor, before moving on to become a researcher, currently at the Work Research Institute, OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). Her work on innovation in media organizations focuses on topics like creativity, idea development, and audience engagement. John Hassard is Professor of Organizational Analysis at the Alliance Manchester Business School. Previously he was Head of the Management School at Keele University, Visiting Fellow in Management Learning at Cambridge University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at London Business School. His research interests lie in organization theory, industrial sociology, and management history. Tor Hernes is Professor of Organization Theory and Director of the Centre for Organizational Time at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, and Adjunct Professor at USN Business School, University of South-Eastern Norway. In recent years, he has devoted increasing attention to the subject of organization and time. The main thrust of his work on time is directed towards a situated, events-based view inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s

philosophy, which serves as a point of departure for better understanding how actors enact their time on an on-going basis. The focus on time construction derives from a desire to better understand how actors’ time construction may take different shapes and accommodate variations of near and distant pasts and futures. Tor has published more than a dozen books, among them A Process Theory of Organization which won the George R. Terry Book Award at the Academy of Management meeting in 2015. Anthony Hussenot is a Professor in Organization Studies at Université Côte d’Azur, France. He specializes in new ways of working. In his research, he explores current developments in the way we work, focusing on the relationship between these new work practices and organizational dynamics. He has conducted studies on various topics such as the digital nomad trend, the maker movement, the banking sector, and education. His research has been published in various academic journals and edited books. One of his most recent publications includes a book about the maker movement and the events-based approach (in French). Astrid Jensen (PhD Copenhagen Business School) is Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the Department of Language and Communication, and Director of the Centre for Organizational Practice and Communication (OPC), University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests include various aspects of organizational communication. Recent work combines theories of metaphor and narratives with a practice-based perspective on organizational change, culture, and identity. Projects on which she is currently working include counternarratives in and around organizations, metaphor and narratives in mergers, strategizing, and identity construction. She

List of Contributors  xi has published in international journals such as Organization Studies, English for Specific Purposes, Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquee, Culture and Organization, and Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. Henrik Koll received his PhD from SDU (University of Southern Denmark), Department of Language and Communication, for his work on change management and the strategic organization of time in a Scandinavian telecommunications company. His research interests include the strategic organization of time, organizational change, temporal work in organizations, Bourdieu’s theory of practice, strategy-aspractice, organizational memory, and organizational identities. Before becoming a researcher, he worked in management consulting, specializing in change management. He is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at Malmö University, Sweden.

organizations as organizing processes rather than organizational structures. Inspired by the pragmatist concept of inquiry, he views organizing as actors’ ongoing dialogical exploration of and experimentation with the possible futures of their collective cooperative action. He has published book chapters, articles in international top-ranking journals, and the book Pragmatism and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018; EGOS Book Award, 2019). David Musson is an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School, Oxford. He was formerly the Business and Management Editor at Oxford University Press.

Ann Langley is Professor of Management at HEC Montréal, Canada, and Canada Research Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings. Her research focuses on strategic change, leadership, innovation, and the use of management tools in complex organizations, with an emphasis on processual research approaches. She has published over fifty articles and two books, most recently Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources with Gerry Johnson, Leif Melin, and Richard Whittington (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Juliane Reinecke is Professor of International Management and Sustainability at King’s Business School, King’s College London. She is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Research Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, from where she received her PhD. Her research interests include process perspectives on global governance, sustainability, practice adaptation, and temporality in organizations and in global value chains. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Research Policy, among others. Juliane serves as Associate Editor of Organization Theory and Business Ethics Quarterly and on the editorial boards of Organization, Organization Studies and the Journal of Management Studies.

Philippe Lorino is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at ESSEC Business School. He advises the French Nuclear Safety Authority about organizational factors of risk. He served as a senior civil servant in the French government and as a director in the finance department of an international manufacturing company. He draws from pragmatist philosophy (Peirce, Dewey, Mead) and dialogism theory (Bakhtin) to study

Michael Rowlinson is Professor of Management and Organizational History at the University of Exeter. Before joining Exeter he worked at Queen Mary University, London. He previously edited the journal Management and Organizational History before becoming a Senior Editor for the journal Organization Studies. He is a former editor of the Association of Business Schools’ Academic Journal Quality Guide.

xii  List of Contributors Gudrun Rudningen holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and works at the Work Research Institute at OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). Her research has mainly revolved around creativity, material culture, digital technology, and organizational change. She is currently conducting her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, on the digital transform­ ation of the newspaper industry. Barbara Simpson is Professor of Leadership and Organisational Dynamics at Strathclyde Business School and Distinguished Professor of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University. Originally trained as a physicist, she brings the principles of action, flow, and movement to bear on the social processes of creativity, innovation, leadership, and change. Her current thinking is also deeply informed by the philosophies of the American Pragmatists, especially George Herbert Mead’s integration of sociality and temporality.

Academy of Management Review. His research has won best paper awards from the Academy of Management Journal and Administrative Science Quarterly, and he has twice been recognized by Thompson Reuters as ranking in the top 1 percent of researchers in business and economics for citation impact. His research focuses on the critical role of symbolic resources—legitimacy, authenticity, identity, and history—in improving an organization’s competitive position. His current research examines the changing social and symbolic role of the modern corporation. Anna R. Swärd is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business School. She received her PhD in 2013 and has since focused on research within the field of strategy, in terms of understanding the processes of coordination, cooperation, trust, and practice within and between organizations.

Andrew David Allan Smith is a Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Liverpool Management School. He is a historical organization studies scholar whose research deals with the relationship between cultural evolution and how firms create and exploit competitive advantage. He has published in journals including the Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Enterprise and Society, Business History, Political Studies Review, and Multinational Business Review. Andrew completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario in 2005 and his BA at Queen’s University Belfast in 1999.

Ingrid M. Tolstad is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at the Work Research Institute, OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). Based on fieldwork among hipsters in Williamsburg, New York, her MA presents an analytical model for the notion of coolness, while her PhD in musicology from the University of Oslo is an ethnographic case study of a Swedish music production company in the making. She mainly researches creativity, innovation, digitalization, and the development of organizations within the fields of media, art, and culture, having a keen interest in the methodological potential and implications of citizen participation in research.

Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of Management at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business in Victoria, Canada, and a Chair in Organisation Theory at the Management School of the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the past Editor of the

Rory Tracey is a doctoral graduate of the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation at the University of Strathclyde. His research focuses on technology and its role in the emergence of novelty in organizations. Specifically, he is

List of Contributors  xiii interested in the nature of technique, and how design-led practices provide a structure for the generation of new forms. Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com) holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair in Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, and is a Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He has published widely in several leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Studies, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Human Relations. He was the Editor-inChief of Organization Studies from 2003 to 2008. His research interests include: knowledge-based perspectives on organizations; organizational becoming; the management of organizational change and social reforms; the epistemology of practice; and epistemological issues in organization theory. He is the editor (with Christian Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Meta-theoretical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also edited (with N. Mylonopoulos) Organizations as Knowledge Systems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and (with J. Shepherd) Managing the Future: Foresight in the Knowledge Economy (Blackwell, 2004). He is also the author of the book If Aristotle were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2004).

Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology. His research approach is inspired by pragmatism and engaged scholarship, combining practice and process theory for researching between practice and theory. The topics of his research combine his backgrounds in organization studies and design studies to study organizations, design, strategy, innovation, and organizational designing. Alongside his PhD, he discusses management and organization classics as a host of the Talking about Organizations Podcast. Alia Weston is Associate Professor of Creative and Business Enterprise at OCAD University, Toronto. She has expertise in business management and design, and her research is focused on understanding how creativity and business can contribute to positive social change. Key themes in her research include exploring creative resistance in resource-constrained environments, and how alternative business practices can contribute to solving key challenges in society.

Anne Live Vaagaasar is an Associate Professor at the Department of Leadership and Organization, and Head of the Project Management Executive Portfolio. Her research interests lie within themes related to project management and leadership, knowledge development and integration, innovation processes, and inter-organizational relationships.

Elden Wiebe (PhD, University of Alberta) is Associate Professor of Management, Leder School of Business at The King’s University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His primary research interests are time/temporality in relation to organizations, organizational change, and strategic management, and spirituality in the workplace. He has published in Perspectives in Process Organization Studies, Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management Inquiry, Management and Organizational History, Journal of Religion and Business Ethics, and Healthcare Quarterly. He is co-editor (with Albert J. Mills and Gabrielle Durepos) of the Sage Encyclopedia of Case Study Research.

Frithjof E. Wegener is a PhD candidate in the Department of Design, Organization, and Strategy at the Faculty of Industrial

Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His main

xiv  List of Contributors areas of interest are cognitive sociology and the sociology of time. His recent publications include The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford University Press, 2006); Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2011); Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance (Oxford University Press, 2015); and Taken for Granted: The

Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book on formal theorizing. In 2003 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016 he received the Rutgers University Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award, and in 2017 he received the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction’s Helena Lopata Mentor Excellence Award.

Series Editorial Structure Editors-in-Chief Ann Langley, HEC Montréal, Canada, [email protected] Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK, process. [email protected]

Advisory Board Hamid Bouchikhi, ESSEC Business School, France Michel Callon, CSI-Ecole des Mines de Paris, France Robert Chia, University of Strathclyde, UK Todd Chiles, University of Missouri, USA François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Canada Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Martha Feldman, University of California, Irvine, USA Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State University, USA Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy Cynthia Hardy, University of Melbourne, Australia Robin Holt, University of Liverpool, UK Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School, UK Sally Maitlis, University of British Columbia, Canada Wanda Orlikowski, MIT, USA Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University, USA Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois, USA Georg Schreyögg, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Barbara Simpson, University of Strathclyde, UK Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan, USA Andew Van de Ven, University of Minnesota, USA Karl E. Weick, University of Michigan, USA Editorial Officer and Process Organization Studies Symposium Administrator Sophia Tzagaraki, [email protected]

Endorsements “As we become more willing to convert reified entities into differentiated streams, the resulting images of process have become more viable and more elusive. Organization becomes organizing, being becomes becoming, construction becomes constructing. But as we see ourselves saying more words that end in ‘ing,’ what must we be thinking? That is not always clear. But now, under the experienced guidance of editors Langley and Tsoukas, there is an annual forum that moves us toward con­ tinu­ity and consolidation in process studies. This book series promises to be a vigorous, thoughtful forum dedicated to improvements in the substance and craft of process articulation.” Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, University of Michigan, USA “In recent years process and practice approaches to organizational topics have increased significantly. These approaches have made significant contributions to already existing fields of study, such as strategy, routines, knowledge management, and technology adoption, and these contributions have brought increasing attention to the approaches. Yet because the contributions are embedded in a variety of different fields of study, discussions about the similarities and differences in the application of the approaches, the research challenges they present, and the potential they pose for examining taken for granted ontological assumptions are limited. This series will provide an opportunity for bringing together contributions across different areas so that comparisons can be made and can also provide a space for discussions across fields. Professors Langley and Tsoukas are leaders in the development and use of process approaches. Under their editorship, the series will attract the work and attention of a wide array of distinguished organizational scholars.” Martha S. Feldman, Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management, Professor of Social Ecology, Political Science, Business and Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will be the definitive annual volume of theories and research that advance our understanding of process questions dealing with how things emerge, grow, develop, and terminate over time. I applaud Professors Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas for launching this important book series, and encourage colleagues to submit their process research and subscribe to PROS.” Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change, University of Minnesota, USA

xviii Endorsements “The new series—Perspectives on Process Organization Studies—is a timely and valuable addition to the organization studies literature. The ascendancy of process perspectives in recent years has signified an important departure from traditional perspectives on organizations that have tended to privilege either self-standing events or discrete entities. In contrast, by emphasizing emergent activities and recursive relations, process perspectives take seriously the ongoing production of or­gan­ iza­tion­al realities. Such a performative view of organizations is particularly salient today, given the increasingly complex, dispersed, dynamic, entangled, and mobile nature of current organizational phenomena. Such phenomena are not easily accounted for in traditional approaches that are premised on stability, separation, and substances. Process perspectives on organizations thus promise to offer powerful and critical analytical insights into the unprecedented and novel experiences of contemporary organizing.” Wanda J. Orlikowski, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA “The recent decades witnessed conspicuous changes in organization theory: a slow but inexorable shift from the focus on structures to the focus on processes. The whirlwinds of the global economy made it clear that everything flows, even if change itself can become stable. While the interest in processes of organizing is not new, it is now acquiring a distinct presence, as more and more voices join in. A forum is therefore needed where such voices can speak to one another, and to the interested readers. The series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will provide an excellent forum of that kind, both for those for whom a processual perspective is a matter of ontology, and those who see it as an epistemological choice.” Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies, School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden “We are living in an era of unprecedented change; one that is characterized by instability, volatility, and dramatic transformations. It is a world in which the seemingly improbable, the unanticipated, and the downright catastrophic appear to occur with alarming regularity. Such a world calls for a new kind of thinking: thinking that issues from the chaotic, fluxing immediacy of lived experiences; thinking that resists or overflows our familiar categories of thought; and thinking that accepts and embraces messiness, contradictions, and change as the sine qua non of the human condition. Thinking in these genuinely processual terms means that the starting point of our inquiry is not so much about the being of entities such as ‘organization’, but their constant and perpetual becoming. I very much welcome this long overdue scholarly effort at exploring and examining the fundamental issue of process and its implications for organization studies. Hari Tsoukas and Ann Langley are to be congratulated on taking this very important initiative in bringing the process agenda into the systematic study of the phenomenon of organization. It promises to be a path-breaking contribution to our analysis of organization.” Robert Chia, Professor of Management, University of Strathclyde, UK

Endorsements  xix

“This new series fits the need for a good annual text devoted to process studies. Organization theory has long required a volume specifically devoted to process research that can address process ontology, methodology, research design, and analysis. While many authors collect longitudinal data, there are still insufficient methodological tools and techniques to deal with the nature of that data. Essentially, there is still a lack of frameworks and methods to deal with good processual data or to develop process-based insights. This series will provide an important resource for all branches of organization, management, and strategy theory. The editors of the series, Professors Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas are excellent and very credible scholars within the process field. They will attract top authors to the series and ensure that each paper presents a high quality and insightful resource for process scholars. I expect that this series will become a staple in libraries, PhD studies, and journal editors’ and process scholars’ bookshelves.” Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management, Aston Business School, UK

1 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies An Introduction Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas

Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization studies. Until recently, both time and history have been treated implicitly in most social science research—as important aspects of context, but never important enough to incorporate explicitly into theory. Time has always been an assumptive element of causality in processes of social change, yet “most social and behavioral scientists pay little attention to the temporal factors involved in their research” (Kelly and McGrath, 1988: 10). History, similarly, is a critical element in accounts of social change, yet contemporary sociology has, typically, relegated history to the dimin­ ished status of “background context” in explanatory accounts (Alford, 1998). Today, however, both time and history have begun to occupy prominent positions in contemporary studies of organizations. Management scholars openly ac­know­ ledge a “historic turn” in organizational research (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Mills, Suddaby, Foster, and Durepos, 2016) as well as a turn towards temporality (Reinecke and Ansari,  2015; Slawinski and Bansal,  2015; Granqvist and Gustafsson,  2016). Leading management journals are replete with special issues encouraging more research on temporality and history. This volume and the conference from which it derives stand testament to the recent foregrounding of time and history as focal objects of organizational study. Scholarship in process organization studies (Langley,  1999; Tsoukas and Chia,  2002) has played a pivotal role in raising awareness of the importance of time and history in understanding organizational change. While many definitions of process theory exist (Van de Ven, 1992), its core ontology is to consider “how and why things—people, organizations, strategies, environments—change, act and evolve over time” (Langley, 2007: 271). Since “[no] concept of motion is pos­ sible without the category of time” (Sorokin and Merton,  1937: 615), time and history are foundational concepts that underpin our understanding of processes. Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies: An Introduction In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0001

2  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies For instance, understanding a process as ever becoming highlights its temporal trajectory—the “patterning of events that stretches back into time and extends into the future”—and the work of actors in continually reconstructing such a ­trajectory (Hernes, 2017: 603). Despite the growing interest in temporality and history, their precise relationship to processes of change remains woefully under-theorized. While there are emergent strands of theory—i.e. rhetorical history (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010; Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, and Foster, 2019) and organizational temporality (Fine, 1990; Hassard, 2001; Hernes, 2014)—these strands have yet to coalesce into a paradigmatic statement of either disciplinary identity or theoretical significance for organizational scholarship. Both subjects lack what Kuhn (1967) would describe as a defining “puzzle” or anomaly in how we understand organizational change or “becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Relatedly, we lack a coherent set of concep­ tual tools that can be applied to ongoing research directed to addressing the puzzle. Collectively, the chapters in this volume devoted to understanding temporality and history as a central element of process offer a glimpse of both a defining puzzle and a set of emergent conceptual tools that might be useful for scholars engaged in historical and temporally sensitive organizational research. Before elaborating their contribution to the emergent theoretical scaffolding of historical and temporal organizational scholarship, we first present the puzzle and its evolution in prior literature.

1.1  The Puzzle: Questioning Objectivity and Agency in Process Studies of Time and History The central puzzle shared by most chapters in this volume challenges the assump­ tion of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of ob­ject­ iv­ity in historical narrations of the past. In terms of temporality, scholars have often struggled to move beyond chronological conceptions of “clock” time (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman, 2001). As a result, time is often seen as inde­ pendent from actors and activities. Actors are being driven by deadlines and they structure their activities around seemingly objective timelines, such as the hours of the day measured by clock time or the seeming objectivity of calendar time marking the seasons or moments in one’s lifetime. As Hassard et al. and Simpson et al. suggest (this volume), the traditional focus on time as a linear and objective measure of pro­ cess may well have reflected the subject of study—standardized industrial processes and predictable bureaucratic practices. However, as scholars have started to appreci­ ate the complexity of multiple, overlapping processes in an accelerating society, these conceptions of time seem at odds with the temporal experience of organizational actors. The way we conceptualize time and temporality is critical for process organization studies since it shapes how we view and relate to organizational phenomena—as

An Introduction  3

unfolding processes or stable objects—and how we view agency in general (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015, 2017). In their influential paper on agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 962) place temporality at the heart of agency as they define agency as “tem­ por­al­ly embedded process of social engagement.” They focus on situating agency “within the flow of time,” approaching agency as “informed by the past (in its habit­ ual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 962). In order to further advance our understanding of temporality and agency in organizational research, we must return to the foundational question of how we con­ ceptualize “the flow of time”. If temporality is understood as an external and ob­ject­ ive measure of process, the question is how time shapes agency—for example, how the time horizons actors consider when contemplating past and future events influ­ ence competitive behavior (Nadkarni, Chen, and Chen, 2016). In contrast, if tem­ por­al­ity is understood as a cultural construction of socially accepted temporal norms (Zerubavel, this volume), the question is reversed: how does agency shape concep­ tions of time? This opens up a much wider range of possibilities of how actors may influence the sociotemporal orders they live in. Similarly, the central puzzle shared by the chapters focused on history challenges the assumption of objectivity in historical narrations of the past. Put more explicitly, each raises the question “can history ever be objective?” Questioning the objectivity of accounts of the past is not unique to historical organization studies. Historians place this question at the center of their epistemological debates on historiography, particularly as their discipline has been challenged by critiques from other social scientists, most particularly from social historians. Perhaps the best articulation of “the objectivity question” for historians was provided by Chicago social historian Peter Novick: The assumptions on which it [the objectivity question] rests include a commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as a correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and above all between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts it must be abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist in history are “found” not “made”. Though successive generations of historians might, as their perspectives shifted, attribute different significance to events in the past, the meaning of those events was unchanging.  (Novick, 1988: 1)

As Novick’s quote demonstrates, the objectivity question is not a single question, but rather an admixture of epistemological and ontological challenges to scientific rationality that characterized the postmodern turn in the social sciences and

4  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies humanities some decades ago by writers as diverse as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. An important corollary to the objectivity question, if the answer is “no,” is “what are the limits of subjective reinterpretation of the past by interested actors?” That is, if historical accounts of the past are interpretations subject to the myopia or outright bias of the narrator, what are the limits to which the past can be creatively recon­ structed to serve the interests of powerful actors in the present? The “objectivity question,” thus, arrives hand-in-hand with the “agency question.” The agency ques­ tion is also not new to historical scholarship. The subjective interests of the narrator of history have been the subject of speculation since the time of Herodotus, but have become increasingly prominent through powerful challenges from scholars in crit­ ic­al theory (Foucault,  1964), archeology (Veyne,  1988; Assman,  1995), sociology (Zerubavel, 1996), and literary criticism (White, 1973), among others. The agency question is arguably more relevant in organizational theory, inasmuch as the organization has come to represent the ultimate form for the expression of rationalized agency in contemporary society. The corporation is perhaps the ul­tim­ ate manifestation of modern agency, with a seemingly irrepressible capacity to sub­ ordinate all forms of human experience and expression to commercial self-interest. A growing stream of studies, captured under the broad construct of rhetorical his­ tory, has begun to document the various ways in which managers in organizations engage in the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stake­ holders of the firm” (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010: 157). The growing empirical accounts of the use of rhetorical history in organizations not only re­inforce the validity of both the “objectivity” and “agency” questions in the context of or­gan­ iza­tions, they also strengthen the need for a coherent conceptual vocabulary through which ongoing research can begin to address these questions.

1.2  Contributions to this Volume: Exploring Time, Temporality, and History in Process Studies Each of the remaining chapters in this volume explicitly or implicitly address the objectivity and agency questions for organizations, albeit at different levels of ana­ lysis and with a focus on different concepts and phenomena. The next three chapters, based on the PROS 2018 keynotes, provide important foundations for our under­ standing of how actors experience and may influence process, temporality, and history. In Chapter  2, “Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative: A Heideggerian Approach,” William Blattner examines the phenomenological conditions of how we are able to experience a process as unfolding in time, and how we render the process intelligible by selecting what aspects of the past matter and the direction of where it is going. To do so, Blattner introduces us to Edmund Husserl’s account of “retention” and “pro­ tention” to explain how we are able to experience things as changing or processes as

An Introduction  5

unfolding. By “retaining” the prior elements of experience and “protaining” or anticipating future elements of experience, we are able to grasp the continuing rele­ vance of a previous situation and its continuation. Blattner then draws on Heidegger’s phenomenology of time, and in particular, the notion of “temporal aspect” to explain how we distinguish what is relevant to the present from what is not, as well as to anticipate the direction that a process is taking. The temporal aspect is captured by the distinctive grammatical features of language, as in the perfect tense of “have done,” but is also expressed in the logic of narrative frames, which move from in­aug­ ur­at­ing event toward resolution. Drawing on examples ranging from literature to politics, Blattner uses these phenomenological insights to explain how the way we relate to the past, and what we select as relevant to current concerns, informs our forward-looking ambition to influence the processes we experience as unfolding. These insights into the temporality of processes are complemented by Tor Hernes’ chapter, “Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality” (Chapter  3). Hernes takes up the challenge to conceptualize the notion of temporality as the tem­ poral extension of the present moment. He does so by drawing on the notion of “event” and Whitehead’s epochal theory of time to suggest that events are constitu­ tive of organizational temporality. Events can explain how the present “now” extends into the future so that a sense of continuity is created despite the continual perishing of time. The important point here is to understand that events are not just occur­ rences that are accomplished in any particular moment. Instead, events are defined by their becoming an event even after the actual event has occurred, and their dur­ ation is defined by the time it takes for events to become events. The illuminating example of how events become events is Hernes’ discussion of US President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Despite being one of the best-known speeches in US political history, the speech was barely noticed when President Lincoln first delivered it in 1863. The Gettysburg Address only became “that” speech over a century later as its message of progress and democracy was evoked in a range of civil rights and wom­ en’s movements. The Gettysburg speech is still becoming “the” speech each time it is read aloud in American classrooms, keeping the event alive by translating it again and again in light of a newly emerging present. As this example suggests, tem­por­al­ ity—the extension from the present “now”—can be understood in terms of the becoming of events. In Chapter 4, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel introduces a sociocultural perspective on temporality. In his chapter, “The Sociology of Time,” Zerubavel is concerned with the collective experience and organization of time. This concerns social norms and traditions of measuring, reckoning, and organizing time, or the sociotemporal order through which social groups temporally organize their lives. Zerubavel stresses that this sociotemporal order contrasts with the physiotemporal order. The former is artificial and based in cultural conventions even if it is experienced as absolute and inevitable. Hence, our collective conception of time as a finite resource, which is reflected in common expressions such as “spending” or “saving” time, is both artifi­ cial and consequential for how social life is experienced and organized. A key insight

6  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies of the sociology of time is its political dimension, which enables us to explore the relation between power and time. The authority to impose or change a sociotempo­ ral order is both an expression of political power as well as a means to reinforce it. In sum, Zerubavel’s sociocultural perspective sheds light on the tension of how time can be experienced as objective clock time while being an artificial imposition on people’s temporal experience. In Chapter  5, “Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of Temporality: Introducing the Events-Based Approach,” Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty address the fundamental question of the ontology of temporality, and its implications for the study of organizations. The authors reject a realist understanding of time as a standardized and external dimension of process. Instead, they build on process philosophy and suggest that temporality is expressed through events. Actors make sense of the indivisible flow of temporal experiences in terms of distinguishable events and gain a sense of continuity by positioning them­ selves in relation to their history, the present moment, and an expected future. Not unlike Blattner’s discussion of retention and protention—the capacity to retain the immediate past and anticipate the immediate future—the core idea is that the pre­ sent moment is always co-defined by a sense of past, present, and future events. From this perspective, organizing becomes the organizing of events. Such a view can capture contemporary organizational phenomena such as project or freelance work, where workers are simultaneously oriented toward multiple, partly interrelated pro­ jects. Here, organizing does not mean creating and enacting predictable structures and routines but navigating these multiple projects around multiple yet overlapping event temporalities. In sum, the event-based approach reconciles the process philo­ sophical notion of temporality as an indivisible flow or duration with people’s desire to order their experience along a timeline with distinguishable temporal categories, without resorting to the notion of clock time. In Chapter 6, “The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World,” Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston further add to a conceptual move away from clock time as they seek to better understand and theorize the temporal dimensions of creativity. Their starting point is the dilemma that clock time, with its realist (or objectivist) focus on the ordered succession of past, present, and future, seems inad­ equate as a basis for understanding the ways in which creative work is practiced and temporally resourced. The authors contrast realist and idealist orientations to time, and conclude that although clock time is pervasive in modern Western societies, it is more suited for the control and prediction of recurring processes than the flexibility and flow of creative practice. Simpson and her colleagues propose the concept of timefulness as an alternative foundation for understanding the temporality of cre­ ative practice. Timefulness resonates with the idealist view of becoming time and describes the temporal experience of emergence that is inherent to any creative action. Timefulness evokes multiple temporalities as emergent resources that nur­ ture mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness as enablers for creative action.

An Introduction  7

Whereas Simpson et al. argue that creative work requires rethinking temporality, Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen (Chapter 7) provide an empirical illustration of how this might be accomplished— moving from deadlines and linear working to a continuous flowline. In their chapter, “Flowline at Work: Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations through Metaphor,” Bygdås et al. show how actors have agency in shaping the temporality of their work, even though they might take the temporal structures of their working lives as objective facts. Based on an ethnography of a newsroom, the study shows how journalists navigate the temporal transformation from the deadline-oriented production of the daily printed newspaper to a continuous cycle of online news pro­ duction and distribution. However, internalized temporal structures make it difficult to imagine a different rhythm. In producing the printed newspaper, the journalists had been working towards a daily deadline for the print edition, which provided a temporal configuration for their working day. Producing and publishing news online requires a different temporality, and challenges journalists to adapt to the tem­por­al­ ity of the 24-hour news cycle. This required a temporal reimagining of their activity. The study explores how the introduction of a new metaphor—from deadline to flowline—helped actors to reimagine what they were doing and to change the tem­ poral structuring of their work practices. In sum, the study shows how temporal structures are interlinked with how news production is practiced and its meaning defined, and vice versa. In Chapter  8, “Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning,” Lena Bygballe, Anna Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar explore how temporality shapes the creation and recreation of routines. Based on a process study of a quality routine in a large con­ struction company called Alpha, they demonstrate how routine patterning is a con­ tinuous flow between past, present, and future enactments of the routine. However, temporal conflict is salient in the creation and recreation of a quality routine. Organizational actors must negotiate multiple coexisting temporalities in or­gan­iza­ tions, such as different pace or time horizons between company headquarters and project teams. But conflicting temporalities can also be productive in creating changes in routine patterning so as to reconcile short-term and long-term per­form­ ance in quality work. The notions of temporal shaping and flowlines at work suggested by the authors of the two previous chapters take on a new meaning in Chapter 9, “Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from within the Flow: Fusing a “Withness” Approach and Pragmatist Inquiry” by Frithjof Wegener and Philippe Lorino. Whereas most empirical process scholars tend to focus on time, temporality, and history from the perspective of looking backward at the past (whether or not this past is seen as sub­ ject­ive­ly experienced), Wegener and Lorino argue for a perspective that is interested in capturing the forward movement of life. They do so by integrating the pragmatist ideas of Dewey and James with the “withness” thinking proposed by John Shotter (2001). This is a creative methodological approach that builds strongly on various

8  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies strands of process philosophy. It emphasizes living forward within the flow of ex­peri­ence along with others to intervene in the continually shifting present. From this perspective, researchers both share temporal experience with the subjects they research (rather than looking back at it “objectively” from the outside) and to action in the present, thereby “putting themselves in the making” (paraphrasing the authors’ reference to James). The next chapter, “Organizational Time in Historical Perspective,” by John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson (Chapter  10), more explicitly problematizes the objective understanding of time in organizations. Their core argu­ ment is that many organizational theorists and sociologists have unreflexively adopted a “realist, structural or determinist explanation of time at the expense of ethnographic, interpretive or process-oriented ones.” The authors argue, very much in line with the perspectives of several other contributions mentioned above, that time needs to be considered as a process of subjective interpretation. Hassard et al. offer an important cautionary tale about the dangerous tendency of social scientists to emulate the assumptions of the natural sciences. By assuming that time is linear, monotonic, and stable, there is an implicit assumption that the object of study ex­peri­ences acts of change in a similarly linear, monotonic, and stable process (Kelly and McGrath,  1988). But anyone with even the slightest degree of life experience understands that humans’ subjective experience of time is quite distinct from its objective expression. Hassard et al., thus, expose a critical issue about the messiness of time as a central construct in process theory, raising a foundational question for theorists: how might we integrate objective and subjective aspects of time in process theory? In Chapter  11, “Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool,” Diane Ella Németh Bongers extends the paradox of the subjective experience of time in two dimensions. First, she focuses on history rather than time as the key dimension to be analyzed. Second, she accentuates the contrast between objective and subjective expressions of history by analyzing differences in the narration of the history of an organization in a formal, collective, and institutional way (termed “tight history”) and the narration of history in an informal, individual, and self-expressive way (termed “loose history”). Based on the study of a French cooperative, Bongers con­ cludes that the skillful blending of objective (collective) and subjective (individual) rhetorical histories and the embedding of individual memories in collective or­gan­ iza­tion­al processes and routines contributed to the rapid growth and success of this new form of cooperative organizing, which has grown rapidly to become one of the largest worker cooperatives in Europe. While Bongers’ analysis reinforces the prob­ lematization of objective and subjective experiences of the past, her study usefully points to a fascinating possibility that traditional tensions common to most or­gan­ iza­tions may be resolved by strategically integrating the tensions between objective and subjective accounts of the past. Bongers’ core insight regarding the organizational advantages of bridging ob­ject­ ive and subjective history is reinforced by Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen’s

An Introduction  9

ethnographic study of historical practices inside a Scandinavian telecom, twenty-five years post-privatization (Chapter  12). Their chapter, “Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management,” focuses on the various practices used by managers to implement a performance management system in the firm’s operations department. The study shows how managers skillfully used historical accounts to simultaneously encourage employees to abandon those elements of the objective past that were perceived to be impediments to change and embrace other elements of the objective past that were perceived to enhance change. Koll and Jensen adopt a Bourdieusian perspective of objective and subjective history, in which history can be understood to be both objective (events and chronology) and subjective (something carried in human consciousness) at the same time. The challenge for the managers is to convert elements of objective history into subjective experience which, according to Bourdieu, requires a sophisticated understanding of their commensurability. That is, they must understand that the present is not simply what is objectively ex­peri­ enced in chronological time, but rather is premised on those elements of the past that can be kept alive in our consciousness and thereby influence our experience of the present. A slightly different approach to analyzing and managing the inherent tension between subjective and objective history is offered by William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby’s “Memory Work,” an empirical study of corporate archivists and historians in Fortune 500 firms (Chapter  13). Instead of focusing on differences between individual and collective memories, Foster et al. draw attention to differences in corporate histories that arise between historical narratives that draw from short- versus long-term organizational memory. They observe that “the further away in the past memory reaches, the richer the possibilities for reinterpreting the past and the larger the avenues for reconstruct­ ing past memories.” In other words, recent history is perceived as more objective than long-term history and, as a result, is more amenable to reconstructive interpretation. In Chapter  14, “Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness,” Andrew Smith builds on the emerging theme of rhetorical history by introducing the construct of meta-historical narratives. Smith’s core argument is that any effort to use history strategically is constrained, not necessarily by the objective elements of the past (the brute facts of the past), but, critically, by the degree to which the argument is consistent with prevailing metanarratives of history in the collective memory of the intended audience. Smith describes four prototypical his­ torical metanarratives—Marxist, Liberal Progressive, Dispensational, and Declinist. This is an intriguing extension of the concept of rhetorical history, in large part because it introduces a degree of constraint to the agency of history-based rhetorical strategies. The latter are constrained not so much by what Suddaby and Foster (2017) call “objective history” as by the extent of congruence with prevailing myths that constitute acceptable historical accounts—i.e. “interpretive history.” This is an important insight since the constraint Smith imposes on how history can be sub­ject­ ive­ly reconstructed depends not on “what actually happened” but, instead, on the

10  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies extent to which a reconstructed history resonates with prevailing cultural myths or metanarrative interpretations of the past. Finally, Chapter  15 by David Musson, “The Life and Work of Edith Penrose: Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective,” illustrates the weaving together of multiple histories, and the ways in which organizational and particularly process scholars may learn from them. The chapter recounts the embed­ dedness of Edith Penrose’s work in a particular historical context and in relation to her own personal history. It also reveals how others picked up and subjectively rein­ terpreted her work, which only became famous many years after she penned it, recontextualized in other times and different circumstances. The chapter concludes by reminding us of the value of the kind of rich, thick, and wonderfully detailed scholarship that Edith Penrose and others of her time engaged in, and inviting us to consider whether our own work, influenced by the frenetic chase of article publica­ tion, measures up to the standards of past eras.

1.3  An Emergent Model The chapters in this volume not only help to define and elaborate the two paradigmdefining puzzles for studies of time, temporality and history around the questions of objectivity and agency, they can also be fitted into an emerging model defined by four constructs that flow between the chapters but require further development and clarification (Suddaby,  2016). The constructs are historical time, events, rhetorical history, and historical metanarratives. As presented in the various chapters, these constructs adopt an implicit hierarchy on a continuum from those constructs that, in typical academic discourse, tend to be used more often to describe objective elem­ ents of history and temporality to those that tend to be used more often to describe subjective elements. Time tends to be presented more typically as an objective rather than a subjective concept in mainstream research, despite the observation, strongly evident in many of the chapters in this volume, that it can be both. This is the core argument of Hassard et al., which builds on a long history of social science scholarship that forms the core of process theory (Hernes, 2014). Time or temporality, however, is a foun­ dational construct inasmuch as it is the defining characteristic of both processes and history (Büthe,  2002). Despite our awareness of its subjective–objective duality, however, the vast bulk of research in the social sciences has tended to present time, largely, as an objective construct (Kelly and McGrath, 1988). Many of the chapters in this volume challenge us to reach beyond this. Events are also a foundational construct of both process theory (Langley, 1999) and history (Griffin, 1992). While theorists in both domains acknowledge that the event is considered the primary building block of both social processes and societal history, they also acknowledge that events are typically organized and presented in narrative form (see Pentland (1999) for process theory and Butterfield (1981) for

An Introduction  11

history). It is in the act of constructing the narrative, the selection of events to include, their sequence, and emphasized significance, through which the objective and subjective elements of events intermingle. Despite our awareness of this, his­tor­ ians tend to ascribe natural and reified properties to an event once it has been recorded and preserved in documentary form. Events, therefore, rightly or wrongly have acquired an aura of positivist objectivity, despite our awareness that they are susceptible to interpretive reconstruction (see, for example, Hernes in this volume). Events, thus, occupy a position of assumed objectivity that is slightly less than, but close to, the assumed objectivity of time in academic discourse for both process the­ ory and historiography. Rhetorical history, by contrast, has been explicitly theorized to stand at the inter­ section of objective and subjective understandings of the past (Suddaby et al., 2010; Suddaby and Foster,  2017). Metanarratives build on the construct of meta-history first defined by Hayden White (1973) who argued that historians do not “discover” history so much as “make it” by taking events and organizing them in a narrative structure, with sequence, plot, and ideological interpretation. Perhaps unsurpris­ ingly, the narrative plots of history fall into predictable archetypes that reinforce prevailing cultural myths. On the objective–subjective hierarchy, metanarratives of history occupy a position that is clearly more subjective than objective and, as dem­ onstrated by Smith’s argument (this volume), offer a counterpoint to the objectivity test of positivist history (“did the events really happen?”) by posing a symbolic standard of legitimacy (“does the story resonate as true?”). Together the four constructs cohere along a continuum from those that are pre­ sented and understood to be constructs premised predominantly as objective under­ standings of time and history (including historical time and events) to those constructs premised predominantly as subjective understandings of time and his­ tory (rhetorical history and historical metanarratives). The continuum (see Figure 1.1) represents two poles by which both the legitimacy and validity of data collected under the rubric of each construct are typically assessed. More particularly, as the chapters by Koll and Jensen and Foster et al. suggest, as the continuum moves from objective to subjective poles, the opportunities for human agency in the inter­ pretation of each construct increase. Subjective

High agency Historical metanarrative Rhetorical history

Narratives

Events Historical time Objective

Low agency

Figure 1.1  Core constructs in historical organizational studies

12  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Narratives are a final thematic construct threaded through several papers. Narrative is, of course, an explicit element of Smith’s historical metanarratives, and narratives are an important component of the growing stream of research on rhet­ oric­al history (Suddaby et al.,  2019; Gill, Gill, and Roulet, 2018; Foster, Coraiola, Suddaby, Kroezen, and Chandler, 2017). But narrative is also an important, yet implicit, element of how we conceptualize and use events and time as constructs in process organization studies more generally. Varying assumptions about the narra­ tive ordering of time—its sequence, emphasis, and meaning—is at the core of Hassard et al.’s description of different subjective experiences of time as linear, cyc­ lic­al or fragmented. Events, similarly, are typically presented in narrative fashion, often without any reflection on the part of the researcher as to how the choice of narrative structure used to present an event as data might affect the legitimacy of characterizing the event as data (but see Hussenot et al. in this volume for a richer rendering). Narratives, however, are inherently interpretive rhetorical devices. As White (1978) has so eloquently argued, our use of narrative in discourses of time, events, processes, and history is as much an analytical tool, with important epistemological and ontological implications, as any choice of theoretical frame or methodological technique in the social sciences. Yet we have little understanding of how our choice of narrative structure relates to the plausibility or validity of truth claims that we can make about our observations. How do our choices of sequencing, actors and their motivation, and emplotment of our narratives delimit the objectivity of a historical or process narrative? Conversely, how do prevailing cultural metanarratives influ­ ence our choices of sequencing, character, and emplotment? History and time are unique and exciting contexts for extending our understanding of organizational processes.

1.4  Concluding Remarks Collectively, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the value of creating a dialogue between process philosophy, temporality, history, and organizational scholarship. As is evident from this volume, process philosophy inspires a deeper exploration of the very nature of time, temporality, and history. As a result, it challenges the assump­ tion of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of ob­ject­ iv­ity in historical narrations of the past, but it also provides scholars with novel intellectual resources to move beyond these assumptions. In turn, a focus on tem­ por­al­ity and history can also advance process organization scholars by exploring the “stuff ” of process: while temporality and history are implicit in the question of how and why organizational actions and structures emerge, develop, grow or terminate over time, a more explicit focus can add valuable insights and inspirations for empir­ ical inquiry into processes. We hope this volume is just the beginning of such an ongoing dialogue, and will inspire scholars to continue this fertile avenue of research.

An Introduction  13

References Alford, R. R. (1998). The Craft of Inquiry: Theories, Methods, Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ancona, D. G., Goodman, P. S., Lawrence, B. S., and Tushman, M. L. (2001). Time: A New Research Lens. Academy of Management Review, 26(4), 645–63. Assman, Jan (1995). Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique, 65, 125–33. Büthe, T. (2002). Taking Temporality Seriously: Modelling History and the Use of Narratives as Evidence. American Political Science Review, 96(3), 481–93. Butterfield, H. (1981). The Origins of History, A. Watson (Ed.). London: Eyre Methuen. Clark, P., and Rowlinson, M. (2004). The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an ‘Historic Turn’? Business History, 46(3), 331–52. Emirbayer, M., and Mische, A. (1998). What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023. Fine, G.  A. (1990). Organizational Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work in Restaurant Kitchens. Social Forces, 69(1), 95–114. Foster, W. M., Coraiola, D. M., Suddaby, R., Kroezen, J., and Chandler, D. (2017). The Strategic Use of Historical Narratives: A Theoretical Framework. Business History, 59(8), 1176–200. Foucault, M. (1964). History of Madness. New York: Routledge. Gill, M.  J., Gill, D.  J., and Roulet, T.  J. (2018). Constructing Trustworthy Historical Narratives: Criteria, Principles and Techniques. British Journal of Management, 29(1), 191–205. Granqvist, N., and Gustafsson, R. (2016). Temporal Institutional Work. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 1009–35. Griffin, L.  J. (1992). Temporality, Events and Explanation in Historical Sociology. Sociological Methods and Research, 20(4), 403–27. Hassard, J. (2001). Commodification, Construction and Compression: A Review of Time Metaphors in Organizational Analysis. International Journal of Management Reviews, 3(2), 131–40. Hernes, T. (2014). A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hernes, T. (2017). Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory. In A. Langley and H.  Tsoukas (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 601–6). London: Sage. Kelly, J. R., and McGrath, J. E. (1988). On Time and Method, Sage Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol. 13. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Kuhn, T. (1967). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691–710.

14  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Langley, A. (2007). Process Thinking in Strategic Organization. Strategic Organization, 5(3), 271–82. Mills, A. J., Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Durepos, G. (2016). Re-visiting the Historic Turn 10 Years Later: Current Debates in Management and Organizational History— An Introduction. Management and Organizational History, 11(2), 67–76. Nadkarni, S., Chen, T., and Chen, J. (2016). The Clock Is Ticking! Executive Temporal Depth, Industry Velocity, and Competitive Aggressiveness. Strategic Management Journal, 37(6), 1132–53. Novick, P. (1988).  That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Vol. 13). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pentland, B.  T. (1999). Building Process Theory with Narrative: From Description to Explanation. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 711–24. Reinecke, J., and Ansari, S. (2015). When Times Collide: Temporal Brokerage at the Intersection of Markets and Developments. Academy of Management Journal, 58(2), 618–48. Reinecke, J., and Ansari, S. (2017). Time, Temporality and Process Studies. In A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 402–16). London: Sage. Shotter, J. (2001). Towards a Third Revolution in Psychology: From Inner Mental Representations to Dialogically-Structured Social Practices.  In D.  Bakhurst and S. G. Shanker (Eds), Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self (pp. 167–83). London: Sage. Slawinski, N., and Bansal, P. (2015). Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability. Organization Science, 26(2), 531–49. Sorokin, P., and Merton, R. (1937). Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 42(5), 615–29. Suddaby, R. (2016). Toward a Historical Consciousness: Following the Historic Turn in Management Thought. M@n@gement, 19(1), 46–60. Suddaby, R., Coraiola, D., Harvey, C., and Foster, W. (2019). History and the Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilities. Strategic Management Journal, in press. Suddaby, R. and Foster, W.  M. (2017). History and Organizational Change. Journal of Management, 43(1), 19–38. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Quinn Trank, C. (2010). Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage. In J. A. C. Baum and J. Lampel (Eds.), The Globalization of Strategy Research (pp. 147–73). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group. Tsoukas, H., and Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–82. Van de Ven, A. H. (1992). Suggestions for Studying Strategy Process: A Research Note. Strategic Management Journal, 13 (summer special issue), 169–88. Veyne, P. (1988). Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1996). Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past. Qualitative Sociology, 19(3), 283–99.

2 Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative A Heideggerian Approach William Blattner

This chapter examines the phenomenological conditions of the possibility of our experience of process—specifically, our experience of narrated process. It begins with Husserl’s account of retention and protention, which are the capacities by which we retain the immediate past and anticipate the immediate future. This allows us to experience processes, which must be grasped in their temporal extension in order to make sense. The chapter then turns to Heidegger’s contributions to the analysis, where it offers a novel approach to Heidegger’s phenomenology of time. By examining the way in which the experience of process requires both sorting what we retain into what is relevant and what is not, as well as sorting what we anticipate into what sensibly continues the current process and what does not, a different axis of tem­poral analysis comes into view: temporal aspect. Temporal aspect expresses the internal temporal structure of what we understand. I focus on the Perfect aspect (which expresses the relevance of the past to current matters) and the Telic aspect (which expresses the directionality or teleology of current matters into the future). I show how Heidegger analyzes these temporal aspects as part of his account of what he calls “originary temporality,” and how his analysis can be used to shed light on narrative understanding, and so, of how we understand ourselves and what we are up to.

2.1  Experiencing Process: The Husserlian Background In his seminal research into time-consciousness, Edmund Husserl explored the conditions that make it possible for us to experience a process as unfolding in time.1 He argued persuasively that to understand this fundamental cognitive capacity, we must posit more than just memory and anticipation. We must posit two more basic cap­ aci­ties, which he dubbed “retention” and “protention.” I will explain some of the fundamentals of Husserl’s results, and that will set us up to dig into more complex questions that touch on self-understanding and narrative. Think of the experience of watching a process—say, a yacht pulling into a marina. You watch the boat glide toward the dock. It moves from point A at t1 to point B at t2 William Blattner, Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative: A Heideggerian Approach In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © William Blattner. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0002

16  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies to point C at t3 (say, from the mouth of the marina to the middle of the marina, and then to the dock). To be able to experience the process of the yacht gliding, you must not only see it at points A, B, and C in sequence, but you must also at t2 retain that it was at point A at t1. Your experience at t2 is not just of a yacht at point B, but rather, of a yacht at point B that was earlier at point A. You experience the yacht as moving, in motion. In other words, when you see the yacht at point B, you see it at point B-as-having-earlier-been-at-point-A. If you did not see it this way, you would not see the yacht as gliding. Rather, your experience would be more like seeing a single frame of film at each moment, with no continuity. Your experience would be similar in some respects to that of the protagonist, Leonard, of the film Memento, who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from creating new memories (Nolan et al.,  2002). Or perhaps your experience would be more like that of an Alzheimer’s patient.2 Husserl distinguished the retention that is required to see the yacht as gliding from memory in a more full-blown sense. Let us call memory in the more full-blown sense “recollection.”3 If you today recollect the scene that unfolded yesterday, of a yacht gliding into a marina, you are re-living or re-experiencing the experience you had yesterday.4 To do that, you must, as it were, “re-wind and re-play the tape of your experience.” As you re-experience the yacht at point B, you re-experience it as at point B-having-earlier-been-at-point-A. The important thing here is to recognize that such overt recollection embeds its own internal form of retention. Husserl paired retention with a parallel future-directed capacity he called “protention.” As you watch the yacht glide into the marina, you anticipate that it will move from point B to point C (e.g. toward the dock). While observing it at point B, you not only see it as having been at point A, but also as heading toward the dock. If you did not anticipate any specific future or range of possible futures for the yacht, then it could just as well turn into a goose and take flight as glide toward the dock. Just as with retention and recollection above, we must distinguish between protention and expectation.5 You can overtly envision and work through in your mind several possible outcomes of the process of the yacht sailing into the marina: it can dock at a slip; it can run into the dock; it can make a U-turn and head back out to sea; etc. When you do so, each moment of your pre-visioning involves internal protentions that structure the momentary expectation of the yacht heading in some definite direction, just as recollection is partly constituted by internal retentions. The observation that as you see the yacht at point B, you anticipate or protain a range of possible futures, points us toward another important element of Husserl’s analysis. Because the future is experientially open,6 protention is far more indeterminate than retention. In retention, you retain what you have in fact experienced. There is room for false retention, error, and so on, but even when your retention is erroneous, you retain a single recorded series of experiences.7 As you watch the yacht sail into the marina, you “protain” a range of possible continuations of the current experience. You can understand what happens if the yacht crashes into the dock or if it makes a U-turn and heads back out to sea. These futures were well within the

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  17

range of intelligible continuations of your experience. If, however, the yacht turned into a goose and took flight, you would not be able to understand your experience. This transformation was not within the range of possible developments that you protained. Husserl’s fundamental contribution to the analysis of our capacity to experience processes as they unfold is that our experience of such a process at any given time requires that we retain earlier phases of the process and protain a range of possible future phases. Without retention and protention, you would only see the yacht at point B at time t2, but could not see it as in motion from point A to point C.

2.2  Tense and Aspect: On the Way from Husserl to Heidegger Now, at t1 you see not just the yacht, but a great many other things as well. There’s a seagull gliding above the yacht. There is a hotel behind the yacht. There are puffy clouds in the sky. And so on. Of course, as you watch any particular passing scene, you are tracking many things at once. At t2 you likely retain not only the yacht at point A, but the clouds in such and such a configuration, the sun reflecting off the hotel in this specific way, etc. In so far as you are tracking the movement of the yacht, however, the position of the clouds and the sun reflecting off the hotel are not im­port­ant. At any given time, moreover, there are a large number of “data points” in your experience to which you are not attending. This has been demonstrated in experiments on “change-blindness.”8 The point is, at t2 you do not just retain the yacht at point A; you retain the yacht at point A as relevant to your experience of the yacht at point B. The temporal character of the retention is not just that it retains the past, but that it retains the past as relevant to the present. This retention is characterized not just by tense (reference to the past), but also by temporal aspect. At this point, a quick introduction to the linguistic distinction between tense and aspect is in order. In linguistics, “tense” refers to the assignment of states of affairs to times (Comrie, 1976: 1–2). In English and other Indo-European languages, we have several mechanisms for indicating tense. We can inflect our verbs, so “I walked,” ­“I walk,” “I will walk.” We can also use temporal adverbs, such as “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow.” Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, are not inflected and so use temporal adverbs and other devices to signal tense (Lin, 2006).9 In linguistics, “tense” refers to whatever mechanism a given language deploys in order to indicate the temporal position of the situation described. The qualification “in linguistics” may sound pedantic, but it is important, because we must distinguish between the way linguists use “tense” and the way grammarians often do. Most of us were taught by our English teachers that the present, simple past, and present perfect are three distinct tenses. These grammarian’s tenses are not the linguist’s tenses in the strict sense. They are combinations of the linguist’s tenses and aspects.

18  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies In linguistics, aspects are defined as “different ways of viewing the internal tem­ poral constituency of a situation” (Holt, 1943, as quoted by Comrie, 1976: 3). The Perfect10 aspect represents “the continuing relevance of a previous situation” (Comrie,  1976: 56), and the Non-perfect is the absence of such relevance. What English grammarians call “the present perfect,” e.g. “I have flown to Greece,” combines the present tense with the Perfect aspect, signaled in English by the helping verb “have” and the past participle “flown.” The sentence “I have flown to Greece” (present perfect), as opposed to “I flew to Greece” (simple past), sounds odd unless it is used to construct some relation, and so indicate some relevance, of these past flights to the current topic of discussion. If a police interrogator asks me to chronicle my actions during the third week of June, I might enter into the log, “On Monday, June 18, from 11:20 to 13:20, I flew to Greece from Munich.” If, instead, I’m answering a question about the experience of flying to Greece, I might say, “I have flown to Greece. Ask me anything you want.” That I have flown to Greece explains why I’m willing to offer advice. It is important to note, however, that one cannot read linguistic aspect directly off of the surface grammar of a sentence. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, spoken language, and eventually the written language it shapes, sometimes substitutes and conflates distinct linguistic forms. So, for example, in spoken German, das Perfekt (the present perfect) has largely supplanted das Präteritum (the simple past). As Comrie puts it, “In discussing the Perfect, it is important not to be misled into thinking that every form that is labelled ‘Perfect’ in the grammar-book in fact expresses perfect meaning” (Comrie,  1976: 53). This does not mean that German has lost track of the difference between the Perfect and Non-perfect aspects, but only that it uses other ways of expressing the distinction. Second, one salient feature of dialectical variation within a language is precisely variations in the way in which tenses and aspects are expressed. Some dialects express a greater range of aspects directly through morphological variation than do others, e.g. AfricanAmerican Vernacular English in contrast with Standard American English (Wolfram, 2004). Thus, the examples I gave above (“I flew to Greece.” and “I have flown to Greece.”) are merely meant to indicate the underlying structures of aspect in ordinary language. We are interested in the underlying structures, not the surface grammar. To return now to the main thread of the argument, when we distinguish the elem­ ents of what we retain that are relevant to our current experience from those that aren’t, we are drawing a distinction that can be expressed linguistically by the use of the Perfect and Non-perfect aspects. We have moved beyond tense to aspect. My hypothesis is that Heidegger’s conception of what he calls “originary temporality” (ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit) is an account of the centrality of temporal aspect to human experience. Now, this chapter is not primarily a reconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy, and so I will not devote time to justifying my reading of Heidegger in detail.11 In Being and Time and its neighboring texts, Heidegger develops an account of originary temporality. Whatever else it is, originary temporality is at least a

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  19

successor notion to Husserl’s conception of time-consciousness. It is an account of the capacities in virtue of which we are able to grasp time, both the time of the world around us and the time of our own experience. Heidegger’s term for the past element of originary temporality is “Beenness,” “Gewesenheit,” which is an abstract noun built on the past participle of the verb “sein,” “to be.” By constructing a term built on the past participle, Heidegger signals the centrality of the Perfect aspect. He also associates the future element of originary temporality with the “for-the-sake-ofwhich,” the “Worum-willen,” which refers to the goal-directed nature of action. We may connect this with the Telic aspect, which we will discuss shortly. So, we can see that Heidegger adds a crucial component to Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness. In order to track the movement of the yacht in the marina, I  must not only retain the past phases of the experience, but also sort the elements retained into those that are relevant and those that are not. Husserl would never have denied this, of course, but he also did not see that there is a specifically tem­ poral character to the sorting. That temporal character is expressed linguistically in the Perfect aspect. We may make a parallel point about the future, about protention. We saw above that protention explains why, if the yacht suddenly turns into a large goose and takes flight, you would not be able to make sense of the experience. There is a difference, however, between not being able to understand what happens and being surprised by what happens. If the yacht is gliding toward its slip, but rather than edging up to the dock to be moored, it crashes into the dock (perhaps the pilot is inebriated), you would be surprised. This surprise is based on your understanding of what the yacht is doing in gliding into the marina: it is aiming to dock. You would likewise be surprised, though less shocked, if the yacht made a U-turn and headed back out to sea. The point here is that as you see the yacht glide from point A through B to C, you anticipate that it will slow down and ease up to the dock to be moored. You understand the process as having a direction and a natural ending. Anticipating the future as consummating a process is a telic form of anticipation. In linguistics, the Telic aspect conveys that the verb’s action inherently aims at some completion, whereas the Atelic aspect conveys that the verb’s action does not (Comrie, 1976: 4–48). Consider the contrast between “The yacht is drifting in the water” and “The yacht is sailing into the marina.” The first statement implies no goal or end-state for the yacht. The yacht could be abandoned. A teenager could have stolen it and taken it for a joyride. The owner might be a devotee of absurdism and is in the water with her yacht with no plan of action at all. The second statement specifies a goal or end-state for the movement of the yacht: to dock in the port. Both statements point to protention, for you would be uncomprehending if the yacht adrift in the water turned into a goose. The second statement, however, says more; it implements the Telic aspect, for it describes the yacht as heading somewhere. To sum up our results to this point, retention and protention enable us to ­experience ongoing processes. We must retain or remember the prior elements of experience and protain or anticipate future elements of experience in order to be

20  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies able to experience objects as undergoing change or processes as unfolding. Heidegger ­supplements Husserl’s analysis by introducing the phenomena of relevance and direction: we sort what we retain into what is relevant to the present and what is not. We sort what we protain into what would consummate the current direction of experience and what would not.

2.3  Narratable Processes Our analysis thus far has proceeded at a fairly abstract level. Let us now get a little more concrete and look more specifically at our understanding of human events. When we try to relate some (series of) human event(s), we generally rely on narrative: we tell a story. Stories come in many forms, but common to all forms of story, at least on standard analyses, are a beginning, middle, and end. Very roughly, the beginning of a story presents the crisis, upheaval, or change that sets the chain of events narrated in motion. The end of the story brings the crisis to some sort of resolution. The middle of the story effects the transition from crisis to resolution. Of course, it’s possible to relate (I won’t say “narrate”) a series of human events without placing them into this sort of format. One can offer a mere chronicle, log, or list of events that takes no stand on the shape of the events related. Such chronicles are more the raw material for understanding events than the presentation of such an understanding itself.12 Further, as twentieth-century literature, film, and television have shown, it’s not necessary to use a conventional beginning-middle-end format in order to build a gripping experience for the audience. Neither of these exceptions to the norm undermines the central point, however: we typically relate human events in the form of a story, a narrative. Let us work with an example, the story of the 2016 US Presidential Election. In order to tell any story, we must select a beginning and an end, the bookends of the story, if you will. The beginning and the end must be properly paired. With what event does the story of the election begin? Is it with Donald Trump’s declaration of candidacy in June 2015? Is it with Hillary Clinton’s declaration two months earlier? Or does it begin with President Obama mocking Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Each of these events is a “turning point,” in the sense that it embodies a significant change or unsettling in the course of events. Each of these turning points indicates a distinctive issue that is at stake in the narrative. When he declared his candidacy, Trump famously attacked Mexican immigrants to the United States, whom he accused of being rapists and drug dealers.13 Focusing on these facts, the narrative is framed as the rise and triumph of a nativist politician. One might choose to end this particular narrative with Trump’s executive order on immigration policy on January 25, 2017.14 If we begin the story with Hillary Clinton’s declaration of candidacy, the narrative might be framed as the attempt to “shatter the glass ceiling” in American politics. It might then end with her concession speech in the wee hours of November 9, 2016, in which she stated that “some day someone will [shatter the glass ceiling] and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”15

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  21

A narrative frames a course of events in part by selecting what is at stake in the story. What is at stake in the story is at issue in the events. As the narrative develops, it moves toward resolution. The resolution of the story must be connected with its inaugurating event in some intelligible way. The forms of intelligibility here are those that are governed by the logic of narrative. Analyzing that logic is a large task, one that has been taken on, principally, by literary theorists.16 For our purposes, we need only acknowledge that there is some such logic in play. The point of these observations is that as one follows a narrative, one retains what has already happened in so far as it is relevant to the development of the story, and one projects possible developments of the story, aiming toward some denouement. Thus, the same capacities that underlie our ability to deploy and understand the Perfect and Telic aspects linguistically also underlie our ability to frame and grasp narratives. Narrative relevance and narrative conclusion are distinctive forms of relevance and conclusion, and so they point toward more specific developments of the cap­aci­ ties that underlie our grasp of the Perfect and Telic aspects. Let us call them the “narrative Perfect” and “narrative Telic.” The narrative Perfect and the narrative Telic are much closer to what Heidegger has in mind with the originary past and future, for he presents originary temporality as the structure of the being of Dasein (Heidegger’s term for human being)—that is, a logico-grammatical structure of our self-understanding. It would be precipitous to identify the narrative Perfect and Telic with originary temporality tout court. To endorse such an identification would require that we defend the thesis that the understanding of human life is always narrative, or always capable of narrative formulation. David Carr argued for such a thesis in his Time, Narrative, and History (Carr,  1986). I have argued against Carr’s analysis, at least as an interpretation of Heidegger (Blattner,  2000). Over the past decade or so there has been a renewed interest in the question whether the understanding of human life, according to Heidegger, is narrative in form (Fisher, 2010; Roth, 2018). I do not have the space here to delve into this debate, and this essay is not an exercise in the close interpretation of Heidegger’s text. So, let me simply stipu­late for the purposes of this analysis that the narrative Perfect and narrative Telic, or more precisely, our capacities to understand those temporal aspects, are closely related to the originary past and future, even if the former do not exhaust the latter. Nonetheless, I will focus on the narrative phenomena as stand-ins for the more exhaustive analysis, for it will allow me to offer some final elements of Heidegger’s overall argument.

2.4  Non-successive Temporality Heidegger also famously denies that originary temporality is a successive phe­nom­ enon. He writes, “The future is not later than Beenness and the latter is not earlier than the present” (Heidegger,  1979: 350). On the approach I am developing, this comment not only makes sense, it is clearly true (a virtue!): the Telic aspect does not succeed the Perfect aspect. Indeed, either aspect may be combined with any tense to

22  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies form a more complex phenomenon, such as the future perfect (“Lulu will have eaten her food.”) or the past Telic (“Rosie was chasing a mouse.”). This observation–that temporal Aspects are not ordered successively, as the tenses are–is reflected in the possibilities of narrative as well. Elsewhere (Blattner, 2019) I have used Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) as an example of a narrative in which what is at issue in the novel shifts dramatically mid-story. We start off thinking that it is a novel about a Jewish professor at a small New England college who gets himself into hot water with the students and other members of the faculty by using language that is construed as racist. We find out part of the way through that the protagonist, Coleman Silk, is in fact a light-skinned Black man himself, who has “passed” as white for most of his adult life. This shift in the narrative focus of the novel reconfigures both what is relevant about Silk’s past and the possible tra­jec­tor­ ies the plot might take, and it does so in the middle of the novel. This does not change any of “the facts” that the narrative relates, but it reconfigures them. This is possible because the Perfect aspect of relevance and the Telic aspect of projecting forward are not directly tensed phenomena. They can shift mid-story without the past having to change. What is now relevant about the past, and so how the past now matters to the story, has changed, as does which possible futures now make sense as intelligible denouements of the story. Now, one might object, a novelist can play all sorts of narrative tricks on us, but that’s the fun of fiction. Life doesn’t change like that. In fact, however, it can. Conversion experiences are paradigms of such shifts in the aspectual character of our lives as we live them. Let me work through one well-documented example of a political conversion to make the point. In Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,17 Justin Vaïsse (2010: 58–62) describes the emergence of neoconservatism as a potent force in the politics of the United States from the early 1960s through to the administration of George W. Bush. One critical phase of the development of neoconservatism took place in 1967, at the time of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states. At its most schematic level, a group of American Jewish intellectuals18 moved from an affiliation with mainstream American liberalism19 of the sort associated with presidents Franklin  D.  Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy to a new form of conservatism. Along the way, they re-evaluated the wisdom of the US involvement in Vietnam, coming to see that conflict in a new way and to support it. The key to the change of heart was a realignment of the Arab–Israeli conflict with the bipolar Cold War. In response to the Suez Crisis of 1956, some of the Arab states, most notably Syria and Egypt, sought military aid from the Soviet Union. Further, the revolutionary Arab nationalism of the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq drew the Soviet Union further into the geopolitics of the Middle East. Finally, the Palestine Liberation Organization received both material and ideological support from the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, both of which aimed to bolster national liberation movements. By the time the Six-Day War erupted in 1967, the Arab–Israeli conflict had become aligned with the Cold War. Many American Jewish intellectuals were deeply devoted to the state of Israel as the new homeland for Jews after the Holocaust. This,

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  23

along with the oppression of Soviet Jewry, led them to see the Soviet Union as a principal enemy of the Jewish people and the nationalist Arab states as outposts of Soviet influence. This new alignment of the Arab–Israeli conflict with the Cold War led some of these intellectuals to reassess the US involvement in Vietnam. One assessment of the Vietnam conflict took the relevant background to be national liberation from colonial and postcolonial occupation, and so it saw the Viet Cong as a national liberation movement. Another assessment took the relevant historical background to be the Cold War and the containment of Soviet expansionism, and so it saw Soviet support for the Viet Cong as evidence of Soviet expansion into southeast Asia. These contrary assessments hardened as the scope and brutality of the US intervention in Vietnam escalated. For those for whom the Arab–Israeli conflict was more personally central, however, from 1967 on the Vietnam War started to look more like the Arab–Israeli conflict. The US involvement in Vietnam came to be seen not so much as a continuation of criminal colonial occupation as a necessary front in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. So, we can see here a change in the way in which the past is relevant to current concerns, a shift in Perfect-aspect attributes. This shift goes hand-in-glove with a shift in the dominant Telic-aspect attributes of the situation as well. Those who saw the relevant background to be colonial and postcolonial occupation and liberation focused their energies on ending the Vietnam conflict. Those who saw it the other way focused on defending South Vietnam and winning the war. The “conversion” experienced by the emerging cohort of neoconservatives was a shift from the former to the latter perspective. Now, one might object that this is not really a conversion. After all, aren’t conversions experiences in which one comes to see oneself as a new individual, as did Saul after being struck blind on the road to Damascus? The question presumes that conversion requires an experience of radical transformation in which one feels as if one has become a “new person.” However, research into the sociology and psychology of conversion has shown that sometimes individuals report discovering who they “always were”; other times they report a fundamental change in who they are (Johnston,  2013). The neoconservatives saw their shift as a reinforcement of who they always were (defenders of freedom and democracy), and so their experience does in fact fit some models of conversion. Now, the answer to the question whether the emergence of neoconservatism really constitutes a conversion is less important to my argument than what we may learn from thinking about the question itself. For Heidegger, the question whether one is “the same individual” who now sees the world differently or “a new individual” is not important. In fact, it is the wrong question. It is a question framed in terms of continuity and discontinuity. The difference between continuity and discontinuity turns on the way the phases of a person’s life are arranged in time, and the traditional problem of personal identity, as framed in these terms, is a question of whether an entity (the person, the subject) endures through change. Arrangement in time and enduring are matters of what Heidegger calls “intratemporality” (Innerzeitigkeit) (Heidegger,  1979: §80),

24  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies which is essentially a way of talking about temporal position. Temporal position is expressed linguistically in tense. Temporal aspect is a different phenomenon, and as we have seen, it is not intrinsically a successive phenomenon. Heidegger comments that if the terms “already” and “ahead,” as expressions of the originary past and future, respectively, had standard tensed significations, “Care would then be conceived as an entity that occurs and elapses ‘in time’ ” (Heidegger, 1979: 327). One of the central theses of Being and Time is that Dasein, human reality, does not “occur and elapse in time,” which means that the language of intratemporality is inappropriate to it. This seems like an odd thesis, for if my life did not occur and elapse in time, that would suggest that I am atemporal, perhaps divine. So, surely, Heidegger cannot mean this. What does he then mean? Heidegger’s point is that the logico-grammatical structure of human reality is more like temporal aspect than like tense. Everything we experience and are occurs and elapses in time in some sense. So, to say that my life runs its course in time does not distinguish the structure of my life from any other process I might encounter, such as the sun setting or a bird molting. One of the most prominent targets of Heidegger’s philosophical critique is the propensity of Western philosophy to conceive all phenomena on the model of what he called “the present-at-hand” (das Vorhandene), what occurs, changes, and develops. We can see this in the way in which traditional Western philosophy has approached questions of personal identity. It treats personal identity as much like the identity over time of any object. Sure, persons are more complicated than many objects, and they embody a wider range of properties than many objects—in particular, psychological properties. In a trad­ ition­al analysis, this just means that there is more diverse fodder for the analysis. It doesn’t change the basic set of structural phenomena philosophers focus on: con­ tinu­ity, change, enduring. Heidegger points us toward a different sort of logic by which to analyze the tem­ poral integrity of a person’s character. Rather than focusing on personal identity through time, continuity through change, Heidegger focuses on the coherence of the Perfect-aspect relevance of the past with the Telic-aspect direction of the future. Before their “conversion,” the future neoconservatives were ambivalent about the Vietnam War, as many Americans were. After their conversion, the neoconservatives took the history of Soviet expansionism and alignment with nationalist lib­er­ ation movements as most relevant to understanding Vietnam. This new understanding of the relevance of the past is paired with a new forward-looking ambition to influence US foreign policy in the direction of redoubling its efforts in the Cold War. The measure of the coherence or integrity of their understanding and ambition is the “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) of the way they press forward into their ambitions. Resoluteness is, roughly, the way in which an authentic life is ex­peri­ enced.20 Authenticity, . . . however, is only possible, in so far as futural Dasein can be its ownmost “as it already was,” that is, its “Beenness.” Only so far as Dasein is as I have-been can it

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  25 come toward itself in such a way that it comes back to itself. Dasein is au­then­tic­ al­ly futural as having authentically been.  (Heidegger, 1979: 325–6)

Through this lens we can see why Heidegger did not use the language of personal identity in his existentialist analysis of authentic human life. It is not just that Heidegger was not interested in questions of personal identity, as if this simply reflected his philosophical taste. Rather, he would argue that focusing on personal identity distracts us from the existential questions that his analysis allows us to ask, questions about the nature of resoluteness, rather than enduring and identity; questions about failing to face up to what already matters about the past and failing to respond to what we are called upon to do. To ask these questions we must use a different philosophical language, and the distinctive grammatical features of that language are captured by temporal aspect, not by tense. The distinctive temporal structure of our self-understanding, as we ask these questions, is not a matter of tense and intratemporality, but of affect and originary temporality. In summary, then, Heidegger’s argument maintains that in order to understand our lives, we need more than merely Husserlian retention and protention; we need the capacity to grasp at least what is expressed by the Perfect and Telic temporal aspects. These capacities enable us to distinguish what is relevant in past experience from what is not, as well as to anticipate the development of a process toward its consummation. One standard way in which we understand and relate human affairs is by way of narrative, and narrative also requires the ability to grasp the Perfect and Telic aspects. The specifically narrative forms of the Perfect and Telic aspects enable us to understand human life. These temporal aspects are time-related, but not directly tensed. They exhibit a different kind of logic or grammar than does tense, and this explains how we are able to understand ourselves and others even through significant changes in what matters to us. The coherence or integrity of a human life or human process is constituted by an appropriate pairing of what is relevant about the past with where the life or process is heading. This pairing is not directly a statement about what was and will be, however. It is not a statement about tensed phenomena (qua tensed), but rather about the temporal aspects exhibited by the phenomena.

Notes 1. The locus classicus for Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness may be found in Husserl (1966b), translated into English as Husserl (1991). Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness was first edited by Martin Heidegger and published in 1928 as Husserl (1980), translated into English as Husserl (1966a). 2. This is a non-scientific observation of my father’s final years. 3. I use the term “recollection” deliberately to invoke Kant’s analysis from the A-edition Transcendental Deduction (Kant,  1998). Kant did not distinguish between Husserlian retention and what I am here calling “recollection,” and this compromises his analysis.

26  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies 4. Of course, there are many forms of memory. For example, one can remember that one saw a yacht glide into the marina without reliving the experience, “replaying the tape.” The subtle distinctions here are not important to the main thrust of the argument. 5. We are forced to provide stipulative, quasi-technical definitions of these words, since ordinary English cannot carry the weight of drawing these distinctions. 6. We need not take a stand on whether it is metaphysically open. Our reflections are phenomenological. 7. This is part of what makes the “alternative memories” of Juliana Crain in The Man in the High Castle so unsettling: she has memories of events that she does not understand herself to have experienced, that appear to belong to “a different timeline” (Spotnitz, 2015). 8. For a useful set of demonstrations of the point, see Kevin O’Regan’s website: http://nivea. psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#CB. 9. The title of Lin’s article (“Time in a Language without Tense: The Case of Chinese”) could be misleading to the casual reader. Chinese has semantic but not morphological tense. That is, verbs do not change form (through inflection), so tense-meaning is conveyed in other ways. If Chinese did not have semantic tense, it would not be able to represent states of affairs as occurring at different times. 10. I will follow Comrie’s practice of capitalizing the names of aspects, so as to distinguish them from the common names for certain combinations of tense and aspect in ordinary grammar. So, “the perfect” is sometimes used in English to refer to the combination of the present tense and Perfect aspect. Also note that the Perfect aspect is not the same as the Perfective aspect. The latter refers to sentences that represent an event as a single, complete temporal whole, rather than carving up the internal temporal architecture of the event (Comrie, 1976: 16). 11. I defend this approach as a reading of Heidegger in “Originary Temporality and Aspect in Heidegger’s Early Thought” (in preparation). This essay represents a significant revision of my reconstruction of Heidegger’s phenomenology of time (Blattner, 1999). 12. Philosophers of history have discussed the distinction between narratives and chronicles at some length. For canonical statements of the distinction, see Walsh (1958) and White (1980). 13. “Choice Words from Donald Trump,” New York Times, “First Draft,” June 16, 2015. 14. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-publicsafety-interior-united-states/. 15. https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/hillary-clinton-concession-speech/index. html. 16. For an enduring classic in the genre, see Kermode (2000). 17. Vaïsse draws heavily on the analysis offered by Klinghoffer (1999). 18. Paradigmatically, Nathan Glazer, who was a professor of sociology first at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at Harvard, and Martin Peretz, who subsequently became the publisher of The New Republic. The latter journal was founded in 1912 as a venue of progressive thought of the sort aligned with Theodore Roosevelt. Under Peretz’s leadership, it became a vehicle for neoconservatism. 19. Some of these intellectuals were originally socialist or communist, rather than liberal. 20. Technically, it is the mode of “disclosedness” (Erschlossenheit) or self-revelation characteristic of an authentic life (Heidegger, 1979: 296–7).

Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative  27

References Blattner, W. (1999). Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blattner, W. (2000). Life is Not Literature. In L. Embree and J. Brough (Eds.), The Many Faces of Time (pp. 187–201). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Blattner, W. (2019). Narrative Understanding and Originary Temporality. In A. Buch and T. R. Schatzki (Eds.), Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory (pp. 65–79). London: Routledge. Carr, D. (1986). Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, T. (2010). Heidegger and the Narrativity Debate. Continental Philosophy Review, 43(2), 241–65. Heidegger, M. (1979). Sein und Zeit (15th ed.). Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag. Holt, J. (1943). Études d’aspect. Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget. Husserl, E. (1966a). The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, J.  S.  Churchill (Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1966b). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917) (Husserliana, vol. X). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1980). Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zietbewußtseins (2nd edn). Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag. Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), J. B. Brough (Trans.) (The Collected Works of Edmund Husserl, vol. 4). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Johnston, E. F. (2013). “I Was Always This Way . . . ”: Rhetorics of Continuity in Narratives of Conversion. Sociological Forum, 28(3), 549–73. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kermode, F. (2000). The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klinghoffer, J. A. (1999). Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences. New York: St Martin’s Press. Lin, J.-W. (2006). Time in a Language Without Tense: The Case of Chinese. Journal of Semantics, 23(1), 1–53. Nolan, C., Todd, S., Todd, J., Nolan, J., Pearce, G., Moss, C.-A., . . . Boone, M. (2002). Memento. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment. Roth, B. (2018). Reading from the Middle: Heidegger and the Narrative Self. European Journal of Philosophy, 26(2), 746–62. Roth, P. (2000). The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Spotnitz, F. (2015). The Man in the High Castle [streaming video]. Culver City, CA: Amazon Studios.

28  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Vaïsse, J. (2010). Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, A.  Goldhammer (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Walsh, W. H. (1958). “Plain” and “Significant” Narrative in History. Journal of Philosophy, 55(11), 479–84. White, H. (1980). The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 5–27. Wolfram, W. (2004). The Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular English. In B.  Kortmann and E.  W.  Schneider (Eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English, vol. 2 (pp. 111–32). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

3 Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality Tor Hernes

3.1 Introduction St Augustine’s (1992) conundrum was how time could be extended from the sound of drops from the water clock that simply disappeared as soon as they appeared.1 Yet, without extension from the events of drops there could be no time. Since St Augustine’s Confessions, philosophers such as Mead and Whitehead have drawn upon the notion of events to understand the extension of the experience of time from the present into past and future. Although events are referred to abundantly in the organizational literature, they escape for the most part adequate definitions as to their ontological and epistemological nature. For the most part, events are seen as accomplished entities, primarily defined by their importance or their sequential ordering, or both. However, this definition ignores the emergent nature of events referred to by philosophers of time (McTaggart, 1908). What makes this omission serious is that the understanding of events is closely tied to how we define time itself. Importantly, events help actors define their pasts and futures in the present. They may also help actors establish their future trajectory with selected events from their past. At another level of analysis, conceptualizing time as events opens the way for explaining the complex dynamics involved when actors move along in time by engaging in the interplay between continuity and change. It may be argued that every act carried out is an act of both continuity and change. Every act is an act of continuity by bringing forward something from the past and envisaging something similar in the future. On the other hand, it is also an act of change because, as pointed out by Mead (1932), every new act is by definition an act of novelty. Actors are forever finding themselves in an ongoing present (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), suspended between past and future. Hence, a first step towards a more dynamic theory of organization and time is to theorize pasts and futures. Useful ­distinctions have so far been drawn between past and future events (Bluedorn and

Tor Hernes, Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Tor Hernes. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0003

30  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Standifer, 2006; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) and further distinctions are beginning to be drawn between near and distant past as well as future events (Schultz and Hernes,  2020). Extending from a past versus future distinction to a near versus distant distinction is an important next step in theorizing and empirical research. Organizational scholars have begun to show the roles that distant past and future events may play in organizations. For instance, analyses show how evoking the distant past may engender different dynamics from that of the nearer past (Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Suddaby et al., 2010). There is also an emerging literature on the influence that may (or may not) be  exerted by distant futures on organizations, as indicated in the literature on organizations and the environment (Slawinski and Bansal, 2012; 2015; Bansal and DesJardine, 2014; Wright and Nyberg, 2017). Such analyses reveal dynamics that are very different from analyses focused on near futures only, such as those framed by strategic horizons (Schultz and Hernes,  2020). The useful term “temporal depth,” employed to describe the overall span between the outer limits of future and past horizons, was introduced by Bluedorn (2002: 114). Bluedorn offered the definition of temporal depth as “the temporal distances into the past and future that actors typically consider when contemplating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen.” However, it remains to look more into how different segments across temporal depth are brought into interaction with one another by actors and what the effects are on how they structure their processes in the present (Hernes and Schultz, 2020). Although there is a growing literature addressing the enactment of pasts and futures in the present, research still needs to explain how enactment of pasts and futures is done in the present, because the present represents continuity and change.

3.2  On Sequential Time and Events Investigations into organization and time have traditionally worked with a conception of time as sequential, also known as the clock time or Newtonian time. Sequential time has served the purpose of understanding the influence of time organizations (Adam,  1998), by providing measures such as speed and duration (Adam,  1998), timing (Elias,  1992), and acceleration (Rosa,  2005). An important aspect of sequential time is how it influences the definition and ordering of events. Importantly, in a sequential view of time, events tend to be interpreted against a backdrop of sequential time (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006). Ancona et al. (2001, p. 648) exemplify this view in noting that “The events don’t just transpire every day; they occur at specific times throughout the day.” This implies that events are ordered according to a sequential view of time, whereby an event, once it has taken place, remains that event forever (McTaggart, 1908). Events may be ordered causally, such as a previous event leading to a later event. Another way of ordering relates to the apparent importance of the event. Some events are defined as more consequential than others. When events are seen as taking place against a backdrop of sequential

Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  31

time, it also has important consequences for understanding organizational change and continuity. On the one hand, events such as a sudden change in market conditions, or the introduction of artificial intelligence in a company, represent discontinuity by interrupting and diverting the normal flow of events. Such changes are called events because they stand out as important. Moreover, they are attributed agency due to their chronological ordering dictated by sequential time. For example, a seemingly important event will be seen to impact less important events when there is a short time lapse between them. On the other hand, less important events may be seen to accumulate to cause a major event. When events are seen as consequential for future events, they are defined according to a sequential view of time. A purely events-based approach as seen through the lens of process ontology, on the other hand, departs from the assumption of sequential time being the primary means of ordering time. An events-based view works from the assumption that time is in events (Hernes,  2014a; see also Hussenot, Hernes, and Bouty in this volume, Chapter 5). Events, on this view, are not ordered by a priori importance given by sequentially ordered causality (such as one event being defined as particularly important because it precedes a period of change). On the contrary, in an events-based view, events simply cannot be given importance a priori, because they are never assumed to stay constant in any way. Once they emerge (and if they do), they will be constantly subject to redefinition as they recede into the past while actors move forward in time, encountering new experiences. An events-based view as derived from process ontology can only see events as becoming, and that becoming has no beginning or end. In this view, events are time and define the very meaning of being in time, because they provide actors with a sense of where they are headed as they move through time. Consistent with process ontology, events are forever in the making; they are temporal phenomena that have taken place in the past, may take place in the future, or are potentially about to emerge in the present. Events are ontologically different from sequential time because they signify directionality in time by expressing actors’ movement from past to future, but without being suggestive of sequence as the only feature that expresses direction in time. They serve the purpose of providing a sense of where actors are, where they emerge from and where they are headed, as articulated in the present. If we speak of a twelve-month dur­ation, it is less important from a sequential time point of view whether that duration took place in the past or is expected to take place in the future. With events, this becomes very different. Whether an event has taken place or is expected to take place becomes important, and whether an event has taken place in the near or the distant past may become equally important, because of the importance of expressing directionality of actors’ movement through time. Whereas it may be significant whether or not one event preceded other events, sequence plays a subsidiary role determined by whether or not it adds meaning. It is of less importance that two events are three years apart than whether one took place before the other, because in the latter case the former event forms a past to the latter and the latter event may

32  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies have been a possible future for the former event (Feddersen, 2019). Because ­or­gan­iza­tion­al actors may be seen as temporal phenomena, in the sense that at any one time they exist in a temporal present suspended between past and future, an im­port­ant focus becomes how they weave together their past and future events. Also on this view, they define themselves by the ways in which they perform and provide continuity to ways in which they weave together events as they move through time. Note that continuity, as defined here, is not about the automatic continuation of activity, but about the ongoing process of weaving together events in order to create a sense of continuity. The weaving together of events takes place in what we call the present. However, in the literature, the present seems to have been taken somewhat for granted as an undefined temporal placeholder for past and future. What has been overlooked is the immanent dynamics between present, past, and future, which is the focus of the next section.

3.3  The Event of a Drop and the Experience of a Song Philosophers have wrestled with the question of what it means to be within time since St Augustine’s Confessions in the fourth century ad. Perhaps somewhat iron­ic­ al­ly, questions related to time arose before time as we know it became a subject of discussion. Although St Augustine referred to measuring time, his primary concern was duration and being in the temporal present, the “now.” He raised the perennial question of what it means to be in the present, and consequently, about the ­extension of the present. He asked, for example, whether the present can have any extension at all, and if so, what happens then to what we call time. Consistently with the Greek philosophers who wrote several hundreds of years earlier, such as Zeno (fourth ­century bc), he deduced logically that the present cannot have duration, because a given duration would imply that it could be divided into two half-­dur­ations, each of which could be divided into two half-durations in turn. The p ­ rocess of dividing could thus continue ad infinitum, rendering the very idea of duration meaningless. On the other hand, he argued, in the present we think of things having endured in the past, just as we think of events coming towards us in the flow of time. The flight of a bird flying towards us takes place as duration, which is the future of it flying past us. As we watch the bird, we have a sense of duration until it flies past us. As the bird flies past us and disappears into the distance, there is likewise a d ­ uration of its moving away from us, which is the duration of the past of the experience of it passing above us. However, we cannot appreciate those durations in a constant ­present because they change during the flight, and for the same reason the present cannot have definite duration. At the same time, there is a present, insisted St Augustine, because in order for future to become past there must be passage in time, and that passage can only take place in the present. In other words, without a present there can be no future or past, and hence there would not be time, which is a most serious matter!

Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  33

The problem, however, as posed clearly by St Augustine, is the relationship between the present, the past, and the future, the point being that the present cannot be an isolated moment in the flow of time that has no relationship to either past or future. Remember that the flight of the bird is observed continually in a present, which changes with the distance that the bird is from the observer. At the same time, the present cannot be part of the past or future because, as he points out, in the present the past is no more and the future is not yet. In order to show a way out of this temporal conundrum, he coined the expression distentio animi, which expresses the “stretching out” of time from the present. This, according to him, was made possible by human consciousness (he used the word “soul”). As to the experienced present, it could be likened to a drop of water; a drop of time. It has been pointed out that the expression “drop of time” employed by St Augustine is not completely random, as water clocks were employed during his epoch to keep track of time during the day. It is conceivable that he contemplated “the world at a drop of water” inspired by the sound of the water clock. How fitting that James (1890) would speak of “drops of experience” several centuries later. The elegance of the conception of a drop is that drops simply become in order then to perish, leaving questions about how they connect, and consequently how continuity is possible, and ultimately the role of change. Still, while there is agreement among philosophers that the present is a unique ex­peri­ence that can never be repeated, there has been disagreement about how to theorize extension from the punctuated, drop-like experience of being in the present. How does one extend from ticks of a clock? Songs are composed of “ticks,” which, in various ways, provide simultaneous con­ tinu­ity and change during the song. The song “Time” by Pink Floyd begins with an instrumental and partly cacophonic prelude, which includes ticking clocks, chiming bells, and alarms as a backdrop to the musical instruments. Then the lyrics, sung by David Gilmore, begin as follows, Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way. Try and imagine hearing the song for the very first time. There are the instruments and sounds of clocks, bells, and alarms. Then there are the words, starting with “Ticking away the moments that make . . .” For each word we get an increasing sense of the direction of the song. As we hear the first word “Ticking,” our thoughts may be brought back to the sounds of the clocks and alarms in the prelude that went se­conds before. The lyrics move on to express the futility of catching up with time and the repetitive nature of time as we grow older. When we first listen to the song, the experience of it is inevitably provisional, until the instrumental, rhythm, and ­lyrics come together as a whole. As the song comes to an end, we are left with the ex­peri­ence of something novel, something different from what we have heard before,

34  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and something that stands out as distinct from our flow of experience. Is this an event? Well, it was an event in the making as we were listening to it. Once it’s over, we are aware that we have experienced something that we can look back on as a composite experience, as “I have now heard ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd.” Listening to the song becomes an event as the listening reaches closure (Hernes, 2014a) and we can say, “I heard this song yesterday.” What remains to be seen moving forward is the making of the “eventness” (Bakhtin, Morson, 1991) of the event. I will return to this below. Each tone may be seen as an event, and among the events that stand out in “Time” is each tick of a clock. Songs are instructive (and a popular means among philo­ sophers to illustrate the passing of time) because they combine the incremental discovery of the song as novel tones emerge while the overall song is being discovered. The experience is temporal in the sense that the listener moves along from the beginning until the end of the song, gradually discovering what the song is about through the experience of encountering new notes, which become connected to notes that have passed, but the connecting between the novel note and those that have passed requires a sense of continuity, and a sense of continuity requires a recognition of pattern in turn. At the beginning one does not know what will come next, but the overall composition emerges and becomes increasingly distinct as the song comes to an end. Most philosophers limit their discussion to the experience of discovering the melody and confine their analysis to the time during which the song is being played. Much like Bergson’s work, the theorizing of time relates to introspective processes, whereby the experience of time is confined to the individual mind—what Husserl (1991) called the internal consciousness of time. What gets overlooked is what happens as the melody, once it is over, becomes part of a broader pattern of events over time; when the pattern becomes that of listening repeatedly to that melody, and even more im­port­ant­ly, the social experience of making it into a collective event. What is the difference in the experience, for example, between having listened to Pink Floyd’s “Time” in one’s teens, then having become engrossed with it over the years, and then having it played at one’s anniversary or wedding? We will listen to it and experience it again and again, identifying with the melody as it is being played. But we may at the same time bring forth those times and their corresponding circumstances in which we heard it. Those circumstances are often brought about socially, and sometimes ma­teri­al­ly. Someone may have attended a concert with Pink Floyd, others may have heard “Time” under other circumstances. The question remains, however, does listening to the song with close friends, in a crowd, played through immaculate sound systems, under a starry sky, make it into an event? Let us not forget St Augustine’s saying that the past is no longer (and the future is not yet). If the past is no longer, it is gone forever, and can only be retrieved through the experience of the present. The past is hostage to the imagination projected on it from the present. There is no other option for retrieving a past event because, as pointed out by Bergson (2010: 128), it is counterfeit of what has taken

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place; likewise, as Mead (1932: 30) pointed out, past events are forever unattainable, and even continual reconstructions will not approach them with increasing exactness (Hernes, 2014a: 41). Past (and maybe future) events may be ordered in the present by being distinguished from one another, but only through the present experience. They cannot be held “alongside” the present in any independent, sep­ar­ ate form, but only as part of the “permeated whole” as it is experienced in the present. We are back to the point that the present represents continuity. But continuity is not “just continuity,” as pointed out above. Some analysts, such as Emirbayer and Mische (1998), seem content to posit the present as that which holds together past and future. In this view we can see actors struggling to match a past running away from them with a future coming toward them. On such a view, the role of the present is to ensure some sense of continuity between past and future events. It is therefore important not to underestimate the agency of the present event by underestimating the fact that actors make choices in the present as to which past and future events to assemble in order to make the present event into that present event. As mentioned above, in an events-based view of time, events provide temporal directionality to actors, which signifies more than simply connecting past and future events. The present has its say, even though actors do not know the eventual impact of their actions, and its say is expressed through its ability to create a sense of con­ tinu­ity, which enables a sense of change in turn.

3.4  Events as Continuity or Discontinuity in Whitehead Events offer a means to better understand the interplay between con­tinu­ity and discontinuity (or change). It is not difficult to understand how each novel tone in a song is an instant of both continuity and discontinuity. As continuity, each novel tone extends a melody that has already been under way for a while and may be experienced as continuity of the ongoing melody. At the same time, it constitutes an experience of discontinuity because it is, well, novel. As Mead (1932: 239) wrote, “there is a tang of novelty in each moment of experience.” Similarly, for Whitehead, process is the continual becoming of the world, which is simultaneously a process of continuity and novelty. Temporal experience arises from the “goings-on” in the world (Whitehead, 1920: 75), and those “goings-on” are what he called events. Events come in all shapes and sizes. They can be microscopic or they can be macroscopic. What matters, according to Whitehead, is how they connect to make up a totality of experience, because they are inherently relational; they constitute and define one another, and in so doing they become what they are. However, for them to become events, they would have to have their own internal constitution, therefore each event would be an accomplishment and hence different from all other events, even though other events would be mobilized in the making of that event (such as assumed in a sequential view of time).

36  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The way in which events are theorized depends in large part on how continuity versus discontinuity in time is understood. Although Whitehead subscribed to a view of time as direct experience of temporal flow (Hughen, 1985), he argued that the only way to understand time is as residing in epochs. Epochs, however, are not defined by temporal limits or demarcations. An epoch, which may be defined as an event, is defined by its becoming. Events become, and the duration of their becoming is defined as the time it takes for them to become events. As much as this may be counterintuitive to many people, it is consistent with a becoming, a process ontology view. The event becomes an event as it has reached self-realization (Rosendahl, 1996), for it then to perish as that event. A volcano becomes a volcano through its eruption for it then to perish as a volcano. The eruption may have been in the making for thousands of years, with thousands of interacting or related geological and me­teoro­ logic­al minor and major events. A birthday party becomes a birthday party through its realization, for it then to perish as a birthday party, or, at least, as that birthday party. Listening to “Time” by Pink Floyd becomes an event as and when its unity, its wholeness as that song, is accomplished, when at the end we have a sense of having listened to a piece of music that is different from other pieces of music in its wholeness. The time through which it unfolds is not of the essence. It is not important, for example, what status our experience is at when we are 2 minutes 21 seconds into the song. What matters is the sense we have once it is finished, and that experience is in the making throughout the song. It is a continuous experience marked by the discontinuity of the accomplished song. While listening to it we have an emerging sense of what it will become once it is finished, but we are not fully aware of its wholeness before it is over. The ending could still hold surprises that change the experience as a whole. In Whitehead’s epochal theory of time, the experience of listening to the song becomes a provisional event. When it is over, it is over as that event. In other words, there is an experience of discontinuity. Discontinuity, for Whitehead, was necessary in order to move through time, for how can we experience being in the flow of time without a succession of discontinuous epochs (events)? Hence his insistence that “Time is sheer succession of epochal durations” (Whitehead, 1925: 158). Elsewhere he wrote, “Temporalisation is not another continuous process. It is an atomic succession.” For example, a business meeting becomes an event as and when a decision has been made that satisfies the basis for the meeting. When the decision has been made, the meeting reaches closure (Hernes, 2014a) and becomes an event. A Whiteheadian reading might treat listening to the song as the becoming of an event. There is a continuous experience of listening to the song, but the experience is directed towards the accomplishment in the form of an event. The experience is temporally framed by its becoming. While listening to it we are conscious of moving from its beginning towards its anticipated ending, at which time the event becomes that event of the accomplished melody. At the accomplishment of the melody, when we are satisfied that we have grasped the experience of having heard the melody, there is discontinuity, as another event may be in the making. There are nevertheless,

Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  37

in Whitehead’s conception, seeds of continuity while we listening to the song, which he termed “concrescence”; the becoming of “the one” (song) as it internalizes its relatedness to other occasions of listening, which by the same token becomes constitutive of its uniqueness. Since process represents a striving towards continuity, the disparate experiences are connected retrospectively in order to create a sense of con­ tinu­ity. Hence Whitehead’s well-known phrase that “There is becoming of con­tinu­ ity, but there is no continuity of becoming” (Whitehead, 1929: 35).

3.5  Becoming of Events, Discontinuity and Continuity: The Gettysburg Address Following Whitehead’s theory of time dictates that the song became an event for the listener during the time it was played. Once the music is over, the accomplished event remains, ready to be integrated in some form or other into other events. Whether or not it will take part in future experiences depends on how successive events address it and make it part of their respective becoming. In other words, the becoming of the trajectory through time of the event will be decided by the encounters it makes with other events. As pointed out above, the chronological time that sets them apart is not of relevance. As perspicaciously noted by Zerubavel (2003: 38), “In Irish time, 1651 and 1981 were only moments apart.” One explanation of this observation is that 1981 was an amplification of 1651; 1651 saw hunger and disease resulting from Cromwell’s war on the Irish at Limerick, whereas 1981 saw a hunger strike among republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The adversary in 1651 was Oliver Cromwell whereas in 1981 it was Margaret Thatcher. Evidently, the two events would represent discontinuity at the time, yet decades later they may be seen as forming a sense of continuity as well as of discontinuity. The main question to be addressed is how, in an epochal view, continuity of events is assembled from a discontinuous experience events. It will be argued below that the making of continuity is central to the very making of organizations. In order to provide an illustration of the making of continuity of events over time, I resort to American political history. The following contains excerpts from Zeitz (2013), where he illustrates how President Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, maybe the bestknown speech in American political history, which took place on November 19, 1863, and lasted less than three minutes, is still in the process of becoming “that speech.” It is no less relevant today in view of recent events in the U.S. including huge street demonstrations and removal of historical monuments. The Gettysburg battle, which took place on July 1–3, 1863, was a battle with huge casualties and marked at the same time a turning point in the American Civil War. The battle was won by Union forces. Edward Everett, the former governor of Massachusetts and a noted orator, spoke first, and for over two hours. Then Lincoln rose to give a few remarks. . . . And that was that. At the time, Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg was regarded as an

38  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies im­port­ant political moment, but little more. A search of 15 major American ­newspapers from 1864 through 1889 yields just a handful of mentions of the Gettysburg Address. When Hay and his colleague John Nicolay published their monumental, 10-volume biography of Lincoln in 1890, they devoted eight pages to Everett’s keynote address, and only two pages to Lincoln’s. . . . As memories of the war faded in the 1880s and 1890s, and as Jim Crow stamped out the brief moment of racial liberalism that the Civil War helped catalyze, Americans adopted a new ritual of Blue and Gray reunions, in which aging veterans relived their battlefield achievements. . . . In fact, soldiers’ letters and diaries written during the war suggest that they did indeed understand what they were fighting for. Moreover, at the time of its delivery, the Gettysburg Address—in which Lincoln signalled a new moral turn in the war—was widely understood [although] in its immediate aftermath, an Ohio Democrat denounced the speech as a “mawkish harangue about this ‘war for freedom’ of the negro.” . . . 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.” For many African-American audiences, the Gettysburg Address would remain, as it had always been, a proclamation wedding the Civil War to the emancipationist project. . . . 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. . . . 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.

(The reference here is to Martin Luther King and his 1963 “Gettysburg address.”) In a “Whiteheadian” reading, the story of the Gettysburg address is a story of the becoming of successive events, which could become otherwise, i.e. take on another directionality. It offers the possibility to analyze how the experience of time as discontinuous may enable a sense of continuity through time. In what follows I focus on three aspects of the making of events and their mutuality as a means to understand how continuity may emerge through time.

Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  39

The becoming of the speech at the time. The speech itself had a message, which was one of progress and democracy. It reminded the people present of the “real” struggle, which was about creating a novel society based on equality, a struggle that would honor those who died at the Gettysburg battle. The text of Lincoln’s address does not mention the divide between confederates and unionists, between north and south (once again becoming a central topic in contemporary political debates in the US). Although he could foresee many battles lying ahead before the end of the war, the accomplishment of the address lies in its very message of an underlying struggle for an equal and free society. It is not difficult to appreciate how Whitehead’s epochal view of time works here, as the speech is aimed at its own accomplishment, like the song by Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s speech remained more or less ignored by many people in the years that followed and was not recognized “as the speech it was.” The message of the address was authored to signal that the soldiers had chiefly fallen in the cause of a more equal society. It is important to note, however, that the message of the speech was not lost on the soldiers who wrote letters from the battlefield before the address, which reflected a deeper sense of what they were going into battle for than beating the enemy. The fact that the message was reflected in those letters suggests that there were multiple previous events at which they had participated, which had influenced their ideas about the cause they were fighting for. It is not unreasonable to infer that the address was a synthesis of multiple previous occasions, which made it into an event, however insignificant the attention it received at the time. Mutual becoming between successive events and the Gettysburg address. In Zeitz’s account, successive events served to uphold two different versions of the address. Newspaper articles and the military commemorations were mostly about the battle between unionists and confederates, and underplayed or ignored the message of Lincoln’s address. At other events, however, such as readings of the speech at elem­ en­tary schools across the US, the message of the address was beginning to take hold. The latter stream of events has had the most impact, as shown by the fact that Martin Luther King’s famous speech in Washington DC 100 years later made implicit reference to Lincoln’s address. It is worth noting that in the first part of the twentieth century, events took place in the women’s movement and with African-American audiences at which the address was also evoked. Clearly, such events became what they became by evoking Lincoln’s intended theme of the address. This is where Whitehead’s notion of immanence and time comes in handy. As to the relations between successive events and the address, two observations may be made about their mutual relationality. Firstly, the address is kept alive as it is evoked in the present event. When it is read out loud in a classroom, teacher and pupils evoke that event (assuming they know its context) through the words they utter together and perhaps the discussions they have about the address. Because the actual context of the address cannot be evoked, the address is evoked not so much on its own premises, but on the premises accorded to it by the present event. As the address is uttered

40  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies by school children and their teacher, it is experience in that context, and not the original context. Secondly, while the address is being recreated in the schools, the school events are equally created by the evocation of the address. Much the way listening to “Time” by Pink Floyd is accomplished as an event, reciting the address makes the recitation into an event. This is what Whitehead referred to as immanence: school children imagine Lincoln giving the address as they recite it, and thereby their recitation becomes the event of reciting the address. The word “immanence” is not to be taken lightly, because it signifies the internal connecting of events (Hernes, 2014a; 2014b). The word “connecting’ ” may in fact be too weak in the case of Whitehead’s theory, because immanence implies that two events become “mutually constitutive”; they create one another as they make incursions into one another in mutually constitutive processes of becoming. It is possible to take the metaphor event further and say that the events become one whole. Creating continuity from discontinuity. We might ask ourselves, “what’s the use of considering events immanently as mutually constitutive?” The answer, following Whitehead, is that the experience of each event related to the address represents a temporally discontinuous experience. But on the other hand, nothing can become anything without continuity. Events extend temporally from momentary experience; this is the only way they can transcend their momentary nature as a drop of ex­peri­ ence, as postulated by St Augustine. It is through extension of events that there is “becoming of continuity” (Whitehead, 1929: 35). Continuity is usefully explored as a dimension of the immanent mutual processes of becoming between events. Continuity cannot be limited to comparison of “similar” events. There is little similarity, for instance, between the Gettysburg address and school children reciting it. Continuity is created not through sameness of events, but rather through their commonality. What connects the address and the school recitations is a common underlying concern or theme, which enables in turn the becoming of both the address and the school recitations as events. Without commonality it is hard to see how extension of events may take place through time. Commonality may perhaps be likened to the notion of plot in narrative theory, originally advanced by Aristotle (1996) and pursued by Ricoeur (1984). In poetry, for instance, plot is what keeps disparate actions together in an intelligible account, partly because it has a known ending. However, whereas plot may be inferred from the outside and analytically imposed ex post, the view taken here is that commonality is a process of continual activity among actors in the constitution of events, which means that it cannot be settled in advance. Commonality can only be an immanent process, linking events internally to one another (Hernes, 2014a), and can only be emergent, which does not imply that it has no form. The commonality established by the military commemorations with the event served to extend a mistaken interpretation of the address, which was in some senses rectified by school recitations, African American audiences and the women’s emancipationist movement, as they established a different line of commonality with the address. Hence commonality, and consequently continuity, is contingent, which means that it may be curtailed, thwarted or reinforced by the immanent processes that constitute events.

Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  41

3.6  Continuity in Discontinuity There is a need to know more about the making of events, partly because the making of events can enable us to get to grips with the becoming of organizational con­tinu­ ity as a temporal process. By discussing the becoming of events against a backdrop of Whitehead’s epochal theory of time, it may be seen how events embody both con­ tinu­ity and discontinuity. Whitehead’s approach emphasizes how discontinuity is necessary for continuity to be established, while leaving open the nature of con­tinu­ ity. Everyday life in organizations is full of discontinuities. However, without extracting continuity from those discontinuities, the very idea of organization is rendered pointless. The advantage of contemplating becoming of continuity as done by Whitehead is that it applies to a range of organizational phenomena. For example, it helps answer central questions posed in organizational identity research, such as “who are we becoming?” (Schultz and Hernes, 2013). If organizational identity is to have meaning, it logically needs to represent becoming of continuity of some sort, but emerging from discontinuities. Others who have written persuasively about events and agency include Emirbayer and Mische (1998), whose paper draws heavily on Mead’s notion of time and events. However, because Mead assumes the naturally emerging continuity between events as they happen, there is no particular need for Emirbayer and Mische to search for a stronger sense of temporal agency than what is expressed through the making of the present via its relationship with past and future. When temporal experience is seen as discontinuous, on the other hand, there will be stronger demands on temporal agency represented in the becoming of events to play a more active role in the making of organizational continuity and, consequently, the organization as a whole. If immanence and commonality of events are decisive for continuity, as suggested above, it becomes important to study in more detail how events come into being and how their immanence with other events unfolds over time and how they become reconstructed through the experience of discontinuity. Such a view enables con­tinu­ ity (as well as change) to be studied through the acts of the actors themselves as they face dilemmas and alternatives in evoking past and future events. It requires above all that events are not accorded eventness (Bakhtin, in Morson, 1991) a priori, but that their eventness is allowed to emerge through time as they become enrolled into other events to take part in the becoming of those other events. Here lies the potential of the notion of epoch as sustaining that which has begun, while it is developing its totality as an event, like a song or a speech. Finally, a few words about continuity and discontinuity. On a conventional view, continuity may be seen as a sign of no change; the steady state of things that persevere in the absence of agency for change. Hence the idea that change, not continuity, requires agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). A process ontological view would see it very differently, and siding with Whitehead (1920;  1925;  1929), continuity requires agency, because in a changing world continuity requires effort (Hernes, 2014a). Most process scholars would readily agree with this argument, because a

42  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies basic assumption of process ontology is that any persisting state of affairs requires agency. Nevertheless, until now the notion of continuity has received less attention than the notion of stability. The two concepts relate to time, albeit somewhat differently. Whereas stability is seen as a state of affairs that persists over time, continuity signifies the extension of acts or events through time. This implies that continuity cannot be taken for granted, and equally important, it is contingent and may thus become otherwise, and it is the becoming otherwise that we may label “change.”

Note 1. I am most grateful to Juliane Reinecke for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality  43 Hussenot, A., and Missonier, S. (2016). Encompassing Novelty and Stability: An Events-Based Approach. Organization Studies, 37(4), 523–46. Husserl, E. (1991). On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan. McTaggart, J. (1908). The Unreality of Time. Mind, 17, 457–74. Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. Morson, G.  S. (1991). Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality. New Literary History, 22, 1071–92. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative, Vol. I. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Rosa, H. (2005). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosenthal, S. B. (1996). Continuity, Contingency, and Time: The Divergent Intuitions of Whitehead and Pragmatism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 32, 542–67. Schultz, M., and Hernes, T. (2013). A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity. Organization Science, 24, 1–21. Schultz, M., and Hernes, T. (2020). Temporal Interplay between Strategy and Identity: Punctuated, Subsumed and Sustained Modes. Strategic Organization, 18, 106–35. Slawinski, N., and Bansal, P. (2012). A Matter of Time: The Temporal Perspectives of Organizational Responses to Climate Change. Organization Studies, 33, 1537–63. Slawinski, N., and Bansal, P. (2015). Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability. Organization Science, 26(2), 531–49. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Quinn Trank, C. (2010). Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage. The Globalization of Strategy Research: Advances in Strategic Management, 27, 47–173. Whitehead, A.  N. (1925). Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association Books. Whitehead, A.  N. (1920). The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Wright, C., and Nyberg, D. (2017). An Inconvenient Truth: How Organizations Translate Climate Change into Business as Usual. Academy of Management Journal, 60, 1633–61. Zeitz, J. (2013) Remembering the Gettysburg Address. Available at: https://opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/remembering-the-gettysburg-address/ Zerubavel, E. (2003). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

4 The Sociology of Time Eviatar Zerubavel

Forty-three years ago, in a journal article titled “Timetables and Scheduling: On the Social Organization of Time,” I introduced the notion of a “sociology of time” (Zerubavel,  1976: 87). Having since then written five books (Zerubavel,  1979, 1981/1985, 1985/1989,  2003,  2011) and many articles further fleshing out that notion, here are what I consider the main components of this distinctive perspective on temporality.

4.1  A Sociotemporal Order As its very name suggests, the sociology of time explores its distinctly social dimension. Unlike the psychology of time, it thus focuses on its pronouncedly collective experience and organization. Its units of analysis, therefore, are not individuals but social groups ranging from mere couples to entire civilizations. Dealing with the suprapersonal aspect of temporality means, for example, dealing with traditions of measuring (“seven minutes”) and reckoning (“10:54”) time as well as of dating past (“1658”) and future (“next Wednesday”) events. It also means dealing with norms of duration (such as how long one should mourn the death of a parent), sequence (such as eating sweets only after the main course), timing (such as the appropriate age for retiring), and frequency (such as what we consider “too often”). Yet while avoiding the strictly personal, the sociology of time is also careful not to mistake the merely impersonal for the truly universal and thus not to conflate the sociotemporal order with the natural, physicotemporal order. In order to do so, it focuses on whatever lies between the personal and the universal. As such, it deals with unmistakably social conventions such as the ones underlying teachers’ and nurses’ (in sharp contrast to hunters’ and fishermen’s) work/rest rhythms or the fixed times at which we brush our teeth rather than when they get dirty. Unlike the physicotemporal order, the sociotemporal order is based on artificial rather than natural constraints. This is most pronouncedly exemplified by social rhythms that, though they may seem to us natural, are actually based on un­mis­tak­ ably artificial units of time. That is true not only of the television “season” or the academic semester but also of the day, the month, and the year, let alone the hour and the week. Eviatar Zerubavel, The Sociology of Time In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Eviatar Zerubavel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0004

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As one of our major standard units of time, the day is based on the time it takes the earth to complete a full rotation on its axis. Yet is it nature that dictates that it would “begin” at midnight (or, as in Judaism and Islam, at sunset)? Is it nature that generates 23- and 25-hour days when we shift to and from daylight-saving time? And is it nature that makes us abruptly gain or lose a day upon crossing the International Date Line? Consider also the month, another major standard unit of time originally based on the period from one new moon to the next. Yet while seemingly a product of nature, our 30- or 31-day (or, in February, 28- or 29-day) calendar month is defined strictly mathematically as a precise multiple of the day and is thus but an artificial approximation of the actual 29.5306-day lunation. That is also true of the year, another seemingly natural standard unit of time, based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, on which we base our annual as well as multi-annual (elections, Olympics) rhythms of social life. After all, in sharp contrast to the actual solar year, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 se­conds long, our calendar year too is defined strictly mathematically (and thus artificially) as a precise multiple of the day. Furthermore, it is clearly not nature that determines the length of the 354- or 355-day Islamic calendar year, let alone the 260-day Central American and 210-day Indonesian divinatory calendar years (Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 50–8). Nor, for that matter, is it due to nature that the year “begins” on different days in different calendars (and as in the case of the fiscal and academic years even within the same society) or that it constitutes the very basis on which we reckon age. The need to avoid conflating the sociotemporal and physicotemporal orders is even clearer when one considers the weekly rhythm, which, whether based on a seven-, four-, six-, ten-, or nineteen-day-long cycle, has nothing whatsoever to do with nature (Zerubavel, 1985/1989). Nor, for that matter, does the hour, the standard unit of time on which we base our very notion of “clock time,” which is strictly mathematically and thus utterly artificially defined as a precise fraction of the day.

4.2  Culture and Time We have thus far examined one component of the distinctive perspective that soci­ ology brings to the study of time. Yet as implied in Pitirim Sorokin’s notion of “socio­ cul­tural” (rather than “physicomathematical”) time (Sorokin, 1943: 158–225), there is much more that it offers the student of temporality. Let us examine, for instance, some major ways of collectively experiencing time with which we are all very familiar. Given such familiarity, they may actually seem to us quite natural and therefore inevitable. A closer examination, however, reveals that they are anything but. Consider, first, our conception of time as a finite and thereby irrecoverable resource, which is at the heart of our experience of “not having enough time” and of the effectively utilitarian way we think about “spending” a month, “investing” three

46  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies years, “saving” twenty minutes, or “wasting” an evening. Our effort to minimize the amount of “unused” time is evident, for example, in our attitude toward waiting and commuting, not to mention in our very notion of “killing” time. Such a pro­noun­ ced­ly pragmatic approach to time also underlies our cultural valorization of speed, as evidenced by the expressway, the supercomputer, the microwave oven, the scientific abstract, and even the “quickie,” let alone the very idea of simultaneous consumption or “multitasking.” A further manifestation of the role of culture in how we view time is its math­em­ at­ic­al conception as an abstract quantity of duration totally independent of context. The hours and minutes that our parking meters and egg timers measure, for instance, are utterly removed from any concrete physicotemporal context such as the season or time of day, and so are our running and swimming records. And it is such a view of time that also allows us to schedule our various daily and weekly activities in the exact proportions we wish to be involved in them (Zerubavel, 1999: 14–17). Viewing time as an abstract quantity of duration also explains how we can “move” a thirty-minute appointment from one day to another as well as add and subtract hours and minutes when calculating what time to set our wake-up alarm for in order to be on time for an early-morning meeting. It is likewise manifested in the way we dissociate measured time from passing time, such as when what we officially measure in basketball games as three minutes may actually last twenty! Such a fundamental distinction between “net time” and “gross time” (Zerubavel, 1981/1985: 62–3) is also exemplified by the way we combine sick days we accumulate over several years into a single continuous three-week sick leave, the way college professors’ “tenure clock” figuratively “stops” when they take a maternity leave, as well as the way delivery times are calculated in terms of a number of “business days,” effectively skipping weekends and holidays. Yet another manifestation of the role of culture in how we experience temporality are both our linear and circular views of time. Effectively based on the notion of irreversible processes such as growing up or aging and unique events such as birth and death, the linear view of time underlies the way we date events chronologically. “2019” thus refers to a point in time we experience as absolutely later than “1982,” which is definitely not true of the temporal relations between “7:16” and “11:38,” “Monday” and “Friday,” or “October” and “June,” all of which presuppose a circular view of time. (Though clearly antithetical to each other, however, those two views are by no means mutually exclusive, as exemplified by the way Jews bless God on Hanukkah for the miracles he performed “in those days at this time”—that is, at that point in history yet on these particular days of the calendar year.) The circular view of time is the basis for mythically synchronizing historical and calendrical time by invoking the notion of actual repetition (Eliade, 1957/1959), yet also far less dramatically for viewing the week, for example, as a series of periodically recurring non-historical “types” of days. As Mark Twain allegedly quipped, even if history does not actually repeat itself it nevertheless “rhymes.” Although a yoga class last Tuesday, therefore, may not be identical to a yoga class next Tuesday, they are

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nevertheless both instances of the very same periodically recurring “type” of event. That certainly adds an element of predictability to the sociotemporal order. Unlike nighttimes or summers, for example, Saturdays may not be part of nature, yet we can nevertheless expect them to “behave” in a way we would not expect from “a Monday” or “a Wednesday”.

4.3  The Semiotics of Time As implied in the above, we often view certain time periods not just as abstract quantities of duration but also as having certain qualities marking them as effectively distinct from durationally identical time periods that do not have those qualities. Such a pronouncedly qualitative view of time boils down to a fundamental distinction between special, “marked” periods and ordinary, “unmarked” ones, whether we experience it circularly (such as the difference between annual holidays and the mere intervals among them [Hubert, 1905/1999]) or linearly (such as the contrast between highly “eventful” historical periods and those collectively considered “empty lulls” [Zerubavel, 2003: 25–34]). Such a pronouncedly semiotic dimension of time is also evident whenever we use time to signify other things such as status, commitment, intimacy, priority, and power (Zerubavel, 1987). Consider, for instance, the symbolic aspect of duration, as evidenced when we compare the different amounts of time someone spends with different people, or the disappointment we feel when our guests leave “so early.” It also explains why one might feel slighted that it took a close friend two weeks to notify one of her engagement, as well as why one might refuse to wait for latecomers beyond a certain amount of time. Along similar lines, consider also the symbolic aspect of sequential ordering, as manifested in the significance we attach to the order of speakers on a panel, or in the priority signified by doing something “first.” By the same token, note also the symbolism of timing, as manifested in the significance attached to a pledge to be avail­ able “whenever you need me” as a token of commitment, or in the way a widow’s decision to remarry is characterized as having been made “too soon.” Finally, consider the symbolism of frequency, as exemplified by the significance attributed to “progressing” from meeting once or twice a year to doing it regularly every week.

4.4  The Politics of Time The sociology of time also highlights the political dimension of temporal arrangements, and particularly the relation between power and time. The authority to allow one’s children to play or watch television only after they finish their homework is clearly a function of one’s power over them. So for that matter is the authority to impose a curfew or decide when they should go to bed.

48  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The political aspect of time is also manifested in the establishment of calendrical contrasts. The early Christians’ decision to move the “peak” of the Jewish seven-day week from Saturday to Sunday was an unmistakably political act, expressing as well  as promoting the break between the Church and the Synagogue (Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 20–2, 1987: 349–52). And given that Passover is always celebrated on a full moon, so, indeed, was their decision to fix the date of Easter on the Sunday ­following the full moon that coincides with or falls next after the vernal equinox (Zerubavel, 1982a). Consider also in this regard the decisions of the architects of the French Revolution to introduce a ten-day week, replace the traditional Christian Era with a new Republican Era, and begin the calendar year on September 22 instead of January 1 as parts of a larger attempt to de-Christianize France (Zerubavel, 1977, 1985/1989: 28–35, 1987: 352–3). Equally political was Stalin’s introduction of a five-day week in order to dissociate Soviet social life from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sevenday rhythms of worship. Furthermore, he abolished the very institution of a common weekly day of rest, which meant that every day a different one-fifth of the Soviet society had a day off, thereby exemplifying the role of calendrical arrangements in promoting a “divide and rule” brand of politics (Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 35–43). * * * Given its strictly conventional basis, one might come to view the sociotemporal order as somewhat less pervasive than the natural and therefore inevitable physicotemporal order. Yet as evidenced by the question “Do you know what day it is?” we need to be sociotemporally “oriented” in order to be able to participate in the pro­ noun­ced­ly intersubjective social world (Zerubavel,  1985/1989: 2–3). To be part of that world we also need to know what time it is (Zerubavel, 1982b), what month it is, as well as what year it is. In fact, despite its conventional basis, we tend to essentialize the sociotemporal order and experience it as inevitable. Thus, for example, given the lack of any three-, four-, five-, six-, eight-, nine-, or ten-day regular periodicity in our daily lives, we often come to experience the seven-day week as a natural rhythm (Zerubavel, 2016: 71–2). Trying to offer a class that would meet every nine days or establish a regular routine of cleaning one’s home or calling one’s parents every six or eight days would therefore most likely fail after just one or two rounds of such seemingly “absurd” cycles. And yet, it is absolutely imperative that we avoid conflating merely conventional sociotemporality with truly inevitable physicotemporality. As Peter Beagle put it in his fantasy novel The Last Unicorn, When I was alive, I believed—as you do—that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said “one o’clock” as though I could see it, and “Monday” as though I could find it on the map . . . Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.  (Beagle, 1968: 199)

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References Beagle, Peter S. (1968). The Last Unicorn. New York: Ballantine. Eliade, Mircea (1957/1959). The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Hubert, Henri (1905/1999). A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic. In Essay on Time (pp. 43–91). Oxford: Durkheim Press. Sorokin, Pitirim  A. (1943). Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time: A Study of Referential Principles of Sociology and Social Science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1976). Timetables and Scheduling: On the Social Organization of Time. Sociological Inquiry, 46, 87–94. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1977). The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time. American Sociological Review, 42, 868–77. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1979). Patterns of Time in Hospital Life: A Sociological Perspective. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1981/1985). Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1982a). Easter and Passover: On Calendars and Group Identity. American Sociological Review, 47, 284–9. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1982b). The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective. American Journal of Sociology, 88, 1–23. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1985/1989). The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1987). The Language of Time: Toward a Semiotics of Temporality. Sociological Quarterly, 28, 343–56. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1999). The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (2003). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (2011). Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar (2016). The Five Pillars of Essentialism: Reification and the Social Construction of an Objective Reality. Cultural Sociology, 10, 69–76.

5 Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of Temporality Introducing the Events-Based Approach Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty

5.1 Introduction The matter of time and temporality has always been a core topic in the humanities, as time serves as a basis for any definition of the social order (Sorokin and Merton  1937; Zerubavel,  1981; Adam,  1990).1 Since the appearance of works by Clark (1985), Bluedorn and Denhardt (1988), Gherardi and Strati (1988), and Hassard (1991), the subject of time and temporality has been considered a core topic for organization scholars as well. These researchers have attempted to incorporate the subject of time into their studies in two ways (Bluedorn, 2002): either based on a realist understanding of time including, among others, linear-views and clock time (Ancona, Okhuysen, and Perlow, 2001), to which we will hereafter refer as the ontology2 of time; or based on a subjective understanding of time, to which we will hereafter refer as the ontology of temporality, and which includes social construction and process-views (Chia, 2002; Hernes, 2014a; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017). Whereas in the ontology of time, time is a standardized and external dimension from which the organizational phenomenon can be measured and managed, the ontology of temporality has been favored by those working on ongoing change (Schultz and Hernes, 2013) or emerging activities (Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) because it signals the constant co-definition and re-configuration of the past, the present, and the future. As pointed out by Bluedorn and Standifer (2006), the ontology of temporality signals the unique temporal perspective of the actor as opposed to generalized time as expressed by clock time. Another factor that distinguishes time  from temporality is that whereas the ontology of time is linear or sequential

Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty, Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of Temporality: Introducing the Events-Based Approach In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0005

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(see Hernes in Chapter 3 of this volume), the ontology of temporality is expressed through events (Bluedorn and Standifer,  2006; Hernes,  2014a; Hernes, Chapter  3, this volume). In spite of this rather clear distinction in the literature, the ontology of time (linear view of time) is so dominant in the field of organization studies that it often appears as the only way to deal with organizational temporality (Bluedorn and Waller, 2006: 357). To date, the ontology of time might have been relevant to understanding repetitive and standardized procedural activities, especially in large formal organizations (Chia,  2003; March,  2007; Jensen, Thuesen, and Geraldi,  2016). As most of the early research in organization studies has been conducted in large manu­ fac­tur­ing and services companies, the activities studied were often procedural and standardized, and based on a rather stable structure of governance. This apparent stability encouraged researchers to adopt an absolute view of how actors define the continuity and change of their activity. In such a view, an organizational phenomenon is considered as evolving from a given past, to a present and then a future, in this order, as these time-slices seem to be defined once and for all. However, the recent emergence of ever-changing organizational phenomena such as freelancing, social movements, etc., and the development of projects in which actors must develop responses to unforeseen situations and define unique and dynamic collaborations, bring a new perspective to how actors have to define their tem­poralities. Such organizational phenomena cannot readily be studied using the ontology of time because the past, the present, and the future of these activities are not given but rather have to be created and recreated on an ongoing basis by actors. This type of fluid situation can be observed in any kind of organizational phe­nom­ enon but it is especially prevalent among project-based organizations, which pursue innovative and creative activities, when the ordering of the activities cannot be defined beforehand at the beginning of a project but instead must be constantly defined by actors as they face unpredicted events, forcing them to constantly re/ adjust their tasks, roles, goals, etc. More generally, in a context of growing projectification of work and the society (Jensen, Thuesen, and Geraldi,  2016), based on temporary, multiple, improvised, and innovative activities characterized by their situated temporalities, the linear and sequential ontology of time loses some of its usefulness for understanding organizational phenomena. Rather, we need an ontology of temporality enabling us to understand how such activities are defined and ordered as events. In However, the current The lack of a substantial development of the ontology of temporality becomes problematic, since it drives scholars to impose a linear view of time on the intimate experience of informal, emerging, innovating, and project-based activities. This prevents us from netter understanding how actors actually define the continuity of their activities through time and over time, which is what makes these activities possible (Bergson, 1907/2009; Mead, 1932). This chapter aims to contribute to the development of an ontology of temporality in organization studies by introducing an events-based approach to study the

52  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies emergence and evolution of organizational phenomena (Hernes, 2014a; 2014b; 2017; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016; Hussenot, 2019). An events-based approach represents a useful framework for understanding and empirically studying the becoming of continuity (Whitehead, 1929/1978) within activities, especially within a context of nonbureaucratic and ever-changing collaboration. More precisely, an eventsbased approach makes it possible to understand how continuity is produced and reproduced through events despite the on-going unfolding and uncertainty of actors’ activities. The next section discusses the ontology of time and the ontology of temporality and aims to clarify the analytical distinction between the two. Each ontology is defined and positioned within the literature. Section 5.3 introduces the events-based approach as a way to understand organization from the perspective of the ontology of temporality. Section 5.4 deals with some methodological challenges of the events-based approach. Finally, section 5.5 discusses the contributions and implications of the events-based approach. We notably emphasize the implications of an events-based approach for our understanding of what an organization is and the relevance of an events-based approach for studying contemporary organizational phenomena.

5.2  Distinguishing between the Ontology of Time and the Ontology of Temporality The ontology of time and the ontology of temporality are sometimes conflated in studies as the objectified passing of time is mixed up with the subjective experience of the flowing of activities. This conflation is not surprising, as it can be traced back to the very classic distinction between the Greek notions of chronos and kairos. It is generally accepted that chronos, which is the personification of time in pre-Socratic philosophy, refers to a numerical and linear view of time, while kairos stands for a more qualitative view of time, as this Greek word signifies the right and opportune moment (Markosian, 2002). The chronos view is visible in realist ontologies of time established by Plato (360 BC/2008) and Newton (1686/2009), among others (Markosian, 2002), while the kairos view has led to a more subjective view of time that appeared in the philosophies of Saint-Augustin (401/1993), Bergson (1889, 1896/1939, 1907/2009), and Ricoeur (1984), among others.

5.2.1  The Ontology of Time The ontology of time is based on the assumption that time is a natural and objective dimension that can be measured and used to run/schedule activities. This view is deeply anchored in the Judeo-Christian civilization, as time here begins with creation and ends with the apocalypse (TenHouten, 2005). Time is thus external and absolute. It does not depend on individual experiences, as it is the same across all

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situations and individuals (Shipp and Cole, 2015). This view has been referred to as clock time (Zerubavel, 1981) or fungible time (Bluedorn, 2002). As institutionalized measures of time are based on natural cycles (days, seasons, etc.), time is here conceptualized as being chronological, unidirectional, linear, and progressing from the past to the present and then to the future (Bluedorn and Denhardt 1988). In such a view, the past, the present, and the future are detached; the past vanishes into the present, and the future is expected. The events lived by actors can be differentiated from one another by defining them as belonging to the past, to the present, or to the future. Thus, in this view, events are positioned along the arrow of time but do not constitute time per se, as time is a dimension that is given and independent from these said events. Such a view leads to a representation of time as a spatial dimension, or rather, time is here conceptualized as “the ghost of space” (Bergson,  1896: 75). More precisely, time and space are alike, since we define time merely by separating and spatializing events, spreading them out along a time-line with a given orientation. In spite of the criticisms leveled against this approach, seeing time as a common temporal scheme enables actors to regulate social life (Sorokin and Merton, 1937). As an institutionalized measure, time plays a useful role, as it makes the co­ord­in­ ation between people possible (Zerubavel, 1981). Consequently, many studies have focused on the role of time in organizations—notably, how it is experienced (Butler, 1995) and managed as a controllable resource (Knights and Odih, 2002), or used to identify, coordinate, and measure processes in organizations. Time can be used to measure and define frames that articulate the different steps of an activity— called temporal frames by Boden (1997). Some scholars have also focused on how actors deal with different temporal frames and whether these different temporal frames, such as lifecycle vs. cyclical frames (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988), are well articulated or in tension with one another (e.g. Doz, 1996; Doz, Olk and Ring, 2000; Huxham and Vangen,  2000; Lipparini, Lorenzoni, and Ferriani,  2014; Inkpen and Pien, 2006). In terms of organization and management, the ontology of time resonates with coordination, synchronization, and timing. It is concerned with extension in the present. It does not, however, concern itself with the dynamics between present, past, and future. Time is used as an objective dimension to measure, interpret, and position organizational phenomena.

5.2.2  The Ontology of Temporality The ontology of temporality, i.e. a process-view of time (Hernes, 2014a; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017), is anchored in the idea that time is not an external framework imposed on actors, but rather, it is indexical to the events, activities, and experiences lived by actors (Abbott, 2001). In this view, temporality is about the passage from the flow of one’s experiences to a tangible continuity that defines these very

54  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies activities. Temporality becomes the creative definition of the reality enabling actors to act in ways that create a sense of continuity through their activity. Importantly, this sense of continuity can be created from mere repetitions and/or novelty (Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) but is not confined to either repetition or novelty. In such a view, the understanding and meaning of the past, the present, and the future thus emerges from the temporal work performed by people (Kaplan and Orlikowski,  2013)., Such understanding and meaning emerges from the way the current moment is defined, connected, and related to the past, the present, and the future (Weick, 1979; Dawson, 2014). Rhythms, stabilities, novelties, ruptures, etc. are not defined along a given timeline but rather are always in a state of becoming, as pointed out by Feldman and Pentland (2003) in the case of routines that are constantly re-defined by actors. In this sense, temporality is expressed in multiple ways, but narration seems to play a key role in such expressions (Ricoeur, 1984; Boje, 1995; Rantakari and Vaara, 2017). This type of temporality is what Cunliffe, Luhman, and Boje (2004), inspired by Ricoeur’s (1984) work on narrative and time, have called “narrative temporality,” i.e. the definition of the continuity of activities as a collective narrative practice. Such a view suggests that “stories are not just chronologies (a sequence of events) but ­situated, responsive performances” that “create a current experience and sense of reality in the moment of telling” (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 273). In such a view, events and their meanings and configurations depend on how actors narrate their experience, how they create and recreate configurations of events (Ricoeur, 1984). Similarly, the configuration, the acceleration, and the slowing down of the past, the present, and the future, as well as what are considered to be a near or a distant past and future, are not given; rather, they are situated and immanent in activities. The temporality of an activity evolves and can have multiple expressions, since actors can tell different stories as they experience the current moment differently one from another and therefore give different definitions of their own personal continuities. More precisely, the principle of immanence (Chia, 1999; Cobb, 2007; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016; Hussenot, 2019) implies that the very defining and configuring of the past, the present, and the future take place as one indivisible activity in the current moment. Immanence here means that the current moment embodies past, present, and future events, and this embodying of these events in the current moment also gives shape to those past, present, and future events. Such a conception of immanence implies that, as each moment absorbs preceding moments while “projecting them towards a not-yet knowable future” (Chia, 1999: 220), by the same token the future moment both gives shape to and is shaped by that very same operation. Consequently, the past is immanent in the present and the future; the present is immanent in the past and the future, and the future is immanent in the past and the present. Although authors in process studies have made efforts to develop methods to study organization from the perspective of the ontology of time, especially in the

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literature on change and innovation (Van de Ven and Poole, 1990; 1995; 2005), the apparatus of an ontology of temporality remains to be developed. More precisely, the ontology of temporality supposes to represent the immanence of the past, present, and future from which the continuity of the activity is re/defined in the current moment. However, as noted by Langley et al. (2013), attempts to study organization from the perspective of the ontology of temporality have suffered from a lack of consistency, leading to a “temporal bracketing” that consists in applying the ontology of time. We think that this difficulty arises partly because the implications of our understanding of organization as process through time have not been given sufficient attention. Within the ontology of temporality, organization is not a social or economic entity evolving along a time-line, but rather, organization is in the very definition of temporality, as the reality of activities emerges from this temporality itself. The events-based approach we introduce in the following section is an attempt to provide an approach that allows one to follow and transcribe the way that temporality is defined and serves as a basis for making any activity, and hence organization, possible. More precisely, we are interested in building a framework that allows one to understand how actors define the continuity and the ordering of their activity, by re/defining and configuring past, present, and future events.

5.3  The Events-Based Approach The events-based approach suggests that organizations are temporal phenomena that emerge and are maintained through the ongoing configuration and co-definition of past, present, and future events that define both the current moment and its agency. The relation between the events and the temporality has already been underlined many times in organization studies (e.g. Chia,  1999; Cobb,  2007; Cooper,  2014; Hernes,  2014a; Hussenot and Missonier,  2016; Danner-Schröder, 2018). Relying mainly on the process philosophy, such as the works of Henri Bergson (Hussenot, forthcoming); Gilles Deleuze (Deroy and Clegg, 2011); George Herbert Mead (Schultz and Hernes, 2013); Alfred North Whitehead (Chia, 1999; Cobb, 2007; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016), several scholars have tried to conceptualize or­gan­iza­tion­al temporality as arising from events.

5.3.1  The Notion of an Event While the event is the unit of analysis of the events-based approach (Hernes, 2014a; 2014b;  2017), this notion remains open to interpretation as it means both what is taking place (from the Latin word eventum) and what happened (from the Latin word eventus) (Deroy, 2009). The event, therefore, refers both to the actual moment and to the past, present, and future events that are considered external to the actual moment.

56  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies However, these two meanings should be seen not as opposites, but rather as a unique dynamic in which the actual moment is defined by past, present, and future events as much as past, present, and future events are re-defined in the actual moment. In such a dynamic, all the past, present, and future events are directly or indirectly codefined in the actual moment, as there is nothing else in the actual event but other events (Cobb,  2007). In other words, an event is anything that makes the actual moment understandable. Consequently, understanding happens through the enactment of past, present, and future events in the current moment. In this way, reality is defined primarily by the past, present, and future events enacted by people, as these enacted events define temporality, i.e. a sense of continuity arising through “sequential plots” (Boje, 1995: 100). In such a view, temporality is not given or stable, but rather, it is always active (Hernes, 2014b), as past, present, and future events, as well as their configurations (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), evolve permanently in a way that maintains continuity and meaning of reality. Let’s consider a paddler, crossing a bay from a point A to a point B on her/his stand-up paddle.3 From an outside point of view, the crossing can be seen as a series of separate event because the board is gliding on the water without stopping. But from the point of view of the paddler, each stroke is a new and distinguishable one, even if it depends on the previous and the next ones. Each stroke addresses the feeling of being in movement on the water, but also the event of having left one shore and the event of eventually arriving at the opposite shore. As each stroke fades into the past, it leaves behind a trace that can be enacted with every other current or expected stroke. Some may stand out more than others because they are associated with a beautiful sighting. Each new stroke leads to the re-definition of the activity— not entirely, but the nature, the difficulty, the meaning of the activity can be ­re-assessed during each stroke. In this view, the meaning of the activity of paddling (easy, difficult, fun, boring, etc.) is constantly redefined according to what the paddler has experienced previously, what she/he is experiencing, and what she/he expects to experience in the future. A tangible temporality is thus re-produced in passing from the flow of indivisible experiences to events, which are distinguishable from one another, yet immanently related. This passage from the indivisible flow of experiences to events is what en­ables actors to position their current moment in a past, a present, and a future (Bergson,  1907/2009). Moreover, it is through this positioning of the actual event into a continuity that actors are able to act in a certain way and anticipate continuity and change.

5.3.2  Organization as a Structure of Events Following this events-based view, the idea of organization gains a specific meaning. Organization is not here viewed as a social or an economic entity, but instead as the very process of co-definition and configuration of events by which people can

Studying Organization from the Perspective   57

both define their actual moment and act in anticipation of novel events. The rise of independent workers and their numerous collaborations provides a good illustration of organization as a structure of events (Hussenot and Sergi,  2018). As independent workers’ activities are orient­ed toward multiple projects that are partly interrelated and involve multiple actors, the organization of these workers cannot be understood as a stable governance structure, but rather as an activity that consists in creating a sense of continuity despite their involvement in numerous projects. The organization emerges here from the temporalities of the projects in order to create a structure of past, present, and future events from which the independent workers can define the current moment, make decisions, and take action. For example, it is based on the structure of events that independent workers can prioritize their tasks and allocate resources to each task. In this view, what we call organization is a structure of past, present, and future events re-enacted by people (Hernes, 2014b; Hussenot, 2019). The notion of structure does not mean that the past, present, and future order is stable or given, but rather that it is constantly negotiated, re-defined, and re-configured by actors. More precisely, the events-based approach does not give primacy to any past, present, or future events. It rejects preconceived primacy and instead aims to understand the configuration of events from the point of view of actors in their actual moment.4 The importance, the duration, and the pace of events is not imposed on actors, but are considered as a way to define the actual moment. In this way, an events-based view differs from more linear views of events (e.g. Langley et al., 2013; Morgeson et al., 2015; Lord et al., 2015), according to which events are defined and viewed in relation to one another in at least two ways—namely, their ordering, which is assumed to remain the same as they move through time, and events are given particular qual­ ities, such as centrality or strength (Morgeson et al., 2015). The continuity of activities that emerges from the structure of events is thus always in a state of becoming. This is in line with the Deleuzian view suggested by Deroy and Clegg (2011: 639), whereby both difference and repetition are brought about by the event: “any event can potentially deform the structural regularities in which it is embedded. Thus, the concept of an event relates to both difference and repetition.” In such a view, organization is defined as a temporal phe­nom­enon expressed through the very structure of events that are constantly re/enacted by actors. Continuity/discontinuity (Weibe,  2010), stability and/or novelty (Hussenot and Missonier,  2016), and distant/near past and future (Hernes and Schultz, 2018) are only modes of defining and configuring the past, the present, and the future. Table 5.1 introduces some of the main concepts of the events-based approach.

5.4  Applying the Events-Based Approach The methodological challenge of an events-based approach is to show how the ­structure of events evolves through actual moments, not merely from one stage to

58  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Table 5.1  Some core concepts of the events-based approach Concepts

Definition

Actual moment

Current experience lived by actors in which they enact a structure of events in order to make sense of the world and act. This is the actual event/current moment; the “now” lived by actors. Sense of history, present and future re/defined through the re/definition and configuration of various events. Continuity brings meaning and ordering to actors. It is also called the continuum by Whitehead (1929). Reification of the flow of experiences into moments that define the very history, the present or the future of the activity and its context. Re/definition of past, present, and future events in the actual moment. Also called “prehension of events” by Whitehead (1929). Configuration of past, present, and future events. This is the very definition of organization. Structure of events re/enacted by actors that defines their current activity, i.e. the current activity’s continuity and ordering, as well as all “things” involved in the current activity.

Continuity Events Enactment of events Structure of events Organization

another, but as both an immanent and a situated process. More precisely, the aim is to show how actors enact a temporality that is constantly re/defined in the “now.” Of course, the events-based approach does not pretend to provide a full description of all the past, present, and future events enacted, but rather tries to offer an understanding of the core events that are re/enacted by actors as they engage in activities.

5.4.1  Depicting the Structure of Events as an Immanent Definition of Temporality The immanent principle described here means basically that events “connect in­tern­ al­ly,” that previous or future events are brought into the “living present” by actors (Hernes, 2014a). The structure of events of an actual moment is thus immanent in the previous one. The way we define the current moment influences the definition of the next current moment. Any representation of the structure of events during a current moment includes - although differs from- the structure of events that was manifest during the previous current moment. It is the progression of the structure of events through actual moments that brings a sense of continuity to actors. As the structure of events is translated in an actual moment from a previous one, the structure of events is neither a mere repetition of the previous structure of events nor entirely new. More precisely, the immanence principle can bring a sense of continuity to actors, not only toward the past but toward the future as well, while

Studying Organization from the Perspective   59

the principle of situatedness might reinforce this sense of continuity in certain situ­ ations, while introducing a sense of novelty in others. The principle of situatedness can give a sense of continuity if the current moment requires one to rely on what has been previously enacted (i.e. past, present, and future events), but it can also provide a sense of novelty if the current moment requires one to redefine and reconfigure past, present, and future events. In whatever way the structure of events is enacted by actors (as bringing a sense of stability and/or novelty), it always serves to define continuity of reality for actors.

5.4.2  Defining Past, Present and Future Events and Transcribing the Structure of Events The literature on organization and temporality engages only partially with the process by which actors select past, present, and future events. However, given the important emergent literature on topics such as the uses of the past (Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank, 2010) and the challenges of addressing distant futures (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014; George et al., 2016; Wright and Nyberg, 2017), the situated dynamics offered by an events-based approach should shed some light on how different elements of the past and future are defined and processed in any current event, enabling the current event to reveal itself to actors. According to the process view (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010; 2017), in which the events-based approach is anchored, any depiction of the structure of events is the result of the construction of a given organizational phenomenon. The depiction of the structure of events is a way to describe the very making process of the continuity, i.e. how actors create a story that enables them to make sense of their actual moment and to act. This real­iza­tion shows us that the researcher is not external to the process of defining the structure of events, since she/he enacts the events in the same way as any other actors. Consequently, the depiction of the structure of events is never an objective one, but rather it is the uncertain outcome of a fragile collective enactment of past, present, and future events marked by on-going negotiations, interpretations, and compromises. In this sense, the main task of the researcher is to experience and transcribe this enactment of the structure of events, i.e. to experience the actual moment and transcribe the structure of events enacted. Figure 5.1 is an attempt to represent the progression of the structure of events of an actual event (A) to other actual events (B and then C). As actual events are simply different “nows” in which the past, the present, and the future are enacted, the figure represents how past, present, and future are co-defined in actual events to provide a sense of continuity that evolves from one actual event to another, providing a sense of both stability and novelty for actors.

60  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

Past events x

Present events x

Actual event (A)

Future events x Past events x’

Present events x’

Actual event (B)

Future events x’ Past events x’’

Present events x’’

Future events x’’

Actual event (C)

Figure 5.1  Progression of the structure of events through actual events

5.5  Some Implications and Contributions of the Events-Based Approach The events-based approach introduced in this chapter aims at studying or­gan­iza­ tion­al phenomena from the perspective of the ontology of temporality. In such a view, organization is a temporal phenomenon, i.e. it is the passage from the in­di­vis­ ible flow of experiences to configuration of past, present, and future events, serving a sense of continuity for actors. Continuity is of great importance because it is primarily from such a sense of continuity that actors can make sense of the world and act. We can list at least three implications and contributions that an events-based approach has to offer. First, this view implies that we see any organizational characteristic as a temporal phenomenon and not as a substantive one. Second, the eventsbased approach provides an alternative to the substantialist view in organization studies that is based on predefined dualisms. Third, by surpassing the substantialist view of organization, the events-based view offers an approach for studying contemporary organizational phenomena characterized by their fluidity and on-going change.

5.5.1  Understanding Organizational Characteristics as Temporal Phenomena By stating that organization is the enactment of a structure of past, present, and future events, the events-based approach offers an interesting way to comprehend organizational characteristics as temporal phenomena. Continuity is not understood here as something imposed on events by an external governance structure or by the physical aspects of the organization (buildings, offices, etc.); instead, continuity is produced and reproduced through the structure of events. In this sense, narration and stories play a key role in enabling continuity. However, such an understanding does not imply that non-humans do not play any role in the re/definition of continuity.

Studying Organization from the Perspective   61

Buildings, technologies, etc. all play a role in re/defining continuity as well, as in such a view, these non-human elements are seen as ingredients of events (Whitehead, 1929; Hussenot, 2019), i.e. they participate in the re/definition of events insofar as their meaning depends on the events they are related to. Following this idea, “things” emerge from the structure of past, present, and future events to make reality tangible and activity possible. In such a view, humans and non-humans are not given entities positioned in a given space and time, but rather, they are abstractions (re)produced through immanent and situated temporal activity. Nevertheless, the fact that nonhumans and humans are abstractions does not mean that non-humans and humans do not exist; instead, as abstractions they gain specific meanings, roles, and statuses because they are embedded into a structure of events, i.e. a history, a present, and a future. By being embedded in this way, all “things” only exist as both outcomes and ingredients of temporality. Organizational phenomena such as collective memory (Hatch and Schultz, 2017), identity (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), culture (Hernes and Schultz, 2017), or strategy (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013) thus emerge and are (re)produced as tem­ poral phenomena. In this view, the relation between the collective history, the present, and the expected future forms the basis for defining any or­gan­iza­tion­al characteristic. Organizational characteristics are thus not made from inherent and stable properties but are always re/defined through temporality. For example, any attempt at developing a governance is a fragile outcome based on an activity’s history and expected future, while this governance is also situated in a current context. Any form of governance is an ingredient of events in the sense that it participates in the re/definition of past, present, and future activities as much as it emerges from those same events. In this way, governance participates in the main­ten­ance of a sense of continuity. By putting temporality first in the analysis, the events-based approach is thus an invitation to reconsider how organizational characteristics emerge and are maintained.

5.5.2  Surpassing Predefined Dualisms and Embracing the Complexity of Continuity The events-based approach considers the continuity of organization not as ­something made up from stable “things,” but rather, as always in a state of becoming, performed through the enactment of the structure of events. This view invites ­scholars to see organization as an ever-evolving phenomenon that is not just a ­constant novelty, but more as progression in which continuity embraces novelty (Hussenot and Missonier, 2016). Organization progresses by partially reproducing previous or­gan­iza­tion­al characteristics while bringing new ones into existence. New and old or­gan­iza­tion­al characteristics are not opposed, but rather, they are co-defined, as these characteristics are re/produced in the re/definition of the structure of events. This view offers an alternative to the one that has conceived of organization as a process based on opposite stages or states, such as change versus stability.

62  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Dualisms such as novelty/stability, order/disorder, etc. are considered not as opposites but rather as different ways to express the very complexity of the continuity re/produced through the immanence and the situatedness of the structure of events. As the progression of the structure of events does not lead to a clear and unique meaning of the continuity of an activity, but instead to a complex one, and because such a progression can be conflicted and open to multiple interpretations, dualisms are only seen as analytical distinctions made by people to make sense of the world. This means that an organizational phe­nom­enon should not be considered as changing or stabilized, ordered or disordered, but rather, as always progressing, continuing as well as becoming novel. Following this idea, what seems important is to study the emergence and reproduction of continuity, and how this continuity is interpreted by actors, without imposing any predefined dualisms on such continuity. As the meaning of the definition and configuration of various enacted events is not always obvious for actors, continuity can seem messy, sometimes leading to very different interpretations among different actors.

5.5.3  Relevance of the Events-Based Approach for Studying Contemporary Organizational Phenomena By considering organization as a structure of events providing continuity, ­meaning, and ordering to actors, the events-based approach provides a relevant framework for understanding some contemporary organizational phenomena. Such a view is especially interesting in a context of ever-evolving ways of working in which the way we define collaboration, job identity, and organization is moving forward (Barley, Becky, and Milliken,  2017). To date, most organizational analyses have been based on the tenet that organization is the social and economic entity that physically and socially circumscribes work activities (Chia, 2003). In such a view, inherited from the industrial and bureaucratic era, work only occurs in organizations. As this substantive view about organization was developed in  this specific context, we can understand the attraction of ­scholars to this paradigm. However, what about the current development of alternative ways of working such as freelancing (Burke, 2015), coworking (Spinuzzi, 2012), the maker movement (Anderson,  2012; Dougherty,  2012), and digital nomadism (Makimoto and Manners, 1997), among others? These ways of working cannot be encapsulated into an organization as a predefined entity, as workers engaging in these types of work are often self-employed but still intensively collaborating with each other without having a specific space and/or delimited work hours within which to do so. Furthermore, these alternative ways of working are not separated from the rest of society but are integrated into it, as they are not only about working but often

Studying Organization from the Perspective   63

represent a lifestyle choice, including, for some of these workers, a political commitment (Dougherty and Conrad, 2016). The same can be said about studies of social or artistic movements (among others). All these phenomena have gained legitimacy in the field of organization studies, but approaches relevant for understanding such phenomena are hard to come by. Our view is that approaches based on temporality, such as the events-based approach, might help scholars to change their focus in studying such organizational phenomena. An events-based approach might contribute to such a change in focus by providing insights without stating the pre-existence of a social and physical structure, but rather, inviting scholars to focus on the re/production of events, their temporality, and based on that, the organizational features emerging from the structure of events. The events-based approach does not deny the existence of organizational characteristics, such as the structure of governance, an organization’s strategy, its identity or even its space, but instead, urges scholars to understand how these characteristics are produced and maintained as immanent and situated abstractions re-produced through the structure of events. By priv­il­ eging the ontology of temporality, the events-based approach provides an alternative view about organization and invites us to reconsider the way we understand organization in order to deal with current developments in our work endeavors and in society at large.

Notes 1. We are very grateful to the editors and especially Juliane Reinecke for her useful comments and ideas that helped us to improve this chapter. A previous version was presented in 2018 during the annual Process Organization Studies Symposium. We also thank the organizing team and participants of this symposium for their astute and insightful feedbacks. 2. The notion of ontology is used to draw attention to the processes whereby temporality and time come to matter and to become something that have a special existence for actors. 3. Stand-up paddle boarding is a sport in which the paddler is standing on a board and using a paddle to move across the water. 4. This point differs from previous developments of the events-based approach (for instance, Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) in which the present and the actual moment were not analytically distinguished but instead were conflated.

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6 The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston

6.1 Introduction New ideas take time; they do not simply appear out of nowhere. Many fast-moving, innovative companies such as Apple, Google, and LinkedIn claim to know this. At AT&T’s Bell Labs, for instance, protecting employees’ time has arguably enabled researchers to produce Nobel prize-winning innovations such as the laser beam and the transistor (Amabile, Hadley, and Kramer, 2002; Burkus and Oster, 2012). Sony and HP have provided “safe havens” away from normal business activities, where employees can use company resources for personal projects that are not officially sanctioned (Zien and Buckler, 1997), while 3M, Google, and Intuit Canada have all allowed staff a percentage of their time to pursue novel ideas (Conceição, Hamill, and Pinheiro, 2002). For Google, this action is justified on the grounds that creativity requires a degree of freedom and flexibility. Accordingly, the company reputedly sanctioned 20 percent of employees’ time for working on ideas that they find personally stimulating (Steiber and Alänge,  2013), although the extent to which this practice is still, or indeed ever was, actually followed may be more urban myth than fact (Hill,  2019). More generally, research into large-scale innovation projects has revealed a variety of different perceptions and strategies for managing time when working with new ideas (Saunders, Van Slyke, and Vogel, 2004), capturing the tem­ poral intensities of key events (Dougherty, Bertels, Chung, Dunne, and Kraemer, 2013), gathering and sustaining momentum (Granqvist and Gustafsson, 2016), and recognizing the “right,” or serendipitous, time for novel ideas to emerge (Garud, Gehman, and Kumaraswamy, 2011). The fact that many companies manage to sustain a continuous flow of novel products and solutions in today’s fast-moving world invites a closer look at time and tem­ poral­ity in relation to creative practice. In particular, how should we understand the various temporalities of creative work in a world where companies are facing everincreasing pressures to innovate more quickly; how might temporality help us to

Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston, The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0006

70  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies think differently about generativity and the dynamics of emergence; and how can companies be confident that, by simply setting aside flexible time, novel ideas will result? Responding to these questions, our argument here is positioned in the con­ tem­por­ary context of late modernity, which Rosa (2003, p. 3, citing Gleick,  1999) claims is characterized by the “acceleration of just about everything.” Whether speed and acceleration are beneficial in creative processes is, however, still very much a matter of debate. For instance, in their study of technology firms that depend upon innovation for survival, Brown and Eisenhardt (1997) found that speedy decisions lead to superior performance. In contrast, Chen et al. (2012) found little support for such a direct relationship between the pace of new product development and ­product success, suggesting instead an inverted U-shaped relationship where initial positive performance declines rapidly with increasing speed due to the limits of human processing capacity. Similarly, pressures to meet strict deadlines have been viewed both as a positive incentive for focused idea generation (Gersick, 1995), and as detrimental to the incubation process (Amabile et al.,  2002), as illustrated, for instance, in Czarniawska’s (2013) study of the news industry, which shows that technology-accelerated news delivery, and the competitive pressure to generate “Breaking News,” undermines traditional journalistic values of credibility, accuracy, and impartiality. As our world accelerates, then, there is an increasingly urgent need for theories of time and temporality that can bring new insight to empirical dilemmas such as these. Much of the existing literature on organizational creativity (e.g. Amabile,  1996; Ford, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin, 1993) is focused on the antecedents to creativity and its outcomes. To the extent that time is even considered in such studies, it is most often treated as an exogenous variable that tracks the orderly progression of creative action over long periods of time, such as in large organizational restructurings or in project team work (Drazin, Glynn, and Kazanjian, 1999; Ford and Sullivan, 2004), or at the opposite extreme it is reduced to that momentary flash when inspiration occurs (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). More processual approaches seek instead to engage with the actual unfolding of creative practice over, or in, time (Sonenshein,  2016; Unsworth and Clegg,  2010), although not necessarily in ways that conform to conventional temporal distinctions (Fortwengel, Schüßler, and Sydow, 2017). For example, based on his interview studies of a large and diverse set of people deemed to be creative, Csikszentmihalyi (1975; 1997) came to understand creativity in terms of what he calls “flow,” an experiential state that: denotes the wholistic sensation present when we act in total involvement . . . the state in which action follows upon action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part . . . we feel in control of our actions and . . . there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975: 43)

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This notion of flow seems inherently temporal, implying as it does a dynamic c­ on­tinu­ity of movement in ongoing creative practice (Petranker, 2002), but in attending to flow as a state of being, Csikszentmihalyi’s work tends to overlook the temporal implications of creative becoming. Mainemelis (2001) has gone some way towards addressing this gap in the theorization of flow by proposing the notion of timelessness as a key characteristic of creative experience. However, whilst it is certainly true that creatives often report losing all sense of time when they are engaged in creative work, this apparent disconnection from time is by no means uniquely associated with creativity. Csikszentmihalyi noted that timelessness might equally arise in contexts as diverse as experiences of religious transcendence or in simple play. For instance, the gambler’s experience of timelessness in a casino devoid of clocks and windows has little to offer any re-theorization of creative action. Further, the characterization of creative practice as timeless denies the potential for different temporal resources to contribute to the emergence of creative work. The issue for theory, then, seems to be less a matter of time per se, and more about what we actually make of time and the multiple temporalities of creative practice. In this chapter, we propose timefulness as an alternative formulation of emergent creativity, in which multiple temporalities may be understood as resources that are themselves continuously emergent, and which in combination have the potential to generate a multiplicity of options for creative action. In making this argument, we elaborate two contrasting perspectives on time: a realist view of clock time, or being time, with its commitment to the orderly passage of pasts, presents, and futures in time, and an idealist view of becoming time as the temporal experience of emergence with time, which is inherent to any creative action. But first, we set the context for this debate in the next section by exploring the concept of acceleration and its complement, deceleration, especially as articulated by Rosa (2003;  2013). Later, we examine the role of acceleration and deceleration in relation to being and becoming temporalities. The chapter concludes with our reflections on the value of timefulness as a way of engaging with the temporal dimensions of creative practice, and the potential costs of unchecked acceleration.

6.2  Our Accelerating World The ever-growing demand in Western economies for more, and faster, creativity has wide-reaching implications for contemporary organizations, especially those in the creative industries (Brown and Eisenhardt,  1997; DeFillippi, Grabher, and Jones, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008). However, the connections between this insistent demand for creativity and the accelerating trends in both business and society remain under-examined. The effects of acceleration are evident in both the demands of modern working life (Ulferts, Korunka, and Kubicek, 2013) and the manner in which temporalities are understood and organized (Sennett, 1998). Although often

72  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies valorized as a means towards greater efficiency and the freeing up of more spare time, acceleration can also become a pathological syndrome where the early ef­fect­ ive­ness of speed traps organizations into ever-faster processes as requisite for their survival (Perlow, Okhuysen, and Repenning,  2002). Acceleration may then be ex­peri­enced as a source of stress, hurry sickness (Adam,  1995), time famine (Perlow,  1999), and “dead”lines. Too much to do, and insufficient time to do it, creates a crisis mentality that results in burnout, exhaustion, and enforced deceleration. Social acceleration is arguably a defining feature of both formal organizations and modern life more generally (Rosa, 2013; Wajcman, 2008). In the specific context of business, Grey (2009) suggests that the pursuit of increasing speed, as exemplified by practices ranging from Taylor’s time and motion studies to more contemporary interests in business process re-engineering, just-in-time production, and lean manu­fac­tur­ing, is emblematic of the late industrial era. Speed has become the handmaiden of progress and technological advancement, an end in its own right that has been cast adrift from its early modernist objectives of efficiency and optimization. In his meticulous drawing together of sources from sociology, social psychology, history, politics, and cultural theory, Rosa (2003) has developed a systematic theory of social acceleration that offers a much needed temporal perspective on the developmental logics of late modernity. He uses this analytical framework to ask what, if anything, is common across the enormous range of accelerating processes that characterize our world today, whether these be at work, in family life, in terms of lifestyles, fashions, and changing social practices, or on the global/political stage. Rosa’s model is based upon three not entirely distinct categories of acceleration, each of which he links to a specific driving mechanism. Perhaps the most obvious domain for social acceleration is in the speeding up of communications, data processing, and transport through technological advances that have drastically reshaped production and consumption into globally connected activities where physical distance has ceased to be a barrier to the almost instantaneous flow of information and change (Adam, 1995). The primary driver for this technological form of acceleration is the capitalist economy, particularly to the extent that time is equated to money, thereby providing both a means of commodifying and intensifying labor, and a source of competitive advantage. The second category in Rosa’s model is the acceleration of social change by means of which society itself may be understood as speeding up. This is exemplified, for instance, by changes in the relationship between family and work from “an intergenerational pace of change in early-modern society . . . to an intra-generational pace in late modernity” (Rosa, 2003: 8, emphasis in original), in which the life-span of individuals is likely to exceed the time-span of a family or any given occupation. Here, acceleration is driven by the increasingly fluid and contingent structures and practices of society, where it is the complexity of emergent relations across the social system that introduces new and potentially destabilizing disruptions capable of ­rippling across the entire system.

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Finally, Rosa argues that the pace of life itself is a third category of social a­ c­cel­er­ation, as reflected in people’s personal experiences of time, as well as their awareness of time compression and the scarcity of time. This leads to growing stress as people worry about not having enough time to keep up, with the consequence that they increasingly multi-task while also spending less time sleeping, preparing food and eating, being with family, or enjoying leisure activities. The driver of this form of acceleration is the desire to “taste life in all its heights and depths and in its full complexity” (Rosa, 2003: 13), which involves reimagining a fulfilled life as one that continuously expands beyond one’s own immediate experiential sphere. Whilst these mechanisms of acceleration may dictate our experience of late modernity, they are not necessarily universally accepted and celebrated. Indeed, many traditional societies, such as indigenous and local communities, resist the Western obsession with progress, preferring narratives of knowing that sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly draw out and weave together multiple threads of meaning (see, for example, Holmberg and Ayalik,  2019; Rosile, Boje, and Claw,  2018). Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness (1996) offers an evocative reflection on the implications of acceleration for human experience. The story opens with an account of a man riding his motorcycle faster and faster in a veritable ecstasy of speed. Kundera surmises that the faster the man goes, the more he finds himself living only in the present moment, cut off from the past which informs his memories, and also from the future which engages his imagination. With neither memories nor prospects, he effectively stands ­outside of time, outside of the chronology of life, literally outside his own standpoint (ex-stasis). In this state he can identify only with the present moment and nothing else; past and future are forgotten and inaccessible; he is in a state of timelessness. In this state, he is as innocent as a child who has no past, and as fearless as a person who has no future. Kundera tellingly describes this ecstatic timelessness, not as a moment of inspiration, but rather as an ordinary, everyday, vulgar experience that merely seeks relief from the remorseless effort of becoming ourselves. There is no possibility for creative action when experience is reduced in this way to a succession of timeless moments. Responding to this ecstatic angst, Rosa suggests that, in fact, social acceleration often functions as a superficial phenomenon that merely papers over a deep-seated inertia, which slows down, or even paralyzes possibilities for social change. He points to a number of natural limitations to perpetual acceleration, such as bio­ logic­ al constraints on reproduction and growth, anthropological orientations towards certain types of perception, the social boundedness of cognitions, and the speed with which our brains can process sensory inputs. Furthermore, human systems may generate dysfunctional responses to acceleration, such as the traffic jams produced by more people trying to reach their destinations quickly, or the impending failure of the UK National Health Service as a result of pathological levels of complexity caused by trying to do more and more. These apparently natural limits function as an unintentional antidote to acceleration by introducing decelerating dynamics into social systems.

74  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies There are also more intentional forms of deceleration that may be invoked to resist the effects of acceleration. For instance, at a personal level, taking time out for meditation, or yoga, or just to get off the treadmill for a while, is seen as a way of preparing to re-engage more energetically and more creatively with the accelerating world. Even scheduling in some mindless activity from time to time may allow for some necessary separation from endless acceleration (Elsbach and Hargadon, 2006). In addition, there are more radical social movements of deceleration that actively challenge the speeding up of modern life. Examples include the Slow Food movement (Petrini, 2007; van Bommel and Spicer, 2011), which recognizes the threats to environmental sustainability and social well-being of lives lived in the fast lane, Slow Cities (Knox, 2005), which seek to reclaim the human dimensions of city living, and Slow Democracy (Saward, 2017), which responds to the challenge posed to democratic design by social acceleration. Even Slow Radio has made a recent appearance on the BBC as a response to the relentless pace and pessimism of much news broadcasting. These various forms of deceleration all acknowledge that increasing speed in­ev­it­ ably leads to short-termism and mounting uncertainties, which in turn call forth quick impulsive reactions that may “make do” in the interim but ultimately risk falling short of what is actually needed in any given situation. They do offer encouragement to avoid unnecessary and possibly costly mistakes by advancing more slowly and with more deliberation, but can simply “slowing down” ever be a practical answer to the challenges of doing creative work in the context of social acceleration? We suggest that in order to advance understanding of creativity we first need to develop an appropriate theory of temporality, so we now turn to consider two alternative approaches to theorizing time.

6.3  Different Times, Different Temporalities Time, its nature, how it can be represented, and how we abide within it, is a puzzle that has preoccupied humans throughout history. Indeed, analysis of the parietal art produced by our prehistoric ancestors in places such as the Lascaux cave complex in France suggests that Paleolithic artists were every bit as concerned as we are today with the depiction of movement and change (Lima, 2012). Not only did they represent seasonal cycles, but they also used multiple adjacent frames, just as con­tem­por­ ary movies do, to suggest movement. Thousands of years later in the fifth century ce, the ineffability of time is still reflected in Augustine’s question “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided no one asks me. But if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I do not know” (cited by Bardon, 2013: 24). The problem that Augustine was struggling with is that as soon as we reify our ordinary everyday tem­ poral experience by translating it onto objective representations, we lose the capacity to contemplate the becoming of meaning (Williams,  2016). It is this dilemma that continues to underpin philosophical thinking about time and temporality today: on

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one hand, we think about time as a way of ordering events across the discrete ­tem­poral­ities of past, present, and future, and on the other it is connected to the tem­poral experience of emergence in the creative unfolding of living. Bardon (2013) maps these two perspectives respectively onto realist and idealist orientations. The realist position is that time exists as some “thing” that is independent of human experience, a universal law of nature that acts as a temporal container within which events are logically ordered in time. Past, present, and future are more or less distinct temporal categories that are defined relative to each other in dualistic, either-or terms. This perspective has come to be dominant in Western thinking, especially since the Enlightenment and the advent of the clock, which literally carves time up into equally spaced intervals. The idealist alternative asserts that temporality is the means with which we experience the dynamic changefulness of living. There is no external measure of time—temporality is becoming within us rather than us being in it—and the extent to which experience appears to be ordered and progressive is simply the product of our own mental constructions rather than a consequence of any immutable law of nature. This idealist position has a long and venerable history reaching back at least as far as the change-denying Eleatic philosophers of Ancient Greece, then returning more recently with Kant and twentieth-century process philo­sophers such as Bergson, Mead, and Heidegger. Although these idealist arguments may seem extreme and counterintuitive to our modern minds, they are remarkably resonant with post-Newtonian developments in physics, which have challenged every conventional assumption about the independent existence of time, its uniformity, and its directionality, pointing instead to temporal meanings that we construct in our efforts to make sensible the vast complexities of the cosmos (Rovelli, 2017). The difference between realist and idealist perspectives is more than simply the extent to which time is treated as either an objective measure or a subjective ex­peri­ ence. The key distinction we wish to emphasize is between the realist view of being time as passage from past to present to future, and the non-successive idealist view of the becoming present as an emergent experience resourced by pasts and futures that have been purposively constructed. Whereas realism seeks patterns of pre­dict­ abil­ity, idealism engages with the disruptive dynamics of creativity. These two philosophical orientations should not, however, be taken as mutually excluding. Nor do we intend to suggest that either is superior to the other, but rather that they offer valuable complementarities in relation to creative practice. To elaborate these points, we now develop each perspective in detail, paying particular attention to their implications for acceleration and creativity.

6.3.1  Creative Practice in Time Although time has always fascinated philosophers, it has only relatively recently entered seriously into the organization studies domain (Antonacopoulou and

76  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Tsoukas, 2002; Goodman, Lawrence, Ancona, and Tushman, 2001; Hernes, Simpson, and Soderlund, 2013; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017). The particular challenge here is to expand current theoretical understandings of time to provide more comprehensive insights into the temporal nature of organizational practice. To the extent that organizations are social phenomena, they necessarily change and evolve over time, both shaping and being shaped by human activities that are themselves formed in time. The significance of this temporal disposition is reflected in a growing vocabulary that distinguishes between different time-reckoning systems such as clock time, event time, cyclical time, quiet time, banana time, just-in-time, and so on (Bluedorn and Denhardt,  1988; Butler,  1995; Clark,  1985; Perlow,  1999; Petersen,  2002; Roy,  1959). More nuanced typologies distinguish different aspects of time such as polychronicity, speed, punctuality and temporal depth (Bluedorn and Jaussi, 2007), time aggregations, durations, frequencies, rhythms, and cycles of time (George and Jones,  2000), and temporal structuring (Orlikowski and Yates,  2002). Time is also manifest in organizational pathologies such as diminishing product life cycles that feed into the voracious modern demand for consumables (Brose, 2004), time impoverishment (Perlow,  1999) where a perceived shortage of time produces stress and anxiety, and of course the time-distorting effects of acceleration (Czarniawska, 2013; Grey, 2009; Rosa, 2003). The underpinning assumption in all of these developments is the steady progression of clock time, which overtly supports and justifies organizational control through patterns of replication and predictability (Adam, 1995). Its significance is demonstrated, for instance, in the globalized economy, where twenty-four world time zones provide for activities to be coordinated across multiple locations. These time zones facilitate the workings of society by scheduling a host of services that are made measurable, and therefore manageable, through time budgeting and time efficiencies (Hernes et al., 2013; Simpson, 2014). Clock time also provides for the commodification of labor by attaching an exchange value to time worked and the nature of that work (Giddens, 1990), which in turn sets the scene for disputes over who has control of time. Clock time, then, is both a commodity and a mechanism of control in the production processes of contemporary industrialized societies. Adam (1995) argues that clock time, because of its relentless and mechanistic uniformity, serves to obscure the natural temporalities of lived experience. Nevertheless, clock time often remains an invisible, taken-for-granted force in theory development so it is in­struct­ ive to briefly consider its origins and implications. As we have previously suggested, clock time is an Enlightenment invention that draws on Newtonian mechanics to understand time in relation to space, as a universal law of nature, a mechanism that is entirely exogenous to lived experience. Here, time is constituted as an infinite sequence of “instants” that stretches out in an endless succession towards past and future instants. Each of these instants is independent of those that precede or follow it, and each is also infinitely divisible or summable as durations that can be reckoned using clocks or calendars. So, for example, an instant may be a nano-second, an hour, a season, or an epoch—the defining quality of time

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in this view is that instants proceed in a unitary succession as one second follows another, and each season heralds the next. The relationship between past, present, and future is simply that of succession, where the meaning of any instant does not depend upon the carrying forward of experience from previous instants. This view of time is consistent with a realist, being mode of thought that is characterized by the externalization of time as some “thing” within which practice takes place, and where time can be represented as an ordered sequence from past to present to future. This approach aims to distil metrical theories or laws that formalize relationships between variables already stabilized as entities within the field of inquiry. Although this strongly rationalistic view has been widely rejected in or­gan­ iza­tion­al studies, for instance in the contrast between chronos and kairos (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002), traces of well-ordered pasts, presents, and futures nevertheless persist, suggesting continuing adherence to realist assumptions about time as an “epochal succession” of events that have “temporal directionality” (see for example Hernes, this volume, Chapter 3). In fact, the very notion of speed and acceleration is a product of realist thinking with its commitment to the ordered and uniform progression of clock time. The speeding up of technologies, societal shifts, and the pace of life in general are measured against a ticking clock, each event being afforded fewer and fewer instants of time in the race for progress. Thus acceleration has a logical limit when the duration of any given task or experience is reduced to a single instant that is effectively timeless, devoid of duration, and stripped of any meaningful association with past or future. Importantly for our argument here, clock time cannot create time because it cannot address the variability and unanticipated emergents of lived experience, and neither can it engage with the dynamic continuities of flow. It cannot actually explain the generation of anything new, although it is certainly useful for tracking the movements of already-formed entities as they appear in successive instants. Clock time produces futures that can be nothing more than projections of what has already passed. Its very finitude excludes the generative possibilities of becoming. To grapple with creative emergence then, it is necessary to seek an alternative to the realist image of time as a discrete, metrical passage from past to future, one that evolves with and through human action. Accordingly, we now turn to idealist perspectives on time to explore what they might offer to creative practice.

6.3.2  Creatively Practicing Time Practicing is, first and foremost, a lived experience, a becoming that unfolds with time (Shotter, 2006). However, if we are ever to grasp this dynamic quality of practice, we need a theory of time that focuses on the movements of temporal experience rather than on discrete, disembodied, and static “instants.” This need is reflected in  recent developments in process organization studies, where researchers are attending more to questions of “how” than “what,” especially how organizational

78  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies phenomena emerge and develop over time (Garud, Simpson, Langley, and Tsoukas,  2015). As Langley et al. (2013) observe, this growing interest in process invites a comprehensive re-examination of ontological, epistemological, and methodological issues in process research. A re-theorization of time as temporal ex­peri­ ence is a necessary complement to these developments, one that acknowledges there is more to understand than can be represented by realism alone. Early contributors to this new project include Kaplan and Orlikowski (2014), who draw on Emirbayer and Mische (1998) to redefine the past and future as interpretations rather than fixed realities, by means of which coherent and shared accounts of present actions may be constructed. Similarly, Hernes et al. (2013) emphasize the dynamic and ongoing interplay between pasts and futures as resources that inform actions in the present, while Simpson, Buchan, and Sillince (2017) exploit this dynamic interplay in an empirical study of emergent leadership. These dynamic accounts of temporal experience ultimately trace their origins back to Henri Bergson, for whom movement and time were recurring themes right across his diverse oeuvre. “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed” (Bergson,  1907/2011: 17). Living (and practicing) then, is a temporal matter that, at best, can be only partially understood through an external lens such as clock time. Bergson refers to this form of time as “abstract time” (1907/2011: 19), which in his view is not really time at all as it attends only to the succession of instants (Guerlac, 2015). As such, it is merely a mechanism of spatialization by means of which we divide up our experience of living into sequences of instantaneous moments. By contrast, Bergson’s “concrete time” reflects a temporal perspective in which the past endures into the present in a perpetual process of becoming. In other words, the present can only come into being if the past is contemporaneous, thus confounding the conventional dualistic separation of past and present. It is by prolonging the past into the present that temporal experience acquires the continuity of durée.1 Thus past and present are no longer conceived as discrete instants in time, but rather as coexisting and embodied experiences. Durée “is not merely one instant replacing another . . . [it is] the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances” (Bergson, 1907/2011: 11). It is durée that differentiates between “an hour spent by a condemned prisoner waiting to be executed, an hour spent by a child waiting for the start of their birthday party, an hour spent undergoing interrogation, an hour spent in a traffic jam, an hour walking in the forest, or an hour making love” (Linstead and Mullarkey,  2003: 6). Furthermore, because there is a multiplicity of pasts that may be carried forward into presents, temporal experience is both plural and irreversible. “We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed” (Bergson, 1907/2011: 12). The comparison that Bergson makes here between “abstract” and “concrete” time parallels the philosophical distinction that we have drawn between realist and idealist orientations to time. However, it is qualitatively different from the contrasts

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frequently invoked in the organizational literature between objective time and ­subjective time, chronos and kairos, or clock time and event time. Whereas these various dichotomies are unified by their common assumption that it is entities that move, Bergson’s more radical position is that movement, or process, is ontologically prior to entities, so “abstract” and “concrete” times are different, not just in degree, but in kind. Rather than a dualistic, either-or distinction, Bergson is articulating the both-and perspectives of a duality that offers ontologically different ways of seeing and engaging with practice. Heidegger (2010/1953) similarly argues that clock time is a de-temporalized and spatialized representation of time, quantified in units that remain constant regardless of the specifics of any given situation. Instead, he favors a non-successive tem­ poral­ity of becoming in which past, present, and future are interpenetrating and co-constituting rather than discrete points in an ordered sequence of time. Blattner (this volume, Chapter 2) shows how Heidegger builds on Husserl’s concepts of retention and protention to construct an originary temporality in which the experience of the present retains something of what has passed while also anticipating something of what is yet to come. The future, then, is not some imaginary “thing” located in metrical order beyond the present, but rather it is a becoming future that will prob­ ably, but not certainly, come to pass. Equally, the past is not a memory that is recalled; it is a consciousness of what has passed in the continuity of experience. For Heidegger, this continuously emergent temporality is an ontological precondition for lived experience. Mead (1932) also extends Bergson’s idea of the coexistence of past and present in temporal experience by invoking the Pragmatist Maxim, which asserts that our present actions are conditioned not only by the past, but also by what we anticipate their future consequences might be (Peirce,  1878). Like Heidegger, Mead understands temporality as the co-evolutionary engagement of pasts and futures in the actions of the present moment (Simpson, 2014). Here, a present is defined by something happening. It is a movement, a turning point, a becoming, that is inherently creative in its changefulness. Each present is distinguished from others by the change that it generates rather than the state that it accomplishes, and as such, it is not only a direct expression of creative action, but also a profoundly processual concept. Pasts and futures, then, are the epistemic resources that interpenetrate to create the dynamic movements of presents, which in turn inform the further reconstruction of pasts and futures. “The long and short of it is that the past (or the meaningful structure of the past) is as hypothetical as the future” (Mead, 1932: 44). Consequently, it is only the present that is real in an ontological sense, and it is the simultaneity of hypothesized pasts and futures in the present that generates creative action by allowing us to take alternative attitudes and see alternative perspectives. In what Adam (1995: 78) describes as “the most radical of all social science conceptualizations of time,” Mead explicitly links temporality to sociality, which he defines as “the capacity of being several things at once” (1932: 75), the liminal ex­peri­ence of being “betwixt and between the old system and the new” (1932: 73).

80  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies For him, sociality is expressed as emergence—it is that process of readjustment which produces continuity in experience. By simultaneously drawing on a past and a future, novel possibilities for present action may be realized. In his Introduction to Mead’s “Philosophy of the Present,” Arthur Murphy elaborates this notion of simultaneity: The novel event must not merely be in two systems; it must adjust this plurality of systematic relations in such a fashion that “its presence in the later system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs” (page 92) while its older relations are reflected in the new system it has entered. It carries over the old relations, yet in its emergent novelty it reflects back upon the older world the uniqueness of its new situation.  (Mead, 1932: 25)

Temporal experience is thus constituted in the ever-changing sphere of social engagement where our interactions do not merely exist in time, but they are time. By walking simultaneously in our own shoes and those of others, and taking the alternative perspectives offered, new and unanticipated meanings may be generated in the present. It is in these dynamic presents that both selves and their situations can be creatively transformed in the ongoing social processes of living. These idealist accounts of temporality from Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead capture to varying degrees the fluidity, emergence, and heterogeneity of a worldview that is lived rather than merely counted, that attends to the flow of experience rather than the fixity of entities, and that raises issues rather than securing answers. Following Chia (1995), the view of temporal experience that we are advancing might be called “postmodern” but its meaning is more exact than can be conveyed by this broad term; we intend it precisely as an ontologically processual account of the tem­ poral resourcing of creative practice. Far from the timelessness implied by the sequential “instants” of clock time, here temporality is filled with a multiplicity of times which, in their dynamic interplay, generate the flow of experience. Following Mead in particular, we propose that an idealist approach to time is characterized by timefulness as temporal resources drawn from past recollections and future imaginings interpenetrate to produce novel and unexpected outcomes. Furthermore, timefulness is necessarily social as it brings together different viewpoints that invite the creative reconstitution of time by allowing us to reassess situations through the experiences of others. We have previously suggested acceleration is a concept that is rooted in a realist, clock time perspective, but is there anything that a becoming temporality might offer to extend this understanding? What is clear is that without timefulness there is no prospect of creative novelty or innovation, and of course without these, the whole industrial agenda would grind to a halt. The critical question then is not how to speed up timefulness, but rather, how to accomplish more through it. The old adage “make haste slowly” reminds us that allocating time for creativity may produce better results, but the notion of timefulness extends this idea by emphasizing that it is

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the temporal quality of this affordance of time that is all important. It seems that this is precisely what the fast-moving, innovating companies we introduced at the ­beginning of this chapter may have recognized.

6.4  Timefulness, Acceleration, Creative Practice The puzzle that has motivated this chapter is to better understand the temporal dimensions of creativity, especially in the late modern context of an accelerating world. In building our argument, we have contrasted realist and idealist orientations to time, and have concluded that clock time (as well as other successive forms of time) provides more readily for the control and prediction of recurring processes than the flexibility and flow of creative practice. Although the limitations of clock time, with its relentless and ordered progression, are well recognized in the or­gan­iza­tion­al literature (Reinecke and Ansari, 2017; Simpson, 2014), many studies still quite appropriately engage the dualistic sequencing of past, present, and future in order to trace timelines and explore temporal structures. The ­problems with this approach are, however, exacerbated by the accelerating trends in technology, social change, and the pace of life (Rosa,  2003), where like the speeding man on a motor­cycle in Kundera’s story, passing instants are stripped of their temporal context and meaning as time becomes more and more compressed, and ultimately timeless. The notion of deceleration, whether it be a natural consequence of, or a volitional response to, these accelerating trends, redirects attention towards the dynamics of slowness by means of which the timelines of our lives might be decompressed (Parkins, 2004). In an accelerating world “The density of time increases. The gaps are being filled” (Eriksen, 2001: 21), whereas deceleration slows the pace of practice by reopening and expanding the gaps in the progression of time. However, to the extent that deceleration is defined in dualistic opposition to acceleration, it will suffer the same limitations in its temporal theorization despite its commitment to a more expansive and flexible temporality. Because deceleration is tied to realist assumptions about the linear and unitary succession of past, present, and future, it cannot provide an antidote to the lack of creativity inherent in clock time. The idealist temporalities of Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead offer insights into an alternative form of time in which temporal experience is reconfigured as emergent process. This understanding of time is inseparable from the processes of living, and by extension, creative practice. Lived experience then, is an evolving process punctuated by creative actions that make sensible, and give meaning to, the present. We have argued it is this simultaneous juxtapositioning of pasts and futures in the present that generates the movements of creative action, the turning points of change, and the flows of becoming. This temporal simultaneity demonstrates what we have called timefulness, by which we mean to indicate dynamic and creative presents that are filled with interpenetrating pasts and futures.

82  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The well-known story of Art Fry’s creation of Post-It Notes at 3M illustrates this dynamic simultaneity of pasts and futures in developing a new product (Fry, 2008). A striking feature of Fry’s story is how his extracurricular activities (golfing and singing) provided epistemic resources for his idea generation. It was on the 3M golf course, at the second hole of the red nine to be precise, that he first heard about Spence Silver’s discovery of sticky micro-spheres that “don’t know what to stick to. They’re real interesting because you can’t dissolve them and you can’t melt them. It’s like sticking to a bunch of marbles.” He was sufficiently intrigued by these microspheres that he went along to hear Spence Silver talk about them at a 3M technical forum. Curiosity satisfied, Fry then filed this information away. It was some time later, when he was singing in his church choir, that the slip of paper marking his place in the musical score fell out just as he stood up to sing. “Everyone else was singing and I was trying to find what page we were on. I thought, I wish I could have a bookmark that would stick to the paper but couldn’t pull it apart.” Recalling Silver’s sticky micro-spheres, Fry realized that they are more sticky when they are tightly packed together, and less sticky when they are spread apart, so there should be “some magic spacing” that would work just right for paper. This question then became the focus of his experiments, and the rest is history. What we see here is a classic illustration of Mead’s sociality, where recollections of the past (Silver’s “glue”) and imaginings of the future (dependable page markers) interpenetrated in a present to stimulate experimentation, and eventually a novel product. Fry’s creativity thus involved more than just timeless immersion in the flow of experimentation, or having a bit of time to spare for new thinking. It was also timefully resourced by the simultaneity of pasts and futures that created the conditions for sociality. Mead argues that it is through this readjustment of meanings that conscious mind is continuously reconstituted in social interactions. Timefulness thus implies mindfulness, which evolves through the relational and co-productive dynamics of dialogue. Similarly, Heidegger (2010/1953) designates “care” as an existential quality of being-with the world and others. By extension, we propose, therefore, that carefulness is integral to our understanding of timefulness as a social phenomenon that depends on deliberative and attentive practice. Although details provided in Fry’s podcast (2008) are sketchy, he does certainly acknowledge the social and collaborative context for his work. In his view, having ideas is the easy part, but without the collaborative exchange of ideas there can be no evolution of either mindfulness or carefulness. The third quality of timefulness that we see in Fry’s account is that of playfulness, as exemplified by his golfing activities, and also his playful experimentation to find the perfect spacing for sticky micro-spheres on Post-It Notes. It is this playfulness that addresses the ever-present dynamics of learning in all creative processes. Timefulness thus offers a rich conceptualization of the ways in which creative practice may be realized alongside, and threaded through, the unfolding continuities of temporal experience. For researchers seeking to understand creative practice, this conceptualization challenges conventional realist assumptions about the sequential

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ordering of pasts, presents, and futures, offering instead a non-successive and ­non-dualistic temporality in which it is the simultaneity of pasts and futures that creates the possibilities for novelty and change to emerge in the present. This temporal reconfiguration has significant implications for the doing of empirical research as it requires us to turn our attention to the movements and flows of emergent practice in the present rather than the retrospective reconstruction of time-ordered narratives. The methodological challenges to working in this way are significant, but there is now a growing body of literature that is concerned with, for instance, mobilities (Urry,  2007), travelling concepts (Simpson, Tracey, and Weston,  2018), and the shadowing of movement (Czarniawska, 2007), all of which inform a nomadic style of engagement where the researcher is embedded and participating rather than observing objectively from outside the action. However, there is still plenty of potential for both empirical and methodological developments in advancing this becoming perspective on temporality. Because timefulness is fundamentally grounded in ongoing practice, it also has direct implications for organizations as they seek creative ways of enhancing their activities. Whereas the accelerating pace of business is often a source of anxiety and stress, timefulness reminds us that mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness are also qualities of the temporal experience that constitutes the processes of creativity. Thus there is more to the creative successes of companies like Apple, Google, and LinkedIn than simply protecting time. We surmise that they also invest in creating the conditions in which timefulness can flourish and haste can be accomplished more slowly.

6.5 Conclusion In this chapter, we have focused attention on the temporal dimensions that underpin a processual understanding of creative practice, especially in the late modern context of an accelerating world. Drawing on the idealist thinking of Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead, we have emphasized the importance of temporal experience, rather than simply the passage of time, in understanding the continuity and creativity of practice. Our argument is directed towards unsettling those powerfully established notions of successive being time that prevail in the West in order to open up opportunities for new questions and new insights into the creative processes of becoming. We propose that it is in the timeful simultaneity of interpenetrating pasts and futures that creative presents can arise. Instead of attending to the inputs, the agendas, the decisions, the structures, and the outputs of creative practice, then, we endeavor to trace the creative movements and flows of generative work. In making this argument, it has not been our intention to reject clock time as a legitimate temporal frame, but rather to demonstrate that, on its own, it can never account for the emergent creativity that is inherent in all human practice. Further, because acceleration and deceleration are essentially being time concepts, they have little relevance to an idealist take on time; we have proposed mindfulness, carefulness,

84  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and playfulness as potentially more relevant and more dynamic constructs to ­mo­tiv­ate research into the becoming time of creativity. We see being time and ­becoming time as complementary temporal perspectives, each offering different ways of understanding and researching the processes of organizing. Whereas being time, with its dualistic separation of past, present, and future, may be ideally suited to tracking time sequences, becoming time attends to the generative possibilities that arise when pasts and futures are juxtaposed to resource emergent presents. The invitation to researchers, then, is to actively explore the interplay between these two temporalities, thereby deepening and enriching scholarly inquiry into the temporal organizing of creative practice.

Note 1. We use Bergson’s original language here to distinguish his notion of durée from the more general usage of “duration,” which tends to refer to a measurable span of time.

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86  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Garud, R., Gehman, J., and Kumaraswamy, A. (2011). Complexity Arrangements for Sustained Innovation: Lessons from 3M Corporation. Organization Studies, 32(6), 737–67. Garud, R., Simpson, B., Langley, A., and Tsoukas, H. (2015). Introduction: How Does Novelty Emerge? In R. Garud, B. Simpson, A. Langley, and H. Tsoukas (Eds), Process Research in Organization Studies: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations (pp. 1–24). Oxford: Oxford University Press. George, J., and Jones, G. (2000). The Role of Time in Theory and Theory Building. Journal of Management, 26(4), 657–84. Gersick, C.  J. (1995). Everything New under the Gun: Creativity and Deadlines. In C. M. Ford and D. A. Gioia (Eds), Creative Action in Organizations: Ivory Tower Visions and Real World Voices (pp. 142–8). London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, R., and Pratt, A. (2008). In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture and Society, 25(7–8), 1–30. Gleick, J. (1999). Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. New York: Pantheon. Goodman, P. S., Lawrence, B. S., Ancona, D. G., and Tushman, M. L. (2001). Introduction. Academy of Management Review, 26(4), 507–11. Granqvist, N., and Gustafsson, R. (2016). Temporal Institutional Work. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 1009–35. Grey, C. (2009). Speed. In P. Hancock and A. Spicer (Eds), Understanding Corporate Life (pp. 27–45). London: Sage. Guerlac, S. (2015). Time of Emergence/Emergence of Time: Life in the Age of Mechanical (Re)production. In R. Garud, B. Simpson, A. Langley, and H. Tsoukas (Eds.), Process Research in Organization Studies: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1953/2010). Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hernes, T., Simpson, B., and Soderlund, J. (2013). Managing and Temporality. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 29(1), 1–6. Hill, G. (2019). The Myth of Google’s 20% Time. Chief Innovation Officer. Available at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/the-myth-of-google-s-20-time. Holmberg, N., and Ayalik, T. (2019). Aural Cycles. canadianart (Spring). Available at: https://canadianart.ca/features/aural-cycles/. Kaplan, S., and Orlikowski, W. (2014). Temporal Work in Strategy Making. Organization Science, 24(4), 965–95. Knox, P.  L. (2005). Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World. Journal of Urban Design, 10(1), 1–11. Kundera, M. (1996). Slowness. London: Faber and Faber. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van de Ven, A. (2013). Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13.

The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World  87 Lima, P. (2012). The Many Metamorphoses of Lascaux, V.  Bell (Trans.). Montélimar, France: Éditions Synops. Linstead, S., and Mullarkey, J. (2003). Time, Creativity and Culture: Introducing Bergson. Culture and Organization, 9(1), 3–13. Mainemelis, C. (2001). When the Muse Takes It All: A Model for the Experience of Timelessness in Organizations. Academy of Management Review, 26(4), 548–65. Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Orlikowski, W., and Yates, J. (2002). It’s about Time: Temporal Structuring in Organizations. Organization Science, 13(6), 684–700. Parkins, W. (2004). Out of Time: Fast Subjects and Slow Living. Time and Society, 13(2–3), 363–82. doi:10.1177/0961463x04045662 Peirce, C. S. (1878). How to Make our Ideas Clear. Popular Science Monthly, 12 (January), 286–302. Perlow, L. A. (1999). Time Famine: Towards a Sociology of Work Time. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 57–81. Perlow, L. A., Okhuysen, G. A., and Repenning, N. P. (2002). The Speed Trap: Exploring the Relationship between Decision Making and Temporal Context. Academy of Management Journal, 45(5), 931–55. Petersen, P.  B. (2002). The Misplaced Origin of Just-In-Time Production Methods. Management Decision, 40(1/2), 82–8. Petranker, J. (2002). Time and Knowledge: Comments on Mainemelis’s “When the Muse Takes It All: A Model for the Experience of Timelessness in Organizations.” Academy of Management Review, 27(3), 339–40. Petrini, C. (2007). Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. New York: Rizzoli. Reinecke, J., and Ansari, S. (2017). Time, Temporality and Process Studies. In A. Langley and H.  Tsoukas (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 402–16). London: Sage. Rosa, H. (2003). Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society. Constellations, 10(1), 3–33. Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, J. Trejo-Mathys (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Rosile, G.  A., Boje, D.  M., and Claw, C.  M. (2018). Ensemble Leadership Theory: Collectivist, Relational, and Heterarchical Roots from Indigenous Contexts. Leadership, 14(3), 307–28. Rovelli, C. (2017). The Order of Time. London: Allen Lane. Roy, D. (1959). Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction. Human Organization, 18, 158–68. Saunders, C., Van Slyke, C., and Vogel, D. R. (2004). My Time or Yours? Managing Time Visions in Global Virtual Teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, 18(1), 19–37. doi:10.5465/ame.2004.12691177 Saward, M. (2017). Agency, Design and “Slow Democracy.” Time and Society, 26(3), 362–83. doi:10.1177/0961463x15584254

88  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Sennett, S. (1998). The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton. Shotter, J. (2006). Understanding Process from Within: An Argument for “Withness”Thinking. Organization Studies, 27(4), 585–604. Simpson, B. (2014). George Herbert Mead. In J. Helin, T. Hernes, D. Hjorth, and R. Holt (Eds), Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies (pp. 272–86). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simpson, B., Buchan, L., and Sillince, J. (2017). The Performativity of Leadership Talk. Leadership, 14(6), 644–61. Simpson, B., Tracey, R., and Weston, A. (2018). Traveling Concepts: Performative Movements in Learning/Playing. Management Learning, 49(3), 295–310. doi:10.1177/ 1350507618754715 Sonenshein, S. (2016). Routines and Creativity: From Dualism to Duality. Organization Science, 27(3), 739–58. Steiber, A., and Alänge, S. (2013). A Corporate System for Continuous Innovation: The Case of Google Inc. European Journal of Innovation Management, 16(2), 243–64. Sternberg, R.  J., and Lubart, T.  I. (1999). The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms. In R.  J.  Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity (pp. 3–15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ulferts, H., Korunka, C., and Kubicek, B. (2013). Acceleration in Working Life: An Empirical Test of a Sociological Framework. Time and Society, 22(2), 161–85. Unsworth, K.  L., and Clegg, C.  W. (2010). Why Do Employees Undertake Creative Action? Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83(1), 77–99. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. van Bommel, K., and Spicer, A. (2011). Hail the Snail: Hegemonic Struggles in the Slow  Food Movement. Organization Studies, 32(12), 1717–44. doi:10.1177/ 0170840611425722 Wajcman, J. (2008). Life in the Fast Lane? Towards a Sociology of Technology and Time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 59–77. Williams, R. (2016). On Augustine. London: Bloomsbury. Woodman, R.  W., Sawyer, J.  E., and Griffin, R.  W. (1993). Toward a Theory of Organizational Creativity. Academy of Management Review, 18(2), 293–321. Zien, K.  A., and Buckler, S.  A. (1997). Dreams to Market: Crafting a Culture of Innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 14, 274–87.

7 Flowline at Work Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations through Metaphor Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen

7.1 Introduction The way of producing, distributing, and consuming news has changed dramatically since the introduction of online publication platforms in the mid-1990s. While the traditional cyclical news model is characterized by strict deadline production and predictable distribution, online news production and distribution is continuous, immediate, and in the literature characterized as “liquid journalism” (Deuze, 2008). In most newspapers around the world, the morning meeting has marked the start of any working day since the start of the modern press around the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of the newsroom (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009). This traditionbound ritual’s main purpose has been, first, to determine what news will be covered in tomorrow’s newspaper, and second, to evaluate today’s newspaper. After the meeting, the newsroom staff all start working, mostly individually, towards the shared goal of bringing the contents of the paper product together within the given deadline for the print edition. Even though online news is growing and about to outcompete print, the traditional way of producing news tends to reproduce established structures (Larsson, 2012) and it can be a struggle for newsrooms to overcome the conventional rhythms of news production (Schlesinger and Doyle,  2015). For instance, at the Financial Times the number of stories published per hour was found to peak as the deadline for the print edition was approaching (Schlesinger and Doyle,  2015). Suggestions for why this occurs include the institutional nature of journalism making profound and fundamental change difficult (Eide and Sjøvaag, 2016) and the fact that established practices minimize people’s fear, “providing a sense of ontological security” (Wheatley and O’Sullivan,  2017: 977). However, as reported by the Reuters Digital News Report 2014, the traditional news consumption curve is undergoing a transformation because news is being accessed online and steadily throughout the day, with peaks in the morning, lunchtime, and early Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen, Flowline at Work: Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations through Metaphor In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0007

90  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies evening. As news is consumed on a more or less continuous basis instead of being dependent on the print product arriving “on the doorstep,” most newsrooms are reorienting their production and publication efforts towards a “digital first” strategy. In practice, the print product is still the organizer of time and effort, to the effect that both products and the work environment of journalists suffer. Based on ethnographic observation over several years in three newsrooms in Norway, we argue that a key for efficient organizing is synchronized production and distribution—what we call flowline, rather than the differentiated and punctuated time frames of deadline production. In our action research-inspired study of these newspapers in Norway, we found this transformation easier said than done. In this chapter we will focus on one of them, a local daily in a medium-sized city in the southeast part of Norway. Managerial efforts at changing production from a closed day-to-day framework of producing stories for the next day’s newspaper, to an ongoing, open-ended workflow adapted to the digital, were initially unsuccessful. The journalists and editors seemed unable to let go of the mindset and behavior of a deadline regime and thus ended up attempting to do digital, in following their “digital first” strategy of publishing all stories first on the digital platform, rather than being digital—that is, structuring their work and mental models according to an open-ended, near-future-oriented production flow. For instance, they kept the morning meetings and the editor-inchief would lead by asking for what could be the front-page story of the day, inadvertently making everyone visualize the print product instead of the online news site with its ongoing stream of stories. It seemed like the managers’ rhetoric of going “digital first” constituted an empty narrative because they were not able to translate their “specific forms of social action” (Thatcher 1998: 554) into actually representing digital production. In this chapter we explore the process of enabling a temporal transformation in a newsroom setting. We propose that a new and generative metaphor, flowline, should be created to replace the ingrained deadline mentality enabled models of real and imaginary worlds, allowing joint interrelations of perceptually guided action to emerge, and giving rise to active experimentation and temporal transformation of the workflow. We suggest that metaphors are devices for capturing and expressing embodied, tacit, and relational aspects of the temporal (past, present, and future) flow of experience, and as such are better to spur change than literal language, which tends to be prescriptive in relation to the social phenomena with which it is connected (Tsoukas, 1991).

7.1.1  Time and Temporality in News Organizations News organizations operate in increasingly dynamic and “hyper-temporally driven environments” (Wheatley and O’Sullivan, 2017) and are under tremendous pressure to change due to rapidly decreasing revenues, forcing them towards “abbreviated”

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thinking and “becoming accustomed to living in a constant present” (Hassan, 2003: 239). The “presentism” nurtured by daily deadlines helps them to survive and compete every day, while simultaneously preventing them from thinking about alternative futures. This paradox is ingrained in deadline practices, a temporal configuration in the news industry today that is out of sync with the reality it operates in. Newsrooms are not alone in facing such dilemmas. Awareness that the imposed temporal constraints are provisional and constructed is low in many organizations, and hence initiatives to reconfigure organizational practices by thinking differently about time are more or less absent (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Ballard, 2008). For news organizations, the deadline is thus a process of temporal configuration, an ingrained institutionalized norm that provides principles for producing news­ papers, and a scaffold for the activities taking place, limiting the need for explicit managerial efforts to follow up on journalists’ everyday work. Consequently, trad­ ition­al production of journalistic content is dominated by an understanding of “time as an assembly line” (Eide, 2016; Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988), maintaining a preoccupation with the passage of time as linear, measurable, and controllable. It is a collective construct which shapes what one is paying attention to and how phenomena are interpreted, and it is functional in guiding what actions should be performed at various (clock) times, providing “a shared and recognized organizing device to describe, understand and possibly control large configurations of events” (Clark and Maielli, 2009: 257). These trajectories are construed out of already existing repertoires of temporal structures and only occasionally change orientation (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). In addition, the development of new conceptions of time, pace, and rhythm in organizational life is constrained and attempts to achieve them may generate conflict (Yakura, 2002). So how did this newsroom succeed in replacing their repertoire of temporal structures, reportedly without conflict? According to the journalists themselves, the changes not only increased the production volume, but also reduced stress and improved the work environment immediately. Navigating temporal transitions is a familiar challenge for organizations, yet it is not clear how they align conflicting temporal demands and resolve pressure to entrain to their environments (Patriotta and Gruber, 2015; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015; Ancon and Waller, 2007). In viewing time as a process, temporality can be “defined as the ongoing relationships between, past, present, and future” (Schultz and Hernes 2013: 1), while viewing time as enacted in practice makes objective, subjective, and intersubjective time inseparable (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). That is, time is in the activity and perceptions of time shape and are shaped by the actions and interactions performed (Roe, 2008; Bluedorn, 2002). A process view suggests that conceptions of time and temporal structures are constituted in practice (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015) as a result of creative action. It follows that adaptation and change of temporal structures is also warranted in action. In order to understand how change in recurrent temporal structuring comes about, it is therefore necessary to investigate conditions and mechanisms for how dispositions for action emerge. Below we will suggest and

92  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies discuss how a particular type of metaphor, i.e. generative metaphors, can be used to spur such collective temporal change.

7.1.2  Metaphors in Organization Theory The use of metaphor implies understanding and experiencing something in terms of something else. In more formal terms a metaphor is, according to Merriam-Webster, “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them” (2018). Within organizational theory there has been a continuous interest in metaphors since Gareth Morgan’s comprehensive contributions on the role, scope and application of metaphors to organizations and organizational processes in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. 1980; 1993; 1997/1986). Subsequent work on metaphors in organization theory can roughly be divided into two strands: “organization of metaphors,” which is general in nature and not specific to organization theory, and “metaphors of organization,” which is concerned with the status of metaphors—that is, whether they represent a “liberation” and advancement of knowledge and insight, or are “imprecise” and ambiguous figurative devices that are of no or little scientific value (Grant and Oswick, 1996). More recently, Cornelissen (2005: 752) comments that the existence of metaphors in organization theory is now undisputed and that “our concern should be with figuring out how [metaphor] operates to aid theorists and researchers,” advocating an interactionist model in which metaphoric understanding is genuinely creative (or generative) rather than a matter of deciphering already present features in the representation of the target (i.e. the “unknown” subject) when compared to the source (i.e. the familiar subject). Despite metaphors’ importance for communicating, guiding, and navigating collective action, little is known about how they can be used as an initiator of changing organizational work practices (Biscaro and Comacchio,  2017; Grant and Oswick,  1996). How does the use of metaphor, as a temporally enacted performance, enable change of work practices, and what are the implications?

7.1.3  The Generative Qualities of Metaphors Schön (1979/1993) introduced “generative metaphor” to denote metaphors that enable frame restructuring when frame conflict exists. They can be transformative because they allow deeply embedded mental models and behaviors to be transferred from an area of “impossibility,” “to an area of difficulty, enabling problems to be ‘solved’ without direct engagement with the problem” (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990: 236). New metaphors that are imaginative and creative are capable of providing novel understanding and meaning to our experiences and everyday activity, which is not available through our conventional conceptual system (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 139–41). In Schön’s view metaphor is not just a way of looking at things, but

Flowline at Work  93

also a “process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence” (1979/1993: 137). Morgan extends this view when he comments that a metaphor is a “primal, generative process that is fundamental to the creation of human understanding and meaning in all aspects of life” (1996: 228, italics added). Generative metaphors are not means to transmit content or shared “meaning,” they are enacted accomplishments linking the organizational realm to the realm of action. For a metaphor to be efficient it needs a “plot” allowing participants to create metaphorical events by making temporal links to past/present/future, and it becomes “a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it [and] alter the conceptual system and perceptions and actions that the system give rise to” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 145). Possibilities for action are continually shaped and brought forth by the types of action in which humans engage to fulfill something “missing” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch,  1993), and metaphors thus have the potential to actualize situations by providing plausible, coherent, and acceptable actions with the features of importance being emergent (Cornelissen, 2005). Collective metaphorical events generate proscriptive actions that are shaped and constituted, not arbitrarily, but as a result of ongoing creative acts that bring both past history and future anticipations into the present. The self-referentiality and articulation of experiences from the past (source, e.g. deadline) and anticipations of expected outcomes in the future (target, e.g. “flowline”) enable the constitution of a temporal action domain composed of available artefacts, resources, and capacities. Metaphorical events transcend the individual level of knowing by enabling a transformational process of mutual tuning where experiences, insights, and expectations shaping future conduct are imagined, shared, and elicited through a process of co-construction (Walsh and Ungson, 1991). Metaphors’ potential for framing agential conduct is determined by the extent to which they enable fusing of separate realms of experience (and imagination) and allow reframing of perceptual processes and ingrained schemas (Barrett and Cooperrider,  1990; Srivastva and Barrett, 1988)—and are made relevant through the temporal affordances of the situations they create. But how does the new “living” metaphor evolve and new temporal concepts and possibilities for action emerge? In what follows we will examine how the workflow and practices in a local newspaper changed as a result of the research team’s (authors’) introduction of a new metaphor, flowline, and the enactment of this generative metaphor by the newsroom managers and staff, replacing deadline as the main governing mechanism for news production and distribution.

7.2  Case Study: Syncing the Newsroom in Local News 7.2.1  Research Design and Method Our work with the local newspaper started in early 2015. The paper, here denoted Local News, employs about thirty persons and is part of a large corporate media

94  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies group in Norway, with a circulation of about 12,000 copies and 44,000 daily readers. Like many other newspapers it had adopted a “digital first” strategy and wanted to develop an integrated and synced newsroom for both online and print news, “one newsroom, one product.” This strategy gave prominence to the digital distribution of news on behalf of the printed edition, even though the latter still generated 70 percent of the revenue. However, changing the organizational mindset and making this shift in practice was not straightforward, and the editorial group wanted the research team to help facilitate the change (see Table 7.1 for an overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events in this organization). Local News is part of a larger four-year action research project called OMEN: Organizing for Media Innovation, which includes two other newspapers (regional and national), with the overall aim of improving their innovation processes, by strengthening both the journalistic creative processes and their ability to change in response to whatever new technologies or societal changes present themselves in the future. The aim for the change of temporal regimes was to support Local News in achieving a more stable and predictable everyday production in sync with its audience’s expectations of when news should be available, through elaborating imaginatively the implications of time regimes in the newspaper’s everyday working life as a way to improve its present workflow. Since our empirical approach builds upon longitudinal field studies engaging participants in joint collaboration inspired by appreciative inquiry (Ludema et al., 2006), which is a positive mode of action research (Reason and Bradbury, 2006), we focus on liberating the creative and constructive potential of organizations and human communities (Cooperrider and Srivastva,  1987; Ludema,  2001, Cooperrider and Whitney, 1999; Ludema, Cooperrider, and Barrett, 2006). Appreciative inquiry recognizes that inquiry and change are not truly separate moments, but are sim­ul­tan­ eous, i.e. inquiry is intervention (Pålshaugen, 2001). The empirical material collected covers a timespan of three years, 2015 to 2018, and consists of interviews, document studies, participant observation, and facilitation of workshops. The latter have been the primary vehicle for spurring active experimentation with new work forms and testing of concepts as a result of analytical efforts and co-created understanding, but are also used as feedback workshops (Pettigrew, 1990) to validate findings and enhance construct validity (Yin,  2003). Action research is a research design that engages and guides practitioners and researchers in co-creation of practical solutions as well as obtaining knowledge for the research community (Reason and Bradbury, 2006). According to Heron and Reason, “Primacy [within action research] is given to transformative inquiries that involve action, where people change their way of being and doing and relating in their world—in the direction of greater flourishing” (2006: 145). The accumulated insights we obtained through the interaction with the field decided what would be the topic for the next workshop (see Table 7.1). A workshop was typically organized by starting with a presentation of often semi-finished ideas, model or tools that the research team had prepared for news workers and managers to reflect upon and develop further together with the researchers. By

2016

Apr.

Feb.

Jan.

Nov.

Oct.

Implications for organizational practice

Increased consciousness of enablers and potential for change in organization Testing methods and Structure collaborative prototype tool for ideation, creative processes of developed story ideas storytelling development Discussing and planning Agree on action points for how to move forward, immediate and long-term appointed development change group Workshop I with Summary and discussion Implemented new planner development of challenges, plan for (Trello), editors’ pregroup (3 hrs) progression of strategic morning meeting work Workshop II with Discussing audience Failed method (“Sparr”), development engagement, ideation content analysis project on group (3 hrs) method for colleague consortium level planned, support suggested digital first training (“Sparr”) completed Workshop III Looking at organizing Focus attention on with development news production for practices that make group (3 hrs) rhythm and tempo, “no sense” in digital news 24/7 production

Mapping of organizational strengths and challenges

Appreciative inquiry interviews (1 hour) Workshop with newsroom (full day) Workshop with editors (2 hrs)

2015

Sept.–Oct.

Key interventions Aims and outcome

Time

Table 7.1  Overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events

3

Identifying broader topics 3 of discussion and inventing method for colleague support Integrating content 3 analysis and ethic analysis of “digital first” technology and strategy, identifying “no sense” practices Continuing “out of sync” 3 audience analysis, using theory of liminality and temporality

Preparing tasks and adjusting action research workshop methods

Identification of 4 organizational. strengths and challenges Designing workshop series 3 on urgent challenges

4

4

4

Continued

23

26

Managers Employees

Analysis and implications Participants for research

2017

Time

Sept.

June

Feb.

Nov.

Sept.

June

Table 7.1  Continued

Meetings (2 x 2 hrs)

Workshop newsroom (3 hrs) Workshop newsroom (1 day) Workshop (1 day)

Workshop consortium level (2 hrs) Workshop consortium level (4 hrs)

Discussing flowline, testing Idea Propeller Media-trail and ideation with local youth Working group with news editor

Testing IdeaPropeller

Testing improved tool for ideation: Idea Propeller. Introducing flowline

Presenting tool for ideation

Workshop IV Work on strengthening with development engaged practices, group (3 hrs) alternative time regimes, and news quality Fieldwork, Observation of everyday sit-along (2 days) practices Workshop with Presentation of development storytelling ladder and group (2 hrs) airport analogy/flowline

Key interventions Aims and outcome

News editor present, general agreement on need for more creativity and flow Story development, 3 topics Story development, 2 topics Story development, 3 topics Suggestions for flowline strategies

Identification of individual practices of flow Systematizing of storytelling criteria and audience engagement strategies None (no one present)

New internal deadline at noon, failed metaphor (qualimeter)

Implications for organizational practice

Model for employee involvement

Confirmed need for metaphors to work by, need for editor training in ideation Adjusting questions in ideation tool Effectivizing ideation tool: Mini-propeller Adjusting ideation tool

Analytic standstill: why are they always failing at implementing lasting change? Empirical base for flowline practice Empirical base for improved tool for ideation, confirmed relevance flowline Urgent need for a better ideation tool

2

3

3

27

19

3

3

3

1

18

4

22

4

Managers Employees

Analysis and implications Participants for research

2015–18

2018

Sept.

May

Jan.

Dec.

Oct.

Oct.

Workshop, Action points for flowline internal (4 hrs) transition Fieldwork, Observation of flowline sit-along (2 days) practices Meeting with Summary of internal editors (3 hrs) workshop on flowline Meeting Introducing A-game newsroom (3 hrs) analysis Meeting with Introducing “glowline” editors (2 hrs) Meeting with Discussion of glowline editors (2 hrs) continued Informal talks and observation (> 30 hrs) Internal documents (reports and content analyses, consortium level) > 150 pages

General agreement on flowline strategies Effects and results of introduction of flowline Model for low threshold organizational changes Identifying need for change: social media Agree on need to reduce audience “noise” Identify need for glowline workshop

Identify “failed change” factors Systematizing effects of introduction of flowline Fine-tune A-game analysis Inventing metaphor audience engagement Systematizing audience engagement practices Preparing empirical newsroom observation 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

26

20

22

20

98  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies bringing researchers’ observations and analyses back to the organizations as something that was not final or finished, the aim was to raise awareness about what they take for granted or seldom talk about. In this way we hoped to encourage employees’ reflections, imagination, and creation of shared understanding about how problems and challenges could be dealt with, but also to agree upon concrete steps to lower the threshold for experimenting or testing new ways of working. Our first intervention in 2015 was to conduct semi-structured interviews with everyone located in the editorial room—that is, journalists, photographers, desk journalists, editors, marketers, and receptionists. The questions revolved around their everyday work; past experiences, reflections about present performance, and possibilities for the future. More specifically, the topics covered included conditions for performing idea work (see Carlsen, Clegg, and Gjersvik,  2012), digitalization versus print, collaboration with colleagues, and organization and management of newsrooms. Out of this round of interviews, five converging needs were identified; 1) stronger integration and coordination between print and digital platforms, 2) more hands-on involvement of editors when it comes to prioritizing, making decisions, and actively supporting journalists in their work, 3) obtaining a better balance between news and feature stories, 4) revision of editorial profile regarding what stories should be produced and not, and 5) more meeting points for sharing information and entering into joint accomplishments. During our initial observations in the newsroom and of morning meetings we discovered that the journalists had no established routines, methods or practices for developing ideas, echoing the findings of Nylund (2013). Many journalists struggled to find the necessary time to engage in collaborative ideation and it generally took place on an ad-hoc basis. The extent of our engagements was balanced against most employees’ expressed experience of not having time enough to devote to innovative experimentation and interventions, but throughout the project period we were on average in contact with or visiting the newsrooms on a monthly basis (see Table 7.1). Between interventions we conducted follow-up interviews (formal and informal), participant observation in the newsroom, and “sit-alongs” with individual journalists while they were working on their computer, conversing about what they were doing at that moment. We organized meetings with editors and staff, and held presentations and initiated discussions for the whole newsroom or groups of employees, including representatives of the corporate headquarters and editors of other local newspapers in the consortium. The combinations of methods that we used to develop conceptualizations and constructs aimed to obtain verisimilitude and applicability in addition to being recognized and acknowledged by informants (Stewart, 1998).

7.2.2  Setting: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there” Since its formation centuries ago, news work has been temporally structured around the notion of “the deadline”.1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a deadline

Flowline at Work  99

historically indicates “a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot,” but as a metaphor it has become an institutionalized norm in news organizations indicating the rhythm of how news is produced. However, the growth of news published on digital platforms at close to all hours has made this formative figure of action less relevant for the organizing of news work. The industry’s response has been to introduce a “digital first” publishing scheme, but changing the deeply ingrained institutionalized pattern of work activities has been more troublesome than anticipated (Wheatley and O’Sullivan, 2017). This was also the case for Local News when we started working with them in 2015, as falling circulation and downsizing in all parts of the organization had led to increased work pressure and perceived stressfulness, and a dystopic outlook on the future of their organization. The everyday working life of the journalists included preparedness for reporting breaking news, planned stories and features, and calendar temporalities like weekly, seasonal, and yearly activity cycles, and they were thus working, and living, within a multitude of temporal structures. One of our initial observations was how holidays and seasons seemed to take them by surprise every year. “Oh no, Christmas is coming up,” they exclaimed and organized meetings to plan for relevant stories a week or two before the holiday. According to Clark, all time-reckoning “involves a plurality of contingent temporal markers, sequences, durations and combinations of the past/present/future, all of which are socially constructed” (2009: 256). The cyclical year also represented a hindrance to engaging in transformation processes. “We have to wait until after the holidays” (whether Easter, summer or Christmas holidays) was a common response when we took the initiative to involve the larger newsroom. However, we slowly understood that it was the temporality of the deadline that dominated the journalists’ workday and that constituted the major hindrance to change. In particular, the daily need to produce enough stories for the next day’s newspaper within the set deadline seemed to trump every other matter of working life, including long-term planning. The journalists felt a clear expectation to deliver a new story each day, and thus had little time to think about other things beyond the present day. We came closer to an understanding of the implications of the deadline regime when one journalist explained in an interview how they were expected to write one story a day “in order to help fill the newspaper.” Likewise, the editors expressed that a main part of their everyday struggle was the issue of “filling the paper,” having enough stories ready within the deadline so that there would be no empty pages in the paper edition distributed the following day. The main problem after continuous downsizing was that the overall volume of stories produced by the staff was insufficient, not only to “fill the paper” but also to be successful as online publishers. This had become particularly clear to them as the corporate unit for content development and analysis provided them with online access to real-time performance and weekly reports of statistics comparing their results with earlier performance and other newspapers in the media group (consisting of seventy-two local media organizations in Norway). The metrics showed that Local News, in comparison with similar

100  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies news­papers, underperformed in terms of the number of stories produced by its own staff, and was in their own words “the worst in their class.” The lack of a sufficient number of stories can in turn be related to the newsroom’s established practices of work and production flow. Many of the journalists started every morning at about 8.15 a.m. with a “clean slate,” focusing on preparing the one story that they felt was expected of them that day. What stories they were going to produce was often not settled before they came to work; it was instead decided during the regular morning meeting—a common ritual in newsrooms (Gravengaard and Rimestad,  2012). The solution suggested by the chief editor was to produce a repository of stories so that instead of emptying their inventory each day, they had a surplus storage of stories that would make the task of filling the paper a lot easier. The chief editor illustrated his idea with the metaphor of fueling the petrol tank of a car from half full to full instead of emptying the tank and half filling it every day. While the metaphor provided a good illustration of what was at stake, translating it into editorial and managerial practices producing practical implications was not equally straightforward. This quickly became a “failed metaphor.” One reason might be that everyone agreed on the goal (better long-term planning), but they had few suggestions about how to get there, as this would also involve a change in mentality, seeing the newsroom as a collective with a common agency rather than individual journalists expressing their autonomy through the everyday production of news stories to fill the newspaper. There was also little debate around whether making changes in the management’s practices could be part of the solution, although their ways of talking and acting were strongly associated with print production, e.g. discussing what would be the cover story or talking about the culture section of the newspaper. As expressed by members of the newsroom, it also posed a challenge that the paper edition continued to be highlighted as what generated income, and that journalistic pride and status was still associated with what was published on paper. Established rhetorical tropes such as assessing journalistic quality in terms of “how to make a story shine on paper” further contributed to a deadline, paperoriented regime of production in the newsroom. One of the most prominent examples was the central position that the analogue “page planner” had in the everyday production of Local News. A “page planner” is a tool commonly used in many newspapers for keeping overview and control of the flow of production. Most commonly, it is a sheet of paper displaying rectangles representing all the pages of tomorrow’s newspaper in a grid (see Figure 7.1). When a page is produced, it is crossed out with a marker, usually by the copy editor in charge of tomorrow’s paper product. The editors may also have their own paper versions on their desks, to follow progress. When the deadline for the front page (which is usually the last page sent to the print publisher) approaches, the number of crossed-out rectangles signifies the level of progress and generates a possible feeling of crisis or doom. This system for planning and measuring progress functions to “make time concrete and negotiable . . . and envision the ending of an otherwise open-ended story” (Yakura 2002: 956). The predictability of deadlines is in this respect a central

Flowline at Work  101

Figure 7.1  Example of a page planner from Local News

structuring mechanism for employees in a newsroom, but it also stresses that time is always scarce and hence may explain why established work practices are rarely challenged (Widholm, 2016).

7.2.3  Initial Interventions As part of the co-creative efforts of researchers and the newsroom to develop and implement a strategy for synchronizing production and publishing, a “development group” was established in 2016, consisting of three editors and four journalists, representing both experienced journalists and union representatives. We worked with this group for over a year, meeting and discussing what could be done to resolve the problems that the newsroom was facing. Media organizations could be seen as producers, performers, and consumers of time, but due to its pervasive and ubiquitous influence, time is often taken for granted and not questioned in their everyday practices. The initial phase of our cocreative work was thus characterized by activities focused on raising awareness and producing reflexivity among the members of the development group, and eventually the newsroom as a whole. This implied making the group map out the challenges with which the newsroom was currently struggling, before coming up with concrete ideas and suggestions for changes and action points that the newsroom could test out.

102  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies As early as the first workshop, suggestions were made to introduce an editors’ meeting prior to the morning meeting, and to start using a digital production planner in everyday production. In the second workshop, they could report that these changes had been implemented. The new editors’ meeting was characterized as a “great success” that they were “very happy” with, and that was “working well for all parties.” The research group introduced Local News to the free online planning tool Trello because it was used by one of the other newspapers participating in the project, and the development group could report that Local News had “gone straight from the meeting and tested it.” While they had also tried a couple of other options, and found that there were some technical challenges with the interface and establishing a routine of inserting information into the system, they found the online planner to have “eased a lot, mak[ing] it more visual,” exclaiming that “Trello is wonderful.” A next step was to initiate a discussion about time and timing. In order to meet readers’ expectations for updates and new stories, the rhythm for publishing news online should preferably match the traffic peaks throughout the day from early morning to late evening, and the mix of content should change during the day based on what kinds of stories readers want at different times. However, Local News’ “digital first” strategy of publishing all stories on their online news site before they were published in the print edition seemed more like a rhetorical device than a practice in everyday life, due to their strong concern for the fate of the print product, and whether they would be able to “fill” the newspaper if they focused on digital only. To increase awareness of paradoxical practices in the newsroom, we presented the visualization of their traffic peaks on various online platforms (web, mobile, tablets) together with an overview of their own current organization of the news cycle (time of deadline, working hours, timing of meetings, when they published stories online). The discrepancy between when their readers were paying them attention, and when the newsroom was making their stories available, was striking, and seemed to be quite the eye opener for the development group. This insight was strengthened when we asked them to do a simple mapping of when sources for stories were available, and compare this chart with the charts of online traffic peaks and their own workflow during the day. As it turned out, most journalists were in-house in meetings or preparing for stories both when sources’ availability and the online audience presence peaked. This exercise in visual awareness seemed to produce a greater sense of urgency about, and motivation for, the need to change their workflow. It spurred a discussion as to how one might go about rethinking the established work and production patterns. One of the obvious mismatches between stories published and reader attention was the fact that they generally had very good online “traffic” on Mondays, but had very few new stories to publish due to reduced staff levels during the weekend, and this limited the front-desk employees whose job it was to “push stories.” This inspired the idea of thinking differently about when the news week starts and ends, and we joked about how it would make more sense to import the Muslim week. One of the participants stated, “I kind of like the idea of starting the week on a different

Flowline at Work  103

day. Let’s say we start the week on Thursday.” Projecting to the development group a visual representation of the lack of correlation between their production flow and reader attention thus seemed to articulate what was taken for granted, and to open up other ways of imagining practices and organizations of workflow.

7.2.4  The Making of Generative Metaphor Although there were plans to test out several of the suggestions that came up in the development group’s sessions, such as introducing a new main deadline at noon, none of these were actually implemented. While the development group were able to imagine ways of changing their temporal organizing, they seemed less able to actually make these changes happen. A more genuine process of challenging the mindset and practices of the established deadline regime was thus not initiated until several months later, when the researchers suggested a new meeting to continue the work that had been put in motion. In the process that followed, the researchers’ introduction of new metaphors came to play a central part. The way in which these metaphors were generated is quite characteristic of the project’s methodological approach, where the use of creative collaborative work and sketching as an analytical visualization process tool is central. The research team gathered around a high table in our office space with blank paper sheets and colored felt pens, to think and draw forth an approach to the upcoming workshop on production flow. In a series of idea sessions, we worked our way through various metaphors and chains of associations. Since a main concern was to find a production flow that could synchronize the discrepant temporal logics of print and digital production, inspiration from musical terms such as pace and rhythm led to the idea of “grooving the news rhythm.” The development group’s expressed need for the journalists to stop writing what they called “the shit in the middle” stories, i.e. stories that were neither a proper full-length story nor a short informative notice, but something in between, generated associations with a “narrative ladder” (originally “abstraction ladder”) where one would aspire to either stay down or climb the whole ladder, inspired by the familiar storyline structure in journalism (Hayakawa and Hayakawa, 1990). We also drew an idea for a multistage rocket tool, with four sequential groups of questions to ask in order to get the story to “take off.” Most of these metaphoric sketches never left the drawing board, while some, like the ladder, were tested on the development group. The ladder itself was too confusing a metaphor to become useful, but it spurred a set of important questions and ways to engage audiences that later became integral in the development of the Idea Propeller tool for collaborative creativity in newsrooms (Hagen and Tolstad, 2019). At one point in the process, we revisited a statement made by an editor in one of the other participating news organizations. He had raised the issue of figuring out “how to make stories fly online,” which we recognized as a digital equivalent of “making stories shine on paper.” Stories that fly online can be defined as stores that

104  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies are read and shared, reaching a wider audience, and hopefully also triggering new subscriptions. The expressed need to avoid using resources on mediocre stories was related to the implicit notion that stories of high quality had the best potential to fly online (or to shine on paper). At the time, the deadline production regime was preventing Local News from producing such online stories to any great extent. The need for a new production flow was thus related both to improving the synchronizing of online publishing with reader attention, and to providing the journalists with an organizational infrastructure that would enable them to write stories of quality and relevance. Our troubles in actually enabling changed practices in the newsroom inspired a two-day sit-along by one of the researchers. The goal was to identify enablers and hindrances of each individual newsroom employee’s workflow, and to make sense of the gap between what they expressed that they wanted to do (change practices) and what they were actually doing (not changing). Since the goal was to facilitate a transition to a production flow where submission and publication of stories were distributed more evenly throughout the day, we found inspiration in the work routine discovered among one of the journalists. Because he had the sole responsibility for the finance and economy section, he could not rely on the “one story a day” production cycle, and had thus established a rhythm that was independent of the deadline regime. He never started the day with a “clean slate,” but instead worked in a more overlapping flowing mode, continuously switching between preparing stories, ideation, writing and getting the stories ready for publishing. In the intersection of the notion of “making stories fly online” and this individual journalist’s work routine, two interrelated ideas emerged from our collaborative thinking and drawing sessions. A key element in our work was the realization of how the notion of the deadline was so engrained in Local News’ newsroom practices that it strongly limited the abilities of editors and journalists to imagine and implement alternative ways of working and organizing their newsroom. In exploring alternatives to the deadline metaphor, the idea emerged to think about the production of stories in an even flow throughout the day as a “flowline” production mode. As a literal word construction, “flowline” might not make much sense, but “flow” as something continuously in flux and “line” with its connotations to deadline aroused a curiosity and feeling in the group that this was something worth exploring (see Table  7.2 for comparison of deadline and flowline). The idea of flying stories also sparked the idea that understanding how a flowline production would function in practice could be exemplified through looking at airport logistics. An airport is characterized by a continuous stream of people and flights throughout the day, and is thus distinctly different from a deadline approach where everyone starts and finishes at the same time. The rhetorical question, “would it make sense if every traveler came in at 9 a.m. and left by plane at 4 p.m.” seemed to underscore and show the paradoxical nature of the deadline regime. The flowline metaphor and the airport analogy were presented to the development group in the form of a drawing (see Figure 7.2). We asked them to imagine

Flowline at Work  105 Table 7.2  Deadline production vs. flowline production Deadline production Aim

Nature of production Motivation

View of time

Temporal orientation

Publication and consumption Management Technology Metaphoric quality

Flowline production

“Filling the pages”: All pages must be filled within pre-given time limit. Freshism: Bringing the news as fresh as possible. “Make the stories shine”: Copy edit the pages until perfect.

Continual production (primary). Firstism: Being the first to break news (secondary). “Make the stories fly”: Time, platform, and frame the stories for online peaks of audience presence. Cyclical: The timer is reset every Continuous and never-ending: day; repeating work cycle governed Ongoing production governed by by clock-time. reader peaks and breaking news. “Dead if not finished”: The thrill of “Deliver when finished”: the rush of deadline and the adrenaline rush, publishing most read stories, one set goal for the newsroom as a individual accomplishments team. throughout the day. Clock time (primary), exogenous and Experience time: The human independent. Event time (secondary), experience of living in/with time, qualitative, habitual time. clock time and event time are inseparable. Presentism: Focused on here and Open-ended near future: Loosely now, structured relations between structured and directed at what is past, present, and future (re) next. Ongoing present: continuous produced for each cycle. structuring of relations between past, present, and future Asynchronism between production, Continuous coordination between distribution, and consumption. “Gut publishing and reader consumption. feeling” of what engages audiences. Metrics measure audience engagement. Governed by strict time limitation Autonomy and individual effort to and military precision to reach reach reader peaks. deadline. “Page view,” paper page planner. “Digital first,” online story planner (e.g. Trello). Static: Industry norm, “dead Generative: Foster creative thinking metaphor,” internalized and and alternative ways of organizing, routinized, experimental and future-oriented. tradition-bound and history-dependent.

check-in as the moment the journalist pitches the idea for a story, while security control is where you get a “go” for your idea, and the gate is the place where you decide what route the story will take when it comes to form (e.g., feature, reporting, notice) and strategies for publication. The actual take-off of the flight is when the story is published and landing could represent evaluation, feedback, and discussions about the potential for making a follow-up story. As in an airport, the flights, i.e. stories, would be distributed throughout the day, from morning to evening, and perhaps even include a “red eye.”

106  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies HOW TO MAKE THE STORY FLY ON THE WEB

MORNING FLIGHT RED EYE

5 FLY EVENING FLIGHT Contact readers (front desk) 4 BOARDING Deliver in flowline 3 GATE Platforms, Publishing stategies 6 LANDING Evaluation 2 SEQURITY CONTROL Action points The (narrative) ladder

1 CHECK IN Touch down

MA-AIR

Figure 7.2  Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy—original drawing on the left (in Norwegian) and translated version on the right

The flowline metaphor was embraced by the development group as the workshop progressed, exemplified for instance by how they seamlessly started making use of the term as an integrated part of the conversations and discussions unfolding. In the words of the editor-in-chief: “I do think we are in the core of a way of thinking . . . if we were to achieve something on this together with you, I am sure these are models that will make an impact.” Overall, throughout the discussions a common idea about what a flowline approach would imply emerged: a work rhythm of continuous delivery of stories throughout the day, a surplus of stories, increased self-management, better ideation and creative discussions of ideas from the start—resulting in making stories “fly online.” It would be a continuous production cycle, adapted to the needs of “others”—the audience and sources rather than the newsroom staff.

7.2.5  Performing Metaphorical Events The flowline metaphor and the corresponding airport analogy seemed to open the way for the transformative “what if . . .?” question, offering the possibility of imagining without incurring the risks and constraints of the real world (Ragsdell, 2000). This enabled imagination and anticipation of the future, resonating with existing practice, and seemed to be well received by both editors and journalists. While deadline characterized the existing reality (dead if not finished), flowline characterized a new reality (deliver when finished). To paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson: “[flowline] provides an organization of important [work] experiences that our conventional conceptual system does not make available . . . the way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the [flowline] metaphor” (1980: 141). Flowline as an open-ended workflow thus offers new prospects for how to deal with the paradox of performing online and print production in parallel, by providing possibilities for new temporary structuring that enables flexible accomplishments rather than rigidity leading to failures.

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Plans were made for testing the flowline mode of working in the newsroom a few weeks later, as the development group embraced the idea of turning the newsroom into an “airport”: “It’s childish, but couldn’t we have a check-in counter? Standing tables where you check in. . . . You’ll need to meet with [one of the editors] to look over your travel documents before you move through security for another flight.” However, the scheduled test week was cancelled a few days prior due to sickness among both researchers and journalists. The implementation of the flowline was thus left hanging for another ten months, when the news editor initiated another attempt after preparing the newsroom staff for a transition to a new content management system (CMS) for online production, which would replace the old one focusing on page views and print production. In order to concretize the metaphor in terms of what they should do differently when converging the newsroom to a “digital first” production, the news editor met with the research group to outline a plan. Based on the input from this meeting, where the researchers stressed the importance of employee involvement as we had a hypothesis that “ownership” of the process was integral to success, he appointed a team of four journalists to come up with suggestions for how they could change their workflow. A larger workshop with the whole newsroom present addressed these suggestions and asked for common strategies on how they could adapt to this line of thinking. Among the changes proposed and later implemented was a new set of story templates, denoted “quickies,” defined by how little time was estimated for their production. In doing so, ideation became separated from the making of a story, and the news staff could work with several stories in parallel. By introducing a backup plan for when a story was dropped shortly before the deadline, the production cycle now resembled a “hurtline”—that is, no one was “shot” anymore. To reduce ambiguity and maintain control over production, the newsroom revived their use of the online planning tool Trello, as an editorial planner. While the tool had already been implemented in the newsroom, it was with the introduction of the new flowline regime that Trello really had its moment of release. “It [Trello] is our universe. The genius thing we have come up with is the color-coding,” said the digital editor. She was referring to how they were now using color codes to display a story’s status through the production process. “Trello’s foremost function now . . . is the production progress of the individual story. That is what the color codes indicate,” said the news editor. These color codes imply that everyone now has continuous access to the status quo of the newsroom’s production process, both online and paper, and its success was linked to the involvement of the journalists in inventing and agreeing on what the different colors “meant.” One of the journalists stated that by doing this they got “a very good tool to follow our stories from start to finish; we have done a good job concerning which labels and points in production we mark down.” Temporal structures are manifested in logs, schedules, and other time-displaying devices (Gersick,  1994), and the difference between the aforementioned analogue page planner and Trello as tools for newsroom production is in this respect striking. The page planner, as physical sheets of paper with rectangles representing news­paper

108  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies pages, clearly mirrors the logic, the temporal understanding, and even the materiality associated with a deadline production mode. Trello, on the other hand, with its color-coding indicating the movement of stories in the production process, clearly provides a visual representation of how the flowline moves along. While the page planner is a physical tool that is primarily carried around by the copy editor (or other members of management in charge), thus being primarily under the supervision and control of one person, Trello is accessible to all of the newsroom staff all the time. Journalists can follow their stories through the production system based on the colorcoding, and since all of the stories in production are on display, the entire newsroom has continuous insight into how production is coming along. This tool is more democratic and thus clearly adds a sense of shared ownership to the flowline process. Both journalists and management have rearranged their rhythm of production. The journalists prepare their story for the following day in the afternoon, make interview appointments, and put a description of the story into Trello before they leave work at 3.30 p.m. The news editor and the digital editor make a quick “clean up” in Trello each evening, organizing the journalists’ entries for planned stories and marking what has been published. “You can be sure that you don’t miss anything [that] has been a problem,” the digital editor said. They describe their everyday work situation as improved, as they are now both better prepared and have a continuous surplus of stories to publish, both online and in the print edition. In the newsroom seminar leading up to the introduction of the flowline regime, the journalists and editors also discussed issues of how to structure and organize their work within the new flowline regime. Their suggestions included the need to be able to work on several stories at the same time, and that everybody needs to get on board with the new regime and to start the working day outside the newsroom to get new ideas. The way in which the employees were here thinking and producing ideas based on the frames and conditions set by the flowline regime implies that the introduction of this new metaphor had generated new ways of thinking and acting about how news production is executed and organized, which in turn lowers the threshold for implementing these new thought patterns into practice. Now that the flowline regime has been introduced and implemented, the newsroom staff seem to be on board with and motivated for making additional changes in the ways they organize and execute their work. We just recently introduced the metaphor “glowline” as a way to increase audience engagement at all levels in the organization (see Tolstad, Hagen, and Skjælaaen, 2019), and the newsroom staff ’s openness to this might in part be related to the very notion of flowline as a dynamic workflow that is continuously adjusted towards the audience’s attention and consumption patterns. So how did the “flowline” metaphor perform? Within the first month after the changes were introduced the production volume of stories produced in-house increased by 40 percent and the number of readers visiting the news site increased by 30 percent—one of the senior journalists increased her readership by 135 percent in these four weeks. Surprisingly, the paper production flow also got a revival, as the copy editor now had a steady volume of stories to work on throughout the day. “It’s

Flowline at Work  109

Christmas Eve here every day now,” he exclaimed. Half a year later, without any interventions other than a sit-along to document and discuss the changes with the staff, and the news editor paying continuous attention to the results in individual and plenary meetings, the numbers were stabilized at a level slightly below the initial results. Now other newsrooms have started visiting, intending to learn from these experiences and hoping to copy the impressive results. One of the other newsrooms in the OMEN project implemented flowline as their new production regime in 2017, with similar success, and the third newspaper is now in the process of transforming to a flowline mode.

7.3 Discussion As a primary and deep-rooted governing temporal structure, deadline has for cen­ tur­ies been the embodied rhythm, logic, and pace that news workers have entrained in their everyday work. All work practices have been synchronized in order to meet the daily deadline, implying following a highly linear temporal structure that, when zooming out, is also cyclical, as it repeats itself every day. When online publishing entered the newsroom scene some twenty years ago, the accompanying temporal regime was of a fundamentally different character. Because it does not rely on the time it takes to print and distribute the newspaper, but rather arranges for immediate publishing, online temporality is about timing towards audience reception, continuous and speedy updating, and longevity in terms of the everlasting online accessibility of news stories. As a consequence of the promising prospects for online news (compared to print), many newspapers have adopted a “digital first” strategy of publishing all stories online, not “saving” any stories for print. Yet, from dialogue with other media organizations both in Norway and internationally, we see that the changes are mostly techno­logic­al (implementing a new CMS) and not transformative of the newsroom culture and temporal mentality. Our initial investigation showed that a deadline-dominated temporality in turbulent times provided the journalists with a strong emphasis on the present day with little time for developing ideas for future stories, in both the short and long term, and for participating in strategic innovation projects. Starting with a clean slate, as some journalists did every day, also resulted in a lack of stories for publication during weekends and on Monday mornings—when their reader numbers would normally peak. Based on a preliminary analysis of their work practices we introduced several metaphors and among them flowline as a way of adapting towards a more open-ended and near-future-oriented news cycle. To paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson (1980), it was introduced as a metaphor for the news staff to “work by,” not as a new organizing principle, but as something to be practiced. Flowline thus became an enabler for a number of minor technological, cultural, and organizational changes over some time. Traditional work on metaphor in organization theory describes

110  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies metaphors in terms of what Cornelissen (2005) denotes as the comparison model—that is, as fixed-meaning entities provoking “active thought experiments” that “assert similarity” and transmit meaning between a target and a source (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990). Metaphors are in this view proposed to be significant first and foremost at the conceptual level, as they convey organizing principles for thought and experience, and thus play a crucial role within processes of sensemaking (Lakoff, 1993; Cornelissen et al., 2008). Our study resembles an interactionist model (Cornelissen, 2005) of metaphor, advocating the generation and creation of new meaning that is not present either in the source or in the target. Building on a process perspective, we suggest that metaphors unfold as events of creative actions, i.e. as iterative processes of trial and error, imagination and anticipation, reason and learning. Performative metaphors like “flowline” and “quickies” are temporal and provisional constructs functioning as mechanisms for lowering thresholds and enabling transformative change in organizations. It is through metaphorical events that a new temporal structuring of ongoing action is imagined, and that a new way of understanding how activities can be linked, interconnected, and sequenced emerges through action. The deeply embedded deadline-governed workflow corresponds to a collective established background and entire system that shape a domain for ef­fect­ ive action. This action domain is a point of departure for the rhythm, pacing, and composition of work activities which appear as recurrent, stable, and recognizable over cultural, technical, and social barriers. By introducing the new metaphor flowline this background is brought to the fore and questioned through articulation of assumptions, beliefs, and concerns about how one negotiates and navigates through a world that is not fixed and pre-given, but rather is temporally shaped by the types of actions in which we engage (Varela et al.,  1993: 144). This is a creative process which involves “the conjunction of whole semantic domains in which a correspondence between terms or concepts is constructed, rather than deciphered” (Cornelissen 2005: 751, italics in original). What makes a metaphor generative is that the conjoined terms are not self-contained; they are “empty” in the sense that imagined new situations for existing rules and procedures do not apply, and participants must construct and enact narratives to resolve the ambiguities about what they can do (Barge and Little,  2002; Thatcher,  1998). This construction is spurred by “breakdowns” (Winograd and Flores, 1986) in the background or “anomalies” (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990) in the foreground, and is resolved through a com­bin­ation of reflective imitations, shifting between perspective, experiments, and dialogical actions in order to acquire and render new co-constructed dispositions for action. For a metaphor to be generative and enable narration it should be neither too distant from nor too close to the source domain in order not to produce arbitrary or trivial connections. As an enabler for change, metaphor does not address the problem directly, but transforms it in oblique ways by making the world less fixed and creating new and multiple ways of seeing and understanding the target (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990; Cornelissen, 2005). Beyond a reframing there are in our study few new activities added to the workflow which involve learning and training; it is

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the temporal configuration, the pacing, and rhythm that have changed. Clark and Maielli state that: “By selecting various events in the form of sequences or tra­jec­tor­ies, from arrays of events which can be apprehended relative to one another, concepts of time are constructed by attending to sets of events which are seen to unfold relative to other trajectories of events” (2009: 257). A transformation of concepts of time can thus be understood and spurred by viewing metaphor as a creative per­form­ance and enactment of time—that is, it is the timing of events, and not time as such, that enables the generation of a new temporal structuring and patterning of action to make change happen.

7.4 Conclusion Metaphors are devices for capturing and expressing embodied, tacit, and relational aspects of the temporal (past, present, and future) flow of experience, giving impetus to novel interpretations, explanations, and inventions not previously imagined, and “because of its inherent ambivalence of meaning, metaphor can fulfill the dual function of enabling change and preserving continuity” (Pondy, 1983: 164). Our study builds upon an action research design involving the co-generation of new ideas, concepts, and metaphors, aimed at enabling transformative change in the temporal structuring of a news organization as it changed its workflow from day-to-day, deadlinegoverned production to continuous and near-future-oriented production, flowline. As a device for organizational change, metaphor represents a critical yet appreciative inquiry into how multiple interpretations of intersubjective meaning and collaborative construction of new concepts unfold in practice and create new possibilities for action. However, the use of metaphors and action research goes beyond making change happen; they are also promising means of informing practice and processoriented research in general, with its interest in temporary evolving phenomenon, interactions, changing interpretations, and lived and living experience.

Note 1. The title of this section is a lyric from the song “Not Dark Yet,” from the album Time Out of Mind by Bob Dylan (1997).

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8 Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar

8.1 Introduction On time. In time. Time flies. Time is running. Time out. Time has come. Past. Present. Future. Temporality is a salient feature of all human life and activities (Bluedorn,  2002). Temporality is not about time reckoning. It is about living (Jaques, 1982). Temporality concerns the ways in which the passing of time forms the being of things (Heidegger, 1927/1996) through a dynamic process. The notion of temporality refers to a flow-like approach, i.e. the ungraspable flow marked by its ongoing novelty (Hernes,  2014)—in other words, the continuous becoming of things. This process consists of an endless flow of new presents, and the agency of actors always lies in the present where they ascribe the present with meaning, as well evoking past and future events (Schultz and Hernes, 2013). Recently, there has been an increasing interest in how history and time affect organizing processes (Bluedorn and Standifer,  2006; Hernes,  2014; Langley and Tsoukas, 2016). This interest has also reached the routine literature, but there is still limited understanding of temporality (Simpson and Lorino, 2016) and how it shapes routine dynamics (Howard-Grenville, 2005). In line with Turner (2014), we take as a starting point in this chapter that temporality is paramount for understanding routines as it is likely to influence how routines develop and change (Simpson and Lorino, 2016). It is widely acknowledged that routines are crucial for organizational performance (Nelson and Winter,  1982; Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville,  2011), and they are frequently defined as “generative systems that produce recognizable, repetitive patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman and Pentland, 2003: 95). Routines are comprised by actions (Feldman, 2016) and develop as continuous processes of creation and recreation (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013), as actors enact and perform the routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Jarzabkowski, Lê, and Feldman, 2012). As such, routines are seen as action patterns that emerge Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar, Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0008

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and are accomplished through actors’ performances (Feldman, Pentland, D’Adderio, and Lazaric, 2016). Implicit in such a processual view on routines is that temporality is a shaping force in this routine patterning process. Granting agency to temporality is arguably different from the more common approach to time within the routine literature, where time is primarily seen as an independent variable in the unfolding of routines, from their antecedents to their outcomes (Turner, 2014). Time tends to be used as an abstract measure, looking at dating and sequencing. This means that, as argued by Simpson and Lorino (2016), the past is seen as an already determined history and the future is perceived to be deduced from past experience. This leads to accounts of routine development over time. Agreeing with Mutch (2016) that the understanding of historical shaping of routines is still limited, we suggest that time has agency (Hernes, 2014) and propose that the understanding of routines can be furthered by following the actions of actors as they act in time. Such a process approach to the impact of temporality on routine development can help to overcome the time-reckoning perspective and enhance our understanding of routine dynamics (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). In this chapter, we draw on an empirical example from a construction company where temporal conflict is salient in the creation and recreation of a quality routine. The findings give insight into how temporal dimensions such as time orientation, time horizon, and pace shape the routine patterning within the firm. The chapter also contributes to the literature on temporality as empirical research on how tem­ porality affects organizing is still rare.

8.2  Routine Patterning and Temporality 8.2.1  Routine Patterning A processual perspective on routines presumes routines to exist as traces of action patterns through time and space, which can alter from one enactment to the next (Feldman et al., 2016). Routines have inner dynamics that create both stability and change (Feldman and Pentland,  2003; Jarzabkowski et al.,  2012). It has become widely accepted to refer to the constituents of routine dynamics as ostensive and performative. Ostensive refers to the more generative ideas about the routine (Pentland, Feldman, Becker, and Liu, 2012), while performative refers to the actual per­form­ ances of the routine as actors act (Feldman, 2000). The performative underscores the agency of the actors involved, and stresses that routines are performed by specific people in specific times and places (Feldman and Pentland,  2003). Also, they are “not only effortful, but also emergent accomplishments” (Feldman, 2016: 613), i.e. they are often works in progress (Feldman, 2000). Focusing on agency opens up the possibility that actors might approach a routine from different—and sometimes conflicting—perspectives (Salvato and Rerup, 2018). Previous research has demonstrated that the development of routines can lead to

118  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies divergence and struggle between different points of view and conflicts between actors (Howard-Grenville and Rerup, 2017). These enactments can be more or less incompatible and lead to misalignment between different performances of a routine (Edmondson and Zuzul, 2016). Actors have different goals and intentions (HowardGrenville, 2005), and they try to adjust to situational conditions (Essen, 2008) or tap into sequences of the routine (Turner, 2014). Variability in performance can not only lead to change, but also be vital in stabilizing a routine across actors who are dis­par­ ate in time and space (Danner-Schröder and Geiger,  2016; Essen,  2008). Essen (2008), in her study of the internal dynamics of a home-help delivery routine, demonstrated that routine survival happens when workers oscillate between departing from, and returning to, the routine. Individuals respond to situational contingencies differently and in particular when the setting has inherent competing needs, and there is a need for nuanced descriptions of how variability is managed in relation to routine dynamics (Essen, 2008). Recently, some scholars have argued that the notions of “performative” and “ostensive” are starting to resemble separate entities (e.g., Feldman, 2016; Simpson and Lorino, 2016). To overcome these issues, they suggest a stronger process focus on actions and how actions get interlinked with actions and thus form patterns of actions over time. As Feldman (2016: 30) remarks, actions are “simply the doings and sayings,” and are important for several reasons. First, they are constitutive in nature and help overcome dualisms between the ostensive and the performative. Also, they are relational in that every action derives its meaning, significance, and identity from the role it plays in a transaction. To capture the becoming of routines, Feldman (2016) suggests that the performative should be changed to performing, and the ostensive should be changed to patterning. This means that there is an emerging patterning of the routine created by the flow of performances (Feldman, 2016). Through these performances “collective regular patterns of action” emerge, and lead to the development of a shared understanding of what actions are relevant in relation to a routine and how they relate to the organizational context (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013: 183). The patterning is a recurrent process that guides the evolving recreation of patterns of action. Over time these become an interlocking repository of stored actions that appears as a coherent and collective pattern. This means that the performing and the patterning mutually constitute each other (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). The concept of patterning is a more recent development within routine dynamics research, and highlights the role of time and temporality, claiming that routines are inseparable from time (Feldman, 2016). Time and temporality have been approached in different ways in the routines literature. In his extensive review of the nature and role of time in routines research, Turner (2014) showed that time and temporality have been seen to play a role as temporal antecedents of routines (i.e. time as signal, resource, and state of mind), and are also key to explaining the performance outcomes of routines. For example, in a study of a garbage collection routine, Turner and Rindova (2012) demonstrated how changing conditions slowed down the participants’

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routine performances as, over time, they had to figure out new ways of completing their task. The study also demonstrated the importance of a fit between performances of the routine and the environment’s expectations of “timely per­form­ance” (Turner and Rindova, 2012). A slightly different way of incorporating tem­porality in routines research has been from the approach of the participants’ state of mind. For example, Feldman and Pentland (2003: 95) stated that participants’ “ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and respond to present circumstances” shapes the ability for routines to change from within. Participants’ focus and tem­poral orientation also influence the routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). The role of temporal orientation was also key in Howard-Grenville’s (2005) study of a road-mapping routine, where she—based on Emirbayer and Miche (1998)—showed how the combination of actors’ intentions and temporal orientations affected the routine performances. She demonstrated how routine participants might choose to iterate on earlier performances, pragmatically include elements of earlier performances when trying to pursue several ends the same time, or project parts of earlier per­form­ances to imagine and/or plan for future performances (Howard-Grenville,  2005: 629). In other words, the development of a routine is shaped by the temporal orientation of actors, as the present- and future-oriented actor tends to perform the routine more flexibly than those oriented toward the past. It has also been suggested that routine development is shaped by the fact they are highly embedded in a broader network of routines—i.e. an ecology of routines—and, within this ecology, different ­routines can unfold at different speeds (Howard-Grenville, Rerup, Langley, and Tsoukas, 2016). Although the interest in temporality in routine development is increasing, and Turner (2014: 23) concluded that “time is well recognized as an independent variable in routine research,” take away this research is still in its infancy and the routine literature is often mute to time and temporality (Simpson and Lorino, 2016). There is a need to understand “how performing routines is affected by variability among routine participants with respect to time as a signal, resource, and state of mind” (Turner, 2014: 20). Simpson and Lorino (2016) add that there is need for looking at routines in time, rather than the often used variance-based approach that focuses on the routine development over time. They go on to say that the “inherently processual nature of the performative idiom demands a temporal understanding of the present moment as continuously emergent in the interplay between remembered pasts and imagined futures” (Simpson and Lorino, 2016: 65).

8.2.2  A Temporal Lens to Understand Routine Patterning The increasing attention given to time and temporality in routines research aligns with the increasing interest in these phenomena in general organization theory (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman 2001; Hernes, 2014; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van de Ven, 2013). As the process approach has grown stronger, it is

120  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies argued that temporality is not merely a lens of the researcher, but a feature of managing and organizing experienced by all the parties involved (Langley et al., 2013). It has become common to take an agentic temporal view (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015), viewing time as a subjective and intersubjective phenomenon that is highly contextually embedded (Emirbayer and Miche, 1998; Adams, 1998). This means that people in organizations experience time through shared temporal structures they enact recurrently in their everyday practices, which in turn produces and reproduces temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing ac­tiv­ities (Orlikowski and Yates,  2002). Through this process different groups and or­gan­iza­ tion­al entities can develop a “temporal commons,” i.e. a shared conceptualization of time and temporal values that is developed by a culture carrying collectivity (Bluedorn and Waller, 2006: 355). This can lead to the existence of multiple and varying temporalities in organizations that generate tensions between entities (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). Several temporal dimensions can coexist in an organization, and there is—across multi-disciplinary literatures—some variety in terms of which temporal dimensions are singled out. For example, Halbesleben, Novicevic, Harvey, and Buckley (2003) argue that time frame/time horizon, tempo, temporality, synchronization, sequence, pause/gaps, simultaneity with zeitgebers, time personality, and timelessness, are particularly relevant for organizational research. Ancona et al. (2001: 646) argue for including “timing, pace cycles, rhythms, flow, temporal orientation, and the cultural meanings of time.” While recognizing that all of these dimensions might be relevant for our purposes, we will in the following focus on time orientation, time horizon, and pace. We believe that these three dimensions cover the key aspects we need to explore in terms of how temporality shapes routine patterning, and the choice is based on a combination of insights from our case study and the literature. Temporal orientation (Howard-Grenville,  2005), or temporal focus (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006), is about the orientation toward past, present or future and how actors tend to either iterate on earlier performances or project parts of earlier per­form­ances to plan for future performances (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Howard-Grenville,  2005). With time horizon, we are referring to the temporal distances into the past and future that actors consider when anticipating when events happen(ed) or may happen (Bluedorn, 2002: 114). This resonates with the notion of time frame that stipulates the beginning and end of processes (Halbesleben et al.,  2003), and different processes in an organization—for example, exploration and exploitation activities—that have different time frames (Ancona et al., 2001). Pace refers to the speed or tempo with which a phenomenon occurs (Bluedorn, 2002), and indicates how much activity can be accomplished within a given time frame. It relates to Gersick’s (1989) notion of time-based pacing of activities. Pace is linked to entrainment, or temporal coordination (Bluedorn and Waller, 2006; Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006) and “the adjustment of the pace or cycle of activity to match or synchronize with that of another activity” (Ancona and Chong, 1996: 253). It is about the synchronization of

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  121

tempo and/or the pace of two or more activities within a system (Pérez-Nordtvedt, Payne, Short, and Kedia, 2008; Ballard, 2009). Such synchronization can occur both within and between various groups or work units (Halbesleben et al., 2003). We assume that a multiplicity of temporalities affects the enactment of routines, and that these enactments in turn shape temporalities. Using multiple conceptualizations of time enables the understanding of how different facets of temporality affect interaction (Gersick,  1989), and therefore routine patterning. The temporal approach we take includes a more radical understanding of temporality where tem­ porality is granted causality (Schultz and Hernes,  2013), and responds to calls for developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between routine development and temporality (Turner, 2014; Feldman, 2016; Simpson and Lorino, 2016). The key issue is that organizations are caught in endless temporal flows of ongoing presents, where they weave past, present, and future together (Schultz and Hernes, 2013).

8.3 Methods 8.3.1  Research Context We have studied the quality routine in a construction company, hereafter referred to as Alpha for the sake of anonymity. In 2018, Alpha had a total turnover of 4 billion USD and 8,000 employees. The company undertakes approximately 500 construction and civil engineering projects each year across the Scandinavian countries, and is a decentralized organization with a high degree of autonomy granted to the local units and projects. Ensuring quality is a key performance indicator in all projects, and the company was awarded ISO 9001 certification in 2014. However, since then a growing awareness has developed at Headquarters (HQ) that the current quality routine does not fulfill its purpose of creating consistency in quality performance in the project-based organization at large, and of enabling learning from previous defects. This is attributed to the reactive nature of the system, which focuses on re­gis­ter­ing defects when they have already happened—using paper-based checklists— instead of encouraging proactive actions and utilizing the existing system. Calculations show that costs related to quality defects comprise a substantial amount of the company’s total revenue. A new initiative was therefore introduced by the corporate improvement team in 2016 to develop a new quality system, run as an R&D project. The new system was inspired by the company’s lean construction process, focusing on involving project participants and creating commitment. The idea was to connect the new routine to the lean construction process by utilizing the involvement and collaboration of the construction workers and the use of digital tools to ensure quality. The key motivation underpinning the new concept was to complement the existing reactive and push-driven quality control routine with a routine that allowed project participants to be more proactive and pull-driven (i.e. seeking information required)

122  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies than before. In parallel with this center-led initiative, some of the projects had already started to use a digital tool for quality assurance, which they found useful.

8.3.2  Data Collection and Analysis Process research allows for understanding how things evolve over time and why they develop in certain ways (Pettigrew,  1997). Therefore, a qualitative process research strategy seems particularly useful for studying how recognizable, repetitive action patterns form and change over time, and therefore for our purposes. Such an approach is also in accordance with previous studies of routines (e.g. HowardGrenville, 2005; Jarzabkowski et al., 2012, Turner and Rindova, 2012). Furthermore, qualitative studies are useful to explore perceptions of time in organizations (Lumineau and Oliveira, 2018). The findings we present are based on data collected at Alpha from June 2016 until June 2018. It is important to notice, however, that the change process is a neverending story. Data were collected in real time as the process progressed (Pettigrew, 1997). Data sources included participation in workshops and meetings concerning the change initiative, observations at the project level (ten project meetings), and interviews with people at both the project and central levels of the or­gan­iza­tion (thirty interviews). We followed standard procedures for collecting and processing qualitative data, such as the use of a dynamic interview protocol, the development of memos, and a chronological history (Miles and Huberman, 1994) concerning how temporality shaped routine patterning. The analysis aimed at identifying themes and concepts that emerged in the data collection process (Corbin and Strauss,  1990). This process involved qualitative and inductive coding to identify concepts meaningful to the respondents, i.e. first-order concepts that could illustrate how their actions were influenced by temporal dimensions. We scanned the interviews for data that seemed to be important for understanding this process and looked for them in subsequent interviews and documents, as well as in the observations and archival data. The unit of analysis was the actions of individuals and groups of people at different organizational levels and the temporal dimensions related to these actions. Following this first-order analysis, the topics identified were scru­tin­ized and labeled into second-order concepts (Nag and Gioia,  2012), before we worked to identify linkages among the concepts that led to aggregated themes that represented theoretical concepts at a more abstract level (Nag and Gioia, 2012). The constant comparative method was used, iterating between literature on routine cre­ation and recreation (e.g. Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013) as well as literature on tem­porality (e.g. Reinecke and Ansari, 2015) and the empirical material (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), to let the empirical findings direct attention to the theoretical analysis and vice versa. We used the software NVivo in this process, and sought to ensure the reliability of the coding by conducting separate coding, the results of which were compared, discussed, and adapted into the final themes. Table 8.1 shows the coding structure of how we identified the temporal dimensions in the data material.

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  123 Table 8.1  Data structure First-order concepts

Second-order concepts

Aggregated themes

Lack of time—“we use what we have”; Lack of attention due to more pressing issues; “Trapped” in existing artifacts Industry-level norms for quality work; Legal requirements—cover one’s back; Contractual regulations  HQ driven by long-term learning and development needs; Need for creating consistency in quality performance Projects driven by production and delivering within time; Temporary relations between organizations; Quality issues often require ad hoc actions HQ aiding projects with templates and development of checklists and plans that are developed over the years Projects characterized by stress and urgency; Existing routine, with paper-based checklists seen to disturb production logic Consistent quality is important for business; Acknowledgement that existing routine is not working properly The use of new digital tools provides immediate information and learning—HQ recognizing the fit with project work pace New routine linking quality assurance to production planning routine

Iterating past performance of the routine

Past patterning shaping present understandings of routine—creating stability

Orienting toward the past Long time horizon

Differing temporal logics—creating temporal conflict in present performance

Short time horizon

Slow pace

Fast pace

Joint situated understandings— orienting toward the future

Shaping temporal commons—aligned actions orienting toward the future

Shaping temporal structures

In the following, we use data from the study of Alpha to describe how temporality shapes routine patterning, honing in on the temporal dimensions of time orientation, time horizon, and pace. In line with Eisenhardt and Graebner’s (2007) recommendation—and similar to other studies of a single routine and its dynamics (e.g. Turner and Rindova, 2012)— the following section presents together our first- and second-order analysis. We start by describing the different steps in the “generic” quality routine. We then focus on why this apparently inefficient routine continued for so long, before we delve deeper into the triggers of change, the temporality dimensions, and how these have influenced the routine patterning.

124  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

8.4 Findings Overall, our findings show how the routine patterning is a continuous flow between past, present, and future enactments of the routine. The presentation of these findings is organized as follows: After explaining quality assurance at Alpha, we describe how orientation toward the past created stability in routine patterning, even if Alpha’s quality routine was perceived as “not working.” Next, we document temporal conflict in the present performance of the routine, and how the questioning of tem­ poral assumptions triggered change in routine patterning. Finally, we describe how the introduction of a new quality initiative led to a range of adjustments, which recreated routine patterning with an orientation toward the future.

8.4.1  Ensuring Quality at Alpha Quality is an implicit part of any project delivery at Alpha, and relates to both processes and the products being built. Quality is largely influenced by clients’ requirements, government regulations, and the company’s own experiences and procedures. To handle quality issues with regard to what is being built and what the client gets, Alpha has a quality assurance process that is based on some overall steps which run through the life span of a construction project and its design and production phases. This is illustrated in Figure 8.1. The first step in ensuring quality in the product is in the design phase. In this phase, Alpha needs to ensure the quality of the final product, e.g. a building, based on the requirements, standard regulations, and previous experiences, which are stored in the company’s corporate system. The next step of the quality routine is in  the production phase, where quality is ensured through quality assurance. Checklists are used by supervisors throughout the project, to ensure that everything is done according to agreements and that deviations are reported. These are collected

Clients requirements

Law/standards

Design/planning Specifying quality levels and creating checklists according to project plan

Previous experiences

Figure 8.1  Quality assurance at Alpha

Construction production Quality control, filling in checklists, and dealing with deviations on site

Quality in final product Deviations stored in database

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  125

by the responsible foreman, and registered in a database, in order to store the information and to enable opportunities for learning from earlier experiences. Traditionally, the checklists were paper based and the data had to be registered manually. However, more recently digital tools have been used in the process. The way deviations are solved depends on the type and significance of the deviation. Smaller issues are usually dealt with immediately and might not even get registered, while bigger issues are discussed in formal meetings between the parties, such as the weekly site meeting which all the craft managers and foremen attend, and registered in the database.

8.5  Temporality Shaping the Quality Routine Patterning 8.5.1  Orienting toward the Past and Iterating Past Performance—Creating Stability in Routine Patterning Routine participants’ orientation affects routine patterning (Howard-Grenville, 2005). The interviews reflect the fact that many people at both HQ and the project level had for some years regarded the existing quality routine as inappropriate—as one of the HQ managers said: “It is widely held that the routine doesn’t work.” The reason for this was that the system was too complicated and difficult to use, and there were few opportunities for learning from mistakes across projects. However, looking at the overall routine pattern over time, as embedded in various artifacts such as procedures and systems, it seemed relatively stable (Feldman et al., 2016). Other issues, such as improving the construction planning processes and implementing lean principles, were more pressing, Thus, one explanation for this stability can be lack of attention, but other explanations are related to the fact that quality is highly regulated and depends on contractual agreements. Deviations are very costly for the respective responsible party and can delay the progress of production. The following quotes illustrate how actors are oriented towards the past as quality is regulated by law and contracts. As one foreman explained, “The only reason for registering something is because you don’t want to get the blame.” Another foreman concurred: “Of course, I do it because I’m afraid of being caught, legally.” This interviewee further pointed out that people usually do what is expected of them, even if reluctantly, and “those are the ones that make the system persist.” Similarly, some of the subcontractors that we interviewed just referred to the contract with Alpha, and affirmed that “In this project, we do as Alpha wants. Next time there is another contractor, and then we have to comply with their requirements.” The routine patterning of the present was also shaped by the former work with ISO certification and the database. These observations indicate that despite the potential conflicts between the needs of the projects and the company in relation to the quality routine, these formalities are

126  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies likely to sustain the existing routine pattern. We also learned from the interviews that, besides the formal aspects, there was strong pressure to keep the projects going, not having time to think, just following what has always been done, and not creating too much fuss. The findings indicate that there was a shared schema of how the routine should work in principle (Dionysiou and Tsoukas,  2013). However, even though wellestablished individual and shared schemata tend to persist (Fiske and Taylor, 1991), the actions taken in relation to the routine may lead to a change in routine patterning. Our findings show a similar process, and as will be shown in the next section, the actions taken were largely shaped by temporality.

8.5.2  Differing Temporal Logics in Pace and Time Horizon— Creating Temporal Conflict in Present Performance Informants working at the construction sites generally reported dissatisfaction with the existing quality routine, and the main argument was that it was of little use. Typically, the paper-based checklists would be collected and registered into the system on late Friday afternoon. Once they were in the system, no one would ever take any further notice. However, given the large variance in each project in terms of clients’ requirements and product and project specificities, the checklists needed to be adapted to the individual project. In one of my first projects, I got this all-round role called project engineer, which is usually given to inexperienced staff. As is often the case, they also get the responsibility for quality. I made a comprehensive plan and checklists based on the routines. However, this old guy from the HQ, when he saw it, just said “take away half of it.” It has to be adapted to the specific project and its needs—we don’t want to do more than the client requires and we don’t want to overwhelm the craftsmen with redundant work. I learned to keep things simple. (Middle manager, HQ, previous site manager)

One project manager expressed his opinion about the existing routine as follows: “Assurance work is something everyone hates—one of the worse tasks you do. The checklists have nothing to do with quality; something does not become more correct by filling out a list.” This view was confirmed by other informants. Confirmations and controls would usually be done on an ad-hoc basis, and were considered a hassle in the daily work. When talking to the informants, it appeared that there was a difference in the time horizon of the projects and HQ, and that this difference was trouble­some but also to some extent necessary: There are different time horizons. We are so eager to adapt to the projects’ rhythm, but perhaps they need us to think the longer thoughts. They ask for forms, because they don’t have time to create them themselves.  (Quality Manager, HQ)

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  127 The projects will ask us to make a system that works for them while we are thinking: why are you not using the system we have designed?  (IT Manager, HQ)

It used to be business as usual until two relatively uncoupled initiatives, at the project and corporate levels of the company respectively, accentuated the focus on quality and resulted in changes in the quality routine. These change initiatives, and the emerging routine patterning, were largely shaped by the differences in time horizon and pace between the projects and the corporate level, represented by HQ. In one of the projects, the project participants had started using an app for quality checks. It replaced the paper checklists, and implied that confirmations and controls would be registered immediately the work was done, and supported by photos. It was much more in line with the ongoing workflow and tempo of the construction work. It also represented a real-time way of collecting information. While the existing system, being reactive, was oriented toward the past, the app represented the present time.

8.5.3  Shaping Temporal Structures and Allowing for Mutual Adjustment and Temporal Commons—Orienting toward the Future Embeddedness refers to the degree to which a routine is connected with other organizational structures (Howard-Grenville, 2005), and embeddedness shapes routine dynamics (Howard-Grenville and Rerup, 2016). The database where all quality deviations were supposed to be registered was a key part of the quality routine but it was difficult for the project to register and also to retrieve information from this database. The findings show how this system was largely discarded and then evoked in new forms because it was perceived as misaligned with the daily production processes in the projects and thus as hindering enactments of quality performance. This means that the actors were iterating past performances at the same time as they were orienting toward the future. Actors at the HQ started to rethink how to use the database along with an initiative to change the quality system, particularly in respect of how to use all the information stored in the system. The idea was to proactively plan production in a manner that would avoid the most common and costliest quality deviations (historically), and the new system was flaunted as a useful artifact for learning. At first, the new initiative grew relatively independent of the project initiative, but over time these two processes became increasingly connected. Becoming more connected, there were struggles about how quality assurance should be performed, by whom it should be performed, and which artifacts should be included in the performances. In particular, there were disagreements about which digital artifacts should be used and how; the new system, with an associated new digital tool, the app introduced at and used by the projects, or both these. For e­ xample, interviewees (HQ representatives) talked about the non-compliance of the projects in using the existing system and routine, and the subsequent adoption of the app, which HQ at first, hoped was just a fleeting trend.

128  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The system we had was too rigid—information in the system was not well organized—and it took forever to find something that might be useful. So most people put information into it but it did not provide learning to the organization. When [name of the app] came along people at the project level wanted to use it straightaway but at HQ we found it difficult because it was not integrated with the system and we wanted everything to be gathered in a system that we had control over.

We identified several transformational events that contributed to reconciling the opposing forces that the struggles above represented. One transformational point was that, when the actors connected the quality routine to the production planning routine, it seemed to provide them with a more powerful language across the organization that opened up a variety of possible future patterning(s). One of the interviewees explained: “Earlier it was easy for the quality controller to describe the quality process, because everyone else had to adapt to it. However, now the quality process must integrate into the other processes.” In other words, it was recognized that for the quality routine to work, it had to be aligned and integrated with the overall production routine and the planning of the actual construction work. This entrainment proved important in the overall process. Another transformational point in the routine patterning was when the routine was connected to the idea of quality assurance providing a more cost-effective business. Using the app for some time, the project team members experienced how this led to quicker and better exchange of information about mistakes and quality deficiencies—insights that could be used to prevent the same mistake being made repeatedly. For a long time, there were multiple voices at Alpha questioning the value of quality assurance as such and how it could best be performed. As the idea spread that a systematic use of digital tools across all projects in the organization would lead to a more cost-effective business, the belief in quality assurance and the willingness to engage in it increased. These findings are in line with Zbaracki and Bergen (2010) who, in their study of how organizational entities struggled over pricing routines, showed how the organizational actors who managed to connect their performance with more powerful macro-logics won the battle. Struggling over the performance of the current quality routine and trying to carve out potential patterns for the future, the actors at Alpha seemed to actively embed the routine in more powerful logics to increase the potentiality of their envisioned future. The empirical model shown in Figure  8.2 summarizes how people experienced the quality routine and the actions that were taken in response to differing temporalities. For a long time, people at Alpha had used a quality routine that they all found to be useless, but which somehow persisted until new digital tools were introduced. The project teams expressed a need for tools that were easy and efficient to use and that aligned with the inherent temporal logic of project work and construction processes. It seems that the high pace of project work made the actors do quality work on an ad-hoc basis—for example, using parts of the paper-based checklists to

Iterating past performance

Checklists are filled in manually and registered when there is time. Leads to a time lag between reporting and following up on deviations.

Shaping temporal commons

Connecting quality routine to production planning.

Orienting toward the future

HQ adjusting to needs of the projects. Developing shared schemata.

Projects starting to recognize that there is a need for an overall quality system where learning between projects can take place.

HQ starts to tap into project experience with new app, connecting it to their work on a new digital quality system.

Projects’ high pace-focus on delivering the project within a tight time frame. Starting to use digital tools that give immediate and timely documentation and communication.

Attention to problems shaped by differing temporalities

Figure 8.2  The development of the quality routine at Alpha

Picking a set of subroutines needed for the specific project. Existing systems not relevent for daily activities; projects seldom use the database to learn from other projects, but still report on major issues.

Existing quality routine. Large quality system that is cumbersome to access and retrieve data from.

HQ’s long-term focus. Working on finding a quality routine where experience from all projects can be used for learning and efficency purposes.

130  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies confirm expected quality and register the most critical incidents. When starting to use the app, the registration of deviations could be done immediately. In the same time period, HQ was also working with quality. Their work had a longer time frame, and included efforts to develop a digital quality routine. The differences in time horizon and pace at the two organizational levels seemed to shape the actions they engaged in related to quality work (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Nadkarnin, Chen and Chen, 2016; Aeon and Aguinis, 2017). For a long time, the enactment of the app was mainly a bottom-up process where actors disparate in time and place started using it. Gradually it spread to new actors in the organization and became acknowledged as a system that provided transparency to quality assurance (D’Adderio,  2008; Turner and Rindova,  2012). Furthermore, HQ started to realize that using digital tools, such as the app, was more in line with the pace of project work and that it was not in conflict with the developments going on at HQ. This realization paved the way for connecting the quality routine to production planning, and consequently a shared understanding developed that allowed for mutual adjustments and the establishment of a temporal commons in the organization.

8.6 Discussion Repetitive joint action is at the core of routine patterning (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013) and we address how this patterning is shaped by temporality (Simpson and Lorino,  2016). Temporality consists of multiple temporal dimensions that can be constructed differently across actors, tasks, and structures (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). In other words, the actors involved in the performing of a routine can have different temporal logics. We suggest that the temporal lens allows for a broader understanding of routine patterning and to demonstrate this we focus on three of the salient temporal dimensions that we found in the case of Alpha: tem­poral orientation, time horizon, and pace. These dimensions create temporal tensions but they were also, to some extent, necessary and even vital in terms of performing the quality routine in a manner that creates both efficiency and learning in the long term. In the following, we will discuss the inherent struggles of finding meaning and common ground that allow for routine patterning at the same time as permitting desired variability in performances of the quality routine. The model shown in Figure  8.3 illustrates how routine patterning is shaped by—and shapes—tem­porality and is based on the findings presented earlier. Patterns are being shaped as actors take action based on temporal orientation. For instance, the project participants at Alpha tended to use parts of the available quality routine that were useful to them in their high-pace environment. Their performing of the routine included different approaches. They iterated past performances of the routine as the time horizon was short and there was little time to figure out new performances. Also, they chose to dip into the aspects of the routine they found useful due to the high pace of activity. In addition, they adopted an artifact that could

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  131

Routine creation

Past patterning creating stability in present performance

Routine patterning

Differing temporal logics in present performance triggering change

Routine recreation

Shaping temporal commons and orientation toward the future

Figure 8.3  Temporality shaping routine patterning

match the pace they aimed for in performing the routine. Over time the patterning of the routine was shaped by the acknowledgement across HQ and the projects about their different pace, and different time horizons, but also that there were shared goals and interdependencies because both levels were interested in short-term and longterm quality performance. This common understanding makes the actors orient toward future quality work and explore how it could align with various production logics. As this understanding emerged, it was decided to link the quality routine to the planning routine as this would align better with the temporal logic of project work. This enabled the development of a temporal commons and balanced the tensions created by differences in time orientation, time horizon, and pace. The proposed model aims to give insight into how temporality may add to our understanding of routine patterning. The key insights that we would like to discuss further are: (1) how orientation toward the past can create stability in routine patterning (iterating past performance), (2) how temporal conflict in the present per­form­ ance of the routine and the questioning of temporal assumptions trigger change in routine patterning, and (3) how the shaping of temporal structures can create a temporal commons that balances the tensions inherent in temporality, thus allowing for routine patterning and an orientation toward the future. First, the findings show how the quality routine at Alpha was used for a long time even though it was cumbersome and not working. The informants explained how time pressure and the high pace of project work meant that they seldom questioned the quality routine. It was easier to just use parts of the routine and—also because of the short time horizon of the projects—do what you had always done. This finding is in line with Bluedorn and Richtermeyer (2005), who demonstrated that the shorter the future time horizon, the more stress and a sense of urgency will be the reality. Furthermore, quality is largely regulated and there are industry standards for quality work, and this also contributed to the iteration of past performances of the routine. Howard-Grenville (2005) argues that present- and future-oriented actors are likely to perform the routine in a more flexible manner than those oriented toward the past. However, we also found that the actors flexibly navigated in this landscape by using parts of the routine or using the routine as they saw fit—for instance, by only

132  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies registering the most severe quality deviations in the system. The reason for this pragmatic approach might be that the participants, in their context of high pace and short time horizon, were more inclined to remember the past than imagine the future (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Second, we found that in the process of iterating past performance, inherent tem­ poral conflict was present between the projects and HQ. These conflicting tem­por­al­ ities were known and understood in the organization as something that was difficult but also somehow necessary. Projects are, by definition, temporary (Lundin and Söderholm,  1995), with ex ante defined final deadlines and relatively short time horizons, compared to permanent organizations (Bakker, DeFillippi, Schwab, and Sydow, 2016). As the empirical material illustrates, projects also have fast pace, often materialized as sequences of deadlines for deliveries (Jones and Lichtenstein, 2008). HQ, on the other hand, had a longer time frame and a slower pace in their work and this difference made HQ and the projects approach the routine differently (Feldman, 2004). The short time frame of project work made the projects mainly orient toward the present and iterate the past, while HQ—with its longer time frame and perspective into the future—worked with multiple development processes simultaneously. HQ worked on developing a technological quality system, researching the value of the recent quality initiatives, and developing checklists, procedures, and other artifacts. For some time, the enactment of the routine at the HQ and the projects was incompatible (Edmondson and Zuzul,  2016). The difference in temporalities and time scales created tensions in the organization. This is not so surprising and it aligns with, for instance, Howard-Grenville (2005), who showed how differences in orientation can lead to disputes about how to use the routine, as well as tallying with research on conflicting temporalities hampering inter-departmental interaction in organizations (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). The actors at Alpha adjusted their performing of the routine to their perceptions of the situational conditions (Essen, 2008). For example, they expressed a need for tools that were easy and efficient to use—to match their high-paced action and production. The temporal logic of the project led to a preference for a “quicker” quality routine. Adopting the app accentuated the pace of their quality work. This again seemed to reinforce the temporal conception of the project (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). When they adopted the app, it made it possible to document deviations (a salient part of the overall quality routine) immediately. The project team members took this opportunity to change their routine performance. This reinforcement of the project’s temporal structures seemed to increase the temporal conflict (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015) between the projects and HQ, which triggered a change in the enactment of the quality routine at HQ as they also started to question their temporal assumptions. HQ realized that the present performance of the routine and the temporary logic of project work were important for how Alpha should work with quality, and they decided to implement digital tools in the new quality routine. In the following, we will turn to how they also worked on shaping temporal structures to create temporal commons.

Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning  133

Above we discussed how temporal conflict can trigger change in routine patterning as it may make actors question their own temporal assumptions. In the case of Alpha, we see that the recreation of the routine into a shared understanding of what actions were relevant to the routine first flourished when there was acknowledgement of the interdependencies and the reasons for the differing temporal logics. Furthermore, the shaping of a temporal commons came about as actors throughout the organization acknowledged the need for change and started questioning the assumptions about the functioning of the quality routine. As a result of this process it was decided to link the quality routine to the procedures for production planning. This was also a result of future-oriented actors working actively to establish the new routine across the firm, applying elements of earlier performances pragmatically and also projecting the future quality routine at Alpha (Howard-Grenville, 2005). At Alpha this understanding had been there previously as well, but not so much in terms of how it made actors attend to problems differently. In their discussion of how organizations negotiate conflicting temporalities, Reinecke and Ansari (2015) introduce the term “ambitemporality” as a way of explaining how organizations accommodate contradictory temporal orientations. Ambitemporality is not about reaching a unified way of using the routine but about acknowledging the need for different coexisting temporal logics for the organization to work. This mutual understanding and adjustment is motivated by a need to establish some form of common understanding and shared reality with others (Echterhoff, Higgins, and Levine, 2009). We know from before that routine development is shaped by how the routines are embedded in a broader network (Howard-Grenville, et al., 2016). However, HowardGrenville (2005) argued that future-oriented actors tend to perform the routine more flexibly. Our findings are not quite in line with this reasoning as we find that HQ, as well as the projects, were oriented toward the past and the future at the same time. Iterating past performances takes place at the same time as they are orienting toward the future. It is the temporal conflict and the acknowledgment of temporal differences that triggers change. Variability in performance can be vital to stabilizing a routine across actors dis­par­ ate in time and space (Danner-Schröder and Geiger, 2016; Essen, 2008). Our study supports this notion and that situational contingencies exist in routine development (Essen,  2008), in the form of interactive situational issues (Tsoukas,  1996). In the development of the “new” routine, differing temporal logics created variations in how the routine was performed, and even though this involved incompatibility in performances for some time, it seemed to strengthen the “new” routine.

8.7 Conclusion In this chapter, we have focused on connecting temporality and routine research and developed insights into how temporality shapes routine patterning (Feldman, 2016; Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). The chapter has demonstrated how multiple coexisting temporalities in organizations lead to variability in performances—seen as increasing

134  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies deviations in the routine across time and space—but also strengthening the progress of the routine. We have shown how present performances of a routine include iterating past performances as well as opening up new possibilities for future patterning. Furthermore, we have shown how actors, having different time horizons and pace of work, perform the routine in different and sometimes incompatible ways and how these conflicting temporalities can trigger a temporal commons and changes in routine patterning (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). We have only focused on some temporal dimensions that were especially relevant for our context. We encourage further studies to look into other dimensions and other contexts to enrich and build on our proposed model. Furthermore, this study focused on the differing temporalities between projects and HQ. There are certainly also differing temporalities within these levels and between trades, and these differences may hold significance for routine patterning. Future research should delve deeper into these connections.

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9 Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow Fusing a “Withness” Approach and Pragmatist Inquiry Frithjof E. Wegener and Philippe Lorino

9.1 Introduction Brilliant empiricists have poked much fun at those who tell us some vague should-be instead of what is. We want something more than either of these; we want to find out what may be, the possibilities now open to us. (Follett, 1924: 2)

In this chapter, we are inspired by the Talking About Organizations Podcast (2017) to go from research about a process, to process becoming the research practice. Exploring the “possibilities now open to us” (Follett, 1924) requires inquiring from “within” doubtful situations with practitioners (Talking About Organizations Podcast, 2017). Such inquiries from “within” are needed to further our processual understanding of “organizational becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia,  2002; Lorino, Tricard, and Clot, 2011), as capturing the experience of living forward together with research participants offers a deeper understanding of “becoming” (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010). Traditional ways of scholarship tend to rewrite the story with the hindsight gath­ ered during the research process. Such accounts become “artifacts of retrospect” (Weick, 1999: 135), as they suffer from two problems. On the one hand is the problem of “retrospective illusion” (Follett, 1924) where in hindsight we make logical connec­ tions between events, but knowing the outcomes influences these logical ­connections and is not in line with the lived experience of the actors who were fa­cing the actual situation (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). On the other hand is the problem of creating theoretical accounts from a detached observer point of view, separated from the point of view of the actors (Weick,  1999; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Instead of

Frithjof E. Wegener and Philippe Lorino, Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow: Fusing a “Withness” Approach and Pragmatist Inquiry In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Frithjof E. Wegener and Philippe Lorino. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0009

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“artifacts of retrospect” that look backward in time, Weick calls for “narratives of prospect” that capture the point of view of actors, and for developing methodologies that integrate the retrospective nature of understanding backwards with the pro­ spective nature of living forward (Weick, 1999). Living forward describes the “experience of being thrown into an unknowable, unpredictable world” (Weick, 1999: 137). From this perspective, Fachin and Langley (2018) introduced “process as withness” by building on the concept of “withness” (Shotter,  2006). A withness approach incorporates “living forward,” as underlying a withness approach is “a true process perspective [which] places the researcher him or herself in flux along with and in direct relation to the researched” (Fachin and Langley, 2018: 23). Thus, rather than detached observing, a withness approach requires engagement with the inquiry process at hand to highlight the “living forward” of actors (Weick, 1999). While Shotter (2006) introduced withness as a philosophical concept, we lack a methodology for a withness approach, as there are only some exemplary vignettes of a withness approach to research. This chapter aims to build on the proposal of Fachin and Langley (2018) for a “process as withness” research approach by fusing a with­ ness approach with pragmatist inquiry (Martela,  2015; Simpson,  2017), forming a methodology intended for advancing our processual understanding of organizing. For this, we draw on the shared tenets of process ontology and collaborative inquiry shared by pragmatism and a withness approach, as others have done before (Lorino and Mourey, 2013; Lorino, Tricard, and Clot 2011; Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014). We call the methodology “pragmatist withness inquiry,” referring to the fusing of a with­ ness approach with pragmatist inquiry. The question we address is: how might process researchers move beyond pro­du­ cing what Weick (1999: 135) labels “artifacts of retrospect” that look backward in time towards “narratives of prospect” that capture the experience of living forward (see also Fachin and Langley,  2018; Shotter,  2006)? To address this question, we focus on the role of situated dialogic inquiry of actors and the practices employed as they face a problematic situation, their deliberating how to deal with the situation, and how they eventually resolve the situation. The theoretical relevance of such a withness approach lies in the potential of gaining a deeper understanding of the emergence of practices and habits, by joining in the flow with research participants and sharing the lived experience as they are living forward when dealing with doubtful situations. Researchers can thus create theory that is more moving, as their experience and their theorizing are part of the same experience as practitioners’. The proposed withness approach stresses the pro­spect­ive dimension of process research and fuses a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. A withness approach shares similarities in intentions and overall set-up with action research, pro­ cess consulting (Schein, 1993), and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987). A withness approach differentiates itself by starting from a relational-processual ontology, focusing on surprising situations, a return to lived experience, and an inherently dialogical research approach. Where other research approaches share ­

140  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies similar goals of changing existing habits and beliefs, a withness approach specifies how to bring the background to the foreground and how to find new possibilities for action in challenging situations. Combining a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry allows us to go beyond the situation-specific focus of a withness approach, to include the overall inquiry process, adding actual experimentation with the possibilities that were discovered through a withness approach. Such research can generate new con­ cepts, new practices, and narratives of prospect (Weick, 1999). In practical terms, through developing a withness approach, we strive to create socially useful knowledge for specific situations through inquiry with practitioners (Fachin and Langley, 2018). The goal here would be to create research accounts that can “move” practitioners (Weick, 1999) and researchers. Such accounts could allow us researchers ways to help practitioners become more sensitive to processual aspects of practice. Such an approach would also have the potential for exploring ways of teach­ ing processual thinking and acting (Talking About Organizations Podcast, 2017). The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. First, we introduce the con­ cepts of living forward, withness, dialogue, pragmatist inquiry, and community of inquiry. Then, we propose a methodology based on fusing a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. Thereafter we discuss the methodological and theoretical impli­ cations and compare the proposed methodology with similar methodologies. The chapter concludes with an invitation to explore and build on our proposed pragma­ tist withness inquiry methodology.

9.2  Theoretical Framework 9.2.1  The Struggle of Living Forward It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget that other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. (Kierkegaard, cited in Gardiner, 1988: 127)

In an article aptly titled “That’s Moving: Theories that Matter,” Weick (1999) con­ sidered why so few theories “move” us on a deeper level and lack emotional res­on­ance. Weick argued that to “move” us, theories must synthesize backward understanding and forward living. Highlighting this struggle of living forward in a concrete situation requires integrating retrospective, but also prospective elements to grasp the ongoing process of living forward. Weick (1999) argued that theorists need to be sensitive to the situational particulars that shape the struggle of living forward. Examples of such research are accounts that describe the struggles of actors dealing with doubtful situations. Orlikowski (1996) captured the struggles of actors dealing with the ­ ­introduction of new software systems and how the software was appropriated. Schön (1983) described the role of reflection-in-action in the work of professionals who deal

Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow  141

with doubtful situations. Weick (1983) showed how man­ager­ial thought is connected to context and how thinking and acting intertwine. We are faced continuously with living forward and with the “throwness” and uncertainty of having to act despite limited knowledge. Whenever one acts, there is a chance that actions now might not lead to the expected outcomes. Consequently, while research can often sound “obvious” in hindsight, when living forward things are not as “obvious.” Weick put this as the “gap between living forward with flawed foresight and understanding backward with equally flawed but mischievously seduc­ tive hindsight” (Weick,  1999: 134). When people act, they are looking back at a remembered past, anticipating imagined futures as living forward, but needing to act in the now. That is, people make sense of the present situation by finding narra­ tives that make sense of the past, prospectively looking forward to understand the events happening at the moment and to hypothesize courses of action (Weick, 1995). As a result the “Present is perpetually ‘in-the-making’ through the interplay of remembered past and abductive anticipations of imagined futures” (Emirbayer and Mische,  1998; Howard-Grenville,  2005; Simpson,  2009; Simpson, 2014, cited in Garud, Simpson, Langley, and Tsoukas, 2015: 14). Thus, living forward captures the idea that the future is uncertain and that, even though we can learn from the past, new insights might emerge that make us rethink the past and ultimately we need to act in the now (Howard-Grenville, 2005). Living forward occurs most clearly in situations where the action is interrupted, as “interruptions uncover the pattern of taken-for-granted relevancies that had been invis­ ible in routine, ongoing action” (Weick, 1999: 140). In these dialogues, or in Weick’s terms “discourses of absorbed coping” (1999: 140), existing beliefs and ­habits can come to light, showing how current concepts as conceived words are limiting one’s percep­ tion. The idea is that this is not detached reflection but a form of “involved deliberation” that remains engaged with the situation at hand (Yanow and Tsoukas,  2009). The ­dialogue here helps in discovering new action possibilities—as Rorty (1989) put it, “vocabularies are constructed for coping, not for representation” (cited in Weick, 1999: 140). Therefore, the re-description of the situation through dialogue in the midst of practice (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) is essential to uncover new action possibilities. Capturing the experience of living forward requires an engagement with the situ­ ation to understand how the situation is unique and that there are multiple possible futures. For this, moments of surprise are crucial, in which actors are at first unable to go on, but then find ways of moving on and taking new paths. In these situations, the interests of both practitioners and theorists align. The breakdown of action motivates the practitioner to find a solution to resume action. The breakdown and how to resume action highlights living forward to theorists. The ultimate goals of theorist and practitioner might still differ (Weick, 1999), as the theorist is interested in a theoretical understanding of why the situation leads to a breakdown, while the practitioner is interested in the practical understanding of how to deal with the breakdown. However, by inquiring from within, “process as withness” offers the­or­ ists and practitioners a joint approach of engaging in situations of breakdown.

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9.2.2  Process as Withness A promising approach to highlight living forward is the idea of “process as with­ ness” (Fachin and Langley, 2018), building on the work of Shotter (2006; 2008; 2009). Shotter (2006) introduced the concept of a withness approach, as opposed to “aboutness” research. Shotter argued that existing research approaches tended to be distanced from the phenomenon at hand, leading to research “about” others at a distance. Instead, Shotter (2006) called for research that starts inquiries from “within” unsettled situations, rather than from without. The challenge is how to bring about innovative change in organizations, thus doing something new or doing something for the very first time (Shotter,  2009). As such, a withness approach can be seen as acting as a form of “change agent” that helps co-inquirers to retell the stories of their organization (Shotter and Tsoukas,  2011). For this, Shotter mainly built upon the work on language and its relationship with the world, situations, and actions, specifically of Wittgenstein (1953), the dialogism of Bakhtin (1984;  1986;  1993) and Mead (1938), the processual nature of inquiry of James (1890; 1897), and the social nature of inquiry of Dewey (1896). All of these authors share an understanding of language as being deeply related to action, where speech in itself is an act (Lorino, 2014b). A withness approach steps away from the analytical-representational perspective on organizational change, where the idea is that new thinking comes from old think­ ing. Such a perspective means that organizational change happens through persua­ sion, cognitive or discursive reprogramming, or strategic interventions (Shotter and Tsoukas,  2011). In contrast, a withness approach employs a relational-responsive perspective in which “new thinking emerges from certain events that unsettle old ways of thinking and move individuals to start noticing new possibilities” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 345). Such a perspective on organizational change highlights the role of narratives in both organizing and organizations (Pentland, 1999) as “change comes about by telling different stories, while the work of the change agent is to facilitate the process of story re-telling” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 335). In the pro­ cess of retelling, a withness approach joins in. The fundamental tenet of a withness approach is starting the inquiry from within, focusing on what people go ‘inside of ’ (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011; Shotter, 2006). Instead of using preconceived ideas to intervene in a situation from the outside, a withness approach urges an understanding of the particulars of that specific situ­ ation. Shotter (2009) terms these moments “arresting moments.” Such moments give “prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (Wittgenstein, 1953: 132). The point of a withness approach here is that the inherent uniqueness and newness of the situation require perceiving and articu­ lating these new perceptions, rather than being blinded for the unfamiliar by think­ ing and acting with familiar mental categories. For this, a withness approach aims to challenge the meanings behind existing habitual responses. This interest in finding different ways of relating to situations

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and the relational-responsive nature of dialogue in such processes of organizational change links Shotter (2006) with Bakhtin (1984; 1986; 1993). Relating Bakhtin to Shotter (2006; 2008; 2009) requires an understanding of the relation of experience with language. Bakhtin argued that when using words and language to communicate, we depend on a common background, a common cul­ ture, and a common “genre” of language, against which our own specific language can make sense. As children, we have to slowly “grow into” this background, to make sense of what others are communicating (Bakhtin,  1984;  1986). In most circum­ stances, we grasp what others mean, we understand what they are trying to get at, and we are unaware of the background. This background only sometimes becomes explicit, in moments where action breaks down and the taken-for-granted assump­ tions of the background come to the fore. Think, therefore, of background as the underlying assumptions, beliefs, habits, and other dispositions to act, as well as anticipation of how others might react. The aim is to foreground the background (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2013). To foreground the background, a withness approach focuses on experiencing the struggle of “living forward” together with research participants, with the researcher placing herself in the flux of becoming. The idea here is that neither the past nor the anticipated future can determine what will happen in the present. It is in the “spe­ cious present” (James, 1890) that alternative possibilities emerge, and it is in the pre­ sent that actors need to act on these possibilities to create innovative change in organizations (Shotter, 2009; Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). In this process, a withness approach helps by making practitioners aware of what might be surprising in a situ­ ation as an “arresting moment” (Shotter,  2009) and introducing new theoretical insights in a practically relevant way to find novel possibilities for action (Shotter, 2006; 2009). The argument is that, rather than seeing research as describing and analyzing what others do, capturing the experience of living forward together with research participants gives a richer understanding. A withness approach looks towards the future-in-the-present, and what the expected outcome of the actions is. Such prospective and embodied sensemaking is still a relatively understudied phe­ nomenon, especially regarding how participants go through the whole process of sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2014). This is similar to Shotter’s idea of situ­ ated dialogic action research as “exploring, and verbally articulating, the real possi­ bilities for making an innovative next step in a specific situation in a particular organization” (Shotter, 2009: 268). It is relevant here to understand the importance of starting by uncovering new meaning in situations, and to use metaphors and analo­ gies to see in new ways, since “the most we can do is redescribe the world and, in doing so, handle it differently” (Weick,  1999: 140). A withness approach helps by redescribing the world to uncover new possibilities for action. For this, researchers and research participants explore possible actions and antici­ pate future consequences as “action-guiding anticipations” (Shotter, 2008; 2009) by building on the pre-reflective abilities of humans (Shotter 2008). Here, the new dis­ tinctions in a situation can aid in abductive thinking for exploring innovative change

144  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies in the situation that one is facing. By exploring currents habits and beliefs and using the situation to question these habits and beliefs, Shotter’s withness approach follows a process ontology on organizational change as the “reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits of action as a result of new experiences obtained through inter­ actions” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 570). For this reweaving of beliefs and habits, a withness approach uses situated dialogic inquiry to get new experiences. The researcher has a different role in a withness approach than in other forms of research, such as action research, process consulting, and appreciative inquiry. We discern four specific areas in which the researcher plays a different role within a withness approach. 1. The researcher helps practitioners to be “prepared to catch a glimpse of such new possibilities in those moments when events ‘strike’ us. To do this, we must desist from seeking explanations, conducting analyses, offering in­ ter­ pret­ ations, or formulating hypotheses. We must . . . allow ourselves to be struck, moved, arrested, and so on” (Shotter, 2009: 279). Thus rather than analytically detaching ourselves from situations from a rational-positivist perspective, a withness approach employs the relational-responsive attitude to discover from within the situation the kind of differences that might give us a “glimpse of such new possibilities” for actions by allowing ourselves to be “struck” by the situation (Shotter, 2009). For this, it is essential to remain “radically empirical” (James, 1912). 2. To do this, the researcher engages in specific forms of productive dialogue to explore new distinctions and possibilities for action. In the dialogue, the researcher can draw on theoretical insights, but only to highlight aspects of the situation that have not become part of a dialogue. In the dialogue, it is vital to remain relationally responsive to the other, a point to which we will return in the next section. 3. Here, the researcher can also add new possible actions derived from theory, but these again need to be situated and concrete, not abstract and de­con­text­ ual­ized. The idea here is to point out to the participant the levers that can be used to change the situation through “action-guiding anticipations” (Shotter, 2009). 4. Moreover, a withness approach adds looking forward, by trying to specify one’s anticipation of the consequences of actions as “action-guiding an­tici­pa­ tions,” what it would feel like if “it starts moving” (Shotter, 2008; 2009). The idea here is that any broader change ambition in an organization necessarily starts somewhere small and that these smaller changes can be experienced and guide the overall change process. A withness approach calls here for being aware of action-guiding anticipations that can guide us to the next steps to take (Shotter, 2008; 2009) on our path towards an uncertain future. Think here of having in mind a taste about what one is cooking, or a specific idea of how a meeting should go.

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To summarize, a withness approach revolves around novel perceiving and sense­ making in situations through dialogue (Fachin and Langley, 2018) and deliberating how to go on. It is important to understand that a withness approach does not start with problems; rather, a withness approach calls for us to pay attention to the situ­ ation and what might “strike us” as surprises that indicate something novel, some­ thing that might point us towards new possibilities for action. A researcher employing a withness approach thus joins in the enactment (Weick, 1969) of the situ­ ation and of how actors experience the unfolding situation (Dittrich and Seidl, 2018) as they probe it to get a better understanding (Farjoun et al., 2015). Applying process as withness still requires some methodology design and devel­ opment (Fachin and Langley, 2018). There are only snippets of interactions ­available from Shotter himself (see examples in Shotter, 2009), and these snippets seem only to concern one-on-one interactions. Moreover, there are only a few published art­ icles that come close to a withness approach (for an overview, see Fachin and Langley,  2018). A withness approach challenges many of the more traditional understandings of the nature and purpose of academic research (Fachin and Langley,  2018). While the stronger process ontology of a withness approach is interesting in light of process philosophy and helps in creating practically relevant research, this seems to come at the cost of generalizability (Fachin and Langley,  2018). One way out of this seems to us to embed a withness approach within a pragmatic paradigm, which focuses research on pragmatic validity and relevance (Farjoun et al., 2015; Martela, 2015), and brings in insights about organ­ izing as a form of continuous design (Garud et al., 2008).

9.2.3  Productive Dialogue in Surprising Situations Key to such an inquiry process is collective dialogue. The inquiry becomes dia­logic­ ally reflexive, meaning that the trans-actions of two or more people influence not only the situation but also the people involved (Dewey and Bentley, 1949; Lorino, forthcoming). This trans-action allows for novelty to emerge. In line with this, Shotter (2009) and Tsoukas (2009) argue that organizational change begins with dialogue (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014). Yet, the “actual process of how the unfolding of particular, situated, real-time conversations may lead to change remains elusive” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 81). We are interested in such situated dialogue, includ­ ing aspects of conversations that are not necessarily verbal. The primary function of dialogue is two or more people engaging with each other to deal with an unsettled situation (Tsoukas, 2009). Instead of engaging with each other confrontationally, the dialogue partners engage with each other to question underlying assumptions, habits, and beliefs (Schein,  1993). The goal is to “get in touch with what is going on in the here and now and become conscious of how much our thought and perception is both a function of our past learning and the

146  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies immediate events that trigger it” (Schein, 1993: 47). Engaging through dialogue with the ongoing situation “shorten[s] the internal feedback loop as much as possible” (Schein, 1993: 47) between taking an action and the consequences of that action. For this, in a withness approach researchers and other research participants together explore a doubtful situation through dialogue (Shotter, 2006), seeking distinctions that make a difference (Tsoukas,  2009) and can lead to possible (future) actions (Shotter, 2009). Situations are essential here, as processes such as organizational change, strategiz­ ing, and routine dynamics are shaped by the situations in which they occur (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Simpson and Lorino, 2016). Where humans tend to look for similarities between different situations, new insights are more likely to emerge when looking at how a specific unsettling situation is different from previous situations (Raelin,  2001)—akin to what Schön (1983) described as reflection-inaction. The problem often is that our habits, beliefs, and assumptions, based on the past, frame our perception of the present situation. Dealing with the situation at hand thus often requires us to perceive the situation not in habitual ways, but in new ways, in order to become aware of and perhaps adapt our habits, beliefs, and assump­ tions (Schein, 1993), and to change the way we relate to and therefore frame a situ­ ation (Shotter, 2006; 2009). Therefore, understanding how the situation influences the ongoing process is vital for having productive dialogue for organizational change. A withness approach includes this relationship between language, action, and situation by focusing on moments of surprise that are in some ways perplexing and in which action breaks down. To understand the critical role of language in dialogical situations, the ideas of Bakhtin are helpful. Bakhtin described the double role of language and words as conducive to creativity. On the one hand, speech is situated, and the situation in which a word is used influences its meaning. This allows one to use a metaphor or analogy in a specific situation to convey a specific meaning, without taking the word literally. In this way, language allows for situated creativity. On the other hand, speech and individual words are related to categories, as they refer to more general ideas (Bakhtin, 1986). This refers to the idea that “Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word” (Bakhtin 1981: 280). Thus, using a specific word might bring up historical connota­ tions. At the same time, speech and more general acts are related to what happened previously in a specific situation and also anticipate a future. Think of asking a ques­ tion and anticipating an answer. This dialogical and relational interplay between two or more people in a dialogical situation can create new insights. Combining different types of speech (such as differences between different functions or disciplines) can create conflicts and contradictions, which can be resolved through a creative inquiry which projects into the future, relates to the past, and finds in this mutual question­ ing of the future through the past and the past through the future a path towards new meanings and stylistic creativity (Bakhtin, 1981; 1984; 1986).

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Shotter argues that taking a process perspective to its extreme requires realizing that such processual inquiry means changing those involved in the inquiry as well (Shotter, 2008). For such situated dialogue, Shotter (2006) suggests a “form of engaged, responsive thinking, acting, and talking, that allows us to affect the flow of processes from within our living involvement with them” (Shotter, 2006: 585). This requires a perspective on language and speech that sees language not as dead and already spoken with predefined meanings, but as a resource engaged in relational-responsive prac­ tices, where the spoken word relates to the world around us. We should consider how this extraverbal situation influences words in the speaking (Bakhtin 1981; 1984; 1986; Garud et al., 2015) and their “unfolding temporal contours” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 339). This perspective highlights the situatedness of the dialogue, in the temporal sense as well as in the material and social sense of the situation, where a withness approach includes “extraverbal” communication. This means looking at the specific use of lan­ guage in the situation and how the situ­ation shapes those words. In this, new distinc­ tions and new perspectives can emerge, leading to novelty (Garud et al., 2015). Shotter (1996; 2006; 2009) argued for the vital role of metaphors, analogies, images, gestures, more guiding forms of talk (e.g. “look at that”), and generative questions (e.g. “­imagine,” “what if ”) (Cunliffe,  2001; Shotter,  2009). The idea is not to introduce abstract theoretical concepts to the practitioner, but to use these discursive practices as “reminders” (Wittgenstein, 1953) for the practitioner to become aware of new aspects of the situation through the dia­logic­al interaction. This is in line with the idea of Schein (1993) of dialogue necessitating concrete experience, not abstract concepts. To summarize, situated dialogue affords people the ability to question and adjust their existing habits and beliefs by relating the dialogue to the situation at hand. Awareness of the situation is required in order to come to new distinctions in the situation, and potentially reframe the situation. To make the dialogue productive, Shotter suggests using metaphors, analogies, and other gestures to help practitioners become more aware of the situation. Next, Shotter argues for using theoretical insights in a concrete and situated fashion to point practitioners towards potential levers to change the ongoing situation (Shotter, 2006; 2009).

9.2.4  Pragmatist Inquiry Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. (James, 1890: 80)

We now turn to pragmatist inquiry to fuse it with a withness approach. Pragmatist inquiry concerns the process through which actors learn to adapt their habits and beliefs to new classes of situation. It is based on social groups’ interactions with their environment in a recursive relationship (Ansell,  2012) combining thought and action. It is a relational, “transactional” process in pragmatist terms (Simpson, 2009),

148  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies i.e. a process in which new knowledge emerges from actors’ relationships with each other and with the situation. Pragmatist inquiry starts when actors face a surprising, “indeterminate” situation (Dewey, 1929) where action breaks down, and actors are “doubtful” as what to do next (Dewey, 1938). People inquire into this doubtful situation and change it through their inquiry, until they consider they understand it sufficiently to act. Situations and practices are central concepts in pragmatism. Situations trigger, influence, and are influenced by inquiry. They combine time, space, and social settings into a coherent whole, focus­ ing on temporal, social, and material interactions, and they shape possible actions (Farjoun et al.,  2015). Situation and action are in a “quasi-dialogical” relationship (Joas, 1996; Joas and Beckert, 2002), in which actors are “in ongoing dialogue with unfolding situations” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 966). Therefore, situations are not just context to actions but are constitutive of action (Joas, 1996). As described by Dewey: “The purpose is to clarify the disturbed and confused situation that reason­ able ways of dealing with it may be suggested” (Dewey, 1920: 161). To achieve this, pragmatist inquiry is made up of different steps, which are not necessarily linear and might be repeated or overlapping (Lorino and Mourey, 2013). Pragmatist inquiry starts with a practical disruption (habits do not generate the anticipated result), leading to an impulse (or affect, emotion, feelings). Such an impulse can take the form of doubt, curiosity or more generally surprise, and starts the thought process of deliberation, as “thought is born as the twin of impulse in every moment of impeded habit” (Dewey, 1922: 171). This release of impulse starts the inquiry process (Dewey, 1922; James, 1956; Farjoun et al., 2015). In the next step this impulse is intellectualized into a problem (Dewey,  1938), which is needed to give the inquiry an impetus, since “without a problem, there is blind groping in the dark” (Dewey, 1980/1938: 108). Pragmatism highlights the situ­ ational nature of problems (Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Boin, 2017; Follett, 1919). To resolve the problem, the process continues until it ends in a ‘working hypothesis’ through abduction (Peirce, 1932). Problematizing and abduction (hypothesis ­creation) require both looking back at previous experience and how it might relate to the present, and also looking forward to possible future consequences and events, integrating past experience and the current situation. The present is here the “­specious present” of James (1890), “short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.” As Dewey (1922) puts it, people engage in the “dramatic rehearsal” of different possible actions, as both a looking back and a looking forward attitude. Dewey extended hypothesis from the limited use in science to something that can guide action (Ansell and Boin, 2017). The “abductive turning point” (Simpson,  2017) mixes invention and narrative creativity (inventing a plausible narrative) and reasoning (Lorino et al., 2011) and provides a possible explanation of the situation. Here again, impulse plays an im­port­ant role: “The moment arrives when imagination pictures an objective conse­ quence of action which supplies an adequate stimulus and releases definitive action” (Dewey, 1922: 193).

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We often need to “enact” (Weick, 1969) a hypothesis in a situation to learn more about the situation (Farjoun et al., 2015). Thus, even with limited knowledge of the situation, we often need to start acting to better understand the situation. This enact­ ment helps us to understand what ends might be achieved (Joas, 1996). Such enact­ ment is already a form of experimentation (Lorino, 2018). The pragmatist inquiry involves a form of situated creativity (Joas 1996), where actors make use of what is available in creative ways. Only in the present moment can agentic action manifest (Mead, 1932): for any new possibilities to emerge, one has to (en)act in the now. Reasoning deducts how to test the working hypothesis empirically. Next is experi­ menting, a “leitmotif ” of pragmatism. Experimentation highlights the fallibilistic nature of pragmatism and the need to learn through experience (Ansell,  2012). Pragmatic experiments explore the possibilities in a “probe and learn” process (Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Bartenberger, 2016), akin to “probing into the future” as described by Brown and Eisenhardt (1997). Experimental action connects the hypothesis and reasoning with the transformation of the situation (Follett,  1924; Lorino,  2018). Induction is needed to interpret the results of the experimental action. Especially when dealing with an organizational inquiry, experimentation is essential, as only through experimentation can deeper aspects of the organizations come to the fore (Argyris and Schön, 1978). The trying nature of experimenting is needed to learn about the world (Ansell, 2012; Raelin, 2007). Thus, after the experimental action one has to “learn from experience.” The learn­ ing lies in a backward and forward connection between the action and the outcome of the action, which is essential for learning (Dewey, 1916; Elkjær, 2003). The out­ come can be a new practice, habit or concept (Lorino et al., 2011). If the outcome is to the inquirers’ liking and action can resume, the inquiry process ends. If the out­ come is not as intended, or action still cannot resume, another iteration of inquiry starts, with the changed situation as the starting point (Elkjær, 2003), leading to a changed hypothesis. This can also happen when the original intention as “overall end” has been achieved, but the outcome still does not satisfy inquirers. Then the overall end changes again, highlighting the processual nature of ends and purposes (Lorino and Mourey, 2013). Pragmatist inquiry, as a withness approach, requires methodological development (Martela, 2015) that genuinely invites a “theory/prac­ tice synthesis” (Simpson, 2017: 66).

9.2.5  Community of Inquiry Pragmatist inquiry, though it involves mental states and processes, is inherently social rather than subjective and mentalist. It is most productive when it happens in a pluralistic community constituting a “community of inquiry” (Dewey, 1916), par­ ticularly when it faces organizational issues. In the pragmatist perspective, deliberations of a community of inquiry play a cen­ tral role, as Rorty argued: “the best we can do in science is to have useful conversations

150  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies about topics of interest” (cited in Johnson et al., 2015: 17). In particular, Mead’s dia­ logical perspective on “conversation of gestures” is helpful (Simpson,  2009;  2017). Through deliberations exploring the differences within the community of inquiry, new insights and learning can emerge (Simpson,  2009; Tsoukas,  2009), highlighting the importance of dialogue in creativity (Simpson, 2017; Tsoukas, 2009) and the creative use of what is available (Ansell and Boin,  2017). Interesting here is to explore the potential role of collective reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983; Wegener, Guerreiro Gonçalves, and Dankfort 2019; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) of a community of inquiry. The collective nature of dialogical relationships in a community of inquiry is a vital part of pragmatism that invites forms of co-inquiry between academics and other research participants.

9.2.6  Fusing Pragmatist Inquiry with Withness In this section we propose a fusion of pragmatism and a withness approach. A withness approach and pragmatist inquiry share a processual view of the world, a focus on problem building and problem solving, and emphasize experiencing situ­ ations from within (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Lorino and Mourey, 2013; Lorino, Tricard, and Clot, 2011). The process ontology of pragmatism matches our interest in the process thinking of Shotter (2006;  2009) and Tsoukas (e.g. Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). The work of Shotter (2016), Lorino (2011; 2014a; 2014b; Lorino and Mourey, 2013), and Shotter and Tsoukas (2011; 2014) together lay the theoretical and meth­odo­logic­al foundations for fusing pragmatist inquiry with a withness approach. Shotter (2016) had already described links between a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry, inter alia the emergence of background (Wittgenstein,  1967) habits (Dewey, 1938), and “before-the-fact thinking” (Shotter, 2015), i.e. interest in pre-conceptual, pre-intellectual, and pre-cognitive experiences. Dewey, James and Mead, just like Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Shotter, saw that deliberate and conscious capacities of people emerge over time out of spontaneously responsive activities within our environment, highlighting the importance of background and the ­anticipation that such background or habits raise in us (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). Such expectations that grow over time can give us “action-guiding anticipations” (Shotter, 2008; 2009). For this to occur, new experiences are required that stretch people beyond their current background or habits. To gain such new experiences, which allow for new distinctions and even new practices to emerge, both pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach start with an indeterminate or doubtful situation, or an “arresting moment” in the terminology of Shotter (2009). A withness approach and pragmatist inquiry are closely aligned in the concept of the community of inquiry and the important role of dialogue. A with­ ness approach and pragmatist inquiry emphasize the situatedness of dialogue and action, and how such situatedness can lead to “action-guiding anticipations.” New

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experiences can lead to uncovering new action possibilities as “action-guiding an­tici­pa­tions,” but require embracing the not-knowing (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Embracing the not-knowing requires doubt, as “living doubt is necessary to ener­ gize inquiry” (Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman, 2008: 908). Otherwise our mind is more likely to bulk up experience through conceptualizing experience into exist­ ing categories, eradicating any differences that might have created new insights (James, 1909; Wittgenstein, 1967) rather than perceiving experience, the concrete, and the particular (“radical empiricism” in the terminology of James, 1912) as the path to new distinctions (James, 1909; Wittgenstein, 1953). When relating these ideas to organizational studies, specifically organizational change, both a withness inquiry and pragmatist inquiry see organizational change not as devising grand plans or theories based on existing concepts, but as continu­ ously ongoing, triggered by breakdown and doubt (Dewey,  1922; Shotter,  2009). Organizational change becomes more about the changing stories that people tell about themselves and the organizations. The role of the researcher then becomes to “facilitate the process of story re-telling” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 335). Thus, for a group of people to get organized, they need to find a way to inquire into the situ­ ations they face from within, grasping how this situation is different from previous situations, and uncover the possibilities and potentialities for novel change from within this engagement with the situation (Dewey,  1922; Farjoun et al.,  2015; Shotter, 2009). Therefore, by fusing pragmatist inquiry with a withness approach we highlight the social and pluralist nature of the community of inquiry; the major contribution of habits to the inquiry, as its trigger, object, and tool; the transformational nature of inquiry as leading to changing practices and habits; a more holistic conceptualiza­ tion of the inquiry process; and the need for experimenting with new action possibilities.

9.3  Methodological Requirements for Pragmatist Withness Inquiry After the theoretical discussion of a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry, we derive the methodological requirements and design a methodology that fuses a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry into pragmatist withness inquiry.

9.3.1  Entering the Field, Roles of Researcher and Participants, and the Requirement for Genuine Doubt Our pragmatist withness inquiry methodology requires situations and processes where many surprises lead to existential doubt and inquiry processes, and where both researchers and practitioners are challenged to adapt their habits and

152  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies beliefs—not starting from hindsight, but in situations where there are multiple contradictory outcomes or no clear outcome yet (Weick  1999). Weick (1999) ­ ­suggests staying close to the project-size of absorbed coping to come closer to living forward. The focus of the methodology is to study situations where action breaks down, where prac­ti­tioners enter discourses of absorbed coping rather than dis­ courses of detached representation, and where things are provisional rather than settled (Weick,  1999). Capturing living forward here points to what people notice when action is interrupted and how people cope with the interruptions. This inte­ grates both retro­spect­ive backward understanding and prospective living forward simultaneously. In line with this, pragmatist inquiry requires starting from a relational-responsive process ontology that is resolutely anti-dualistic, but rather highlights the recursive nature of phenomena (Farjoun et al.,  2015). For this, pragmatist inquiry requires engagement with practitioners in doubtful situations. Such “problem solving” in the sense of Dewey (1938) allows pragmatist inquiry to bind together the distinctive perspectives of pragmatism on experience, habit, action, and reflexivity. This also makes pragmatist inquiry an inherently situated activity, highlighting the epistemic uncertainty of living forward (Farjoun et al., 2015). This also requires a longitudinal approach, starting with situations that are doubtful and ending the inquiry when “normal” activity resumes again. During this process a “healthy attitude of doubt” (Martela,  2015) is vital as “The scientific attitude may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying the doubtful; scientific method is, in one aspect, a tech­ nique for making productive use of doubt by converting it into operations of infinite inquiry” (Dewey,  1929: 228). Another precondition for inquiry is a willingness to reframe the situation (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), as the initial perspective on the situation might be the very reason why activity came to a halt (Dewey, 1938). Generating new perspectives on a situation, and getting a fuller understanding of it, is helped by the formation of a community of inquiry, therefore making this a collective endeavor (Tsoukas,  2009). Here it is essential to create diversity in the group, not just as stakeholder involvement, but to enlarge the resources of past ex­peri­ences, interpretations of the present, and anticipations of the future (Lorino et  al.,  2011). In line with the idea of the withness approach (Shotter,  2006), the researcher and the practitioners become full participants in the community of inquiry and equal knowledge creators who bring in their habits, beliefs, and prac­ tices. Researchers are looking to understand the process of organizational inquiry from within, through participating in it (Lorino, 2020); and vice versa, prac­ti­tioners become accepted as co-creators of knowledge.

9.3.2  Dialogical Transactions Generating the kind of productive situated dialogue necessary for a withness approach requires relational engagement in the form of a shared commitment to

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improve the situation together. This requires “dialogical and mediated inquiries” (Lorino et al., 2011; 2014a). Participants in the dialogue need to be open with each other and allow their habits and beliefs to be questioned (Tsoukas,  2009). Methodologically, it is crucial to include the extraverbal aspects of the situation here (Garud et al., 2015) and to notice “the unfolding temporal contours of words in their speaking” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 339). In the dialogue occurring during deliberations, we engage with a withness approach to aid in finding possible actions in the specific situation that the commu­ nity of inquiry faces. A dialogical approach requires that a community of inquiry engages in explorations of the situation. Moreover, the inquirers’ experiments are based on these explorations. Here, experimentation can take the form of thought experiments, discursive simulations, and more extensive deliberations of possible actions that transform the situation. Limitations of current habits create the existen­ tial need for new habits and practices. In this process, participants must be free to  voice their authentic perspectives, and the power is somewhat equal (Lorino et al., 2011; Lorino, 2018). During the inquiry process (Martela, 2015), the researchers’ role will be to focus our co-inquirers on the uniqueness of the situation (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014) and the corresponding data (Cunliffe 2001). Our role as researchers is not to come with highly abstract theoretical knowledge, but to try to understand how the characteristics of the situation might tell a community of inquirers how to proceed (Cunliffe, 2001; Shotter and Tsoukas,  2014) through “action-guiding anticipations.” Other participants can also offer relevant ways of “how to go on.”

9.3.3  Understanding Living Forward: Abduction and Experimental Action While reasoning is an integral part of pragmatism, our methodology most clearly differentiates itself from others by including abduction and experimentation.

Abduction and Narration

We are interested in inquiring into a situation of how people abduct what to do next—making the expected or intended outcome as a form of hypothesis as explicit as possible, testing this hypothesis through a field-experiment, and analyzing the results of the experiment as a new situation. We want to understand how the unique characteristics of the situation are consti­ tutive of action—the “law of the situation” (Follett,  1942)—and how the inquiry process unfolds over time. It seems most appropriate to talk about an abductive logic when analyzing these kinds of data. Abduction in the words of Peirce is presented as follows: “Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that some­ thing actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be” (Peirce,  1932: 171). Such an analysis of “what may be” seems appropriate when

154  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies fusing a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. For this, the community of inquiry together creates a coherent narrative story of what is going on through dia­ logue and abduction, deductively designs, and inductively evaluates experiments (Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Boin,  2017). Especially interesting here seems to be the co-creation of prototypes as boundary objects (Lorino, Tricard, and Clot,  2011). These prototypes are then manifested as hypotheses to test.

(Field) Experiments

In pragmatism, experiments play a vital role in testing ideas generated through abduction (Farjoun et al., 2015; Lorino, 2018). Experiments are particularly useful in organizational research and an essential element of pragmatism (Ansell, 2012). They allow us to test the ideas derived abductively, to design experiments deductively, and to make sense of the results inductively (Lorino,  2018). Additionally, combining field experiments with mixed methods process research allows us to understand the changes occurring in more detail, by obtaining data on the pre-and post-experiment stage, as well as obtaining quantitative and qualitative data about the process to understand both causes and effects (Paluck, 2010).

9.3.4  The Role of Data, Analysis, and Theorizing Research from a process perspective necessarily also requires problematizing assumptions about data being “out there” to be “collected” by researchers (Langley and Tsoukas, 2016). Taking a processual perspective also calls for a processual per­ spective on data. Here it seems helpful to differentiate between data as something given and capta as something taken, and to include the situatedness of data and the enactment of data. Choosing what to include and what not to include, and how to make use of data, has implications for the research inquiry (Jones et al., 2019). Inquirers are embedded in complex systems and need to enact meaningful data (Lorino, 2018). Important here is to embrace the exploratory nature of the inquiry and to explore within the community of inquiry what data are meaningful to the ongoing inquiry and how they can be used (Lorino et al., 2011; 2018). This discus­ sion of the processual nature of data has implications for the use of methods.

“Slow Motion” of Moments through Video-Ethnography

To get a better understanding of the “arresting moments” (Shotter  2006) and the abductive turning points (Simpson  2017), we suggest using video-ethnography to zoom in on what is occurring in specific situations and to capture the situation as much as possible (Fachin and Langley,  2018; Vesa and Vaara,  2014). Videoethnography allows us to capture the situatedness of actions by combining temporal, social, and material relationships in one medium. Field notes can miss crucial aspects due to limited time and the fact that what is important in a specific situation is often only known afterwards (Vesa and Vaara, 2014). Rather than making limited

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and indirect interpretations of field notes, video-ethnography allows one to go back again and again to data, enabling novel and richer interpretations of the present and reinterpretations of the past (Vesa and Vaara, 2014). Here, it is interesting to use the video to explore the dialogue with the other research participants in order to grasp what happened in these situations and try to get the “account” right (Weick, 1999). The point is that this is less about having video than about how to use video in a meaningful way in the inquiry process (e.g. Lorino et al., 2011), where the video is not about representing reality, but is used as a tool for iconic mediation (Lorino et al., 2011; Lorino, 2018).

Co-produced Reflexive Auto-ethnography

A reflexive auto-ethnographic journal seems most appropriate to capture the thoughts of actors and researchers (Fachin and Langley, 2018) and is uniquely cap­ able of capturing lived experience (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Vesa and Vaara, 2014). Going from detached observers of ethnography to engaged participants in ­auto-ethnography allows us to grasp and engage more fully with the experience of actors, and not just act as observers. In this way, auto-ethnography allows us to ­capture our own experience of living forward. Auto-ethnography also allows us to  capture how understanding changes over time—not just understanding of the present and the future, but also of events that have passed, by looking back at data from earlier moments and capturing how one’s understanding of the future and the past has changed over time (e.g. Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015). It is interesting to explore forms of engaging in auto-ethnography collaboratively, to allow for more dialogical relational and responsive engagement with the other participants in the community of inquiry, thereby building on the relational and dia­ logic­al nature of a withness approach. The community of inquiry can more fully capture their individual and collective sensemaking and analyze this collectively over time. This is similar to the work of Kempster and Stewart (2010), who followed Stewart’s becoming of a COO through journals and reflecting dialogically on these journals to capture the ongoing change process. Throughout the research, the “flux” experienced is increased as the processes of discovery in the field, self-discovery (Locke, 2011), and the transactional nature of the inquiry process are highlighted.

Analysis

Analysis is concerned with how the hypothesis, or even competing hypotheses, were generated; analyzing the results of the experiments to decide if any hypotheses have been refuted; and finally, how we could explain the surprising results again. Using video allows us to engage in multimodal analysis of how the social, tem­ poral, and material aspects relate to each other in the situation and how they together influenced the actions that actors chose (Jarzabkowski, LeBaron, Phillips, and Pratt,  2014). Here, especially when trying to analyze surprise and the emotional elem­ent that is so important to pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach, video offers a possibility to analyze in detail (Vesa and Vaara, 2014). In addition, to achieve

156  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies a true withness approach requires us to reiterate analysis of past events in the light of current events to understand how one’s understanding has changed over time (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015).

Theorizing

Theorizing in such a methodology would be approached from a different angle than mainstream approaches. On the one hand, it would start from the perspective that theories probably cannot be general, accurate, and simple (Weick, 1999). Instead of aiming at generalizability, to which other approaches are better suited, our pragmatic “process as withness” methodology would favor “accuracy” (Weick,  1999), which allows for theorizing closer to readily available patterns of absorbed coping. In line with this, rather than propositional form, theorizing would take the form of narra­ tives that are closer to living forward. The question thus becomes “ ‘What’s the story here’—not what’s the principle here, what list applies, or which boxes or arrows sum­ marize this” (Weick, 1999: 140). On the other hand, while the theory would probably need to be constructed retrospectively, the idea would be to build theory that can be used prospectively as well, leading to more “moving” theory (Weick, 1999). Helpful here is the co-creation of an account of the inquiry to “encourage continuing dia­ logue dedicated to getting the account ‘right’ ” (Weick, 1999: 140), where the focus is not on abstraction and generalization, but on the context and the particular (Weick, 1999). What transcends the specific situation are the practices and eventual habits that are the objective of pragmatism. These practices and habits can be trans­ ferred into other situations, albeit that a new situation might call for some adapta­ tion. Thus, in line with pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach, the outcome of such research would probably take the form of new concepts/beliefs that have proven helpful, and new habits/practices that can help in future situations (Lorino, 2018).

9.3.5  Summarizing a Methodology for Pragmatist Withness Inquiry In summary, pragmatist withness starts its inquiry from within situations of doubt, focused on the shared experience of the community of inquiry, be that academics or practitioners. Such inquiry requires some guidelines on format, content, situations and surprises, and community of inquiry. Regarding the format, our proposed methodology is deeply relational, focusing on situated dialogue and action of a community of inquiry. A challenge here is con­ ceiving the situation in existing categories. Instead, our proposed methodology calls for perceiving the situation and using metaphors, analogies, visuals, and other ges­ tures to go beyond existing concepts. Lastly, the methodology requires a set-up that allows the community of inquiry to be situated, using audio and video recordings to be able to reanalyze specific situations later. Field notes become a place to capture the emotions, surprises, and hunches that occur throughout the inquiry process.

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Regarding content, our experience so far reinforces the need to allow for emer­ gence in the process and to embrace the process ontology inherent to a withness approach. Rather than providing preconceived ideas, our proposed methodology thrives in moments where no clear end goal has yet emerged. Nonetheless, both the past and the future can be used as resources in the methodology, being fused in uncovering new possibilities for action in the present. A withness approach adds action-guiding anticipations as a way of using future anticipations to guide one’s action in the present. Instead of only reflecting on the past, our methodology also calls on the community of inquiry to “pro-flect.” Pro-flection refers to thinking pro­ spect­ively ahead of our anticipation of the future. This is also needed to become aware if the anticipations have changed throughout the inquiry process. Regarding surprises and situations, our proposed methodology highlights the role of both in the inquiry process. One must have expectations in order to be sur­ prised, but such surprise needs to be attended to, as surprises can be of different intensity. Important here is that the community of inquiry is aware of using the ­situ­ation—including time—as a resource, seizing moments of surprise to gain new insights by asking a question that highlights “information” in Bateson’s sense, i.e. “differences which make a difference” (Bateson, 1972: 315), and foregrounding the background that is often hidden in day-to-day activity (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011).

9.4 Discussion 9.4.1  Comparison with Other Research Approaches In the following, we first describe similarities between action research approaches (e.g. Raelin and Coghlan, 2006), process consulting (Schein, 1993) and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987), and later differentiate a withness approach from these approaches. Regarding action research, there are a plethora of approaches. Originally, Lewin (1946) realized that interventions are more likely to be successful if the target popu­ lation is involved in the change process, “making the client more of a researcher” (Schein  1995: 1). Different from a withness approach, the drive of such action research came from the researcher interested in a specific topic (Schein,  1995). Arguably, though, a critique of action research is that the trigger comes too often from practice, leading to action research that is close to consulting. In our reading, the pragmatic action research approaches of Raelin come closest to a withness approach. In the words of Raelin and Coghlan, “as a form of anticipatory reflection, managers under these circumstances may probe to a deeper level than the prior time orientations by considering alternative goals and approaches, by positing a series of ‘if-then’ propositions based on new contexts, or by challenging underlying assump­ tions that govern the present situation” (Raelin and Coghlan,  2006: 681). We use Raelin’s approach to highlight general commonalities and differences between action

158  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies research and a withness approach. Like a withness approach, pragmatic action research highlights the “here and beyond” (Raelin and Coghlan, 2006: 681). The idea is that pragmatic action research “reframes unanticipated problem situations to see experience different” (Raelin and Coghlan  2006: 681), leading to “premise reflec­ tion” (Raelin, 2001). Process consulting (Schein, 1993; 1995) shares several commonalities with a withness approach. They share a focus on the situation that research participants face with the researchers. Both see the role of the researchers not as providing solu­ tions, but as helping the research participants to gain insights themselves, by en­ab­ ling them to learn from their own experience (Schein, 1993). Both see it as essential to join the flow with the research participants and to follow what the research par­ ticipants are trying to do (Schein, 1993; 1995). Both see the timing as important; some moments are more opportune than others for a question, a remark, or another type of action. Appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987) also shares several com­ monalities with a withness approach. As with a withness approach, appreciative inquiry aims at discovering or even creating “new social possibilities.” Both see the background of habits and beliefs as an essential factor in influencing how people act. Both align in the idea that transforming habits can happen fruitfully through dia­ logue, as a collective interaction in which new “social” knowledge can be created (Cooperrider and Srivastva,  1987). The “action-guiding anticipations” of Shotter (2008;  2009) are similar to the idea of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987) in not only focusing attention on problematic aspects but also speci­ fying what one is “striving” for more positively. The action-guiding anticipations relate to the positive consequences. However, most of these approaches seem to start (implicitly) from a positivist or constructivist perspective. Our methodology departs here, by fusing a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. Pragmatism gives better tools to assess the value of a new practice or habit in dealing with a situation than would positivist methods that rely on truth as correspondence or interpretive/hermeneutic approaches that favor pluralism over relation with reality (Martela, 2015). On the most fundamental level, none of the previous approaches are explicitly based on a relational-processual ontology. The process ontology inherent to our meth­ odology allows us to capture the inquiry on the fly as an unsettled and emergent endeavor, including action possibilities considered but not taken, and highlighting practices used to resolve the situation. Importantly, a withness approach adds the researcher herself joining the flux of living forward, including how the inquiry process changes the researcher. Additionally, the simultaneous combination of ­retrospective backward learning and prospective living forward highlights the role of the past and the anticipated future in how a situation in the present is dealt with creatively. More concretely, while other research approaches also aim at changing existing habits, beliefs, and practices, these approaches are implicit on how to change

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these beliefs. Their focus seems to be more on developing an overall methodology than on specifying the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings for using the  situation and the dialogue to change habits. A critical difference between a withness approach and these approaches is the focus of a withness approach on questions and other methods for changing the habits and beliefs of an actor in order to elicit new distinctions through situated dialogue and integration of pro­ spective elements into the research endeavor. Through this, a withness approach has the potential of more fully following the situated emergence of new practices and habits. The perspective of inquiring from “within” also differentiates a withness approach from other approaches. Other approaches intervene from preconceived concepts, plans, and more specific methods, which necessarily requires employing concepts that are already familiar. Therefore, “new” approaches and concepts are less likely to occur with such preconceived interventions (Shotter and Tsoukas,  2011). In con­ trast, a withness approach focuses on the emergent dialogue and how the inquiry starting with the uniqueness of the situation creates novel possibilities for action. After all, the point of a withness approach is that “The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (Wittgenstein  1953: 109). A challenge here remains—namely, that the inquiry is existential for both practitioners and researchers.

9.4.2  Theoretical Aspects Several authors (Langley, 1999; Van de Ven, 2007; Weick, 1995; Locke et al., 2008) have argued that the discovery process of theorizing and especially its creative underpinnings need better understanding. As argued by Nayak (2008), processual theorizing is less about giving definite answers than about the “becoming” nature of theorizing itself. This allows for creativity and intuition to occupy a more p ­ rominent role in the ongoing process of theorizing (Locke et al., 2008). This becomes even more important as “studying a phenomenon from within involves an effort to cap­ ture the evolving meaningful experience—the qualia—of those involved in it, through . . . partaking oneself in that experience” (Langley and Tsoukas,  2016: 8). Such “prehensive” and “performative” research (Langley and Tsoukas,  2016) requires unraveling the becoming process of process ­theorizing in such a way that we allow others to follow our “flashes.” Abductive moves would allow us to better understand the temporal nature of theorizing (Locke et al., 2008) and offer a per­ spective from within the flux of the ongoing experience. This includes the role that the pre-reflective and the emotional side plays in theorizing and the inquiry pro­ cess itself. As Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman (2008) argued, we need to “ ‘reenter the present’ and find puzzles in the familiar” (Locke et al. 2008: 917); we think that the proposed methodology might do just that.

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9.4.3  Methodological Aspects A constant challenge of a withness approach seems to be creating situations that give rise to dialogical interactions that lead to novelty. Allowing for this openended dialogue “along with a willingness to be visibly and publicly ‘not-knowing’ ” (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) requires a level of trust that seems to require longerterm engagement with the field and co-inquirers. This applies not only to the research participants but also to oneself. As the first author was trying to learn to “do” a withness approach and become more dialogical, it was a challenge to engage in “true” dialogue. In an inquiry, the habits and beliefs of all participants can be called into question. A challenge here was to enter the inquiry from “within,” rather than bringing in preconceived ideas. Still, we feel that having a detailed record of the whole process, including the ­emotion, surprises, and “arresting moments” (Shotter, 2006; 2008) throughout the interaction, offers a more detailed understanding of living forward at that moment. In line with Martela (2015) and Shotter (2009), it seems that both a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry move the focus of research more towards building inquiring habits and practices that work pragmatically, rather than being “mastered by ‘method’ or ‘theory’ ” (Martela,  2015: 547). We started with a quote by Mary Parker Follett, but believe the extended quote below to be more appropriate to grasp­ ing how our proposed methodology differentiates itself from others. We wish to do far more than observe our experience, we wish to make it yield up for us its riches . . . We must face the fact that it is seldom possible to observe a social situation as one watches a chemical experiment . . . We need those who are frankly participant-observers, those who will try experiment after experiment and note results, experiments in making human interplay productive . . . Brilliant empiricists have poked much pleasant fun at those who tell us of some vague should-be instead of what is. We want something more than either of these; we want to find out what may be, the possibilities now open to us. This we can discover only by experiment. Observation is not the only method of science. (Follett, 1924: 2)

We believe that our pragmatist withness inquiry methodology aligns with Mary Parker Follett. The proposed methodology differentiates itself by drawing on a with­ ness approach to “yield the riches” of experience through the methods of Wittgenstein (1953) and the potential of dialogism (Bakhtin,  1981; Shotter,  2006; Tsoukas, 2009). Pragmatist withness inquiry is a situated inquiry that aims at chan­ ging existing practices, habits, and beliefs, building on the pre-reflective capabilities of humans (Shotter,  2008). Adding pragmatist inquiry as a community of inquiry builds on the dialogism of Shotter and adds the full process of pragmatist inquiry, the broader community of inquiry, and experiments to discover and test “the possi­ bilities now open to us” (Follett, 1924).

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9.4.4  Future Research Based on these first attempts at different variants of pragmatist withness inquiry, we want to highlight some exciting avenues for further research. Our primary interest here lies in encouraging other scholars to pick up pragmatist withness inquiry to build on and extend our early attempt, focusing on the situated dialogical dimension of a community of inquiry by adding a withness approach. An exciting avenue for methodological development seems to be to combine a researcher who engages in pragmatist withness inquiry with a researcher who remains in a more detached participant-observer role. This would offer a way of ana­ lyzing the same process both from within and in-the-flow, on the one hand, and from without and afterward, on the other. It might be interesting to watch the videos back together and return later to the same video or audio to compare how one’s understanding has emerged and changed over time (Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015), and to engage in dialogue about this (Lorino et al., 2011; Lorino, forthcoming). One of the biggest struggles that we see going forward is the issue of keeping the prospective and withness nature of this research approach alive when communicat­ ing it to fellow researchers, practitioners, or even students. The writing of Helin (Helin, Hernes, Hjorth, and Holt, 2014; Helin, 2014; 2017) has explored this in more detail. An idea for keeping the prospective nature alive is creating blogposts of understanding the present and the future in which to communicate the pro­spect­ive nature of the research. This could be done alongside more traditional forms of com­ municating research through journal articles or books. Here, it is interesting to explore multimedia experiences, rather than using text exclusively to address these issues (Fachin and Langley, 2018). Such multimedia experi­ ences seem more attuned to the kind of “moving” research and theory of Weick (1999) and Shotter (2006; 2009). An interesting possibility is to co-produce accounts with the participants as an extended form of dialogue. Co-produced accounts would be in line with Weick’s suggestion of co-creating such accounts to continue the dialogue in a meaningful way with the goal of “getting the account ‘right’ ” (Weick 1999: 140).

9.5 Conclusion This chapter set out to explore how process research might produce narratives of prospect that capture the experience of living forward. We argue that the fusion of a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry has the potential to come closer to living forward through exploring ways of co-inquiring with practitioners as equal part­ ners. Researchers join the flux of living forward, consequently applying process phil­ oso­phy as “put[ting] yourself in the making” (James, 1909). For this, we build on the one hand on the relationally responsive dialogic interactions of a withness approach with the research participants to aid in exploring situations to find new possibilities for action. On the other hand, we build on the epistemology inherent to pragmatist

162  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies inquiry and the collective nature of the community of inquiry to extend the dia­ logic­al inquiry of a withness approach by adding the critical role of pluralist deliber­ ating, hypothesizing, and experimenting. This chapter reflects only the early stages of designing a methodology for pragma­ tist withness inquiry. By no means do we want to insinuate that we have addressed all the issues. For example, dissemination of pragmatist withness would probably require new ways of writing and using multimedia experience, which we have been unable to address fully due to space limitations. We do hope, however, to have built the founda­ tions needed for other “adventurous inquirers to dive in and explore more of what pragmatism [fused with a withness approach] may have to offer” (Simpson, 2017: 66). We hope to have engaged readers in a discussion to design this approach further and to embark on the exciting journey towards achieving forms of process research that include the prospective and the performative.1

Note 1. We would to thank several colleagues for their generous feedback. The feedback from the editor and the three reviewers helped tremendously in getting the chapter to higher ­levels. Earlier drafts of the chapter were presented during a Workshop on Design Science at TU Eindhoven, the PDW of PROS 2018, and the Warwick Summer School on Practice-Based Studies 2018, and we are grateful for the feedback we received there. We also have to thank colleagues at the Warwick Winter School for Advanced Video Methods, who gave insight­ ful comments during a data session. Next, we received generous feedback from Katinka Bergema, Katharina Dittrich, Hans Berends, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Hari Tsoukas, which helped at crucial stages. Throughout the process, we had several chances to explore and practice the methodology. We must thank the UX-team for their generous support in allowing us to explore this methodology: Michael Verheijden, Desie van den Belt, Odeke Lenior, Christianne Francovich, Martijn Roza, Yannick Gloudemans, and Linda van der Meijden. We had the chance to practice with Katharina Dittrich and Barend Klitsie, who provided much-needed feedback. Last but not least, Yan Feng has helped incredibly throughout the process as a trusted sparring partner, encouraging in doubtful situations and a deeply processual thinker.

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10 Organizational Time in Historical Perspective Foundational Thinking and the Case for Social Cycle Research John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson

10.1 Introduction In this chapter we argue that sociologists have historically emphasized what might be termed realist, structural or determinist explanations of time at the expense of ethnographic, interpretive or process-oriented ones (Hassard,  1990). Indeed, ana­ lyses of organizational time have tended to reflect one of two realist traditions: functionalist studies of time structuring and critical examinations of temporal commodification. Both traditions have invoked primarily linear metaphors when illuminating core issues of industrial or organizational time, and notably so when examining work experience under various forms of production and service systems. In contrast, sociological research seeking to account for the more heterogeneous and recursive nature of time—inquiry often taking recourse to cyclical or other ­process-oriented metaphors—has historically been thinner on the ground. In studies of industrial and organizational behavior, for example, relatively few researchers have focused on how actors experience working time symbolically in “social cycle” terms (Sorokin,  1957)—in other words, how they obtain meaning through the recurrence of temporally ordered events and construct their own cultural timereckoning systems based on such experience. In this regard, we are concerned analytically with how time and temporality at work can be appreciated from social anthropological, ethnographic, and thus qualitative viewpoints. In this analysis, therefore, we discuss sociological work on time not only in the “linear-quantitative” tradition but also in relation to studies which have developed “cyclical-qualitative” interpretations. Initially, on developing a conceptual framework, we offer explanations of working and organizational time from the historically

John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson, Organizational Time in Historical Perspective: Foundational Thinking and the Case for Social Cycle Research In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0010

170  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies dominant linear-quantitative tradition, and notably in relation to one of the most influential theoretical traditions in industrial and organizational sociology of the last fifty years, labor process theory (sensu Braverman, 1974). Here we draw upon the­or­ ies of working time in social history to explain how the economic structures of industrialism gave rise to a range of linear metaphors—metaphors which have significantly influenced the time perceptions of modern societies. This analysis provides a basis for illustrating just how the linear-quantitative paradigm became dominant in the sociology of time. Whilst recognizing the importance of the linear tradition, we argue subsequently that for industrial and organizational sociology it does not provide a sufficient basis for explaining the nature of time symbolically in relation to work experience. In particular, it can be argued that the linear tradition has neglected interpretive and phenomenological aspects of working time and thus the importance, diagnostically, of cyclical and processual metaphors. To redress the balance, and by turning primarily to French and American traditions of social time research, we illustrate analytical affinities between cyclical and qualitative time notions. We develop this analysis to explain the subjective and inter-subjective perception of working time and spe­cif­ic­ al­ly by reference to findings from four ethnographic investigations that addressed such issues prior to postmodernism. As a result, the chapter considers retro­spect­ ive­ly the case for promoting social cycle research in ethnographic studies of or­gan­ iza­tion­al time.

10.2  Foundational Thinking on Time and Temporality To produce this historical overview, it is important that we first construct a conceptual framework. To achieve this, we draw upon some of the main images of time in social philosophy, and then upon two of the main time metaphors in social theory. These concerns are then brought together in the main body of the chapter.

10.2.1  Philosophical Issues Speaking broadly, of the two dimensions which define existence, time and space, the former has always presented greater difficulties regarding definition. Traditionally, the main thrust of analysis has come from philosophers, although more recently time has been a significant concern for physicists, biologists, and historians. Social scientists, however, have arguably been slower to engage the concept theoretically, and particularly sluggish in deploying it as a central dimension in empirical work. By way of contrast, in philosophy there is a long and scholarly history of temporal analysis, with the concept of time being a central issue of philosophical inquiry for over 2,000 years (Koselleck, 1985). Here, debate is found at several analytical levels, ranging from ontological concerns with time and existence, to epistemological

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concerns with time and understanding. It is a tradition which has yielded a wealth of abstract and complex questions, such as: does time flow, is there an arrow of time, is time dynamic or static, is time merely the perception of motion, and even is there such a thing as time at all (Baron and Miller, 2019)? Although a detailed analysis of such questions is beyond our scope, we can at least identify some of the main traditional—notably dualistic—issues to confront scholars of time. First, at the level of ontology, is whether we should regard time as an ob­ject­ ive fact “out there” in the external world, or as a subjective essence constructed via a “network of meanings”: in other words, should we conceptualize time as real and palpable or essential and abstract? Second, is whether we should theorize time as homogeneous (time units are experienced comparably) or as heterogeneous (time units are experienced differentially); or put another way, is time continuous and in­fin­ite or atomistic and epochal? And third, is whether social time can be measured, and if so, whether we can have more than one valid time; should we regard time as a unitary quantifiable commodity or as a pluralistic qualitative experience (Callender, 2011)? Through a sociological lens, the ways in which we answer such questions essentially determines how we conceptualize time. These are issues which have pragmatic implications for social affairs—for as a culture develops a dominant concept of time, it answers these questions at every point of its evolution. Indeed, with the rec­on­cili­ atory arguments of postmodernism notwithstanding—work often promoting “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” (Barad,  1998: 87; also Hassard and Parker;  1993; Linstead,  2004; Cunliffe,  2011)—traditional sociological antinomies continue to provide valuable means for interpreting the nature of social and organizational time.

10.2.2  Thinking Metaphorically When seeking to conceptualize time and temporality another powerful tool for social and organizational analysis is metaphor (Manning,  1979; Tinker,  1986; Cornelissen,  2005). Indeed, over the decades metaphors and related tropes have been useful for explaining a range of sociological concepts (Lakoff and Johnson,  1980). For organizational analysis, perhaps the best-known work in this area is Gareth Morgan’s (1986) book, Images of Organization, in which he interpreted organizations variously as “systems,” “machines,” “dramas,” “organisms,” and even “psychic prisons.” Since its first publication this book—like Morgan’s earlier influential work Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (1979, with Gibson Burrell)—has become a classic in the canon of management literature, providing a rich theoretical resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations. For the concept of time, however, arguably fewer primary metaphors (Grady, 1997; Cornelissen and Kafouros, 2008) have been developed to conceptualize what is, like organization, a somewhat elusive notion. Of the few that have, the most regularly

172  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies rehearsed have been variants of the “cycle” and the “line” (Hassard, 2001), although writers have discussed other primary metaphors, such as “helical” time, plus a large number of secondary or “complex” metaphors (Cornelissen et al.,  2008). For the metaphor of the cycle, one of the most influential historical analyses is Mircea Eliade’s (1959) book Cosmos and History, in which he describes inter alia how the cycle is the basic time metaphor of (pre-Christian) “archaic man.” He suggests that for archaic societies events unfolded in an ever recurring rhythm—where sense of time was developed out of the struggle with the seasons, and with the “horizon of time” being defined by the notion of the “eternal return.” Eliade argues that when “Christian man” abandoned this bounded world in favor of linear progression to redemption and salvation, then for the first time he was exposed to the dangers inherent in the historical process. For Eliade “modern man,” in response, has sought refuge in various forms of faith in order to rationalize a historical process that seems to have neither beginning nor end. In a complex metaphorical treatise, Eliade describes how in the face of such uncertainty modern scholars have often sought to “master history” and bring it to a conclusion, as in the writings of Marx and Hegel. A similar symbolic argument was developed by Sebastian de Grazia (1974) in Time, Work and Leisure. Grazia argues that while primitive concepts of time were dominated by the metaphor of the cycle, for modern societies Christian beliefs provided the image of time as a straight line—as a testing pathway from sin on earth, through redemption, to eternal salvation in heaven. He contends that in the evolution of modern culture the idea of irreversibility replaced that of the eternal return. The distinguishing feature of ultimate progression thus led the way to a linear concept of time. Grazia relates how in Book Two of Confessions, Augustine “broke the circle” of Roman time. In contrast to Herodotus and his notion of the cycle of human events, Augustine “dispelled false circles” and instead purported the straight line of human history. In so doing, Grazia describes how history began to be dated from the birth of Jesus Christ, even though culturally Anno Domini chronology only became widespread during the eighteenth century. Sociologically, it can be argued that the linear metaphor has been influential due to its link to a further notion—time as a commodity. During the rise of industrial capitalism this sense of linearity was to find time equated with value, as E.  P.  Thompson (1963) described in The Making of the English Working Class. In Thompson’s work technological and manufacturing innovations see time closely aligned with industrial progress. Time, like the individual, becomes a commodity of the production process, for in the equation linking acceleration and accumulation, a human value can be placed upon time. As Karl Marx argued in the first volume of Das Kapital (1867), surplus value can be accrued through extracting more time from laborers than is required to produce goods having the value of their wages. Other influential metaphors similarly emphasized temporal formality and scarcity, with notions from Newton and Descartes suggesting, for example, that time was real, uniform, and all-embracing; it was a mathematical phenomenon; it could be plotted as an abscissa.

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In such metaphorical thinking, therefore, modern cultures are often theorized as adopting primarily linear time perspectives (Dawson and Sykes,  2016). Here, the past is unrepeatable, the present is transient, and the future is infinite and ex­ploit­ able. Time is homogeneous: it is objective, measurable, and infinitely divisible; it is related to change in the sense of motion and development; it is quantitative. Whereas in theology the linear metaphor of time anticipates the promise of eternity, in the material world of modern capitalism it suggests time being measured in finite units of productive performance. Time is a resource that has the potential to be consumed by a plethora of activities and its scarcity is intensified when the number of potential claimants is increased. In advanced societies time scarcity makes events become more concentrated and segregated, with special “times” being given over to various forms of activities. Here time is experienced as a way of locating human behavior and fixing action that is particularly appropriate to circumstances. By uniting the ideas of linearity and value we begin to conceive of time as a limit­ed good, for its scarcity enhances its worth. In Metaphors We Live By (1980) Lakoff and Johnson crystallized this idea by discussing three secondary metaphors linked to linear time: time as money; time as a limited resource; time as a valuable commodity. The suggestion is that, under capitalism, time and money are increasingly exchangeable commodities: time is one means by which money can be appropriated, in the same way as money can be used to buy time; money increases in value over time, while time can be invested now to yield money later. This quantitative, commodified image of time has often been considered a byproduct of industrialism. In Technics and Civilisation (1934: 14) historian and phil­ oso­pher Lewis Mumford stressed “the clock, not the steam engine [was] the key machine of the industrial age.” He argued that rapid developments in synchronization were responsible for organizations of the industrial revolution being able to display such high levels of functional specialization. In turn the emergence of large firms required considerable segmentation of both parts (roles and positions) and activities in time and space. Such specialization set requirements for extensive time/ space coordination, both at intra- and inter-organizational levels. As high levels of coordination needed high levels of planning, sophisticated temporal schedules were necessary to provide a satisfactory degree of predictability. The basis of prediction became that of sophisticated measurement, with efficient organization becoming synonymous with detailed temporal assessments of productivity. As historically the machine became the focal point of work, so time schedules became the central feature of planning (Gantt,  1919). During the course of industrialism, the clock emerged as the instrument of coordination and control, with the time period re­placing the task as the focal unit of production. In his famous article “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), historian E. P. Thompson argued that industrialism witnessed a crucial change in the employment relation, for it was now time rather than skill or effort that was paramount. In large-scale manufacturing, the worker became subject to extremely elab­ or­ ate and detailed time-discipline. Whereas prior to industrialism most craft

174  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies workers were self-employed—working in their own homes, with their own tools, and to their own hours—the coming of the factory system saw progressive temporal rigidification. Before the industrial revolution, Thompson argues, a key characteristic of work was its irregularity, for periods of intense working could be followed by ones of relative inactivity. There was for example the (pre-industrial) tradition of “St Monday,” where Monday might be taken as a casual day, like Saturday and Sunday, with most work being completed in the middle of the week. Moreover, the length of the pre-industrial or agricultural working day was irregular and determined largely by the time of the year. Thompson’s (1967: 56) quote from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles complements his analysis well: “Tess . . . started her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently ­subdivided the day.” Thus, in contrast to the task-oriented temporal experience of pre-industrial so­ci­ eties, the linear-quantitative tradition emphasizes how, under industrial capitalism, not only did the great majority of workers become subject to rigidly determined time agendas, but they also became remunerated in temporal units: paid by the hour, day, week, month, or year. The omnipresence of the factory clock brought with it the notion that the worker is exchanging time rather than skill: selling labor-time rather than labor. Workers were forced to sell their labor by the hour as time became a commodity to be earned, saved, or spent.

10.2.3  The Hegemony of Clock Time Out of this form of analysis, social and organizational theory came to view “modern” or “industrial” conceptions of time as hegemonic structures whose essences are precision, control, and discipline. In industrial societies, the clock becomes the dom­in­ ant machine of productive organization; it provides the signal for labor to commence or halt activity. Workers must consult the clock before they begin working. Although life in industrial societies became structured around times allocated for many ac­tiv­ ities, it is always production that takes preference. While under industrial capitalism Grazia (1972: 439) suggests “man is synchronised to work, rather than technology being synchronised to man,” similarly for auto magnate Henry Ford the key to successful mass manufacture was to take the “work to the man,” not the “man to the work” (Brinkley, 2004). It is indeed no accident that the opening credits of Charlie Chaplin’s (1936) celebrated film about the onset of mass production in American industry, Modern Times, are listed against the backdrop of a large clock. Chaplin is saying that in ­modern societies, time is given to production first; other “times” (familial, communal, etc.) must be fitted around the margins of the production process. Ideal or­gan­iza­tions are those having temporal assets which are highly precise in their structuring and  distribution. The impression is of technological determinism dominating our perceptions of time; of arithmetical equations providing solutions to time problems

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in the context of there being finite limits and optimal solutions to temporal structuring. The implicit rule is that a modern society is effective only if its members follow a highly patterned series of temporal conventions; each society’s productive day must be launched precisely on time, even if this results in “alienation” rather than “freedom” (Blauner, 1964). In this process, clock time holds distinct advantages for cap­ ital as it is both visible and standardized. It has two strengths in particular: it provides a common organizing framework to synchronize activities, and it commodifies labor as a factor of production (Blyton et al., 1989; Tuckman, 2005). It is indeed from this scenario that, for industrial sociology, Frederick Winslow Taylor was to emerge as the heir to Adam Smith’s metaphoric pin factory and become the high priest of rational time use (Kanigel, 1997; Cummings et al., 2017). It is in the manuals of industrial engineers following Taylor that are found the logical conclusions to the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, and Babbage. Scientific Management, and the time and motion techniques that were its legacy, established by direct administrative authority what the machine accomplished indirectly—fine control of human actions. In Taylorism we arguably reach the highpoint in separating labor from the varied rhythms experienced in craft or agricultural work: clock rhythms replace fluctuating rhythms; machine-pacing replaces self-pacing; labor serves technology. For industrial sociology, therefore, the linear conception of time became “commodified” due to a major change in economic development: when time was dis­ covered as a factor in production (Hassard, 2001). Time was a value that could be translated into economic terms: “it became the medium in which human activities, especially economic activities, could be stepped up to a previously unimagined rate of growth” (Nowotny, 1976: 330). Time was now a major symbol in the production of economic wealth. Under industrial capitalism, timekeepers were the new regu­ lators and controllers of work; they quantified and transformed activity into mon­et­ ary value. When time became deemed a valuable commodity then its users were obliged to display good stewardship—time was scarce and must be used rationally.

10.3  Rethinking the Linear Tradition Historically, therefore, linear and quantitative metaphors have been employed to describe how, under capitalism, time became an object for consumption. In this view, time is essentially reified and given commodity status so that surplus value can be extracted from labor. The emphasis is upon time as a condition and criterion of the employment relation—an objective parameter rather than an experiential state. However, in terms of foundational sociological thinking the standard ­linear-quantitative thesis on time and temporality—often associated with studies of “Taylorism and Fordism” requires qualification. When embraced historically by industrial and organizational sociologists, it perhaps results in overstating the deterministic rationality, for example, of production technologies and understating the

176  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies social construction of temporal meaning in the workplace. In other words, there has been a tendency to downplay the experience of temporal flexibility in a range of functions emerging within the rise of the modern corporation (in corporate planning, marketing, research and development, sales, etc.) Moreover, while the work of many professional occupations (accountants, consultants, engineers, lawyers, etc.) has ­customarily reflected event-based task trajectories, the work of many ­non-professional occupations (such as “blue light” workers, trades people, maintenance workers, etc.) has also traditionally reflected irregular, if not necessarily s­ elf-determined, ­operational patterns. In addition, it can be argued that the historical dom­ in­ ance of the ­linear-quantitative tradition appears somewhat anachronistic in an era where, for many nations, the service sector now dominates the economic landscape. We can begin to question, therefore, why in the history of industrial and or­gan­ iza­tion­al sociology the linear-quantitative thesis has been applied so readily as the basis for explaining the nature of time at work. Whereas many applied sociologists have suggested that progressive temporal commodification accompanied increased de-skilling at work—notably in the wake of Harry Braverman’s (1974) influential monograph Labor and Monopoly Capital—others suggest that time-structuring practices at work are far more complex than, and by no means so deterministic as, much labor process theory has habitually implied. A notable proponent of this alternative position has been the British sociotechnical theorist Peter Clark, who in an against-the-grain book, Organizational Transitions and Innovation-Design (1988, with Kenneth Starkey), contended it was naive for organizational sociologists to assume that working time must be routinely commodified into a highly fractionated division of labor through “Taylorian recipes.” Drawing on alternatives to labor process theory, the book offered examples of task designs that were not anticipated by Marxist or Marxian theory, such as under sociotechnical systems design, where a key to improving productivity, and also the quality of working life, was permitting greater temporal autonomy for employees. Under sociotechnical approaches— which gained much profile through experiments in the Scandinavian auto industry, and later influenced team-working and empowerment philosophies—time structuring was somewhat taken away from managers and handed over to members of the autonomous work group. Therefore, although F. W. Taylor’s prescriptions reflected a “tight bundle” of productive elements—combining, for example, time study with method study, payment systems, and organization structure—it is a bundle, Clark and Starkey argue, that was seldom applied in its entirety in Britain or America, a theme developed by Clark in other books, such as Innovation and the Auto Industry (1985, with Richard Whipp), Anglo-American Innovation (1987), and Organizational Innovation (2003). The suggestion here is that many of the metaphors and scenarios emerging from “strong” versions of the linear-quantitative thesis—and from labor process analysis in particular—require scrutiny. The standard impression of Taylorist and Fordist work practices is of homogeneous activities being measured in micro-seconds to realize optimal aggregate production output. However, as organizational eth­nog­raph­ers have

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documented, this image ignores the power of work groups, on even the most externally determined task processes, to construct their own time-reckoning systems (Hassard et al., 2018). Whilst in comparison to other forms of organization the temporal inventories of manu­facturers are relatively exact, they nevertheless remain of somewhat bounded rationality when we consider the role of contingent factors such as effort level, technical failure, and market demand. In fact, for contemporary ­market-based organizations, time inventories are arguably seldom as determined and finite as many so-called “rational” models of workplace behavior would portray. Furthermore, the luxury of long-term commercial time horizons has rarely been available to firms within the economically and technologically “turbulent fields” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It can be argued, therefore, that organizational time has always been an ana­lyt­ic­ al­ly far richer phenomenon than portrayed habitually in industrial and or­gan­iza­ tion­al sociology. Sociological perspectives prevailing for much of the twentieth century, for example, such as functionalism and structuralism, often failed to capture the complexity of organizational temporality. Arguably such perspectives tended to concentrate mostly on delineating ideal types of temporal structuring or suggesting that the nature of working time essentially reflects the social relations of (capitalist) production. To conduct meaningful research into working time, it can be argued that we have always needed in-depth nominalist as well as realist approaches for understanding organizational behavior; methods which access subjective/interpretive well as objective/structural facets of time in the workplace. The concern has tended to be, however, that in contrast to the critical-structuralist juggernaut of “Bravermania” highly influential from the 1970s and 1980s onwards— “­anti-structural” (Hassard and Wolfram Cox, 2013) studies of temporal experience have been much thinner on the ground, with the qualitative dimension of working time being generally understated and research evidence found only in occasional pieces of organizational ethnography.

10.4  Social Cycle Perspectives The question remains, therefore, of how best to advance a case for the development of ethnographic and process-oriented perspectives on time and temporality in organizational research. In championing such an approach the claim we make is that historically we are not as bereft of theoretical models or empirical contributions as we might think. We note at the outset that the identification of subjective and ethnographic themes has long been a major concern of both the French and American traditions in the social anthropology of time. In the French tradition, for example, the writings of Hubert (1905), Hubert and Mauss (1909); Durkheim (1912), and Mauss (1947, 1950) all emphasize the rhythmical nature of social life through developing ethnographic conceptions of time, rather than representing time as simply measurable duration. For example, Hubert

178  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies (1905) defined time as a symbolic structure representing the organization of society through its temporal rhythms, this being a theme also developed by Durkheim (1912), who analyzed time as a product of collective consciousness. For Durkheim, “collective time” is the sum of procedures which interlock to form the cultural rhythm of a given society. He argues, for example: “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” (1912: 69). For Durkheim, therefore, time is derived from social life and becomes the subject of collective representations: it is fragmented into a plethora of temporal activities which are reconstituted into an overall cultural rhythm that gives it meaning (see also Koselleck, 1985). Later, one of the most ambitious attempts to outline the qualitative and heterogeneous nature of social-time was made by the French sociologist-cum-jurist Georges Gurvitch (1964) in his book The Spectrum of Social Time. In a refined, if at times somewhat opaque, thesis, Gurvitch offers a typology of eight “times” to illustrate the temporal complexity of modern society (i.e. enduring, deceptive, erratic, cyclical, retarded, alternating, pushing, explosive). He illustrates how cultures are characterized by a mélange of conflicting times, and social groups are constantly competing over a choice of “appropriate” times. Like earlier writers, Gurvitch distinguishes between the micro-social times characteristic of groups and communities and the macro-social times characteristic, for example, of systems and institutions. He makes regular reference to a plurality of social times and notes how in different social classes we find different timescales and levels operating. Gurvitch suggests that through analyzing time at the societal level we can reveal a double timescale functioning—with on the one hand the “hierarchically ordered and unified” time of social structure and on the other the “more flexible time” of society itself (1964: 391). More recently, in Presentism and Experiences of Time, François Hartog (2003) argues in a similarly heterogeneous vein that our “presentist present” is by no means as uniform or definite as we might think. In an analysis highlighting the contra­dict­ ory qualities of our contemporary temporal understanding, he suggests time is ex­peri­enced very differently depending on the position one occupies in society. Hartog describes how on the one hand we can be temporally absorbed (as well-paid professionals) in “global movements” and “accelerated flows” or else (like casual workers, living from hand to mouth) destined to existence in a “stagnant present.” He argues that the latter possesses no “recognized past” or “real future”—it is instead a world in which the encouraging temporality of “plans and projects” is largely in­access­ible. Hartog’s analysis suggests therefore that the present can be experienced not only as “emancipation” but also as “enclosure,” with similarly the future being perceived as “promise” but also as “threat.” In America, Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton (1937) also highlighted the quali­ta­tive nature of social time, notably in work that laid the ground for social cycle theory (Sorokin, 1957). In the process Sorokin and Merton drew on the French trad­ ition, citing the sociological influence of Durkheim (1912) and also early cultural

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anthropologists such as Codrington (1891), Hodson (1908), Nilsonn (1920), Best (1922), and Kroeber (1923). This synthesis allows Sorokin and Merton to identify qualitative themes at both micro and macro levels of analysis. Whilst, at the micro level, they emphasize the discontinuity, relativity, and specificity of time (“social time is qualitatively differentiated,” 1937: 615), they also suggest, like Durkheim, that: “units of time are often fixed by the rhythm of collective life” (1937: 615). Indeed, Sorokin and Merton take this position a step further. Whereas, for example, Evans-Pritchard (1940) in his studies of the Nuer illustrates how certain activities give significance to social time, Sorokin and Merton adopt a position more characteristic of the sociology of knowledge. They argue that meaning comes to associate an event with its temporal setting, and that recognition of specific periods is ­dependent on the degree of significance attributed to them. Drawing again on anthropological notions, Sorokin and Merton argue that “systems of time reckoning reflect the social activities of the group” (1937: 620). They suggest interpretive notions of time are important not only for analyzing primitive but also modern societies, suggesting ultimately that: “Social time is qualitative and not purely quantitative. . . . These qualities derive from the beliefs and customs common to the group. . . . They serve to reveal the rhythms, pulsations, and beats of the societies in which they are found” (1937: 623). What might be termed this “cyclical-qualitative” literature suggests, therefore, that modern societies, as well as primitive ones, hold pluralities of time-reckoning systems, and that these are based on combinations of duration, sequence, recurrence, and meaning. Unlike with linear and homogeneous time reckoning, there is no uniformity of pace and no quantitative divisibility or accumulation of time units. Instead the emphasis is on cultural experience and “sensemaking” (Weick, 1995): on creating temporal meanings rather than responding to temporal demands. The goal is to explain the largely ethnographic and interpretive nature of social time.

10.5  Ethnographic Exemplars for Organizational Research Finally, having examined theoretical notions underpinning a social cycle ­paradigm—notably from foundational contributions in anthropology and sociology— we discuss how prototypes for organizational research can be found in previous ­ethnographic studies of workplace temporal experience. In so doing, we present as exemplars four social cycle studies of organizational time developed prior to the advent of postmodernism: that is, inquiries developed before sociologically ­“synthetic” thinking gained intellectual purchase, from around the mid-1980s. The proto­typ­ic­al studies in question are: Donald Roy’s (1959) account of t­ ime-structuring rituals amongst factory workers; Peter Clark’s (1978, 1985) proposals for linking temporal experience with organization structure; Jason Ditton’s (1979) analysis of  time strategies among bakery workers; and Ruth Cavendish’s (1982) study of

180  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies tem­poral experience and organizational politics in assembly work. These studies all emphasize the voluntarist nature of time structuring, develop their explanations from ideographic data, and in so doing reflect nominalist ontology. As such they arguably provide a vanguard of exemplars for those wishing to construct an ethnographic process-based paradigm for organizational time—one founded on key elem­ ents of social cycle theory. Of these accounts, Donald Roy’s is probably the best known. In what has become a classic paper in industrial and organizational sociology, he outlined how workers who were subject to extremely monotonous tasks can make their experiences bear­ able by putting meaning into their (essentially meaningless) working days. In Roy’s machine shop, the work was both long (twelve-hour day, six-day week) and tedious (simple machine operation). In reflective, auto-ethnographical, and above all participant observation-based research, he described how he nearly quit the work immediately when first confronted with the combination of the “extra-long workday, the infinitesimal cerebral excitement, and the extreme limitation of physical movement” (1959: 207). It was only on discovering the “game of work” which existed within the shop that the job became bearable. The group in which he worked had established its own event-based, time-reckoning system for structuring the day— although it was one which took some time to understand. As the working day stretched out infinitely, the group punctuated it with several informal social “times,” each of which was the signal for a particular form of interaction. The regularity of “peach time,” “banana time,” “window time,” “pick-up time,” “fish time,” and “coke time,” together with the specific themes (variations on “kidding” and “serious” themes) which accompanied each time, meant that instead of the day being endless durée it was transformed into a series of regular and recurrent social activities. In place of one long time horizon, the day contained several short horizons. Roy explains that after his initial discouragement with the meagerness of the situation, he gradually began to appreciate how “interaction was there, in constant flow. It captured attention and held interest to make the long day pass. The twelve hours of ‘click,—move die,—click,—move die’ became as easy to endure as eight hours of varied activity in the oil fields or eight hours of playing the piece work game in a machine shop. The ‘beast of boredom’ was gentled to the harmlessness of a kitten” (1959: 164). Jason Ditton’s (1979) analysis of the time perceptions of bakery workers is very much in the same tradition. Like Roy, he describes the social construction of times, and how workers develop “consumatory acts to manage the monotony of time . . . breaking endless time down into digestible fragments to make it psy­cho­ logic­al­ly manageable” (1979: 160). He illustrates how time is both handled differently and experienced differently according to the type of work being done. For example, in the bakery studied there were two main production lines—the “big (bread) plant” and the “small (roll) plant,” each with a range of tasks. Whereas in the “big” plant the work was physically more difficult (“hot, hard and heavy”), it was preferred because the number and speed of events made the day pass quickly.

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In  contrast, life on the “small” plant was made bearable only because slower ­production meant there were more opportunities to “manipulate” time. In Ditton’s study, not only do we see (as in Roy’s account) the use of event-based time reckoning to give meaning to the day, but further how such time reckoning is strategic. Ditton shows not only how managers and workers possess differing time strategies but also how these are linked to differing temporal orientations. Ditton distinguishes between the more linear time orientations of management and the more cyclical time orientations of workers. Management is consumed with the lin­ear­ity of clock time—with the calculation and division of duration, and with the relentless demands and pace of the machinery. Workers, on the other hand, use their k­ nowledge of event-based cycles in order to control time. Additionally, the bakery workers possessed a whole repertoire of “unofficial instrumental acts” for exercising control over the pace of the line, and Ditton’s work is aimed, specifically, at showing how these acts were appropriated, for example, as strategies for “making time,” “taking time twice,” “arresting time,” “negotiating time,” and “avoiding time.” Through this analysis Ditton was able to show how, in the bakery, individual work roles were often evaluated according to their potential for manipulating time to a worker’s advantage. Ruth Cavendish (1982) was another around this time to illustrate the strategic importance of time in the workplace. In her account of women assembly workers “doing time,” she portrays time as fundamental to the political struggle between capital and labor, in an analysis that suggests potential fusion with labor process analysis. Cavendish argues that as time was what the assemblers were paid for they made sharp distinctions between “our time” and “their time.” Time-obedience was the crucial discipline that management had to enforce, and skirmishes over clocking off were more than just symbolic: “they were real attempts by them [managers] to encroach on our time and, by us [workers] to resist such encroachments” (1982: 117). In a detailed ethnographic account Cavendish describes, for example, how “UMEC counted the minutes between 4.10 and 4.15 in lost UMO’s [unit of output], and every day the last few minutes before lunch and before the end of the afternoon were tense—each side tried to see what it could get away with” (1982: 117). Like Roy and Ditton, Cavendish outlines how working time is not only an ob­ject­ ive boundary condition, but also a subjective state, as she explains how time was experienced differently according to the situation a work group faced. Cavendish describes how working on the production line “changed the way you experienced time altogether,” and how “the minutes and hours went very slowly but the days passed by very quickly once they were over, and the weeks rushed by” (1982: 117). She notes how there was habitually consensus amongst the women as to the speed at which time was passing, for “Everyone agreed whether the morning was fast or slow, and whether the afternoon was faster or slower than the morning” (1982: 112). Like Roy (1959), Cavendish notes how the women developed a number of recurrent time “rituals” and that these served both to “make the day go faster and divide up the week.” As Cavendish argued suggestively: “All the days were the same, but we made them significant by their small dramas” (1982: 115).

182  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies However, while Cavendish, like Roy, shows how such rituals and events gave the workday an informal time structure, she notes also how the phenomenological perception of time was not always homogeneous. In the interstices between rituals or events, or simply during periods when time seemed unusually burdensome, the women would devise their own, personal strategies for “getting through” the day. Cavendish explains how: “Sometimes 7.30 to 9.10 seemed like several days itself, and I would redivide it up by starting on my sandwiches at 8 a.m. I would look at the clock when we’d already been working for ages, and find it was still only 8.05, or, on very bad days 7.50. Then I redivided the time into half hours, and ten-minute ­periods to get through, and worked out how many UMO’s I’d have done in ten minutes, twenty minutes and half an hour” (1982: 113). In addition, she notes how members of the group would adopt personal strategies for getting through these periods: “Arlene was deep in memories, and Alice sang hymns to herself. Grace always found something to laugh about, and Daphne watched everything that went on” (1982: 115). Among the group’s members, Cavendish suggests older women were more adept at handling time, and that it bothered younger women far more. In particular, older women were skilled at “going inside,” or deciding when to cut off from chatting in order to pass the time by day-dreaming. Additionally, in contrast to Roy and Ditton, Cavendish describes how time in such workplaces can be reckoned differently according to the day of the week. For example, she notes how Monday was a “good day” timewise because “everyone was fresh” (“it seemed a long time since Friday”) and the group could catch up on the weekend’s news. Tuesday, however, was a “very bad day” because it was not special in any sense. On Wednesday, the supervisor issued the workers with their bonus points, which would form part of the basis for their pay on Thursday. This made Wednesday bearable not only because the bonus points gave the group a vehicle for ritual discussion, but also because—as the points were related to the amount of pay—it gave the impression that it was “almost Thursday,” and near the end of the working week (“By Wednesday lunchtime, people would say half the week was over and we could see our way to Friday afternoon,” 1982: 116). Although Thursday was pay day, it could be experienced as a “long day” partly because the pay slips arrived in the first half of the morning. However, the pay slips often served as a vehicle to give the group “a few minutes interest,” especially if one of the packets had been calculated incorrectly. Friday, although the last day of the week, was also a “slow day” as there we few rituals to supplement the group’s work. Apart from the horizon of “subsidised fish and chips” at lunchtime, it was a “long haul” to finishing at 4.10. At the end of the afternoon the women always tried to spin out the last break by an extra five minutes, so that there was then only half an hour or so to finishing time. Finally, although operating at a more macro level of analysis, arguably some of the most innovative social cycle work on organizational time has been accomplished by Peter Clark (1978; 1985), who in studies of food processing and textile manufacture illustrated how temporal differentiation represents a crucial link between a firm’s culture and its structure. Clark was one of the few researchers to go beyond the

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small-group level and make this link to organizational forms. He argues that in depicting organizations in a “static mode”—as under various empirical forms of functionalism and structuralism—sociologists have failed to consider how structures themselves can “vary rhythmically” (1978: 406). Following the earlier cycle theories of Kuznets (1933), Sorokin (1957), and Etzioni (1961), he suggests large firms can experience periodic differences, for example, in the intensity of production or service, and that these, in turn, can reflect significant changes in an or­gan­iza­ tion’s character and culture. In a study of sugar beet processing Clark notes how the time frame of the case company contained “two sharply contrasting sets of recurring activities” (1978: 12). He describes vividly the marked differences in attitudes between the intensive period of sugar beet processing, during the autumn, and the more mundane activities that characterized the factory’s operations during the rest of the year. In so doing, Clark highlights the cultural rhythms that ebb and flow within the organization, illustrating for example the excitement and anticipation that characterizes the onset, in September, of the processing “campaign,” a three-month period during which interpersonal relationships within the factory appeared to change, as did those between workers and their families. However, Clark also describes how as the campaign “matures” the workforce appears to become increasingly alienated from the work of processing, this bringing overt expressions of control by management. Indeed, by the end of the campaign Clark describes how the workforce comes to welcome the second major transitional period—when the workers are dispersed to relatively selfregulating groups, each working on distinctive tasks. In this study, therefore, we see two forms of what Clark calls “temporal repertoires” at work, with each reflecting its own implicit cultural values and structural rules. In a later study, primarily analyzing organizational innovation, Clark (1985; see also 1988, 2003) sought a singular concept with which to frame such changing structural and cultural forces. He found it in Gearing’s (1958) anthropological notion of the “structural pose”—a concept denoting the set of rules required for categorizing a recurring situation, the type of social actors required for a situation, and the forms of action that should be taken. When translated for use in organizational analysis, Clark suggests structural poses are tacit rules of conduct shared by those familiar with relationships between structure and culture. They are founded on depth of cyclical experience and reflect skills of tactical anticipation and expectation. In other words, they represent implicit strategic blueprints that signal actions to be taken in response to particular sets of organizational circumstances. Empirically Clark (1985) used the notion of the structural pose to analyze the actions of two marketing groups within a large textile firm, and how each reacted to a major shift in fashion and demand. The groups were from separate divisions and located in different parts of the country. Further, the personnel of the groups were dissimilar, with one, “Acorn,” being comprised mainly of experienced staff, and the other, “Harp,” of employees relatively new to the industry. In this study, Clark shows how only the Acorn team was able to anticipate and handle the change process

184  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies satisfactorily. He explains principally how it did so by “activat[ing] a structural arrangement by which employees in various parts of the firm were redesignated as members of an innovation group” (1985: 77). In contrast, the Harp team, which in the short history of the site had only experienced periods of buoyant demand, interpreted poor sales figures as merely the result of a “bad season.” As a result: “It was some time before they realized that a major shift in style was unfolding. When they did realize, they had neither the credibility nor the capability to achieve the appropriate collateral structure for innovation. It was not in the structural repertoire of Harp Mill” (1985: 77). Clark argues, therefore, that organizations possess whole repertoires of structural poses based on the premise of temporal recursiveness. In developing such repertoires, employees can account for the recurrent, but varying, rhythms of the or­gan­ iza­ tion, and thus for its heterogeneous time-reckoning system. Clark’s work illustrates links between temporal experience, structural differentiation, and stra­ tegic time reckoning. In work emphasizing cyclical event-based temporal tra­jec­tor­ ies, Clark stresses how firms, over time, draw on recurrent experiences to deal strategically with complex issues and events, many of which are generated by forces in the or­gan­iza­tion­al environment.

10.6 Conclusions In industrial and organizational sociology, the historically dominant image of time is of a phenomenon that is objective, measurable, highly valued, and scarce. The emphasis is upon rationality and homogeneity, and the view that time is quantifiable and evenly distributed. We accept that employment defines the pivotal time around which other social times are structured. As economic performance is often assessed by the number of hours it takes to produce goods or offer services, time is given a commodity image. A corollary is the portrayal of work organizations as marvels of temporal synchronicity and quantitative time reckoning. However, in concentrating upon quantitative time, industrial and organizational sociologists have traditionally overlooked the importance of qualitative time. Stress has been placed on time structuring rather than temporal experience. The focus has been upon how time is formally patterned in task systems rather than how it is “made sense of ” in task execution. In concentrating upon structure and form, and treating time as a hard, objective, and homogeneous phenomenon, we have neglected how it can also be experienced in more processual terms: as soft, subjective, and heterogeneous; as reflective of a “world on the move” (Hernes,  2014) where flow prevails over stability. Indeed, from the complex relationships linking employees, the organization, and the environment there emerge whole ranges of time patterns and rhythms. New employees learn these rhythms gradually, through knowledge of how the character of work can change according to the particular time-period being experienced.

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While work roles are often structured according to a formal inventory of activities, employees also learn the “meaning” of work by reference to an informal catalogue of connected activities and events. Tasks are categorized not only in relation to explicit work schedules, but also according to cultural and symbolic constructs created and shared by employees. As we have noted, time is one of the main criteria at play here, for the experience of employment is inextricably linked to the way time is personally and socially constructed. In sum, this chapter has examined those primarily “dualistic” foundational the­or­ ies of time developed prior to the advent of reconciliatory sociological thinking under postmodernism from the mid-1980s. We have argued that in industrial and organizational sociology we have traditionally sought research which accesses not only the concrete facts of time structuring, but also the subjective flow and essence of temporal meaning. We have argued that while sociology’s traditional conceptions of time are based largely on metaphors of linearity, rationality, and quantification, we have illustrated how such thinking can serve to restrict our awareness of interpretive and processual features of time at work. Instead, by turning historically to the French and American traditions in the sociology and anthropology of time, we have argued there can be found a research position more attuned to understanding the symbolic nature of temporal heterogeneity—one capable, in particular, of illuminating the more culturally recurrent features of organizational time.

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188  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Tuckman, A. (2005). Employment Struggles and the Commodification of Time: Marx and the Analysis of Working Time Flexibility. Philosophy of Management, 5(1), 47–56. Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage. Whipp, R., and Clark, P. (1985). Innovation and the Auto Industry: Product, Process and Work Organization. London: Routledge.

11 Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool Diane Ella Németh Bongers

11.1 Introduction The increasing call for historical perspectives in organization studies, highlighted by the concept of “the historic turn” (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004), illustrates that history has become a central concern in management studies.1 Indeed, history is much more than just a list of facts (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). History is defined by Seixas and Peck (2004) as the past, everything that has ever happened to anyone, anywhere. They insist that the past is located, and therefore it is necessary to understand it and to give meaning to it, in order to be provided with a wider perspective from which to evaluate our present preoccupations today for the future. Thus, what Seixas and Peck (2004) present as essential is the awareness of the past or historical consciousness, a structure to think historically, to practice history, that shapes how we understand the past. The historic turn in organizational studies also comes along with a shift towards history as historical consciousness. Scholars examine history as rhetoric through the study of historical narratives, to show the ways in which the processes underlying historical consciousness unfold. As we demonstrate in our literature review, while most studies of organizational history focus on the use of history by top managers that we propose to call “tight history,” they seem to ignore the informal articulations of history that evolve from the lower levels of the organization, which we offer to label “loose history.” Indeed, tight history is managed top-down whereas loose history is bottom-up, as it comes from ordinary lower-ranking people. Following the literature review, we detail our empirical study which investigates the activities and processes by which actors use history at both the individual and the institutional levels. Thus, our work aims to provide a contribution to understanding the processes by which organizations develop different forms of historical consciousness, by promoting both tight and loose history.

Diane Ella Németh Bongers, Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Diane Ella Németh Bongers. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0011

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11.2  Literature Review The concepts of “tight” and “loose” have been widely used in the social sciences to establish typologies (see, for example, Mintzberg’s organizational configurations, 1993) according to tight–loose properties (Peters, Waterman, and Jones, 1982). Cultural studies scholars compare nations to classify human societies as “tight” or “loose” (Pelto, 1968). According to Pelto, tight societies are formal and orderly whereas loose ones are individualistic and expressive. In the same way, Gelfand et al. (2011) classify nations according to the degree of tolerance people have of deviant behavior. Triandis’s (2004) view of “tight” and “loose” cultures is also related to power, authoritarian ones forcing people to comply, while conversely in conciliatory ones people tend to say “it does not matter.” Another approach initiated by the concept of coupling (Weick, 1976) also focuses on organizational culture. Scholars examine the structural relationships among actors and explore the features of multidimensional fit and interdependence in organizations (see Meyer, 2002; Orton and Weick, 1990; Beekun and Glick, 2001, among others), concentrating on the diverse patterns of coupling. This view con­ siders organizations as tightly or loosely coupled systems, and focuses on the de­coup­ling of policy–practice and means–ends, which is purposefully implemented to serve the interests of powerful leaders (Bromley and Powell, 2012). The variety of theoretical perspectives appear to be complementary as scholars have converged on a common view, agreeing that the concepts of “tight” and “loose” are useful for qualifying cultures or systems, thanks to a focus on their characterization and calibration properties. “Tight” relates to being managed and controlled by top management whereas “loose” refers to individuals in the lower ranks of the organization. We also subscribe to this vision and believe that these concepts are relevant to presenting existing theories in an organized way according to whether they consider history as being managed top-down or bottom-up, as this opens up opportunities for research. The first of these views will therefore be labelled the “tight history” perspective, and the second one, the “loose history” perspective.

11.2.1  The Tight History Perspective The majority of studies in the existing literature examine history as tight history by stressing history as one of the managing tools. Indeed, Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, and Popp (2018) emphasize the performative role of history in the making and unmaking of organizational orders. A study conducted by Smith and Simeone (2017) examines the Hudson Bay Company’s use of the past to show how organizational history was successfully converted into an asset to face political threats. With an emphasis on rhetorical practices, the studies focus on the rhetorical power of history (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2016), especially in the formation of ­legitimate judgments that address the content of messages used for persuasion. Tight

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history is mobilized by organizations and their managers to legitimize their decisions or actions (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010), for strategizing (Suddaby and Foster, 2017; Foster, Corraiola, Suddaby, Kroezen, and Chandler, 2017), or by assimilating history as a resource that forges organizational identity and culture by ­managing the collective memory as resources (Funkenstein, 1989; Zundel, Holt, and Popp, 2016; Corraiola, Suddaby, and Foster, 2017), like, for instance, a recent study ­demonstrating how the founder figure is mobilized in a dynamic perspective in organizational identity construction (Basque and Langley, 2018). As such, history is used consciously, deliberately, and with a manipulative intent. Researchers study how individuals are led to adopt a common judgment and are at the same time pushed or forced to refrain from criticism. Studies therefore address both legitimacy and power. It is about making believe, persuading, even punishing, to force people to adhere to a certain way of seeing. To do this, historical consciousness is used as a rhetorical strategy. The emphasis on rhetorical history in organizational studies relies on the study of historical narratives, especially the grand narratives or organizational stories that express organizational identity claims “to articulate, enact, stretch, preserve or refresh expressions of organizational identity” (Basque and Langley, 2018: 1685), even putting forward the cathartic power of myth (Suddaby, Ganzin, and Minkus, 2017). Suddaby et al. propose to replace legitimacy by authenticity because “authenticity requires an organization to remain true to an internalized ideal, identity or historically defined template of what is real, honest, true or essential about an or­gan­ iza­tion, a product or a practice” (2017: 291). According to them, organizations should be considered like clans headed by a shaman, having a kind of magical language or incantations that allow the organization to be characterized by unique values produced by a unique history. The data primarily considered and analyzed by researchers are discourses, archives, and institutional documents, together with interviews conducted with managers; historical narratives, both internal and external, that are managed and controlled by the leadership of an organization. Issues central to this view address the power and legitimacy dimensions of tight history, but there is a call even among those who endorse the tight history perspective to widen research by considering other concerns, other actors and, of course, other data. The tight history perspective provides a useful but incomplete view of theoretical approaches to history in ­management sciences. A greater understanding may therefore be gained by the ex­plor­ation of the loose history perspective, as we now propose to demonstrate.

11.2.2  The Loose History Perspective An emergent stream of research introduces loose history as an alternative perspective which can offer insights to contrast with earlier studies. These refer to historical narratives that challenge the dominant history of an organization. Here again,

192  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies history is seen as performative, but it is not considered as the prerogative of ­managers as it is also used by all organizational actors. Through an approach focused on legitimacy judgment formation, Smith and Russell (2016) unveil the micro (individual) and macro (institutional) levels of the legitimacy process. They show that the process that ensures persistence of legitimacy judgments and stability of the institutional order is polyphonic. According to them, constitutive historicism results from an individual evaluator’s own judgment of social acceptability and a collective consensus about legitimacy that is present at some higher level. They insist on studying how individuals in organizations contest interpretations of the past by listening to the voices of a wide range of actors at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Bitektine and Haack (2015) also explore the macro and the micro aspects of legitimacy and show how “silenced” legitimacy judgments and judgment suppressor factors induce evaluators to abstain from making their deviant judgments public. The idea of replacing or counterbalancing legitimacy by authenticity is investigated further by Hatch and Schultz (2017), who show that using history au­then­ tic­al­ly is much more powerful than manipulating history to legitimate a strategy already formulated. According to these authors, combining authenticity with power and legitimacy is a matter of aligning strategic choices with wisdom and knowledge extracted from the past. They analyze the historicizing activities of the Carlsberg Group, particularly around the use of the Semper Ardens motto, both to create a multi-award-winning beer and to spread the motto around the world. They show that authenticity reinforced the craft dimension of Semper Ardens beer and enhanced the moral strengthening of the community around the ­founders’ philosophies and ideals. Their study demonstrates the benefits for an organization of including all actors in the historicizing process, a view that counterbalances the traditional perspective focused on the power usually ­ ­conferred to tight history. Hatch and Schultz found that “actors believed that authenticity would produce acceptance by senior decision makers and/or stakeholders” (2017: 688). Therefore, they stress that manipulating history is risky because ­history has agency and therefore possess power which can be grasped by any of those who use it. The prominent role of all organizational actors in the historicism process prompted some theorists to propose an alternative and emancipatory approach to doing history. They developed the view of actor-network theory as historiography which they call ANTi-History, assuming a relational lens to understand the construction of history as a product of the politics of actor-networks who perform their past (Durepos, 2009; Durepos and Mills, 2012). By theorizing history, they insist that doing history depends on an engagement with “history,” “historiography,” and “the past” as well as with critical approaches to organization studies, arguing that researchers should trace the performances of actors as they negotiate the past into written histories to see how the socio-past oscillates as history (2012: 705). Performing history relates in this view to the spatiotemporal process of doing history, the historical consciousness defined

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by Seixas and Peck (2004), a structure of thinking historically which is not just the prerogative of some specific individuals. Hence, the loose history perspective incites one to consider various aspects of context that shape how history contributes to the social construction of reality by actors. Lubinski (2018) points out that historical claims which revise previously existing narratives are validated in a continuous dialogue with multiple audiences and often result in “rhetorical frictions” that require continuous and efficient his­tor­ ic­al revisions to settle emerging conflicts. By examining the context through the study of historical narratives, she proposes to address history as lived and experienced, arguing that “the negotiated reception by audiences and the daily practices in which they are embedded is essential to understanding their socially constructed veracity” (Lubinski, 2018: 1999). Researching the emergence of rhetorical histories and their maintenance over time through the study of conflicts, new practices, and counternarratives should enable scholars to apprehend better how organizations differ in their ability to construct and use rhetorical capabilities, especially according to the co-creative dimension of the processes at work in a practice of history that shapes how organizational actors understand and therefore use the past. The loose history perspective fosters a social co-construction process of history by multiple audiences or by interactions between micro and macro levels, insisting on widening research to include all organizational actors, both managers and employees. Studies mainly center on the analysis of narratives and stories, individual and/or institutional, as they situate historical claims by accounting for the places and practices surrounding their production. However, as Boje, Haley, and Saylors (2016) illustrate with their title “The Antenarrative Turn in Narrative Studies,” some propose to look at “the not yet fully-formed narratives, but rather pieces of or­gan­iza­ tion­al discourse that help to construct identities and interests” (Boje et al., 2016: 391) to see how actors’ fragmented speculations regarding possible futures may influence organizational change. For instance, they study the micro stories of managers and other stakeholders in Burger King Corporation’s international strategizing. Through the stories of collective life inspired by lived experience, they observe that lower-ranking individuals produce their own historical narratives that are sometime congruent with those created by managers and reveal the central role of antenarratives in organizational effectiveness. By offering an examination of the variety of theoretical perspectives on history, which we have labelled “tight history” when emanating and managed top-down, and “loose history” when produced by individuals in a bottom-up direction, we observe that scholars tend either to concentrate on one perspective only by addressing performative issues, or to focus their study on the interplay between levels by considering the confrontations between them that occur over time. However, we know little about the processes by which organizations develop different forms of historical consciousness by promoting both tight and loose history. Therefore, we attempt here to contribute to the understanding of these processes by elaborating further on the articulations of tight and loose histories, showing how they are used

194  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies in or­gan­iza­tion­al settings. The empirical material is presented here mainly to illustrate a the­or­et­ic­al point; we do not pretend to present the data in a very rigorous or extensive fashion.

11.3 Methods Earlier studies of historical consciousness focus on the performative dimension of history through the examination of narrations, especially narrative structures that show and explain the use of history in organizational settings by analyzing rhetoric (Lubinski, 2018; Basque and Langley, 2018, among others). Alternative perspectives have been proposed in recent years to address the doing of history, by highlighting either its temporality or its spatiality, although the variety of perspectives represent more complementary than competing approaches. The former view consists of the­ or­iz­ing about how organizational actors construct reality. Methods here involve tracing the variations in history by studying the emergence of issues in or­gan­iza­ tions, their conflict and resolution (Hernes, 2014; Smith and Russell, 2016), or stressing the performative implications of reinvesting the past (Hatch and Schulz, 2017), tracing the socio-past (Durepos, 2009) by focusing on continuum and change (see, for example, Basque and Langley’s (2018) “conservative” and “progressive” invocations). Therefore, scholars study narratives through discourses, archives, and interviews with managers and/or employees. The latter perspective, in contrast, insists more on how actors build their various spatial representations of the past by tracking how history transpires in various settings and artifacts, and widens data collection by including extensive observations, macro data, such as myths and grand narratives, and micro data, such as antenarratives (Boje et al., 2016), to better contextualize and conduct abductive research. Our proposal is to consider tight and loose history both in the making and in the doing of history. Therefore, we need to address simultaneously two different levels: on the one hand, the individual level, by considering all the various kinds of narratives and practices that are in use within the organization, and which emerge from a bottom-up process that begins with lower-ranking members of the organization; and on the other hand, the institutional level, by studying historical narratives and practices that are managed and controlled by the leadership of the organization. This implies setting up a relevant data collection design to better grasp the dynamics of tight history and loose history in the organizational reality as performed and experienced by the actors. Hence, we conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study of a single case to approach the processes by which organizations develop different forms of historical consciousness by promoting both tight and loose history. As we did not seek to address representativeness issues, but rather to explore the complexity and entanglement of tight and loose history in multiple and intertwined contexts, a paradigmatic case study seemed quite adapted (Yin, 2009; Stake, 2005; Mills, Durepos, and Wiebe, 2010, among others). Hence, our research took place in

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a company where tight history played a prominent role as the “glue” for or­gan­iza­ tion­al identity, and where the fundamental importance of loose history also seemed to be advanced. Another prerequisite for our five-year longitudinal research project was to be able to dive into organizational life and enjoy a complete latitude for collecting data, being free to attend to all kinds of external, internal, open, and restricted events, and with privileged access to everyone and to the company’s archives and information system. Our research setting was therefore a very unconventional company, originating from an unpretentious experiment within a small geographic area, which has constantly evolved and is today an emblematic leader in France. The model is linked to the emergence of the idea of collective entrepreneurship based on the idea of work freely chosen and granted, where entrepreneurs identify and implement new forms of autonomy. Coopaname (which stands for the Cooperative of Paris—Paname in slang) is a business and employment cooperative (BEC) that promotes a political vision of businesses as collectives of people that are craftsmen of both their lives and works. Its raison d’être is to conduct an experiment in cooperativism as an alternative to capitalism and communism, by placing the economy once more at the service of human beings. This organization is thus an ideal place in which to study tight history that supports the organizational model’s development, and the loose history of individual actors in their simultaneous becoming as autonomous entrepreneurs and as members of a collective democratic organization. Of course, we collected a huge amount of data of various types in our study, but we had to ensure that the collection was extensive in relation to both tight and loose history, as we easily had access to a plethora of data related to tight history. On the one hand, we had written data such as corporate external and internal brochures, corporate digital archives of meetings and assemblies, books and papers published or presented at conferences, reports of various collective meetings, and surveys and studies made by external companies. On the other hand, we collected observation notes, updated a daily logbook, made transcriptions of recorded meetings and interviews, explored and captured many pages of the company information system as well as individual websites of entrepreneurs and of collectives of entrepreneurs, and of course we kept all the email exchanges we had. These data were essential for study­ing loose history and useful for triangulation. They were collected in three different moments. First, we followed the steps of the entry path proposed to new cooperators and attended all meetings and training sessions. Second, we watched collective work sessions of several groups held monthly. And third, we attended various external and internal corporate assemblies. All along we developed relationships with actors, surveyed the media and forums, and conducted interviews, although these were not primary data. Primary data were written documents and exchanges, and our extensive field notes collected during and after observations. We proceeded in two stages to make our analysis. At first, we took all data, including our observation notes, transcripts of meetings, emails, photographs, interviews as well as data coming from external and internal archives to triangulate our data,

196  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and considered narratives and antenarratives as well as contexts, audiences, and networks. Then, we went deeply into the study by writing dense descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of tight and loose organizational and individual histories, both in time with chronologies and in space in and across settings to address actors’ lived experience. We then studied how historical narratives are created and received, and examined how people historize the past at the individual and institutional levels. To achieve this, we explored frictions at individual and organizational level and examined the articulations of tight and loose history. By studying actors’ historicizing methods, we researched how the structuring and interplay of loose and tight history may help the organization to achieve its objectives by enhancing the agency of historical consciousness.

11.4 Findings First, we concentrate on tight history performed at the macro level by managers to address external and internal audiences, and show how history has been used to institute the company as an alternative organizational model fundamentally committed to cooperative values, as well as to guide its successive transformations, keeping innovating to stay aligned with them. Second, we focus on loose history at the micro level as individually performed by actors, and how they use history for developing their businesses as well for contributing to and intervening in various col­lect­ ive projects of the organization.

11.4.1  Tight History Tight history addresses various audiences both external and internal to the or­gan­ iza­tion. Primarily available as organizational stories experienced and lived col­lect­ ive­ly, they are the “grand narratives” anchored in early pioneers’ experience and originate from the first associates, some of whom had already endorsed or sometimes would later endorse a social mandate of president or CEO. In addition to the stories massively transmitted orally, some documents are written. A book was written by the initiator of the initial experiment, and papers were presented at conferences and sometimes published in research journals centered on the social economy. All articles are available on the company’s website. We have reconstructed Coopaname’s history to highlight the considerable importance that has continuously been attributed to it, not only to explain, communicate, and legitimize the company, but also to theorize the project and explore how to go even further. Organizational history was handled by the first cooperators, who became more and more frequently associated with external researchers in the social economy and then in law, management, sociology or political science. We will first present the institutionalizing process and then continue by tracing tight history throughout a project undertaken to

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fulfil the legal obligation of setting up staff representation, which illustrates the interrelation of tight and loose history. To do this, we have drawn on our data to include antenarratives and fragmented pieces of discourse from workers, managers, and the media. This was possible because the company is recent, and we had free access to organizational actors and pioneers who still work there and were direct convenient providers of data. Some interviews were even conducted with people who had left the cooperative.

Genesis of Coopaname: The Institutionalizing Process

The main concern of the embryonic experiment was to prevent entrepreneurs from failing after a few months because they could not earn a sufficient income to live on. Microcredit, nurseries, and other devices already existed in the 1990s, but none of them seemed to be able to fully respond to entrepreneurs’ specific needs. “Entrepreneurship is a practice that requires one to acquire in a short time all the skills needed to set up and then run a business: know how to produce, know how to sell and know how to manage.”2 The existing training and coaching services could not solve some specific difficulties. First, the main actors coaching entrepreneurs had no lived experience in running a business. Moreover, entrepreneurs had more than occasional requests to satisfy, and their sometimes “small” problems could also become “crucial” problems. Furthermore, everything was usually managed daily without real concern for the long term. The ideal mode of operation would therefore be to have a global approach ar­ticu­ lated to a local approach, and to focus on time as a crucial dimension of success. The motivation and the determination of the entrepreneur appeared to be the key success factors, rather than his or her ability to run a business, according to the founder (Bost, 2011). In view of these observations, a person working for years with entrepreneurs decided to run an experiment to bridge the gap between the discourse that tends to present entrepreneurship as achievable by everybody, and the actual practice of entrepreneurship, which is a path full of pitfalls. Shortly after the beginning of the experiment, it appeared that “the desire to create a business was more important for the entrepreneurs than becoming a business manager.”3 Thus, a very large number of the project initiators who had been welcomed to launch their activity decided to remain in the company, even though their project was successful. After a few months, the initial experiment had to be adapted: the company now both had to continue to welcome and support new project leaders, and had to have an infrastructure that allowed those with a successful project to stay. Cohabiting entrepreneurs are at different stages of their projects. This diversity adds to the great diversity of projects and people. The experiment had to transform itself to continue to ensure the mission it had set. It progressively but quickly became what it defined itself as “a shared enterprise” project.4 This embryonic enterprise therefore became a new business model, a shared company, labelled a “cooperative of activity and employment.”5 It was ­gradually cloned in several places, particularly in the provinces, and finally was also

198  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies set up in Paris in 2004, when Coopaname was registered. The company project is designed both to coach entrepreneurs who launch a business, and to relieve them of all the administrative constraints brought about by the management of their business once it has become successful. The aim is to facilitate learning by doing, while at the same time securing the professional career. It was decided to open it to all people wanting to earn their living thanks to their savoir-faire. “The model is linked to the emergence of the idea of collective entrepreneurship. It is based on the idea of a work freely chosen and granted, independent in its aims and methods.”6 Most entrepreneurs want to do what they do in their own way, at their own pace, with the tools and techniques they have chosen. This drives entrepreneurs to identify and implement new forms of autonomy.7 The pooling of resources requires the hiring of people to take care of the support functions (accounting, secretarial work, etc.). The company is also the initiator and leader of a BEC network, “Coopérer pour entreprendre,”8 created to be a spokes­ person and a recognized and privileged interlocutor. Negotiations and dialogue are indeed necessary with the public authorities, to give a legal form to what exists in the company. For example, the model involves creating a specific legal status for employees, allowing project holders to retain their rights to unemployment, etc. Different types of co-operators therefore coexisted from that moment in the company, just as in all BECs: there are “project initiators”, “permanent employees,” and “salaried entrepreneurs.” What they do allows them to be assigned a status. Everyone may or may not endorse these statuses, and so can switch from one to the other to fill specific needs or meet specific objectives, as we will see later in the chapter. Less than a year after its creation, Coopaname already had more than sixty co­oper­ators. Especially because of the economic crisis, the growth in project ini­ti­ ators was really edifying. Thus, the model soon needed to be adapted again. According to commercial law, it became a SCOP, a cooperative enterprise in which the employees hold the majority of the company’s shared capital. Employees elect the management team, actively participate in decision making, manage the company, and share its profits, in accordance with the democratic economic principles of cooperatives. At the same time, it was incorporated as a public limited company. This choice was based on an intended purpose that is now totally assumed and clearly claimed. “Coopaname advocates for a political project, which is to seek the reconstruction of securities, rights, protections and solidarity. In other words, it militates for strengthening the collective dimension to face exacerbated and encouraged individualization.”9 Between 2004 and 2014, the company met with tremendous success, growing from 5 to 800 employees. Coopaname became the largest BEC in France. As some entrepreneurs wanted to develop a business in the ­construction sector, a “sister cooperative” called “Alter Batir!” was registered in 2007. It allowed entrepreneurs to have the ten-year coverage guarantee required for construction work. At the same time, another legal entity was created, called ­ “Coopératifs!”, which allowed entrepreneurs to benefit from a license for carrying out services to the person and also to benefit from tax and social benefits such as a

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reduced rate of VAT and social security exemptions. Later, “HOP HOP HOP!” was set up to provide a tailor-made legal framework for trainers and entertainers of the sporting community who work in the associative sector and usually offer their skills without benefiting from any social security. They usually have different statuses and are isolated; very often they have no other choice but to be considered as volunteers, sometimes paid under the table, and they encounter difficulties in dealing with communities or associations. Therefore, all legal and administrative aspects are managed by the administrative team and cooperators who have already faced similar problems. Each member of the community can then become a member of one or more cooperatives of the group, successively or at the same time, depending on the activity proposed or on the target clientele (private companies, individuals, associations, public bodies, etc.) This legal framework was chosen also because it allows for adaptations. The business model of the BEC was enshrined in law in 2014.10

The Staff Representation Project

In 2006 the company initiated a project to comply with the legal obligation of setting up staff representation. The result was an employee committee which was composed of elected staff representatives and chaired by the employer. Two cooperators wrote a paper together to explain this challenge. “Instead of just complying with the law, Coopanamians decide[d] to initiate a process of reflection and engage in action research to answer three fundamental questions about staff representation in the context of a BEC” (quoted in Delvolvé and Veyer, 2011). First, they questioned the meaning of staff representation. Second, they reflected upon the concept of staff representation in a company where employees are at the same time employers and managers. And third, they wondered how to create and formulate a jurisprudence that could be appropriate and relevant to their own business model. This process finally took place in two stages. The first stage lasted two years. It consisted of “intense cogitation to find relevant answers.”11 The second stage lasted three years and aimed at finding the best way to apply it. It was achieved through the election of staff representatives. By the end of this process, the whole project of Coopaname had itself evolved. The company tended to emancipate itself from the business model it had created to continue sticking to the political project it had set for itself—that is, to meet the growing need for a mutual protection of careers. Coopaname left the leadership of the Coopérer pour entreprendre network for several reasons. The first was not to mobilize power and therefore leave it to other BECs; the second was that they wanted to go further in their emancipatory project than others who were satisfied with what already existed; and another reason was that as the network grew, dis­agree­ments crystallized and the atmosphere deteriorated.12 The trademark “mutual of labor” was registered. It consisted of the collective creation (by five cooperatives) of a single economic entity called “Bigre!”13 which constituted an innovative form of economic and social organization: . . . an associated labor mutual, bringing together, in one and same community, several thousand members, who guarantee each other, on an equal footing, an

200  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies economic and social capacity to do their respective jobs and to live on them. The common entity brings together 7000 people and has 25 branches in France. Today, Bigre! continues to be built by a dozen partners and does not yet have any real economic activity as such.14 “Bigre!” will include artists as well as gardeners, computer scientists, interpreters, journalists, service providers, freelancers, shepherds, consultants, carpenters, craftsmen, show technicians, e-traders, authors, seasonal workers, etc. It will also be open to any new company or organization wishing to conceive within itself emancipatory forms of relationship to work and who would like to contribute its stone to the common project.15

Their intention was to create an organizational model that would be exactly the opposite of the one embodied by Uber.16 The aim was to implement a new specific business model which relies, not on financial means, but on an ethics supported by a political vision of organizations. This project did not differ from the original one because had already been announced in 2006 as the basis of any BEC (Veyer and Sangiorgio, 2006). But in 2014 it became a priority for Coopaname which initially took care of itself alone, then partnered with a few other cooperatives “with which there are affinities.”17 Since the implementation of the experiment, the actors have understood the irreplaceable importance of history. Not only did they succeed, thanks to history, in achieving over a period of a few decades the construction of a now recognized organizational model that has spread throughout France, but also history remains their essential driving force in ensuring the resilience of the cooperative and guaranteeing its potential for innovation. Coopaname is still a leading company that participates frequently in the media and at conferences, and which is now increasingly approached by researchers. The “tight history” of Coopaname was assumed initially by the founder, soon afterwards by early workers and associates, and then by all those who wished to, even if they did not always endorse a social mandate. Their participation implies interplays of loose history with tight history. Outside actors working in other BECs and scholars associated more and more massively with the study and theorization of the company. The tight story was thus also taken over by actors outside the organization. The cooperative is evolving through an action research approach which has been continuing since then. It has set up a governance body called “the research commission,” and the year is punctuated by “seasoned universities of autumn” and “of spring” in which all employees participate, and during which researchers and other external personalities are invited. Thus, Coopanamians are making continuous progress in developing their resilience collectively and consolidating their strengths as reflective practitioners. This strategy allows the cooperators to develop and practice as a community, as everyone participates and contributes to the organization. The singularity of Coopaname is always advanced through its history and the ex­plan­ ation of its raison d’être. Similarly, this emphasis on history is used to demonstrate

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how and why this cooperative is different from other BECs that may have lost sight of the values and/or the fundamental political and social objectives of this type of business model because “they do not have any culture.”18 This is done on the website of the company, and in the books or papers written by Coopanamiens, in which the story is explicit and somewhat fixed. But it is also and mainly demonstrated orally when the BEC model is put into perspective in a very educational way on multiple occasions and in different settings, such as monthly meetings and various training programs. Tight history in this company is a management tool implemented to educate and nurture all new members with the values of the organization. When people wish to join the cooperative, they first attend information meetings where the project supported by the company is revealed, among other things. These meetings are set up by company officials who can be considered managers, although they strongly refuse this title, arguing that theirs is a democratic a-hierarchical business. They prefer to present themselves as facilitators, animators, coaches, or even companions,19 but they are generally in charge of a branch office. The core values of Coopaname are thus immediately placed in the context of the cooperative movement. Once admitted into the company, people find their own way and may attend workshops. Moreover, they are all the time encouraged to join in all debates going on about organization, administration, cooperation, etc., which have become somewhat institutionalized as a participatory action research project. One of the workshops, called “cooperative training”, aims at “putting into perspective the daily life of the cooperative by bringing the historical, economic, sociological, legal, philosophical elements that question the political project of Coopaname, its action and its practice.”20 It consists of twelve sessions of three hours each (a total of around thirty-six hours scheduled over a quarter). The training ­covers many topics. First, it aims to put the company in perspective: thus, after retracing the origins, history, and projects of the company, its business model is made explicit. Second, it is compared to the solidarity economy, the social economy and social entrepreneurship. This then allows a focus on Coopaname’s networks and on its own ambitions. Third, there is a presentation and discussion on the mo­tiv­ ations, advantages and criteria which can help people to choose their roles in the company. They can become a partner by buying shares in the company, then pos­ sibly get elected to the board of directors. They can lead collectives, or settle for just being a salaried entrepreneur. This discussion makes it possible to focus more particularly on the analysis of the methods and mechanisms involved in the business. A  final session addresses in detail the vocabularies and arguments that allow Coopanamians to know how to talk about themselves as members of the company. When we took part in this training, we were able to see the wealth of information given to participants, who were surprisingly not all newcomers. The story of the company was traced back to well before its birth and registration. The context presented went from the thirteenth century to today, and it dealt with what happened not only in France but also in many other countries. Indeed, this workshop provided

202  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies participants with a version of French cooperative history that had been created by the leaders of the organization. We find here a practice of history which is shaped by distinct but closely interrelated concepts that provide a structure to think ­historically. But contrary to Seixas and his team (2004), who identify six steps in the process (establish historic significance, use primary source evidence, identify ­continuity and change, analyze causes and consequences, take historical ­perspectives, and understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations), this process almost appeared to have been already completed by the animator of the training, who sometimes introduced himself as an “early days co-worker.” Many and various issues were discussed, each participant bringing to the discussion his or her ­knowledge and experience. They gave rise to debates about ideas because everybody could intervene at all times. The historical narrative was not contested by other seminar participants, who seemed to accept it and link their own lived experience with this version. A former union delegate gave examples of practices and tensions he had experienced there and in other companies. Another person spoke of political or social episodes that he had studied more particularly; yet another proposed to present books or authors he had read and found particularly relevant. If the ­participants sometimes asked for more explanation, they did not dispute anything and were eminently interested. Contestations and disputes did exist in the ­organization, but in other settings. Indeed, our interviews revealed that the person in charge of this training was considered as the privileged guarantor of the values and practices of the company, as shown by sentences often heard such as “As long as S. stays here, I stay” or else “I entered without hesitation as soon as I met S.”21 Training sessions and workshops are places where cooperators meet, get to know each other, and exchange informally. These are not just training workshops because they are also and above all moments of exchange and debate in which disagreement can be expressed. All subjects can be addressed. Some participants do not hesitate to point out certain dysfunctions or dissonances they have experienced within the cooperative. Once on the table, the problems are discussed collectively and possibly redirected to certain governance bodies and/or to ­ad-hoc groups that are formed to collectively reflect upon the issues and try to propose solutions. For example, at the training session observed, several participants proposed quickly to put their personal notes together to develop a formalized document that could, for example, take the form of a database accessible to all. This project, in which we also participated for a while, failed rather surprisingly because it did not seem very difficult to carry out. Two main reasons, formal and substantive, explain this failure. First, no one seemed to be able to fulfill the task, which appeared time consuming, although a sharing of tasks was organized from the beginning and a test was completed. And second, the project stumbled on substantive issues illustrated by questions such as: “Why should we do this work when everyone can attend the workshop?” “Will the document be accessible and read?” “Will it be updated, how and by whom?”22 No decision had finally been made. Although the discussion was

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extended to all participants, the project seemed to have “evaporated” and no col­lect­ ive production ever did emerge. However, deeper reasons seem to have played a particularly important role in the failure of this project. The aim was to write a kind of book which would include all the information provided here in order to facilitate its dissemination throughout the company. Thus, once written it could not be modified. But at each session, many questions were asked as well as requests made for clarification. Even the slightest disagreement was dealt with immediately in a contradictory way. If the facilitator often answered, all the participants expressed a view. The current issues were discussed and always put in the perspective of the story told. Thus, the data of the past, the “raw facts,” were constantly discussed and rearranged. Once this knowledge was written down and therefore formalized, and most probably taken out of context, participants feared that it could lead to misinterpretation.23 We observed that the participants who met on this occasion thereafter often referred to what they had learned during the training. This occurred in many ways and in different places. In those moments, we noted that they had appropriated the story because they used “we” instead of “you” or “they,”24 even though they did not participate in the reported events. This illustrates the interplay between tight history and loose history, which are complementary and indispensable means of enlightening the present, putting it in a context that is always specific. They allow the actors to feed a debate, to establish positions, to justify statements and, above all, to make choices and decide on future actions. Surprisingly, two years later, a document entitled “Little vademecum with real pieces of history of Coopaname in it and its project but not only . . .”25 is released, written by the CEO who conducted the training seminars, who before being CEO was an entrepreneur within the structure. The history is covered rather succinctly, because the book particularly develops the future projects being supported by the company. The story here includes both tight history and pieces of loose history. It is especially a tool to both advocate and legitimate the future and is also important because it allows the actors to build a reality, to share a common set of references and of values. Even once written, history may eventually be interpreted and reinterpreted, orally or by other writing, people tending to favor only certain facts and ignore others whenever it suits them. By browsing the documents and attending all types of events, we saw how the fundamental idea of the “mutuality of work” went through the company for more than ten years, changing its shape and name, and evolving from an internal concern supported by the actors themselves to an external preoccupation assumed jointly with outsiders. We have seen that tight and loose history interplay to provide a historical perspective useful to gain more insight into the deeply rooted values of the company and to explain the present. Here history is positive as it is managed strategically, as a dynamic capability, both to foster the social and legal construction of the or­gan­iza­ tion and to enhance innovation. The past appears to be the most fundamental resource of the cooperative. It is constructive for two reasons. The first is that it is a

204  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies persuasive source of shared social and temporal continuity. History is used as a tool to establish, strengthen, and maintain a collective sense of belonging for its members. Indeed, this business model can only hold if the entrepreneurs who have a vi­able project remain in the company, because they thus support the financing of the accompaniment of the newcomers as well as the development of the company as a whole. At this stage, they could leave the company completely and start their own business. It is the affectiosocietatis26 that cements the community and allows the company to exist and grow. Successful and profitable entrepreneurs must be mo­tiv­ ated to stay rather than become independent. Their choice may be based on practical reasons, such as outsourcing the administration of their business. But we have observed that the decision tends to impose itself naturally on entrepreneurs because they absolutely want to participate in the project. This idea kept coming up in many interviews we conducted and exchanges we heard. History is also constructive as a powerful legitimating agent. Coopanamians have a sense of belonging to a community that actively participates in the development of another way of looking at work, based on cooperation. Moreover, they are continuously motivated to take part in the process, both upstream through reflecting, researching, and debating, and downstream by designing, testing, implementing, and managing. They especially feel that they are participating in making history, accepting tight history and articulating it with loose history. They are promoting a paradigm shift which appears necessary to build better societies and better organizations. They are convinced they are going the right way and make every effort to achieve it and feel totally legitimate.

11.4.2  Loose History Loose history addresses individual actors—ordinary workers but also those who can be seen as managers of the organization. Indeed, at Coopaname a cooperator can take on several roles successively or at the same time, endorsing a social mandate then leaving his place to someone else, being an entrepreneur and then coaching people, then ultimately but not always definitively returning to his or her own business. All the cooperators can also get involved in more or less formal collectives, manage them, animate them, eventually become responsible for them, or settle for being only at a distance, temporarily or not. This is the reason why our data were sometimes difficult to label and classify. There are entrepreneurs who are salaried and others not yet, and to complicate matters further, some salaried entrepreneurs and permanent employees have already “crossed the border” several times. That is why we decided to take into account “the hat”27 under which individuals spoke or did something at a precise moment. Primarily, our sources are observation notes and meeting transcriptions, completed with face-to-face semi-structured interviews. We also watched personal websites of cooperators, some of whom expressed their opinion on the company and/or told their story. We created portraits for our own use of some individuals with biographical notes, observation and interview quotes,

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emails and messages posted on the forums, both to have a better knowledge and understanding of them, and also to observe their evolution in time and space. We followed some individuals as soon as they entered the company and accompanied them for a long time on their journey, both when attending training sessions and at all types of events. Thus, we observed how tight history was handled by individuals and also managed collectively. We concentrated first on entrepreneurship at Coopaname to see the genesis of the process, and more particularly on the “raisonned autobiography” (Desroche, 1984) workshop to study the continuous process by which individuals get used to handling their personal history and how as loose history it interacts with tight history. In what follows we have also drawn on our own data, including narratives as well as fragmented pieces of discourse from cooperators and exhaustive observations of or­gan­ iza­tion­al life.

Entrepreneurship at Coopaname

Entrepreneurial qualities are not presumed for entering this company. Degrees awarded and qualifications obtained are not considered here, whereas various lived experiences are very much emphasized. The Coopanamians are more interested in personality traits and in the person’s whole life history. It appears that the criteria of judgment traditionally used for recruiting staff are not employed at Coopaname, where primacy is given to sincerity, integrity, respect, and trust, which of course are not absent in other firms. Expertise, diplomas, and professional background are not important as such, but criteria do exist and constitute another vision. Coopanamians’ worldview goes with a specific normative system which is also mobilized for recruiting employees, joining as an entrepreneur, and setting rules for living and working together. The entry process takes time, often several months. It goes through discussions and meetings. What is checked is the raison d’être and the sense of a project, the professional and personal histories of the candidate, his or her aspirations. Time is stretched both into the past and into the future, to find the roots and mission set forth by the candidate. It also allows the individual to get to know the company better and thus to check if he or she is likely to find their place in the organization, and has an interest in entering it. At Coopaname, there are manifold training programs, readily accessible to everybody, in which history is used for multiple purposes. Some workshops aim at facilitating integration into the company, but most are designed to help cooperators in overcoming various blockages or in decision making. New and experienced entrepreneurs and employees get the same attention and help. The most numerous people to join the cooperative are women with family responsibilities, this criterion being less discriminatory than it may be in other companies. There are also many people who had a difficult working experience, who are unemployed and cannot get work. A particularity of this enterprise is that people are free to enter and leave, without justification and without taking any professional and personal risks. They can leave

206  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies with their project, their brand, and their customers, at any time. The newcomers are not directly employed. They become so only when they earn money through the sales they make. They can take all the time they need to start their businesses till they succeed in paying themselves a wage. Meanwhile, they have no costs to incur and they can continue to receive social welfare benefits. Various workshops offer to provide concrete assistance to the development of each person’s activity. All Coopanamians meet here. There are newcomers, as well as historic employees. There is a wide spectrum of age and projects (magic, philosophy, gardening, jeweler, journalism, fashion design, dog walking, etc.). Training sessions are set up and run by other Coopanamians and are efficient ways of socialization. Newcomers take habits on board even without being totally aware of it and incorporate the implicit current rules. We observed that Coopanamians tend always to answer a question with another question, which gives the impression that they discuss points of detail and always look for complexity. In this organization, there seems to be no answer that would be considered unique, good, and definitive. Everything is constantly questioned; the doubt is permanent, and is somewhat considered normal. Cooperators who cannot bear this way of doing things spontaneously leave the company. Many techniques are mobilized in the workshops. Coaching methods include psychology as well as specific internally designed methods and processes, and even music and dance. Even if a dedicated path has been set up for newcomers, anybody can propose new training. He or her must just ask for a free room and then post an announcement on the extranet. All training is free and can be attended as often as needed. Some animators are paid by the firm, others are not. It depends on their status: permanent employees free up their own time, so that training is part of their job, whereas entrepreneurs are paid for training only if it has a regular basis. The integration path for all new employees is not mandatory. It includes six workshops in which various methods and techniques unfold and combine to alternate what are labeled “cold moments” of confrontation between the dream and reality of the projects, with “warm moments” of comfort, hope, and encouragement (Németh Bongers, 2017). This alternation makes participants both renew their vision of the ideal project and innovate it in practice. Workshops are moments of encounter at Coopaname as no common place of production exists. These occasions favor the setting up of new projects, either by redesigning existing ones or by creating partnerships. Some shared-brands are now and then created according to the opportunities which arise. People progressively work on all aspects of their project, such as pricing, their product/service offering or their commercial brochure. They are encouraged always to pay attention to the implications of the slightest change made to the project, both for their personal life and for the project itself. At the same time, they examine and re-examine iteratively their whole project and adapt it so that it may be a long-term, viable, and sustainable one. Everything aims at departing from the DNA of the individual to characterize the business which is developed. The same process is proposed to the permanent employees in charge of pooling services to shape their job. As two cooperators wrote

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in the early stages of the organization, “entrepreneurship is then both a collective product and process” (Veyer and Sangiorgio, 2006).

Raisonned Autobiography

The cooperative identity formulated in the 1895 statement promulgated by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and revised in 1995 defines and guides cooperatives worldwide. The fifth principles states that “co-operative societies must provide education and training to their members, elected representatives, managers and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of their cooperatives.”28 Rather than considering that training exists in all companies for newcomers to be socialized or indoctrinated, cooperators believe that educating people empowers them to become the creative subject of their history instead of being an object at the mercy of events.29 One of the most emblematic workshops at Coopaname is undoubtedly a practice called “reasoned autobiography.” It is designed to allow people to turn backward to their past to highlight a logic which finally brings them to discover or rediscover a sense and a legitimacy necessary to move forward. We observed that actors appropriated this way of using history for themselves and used it daily. As they became more and more conscious of the power of history, many also created their own methods, either alone or in teams, and proposed alternative workshops and new projects. They often cited J.  F.  Draperi, a researcher and professional trainer who published books about cooperatives and who now and then joined the Coopanamians. Inspired by Desroches, who proposed in his 1990 book “to learn how to learn,” Draperi (2010) presents reasoned autobiography as consisting in reflecting on one’s own life story, because to know where one is going, one must remember where one comes from. It is both oral and written. “Speaking history is essential to remembering, and writing history is needed to fix the memory in a ­reasoned and sustainable way.”30 The aim is not to analyze how each person represents his or her itinerary, but to allow everyone to develop a project rooted in his or her previous experience. The three main issues of reasoned autobiography are, first, to enhance self-worth and value the career path; second, to significantly strengthen fundamentals by identifying the various key elements that provide an overall cohesion; and third, to provide assertiveness. According to a survey done within the company, participants who were either entrepreneurs or people in charge of support functions at Coopaname felt very enthusiastic about this workshop and highly recommended others to participate in this training program. “It allows one to objectify oneself by becoming the subject of one’s own history.”31 We observed that the people who attended this training had a very particular and recognizable behavior. They generally became more involved in the company, and they innovated even more in their practices and in their projects. In addition, they set up new workshops, and created and experimented with new methods that they then offered to other cooperators. For example, some cooperators implemented

208  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies what they labelled first “connivance committees.” “These are moments of collective tutoring for an individual. Anytime a project leader has a question or a specific issue he/her cannot answer to, he/she can expose it to other Coopanamians. This is a new form of accompaniment designed on demand, composed of very punctual microgroups of people. It is based on volunteering.”32 The people who had the idea for implementing such committees formed a first support committee, and at the same time they objectified their work. The methodology, form, content, and presentation were worked on and refined to a definitive, fully marketable project. The delivery process lasted six months. It was then experienced and adapted internally. Afterwards, it was not only proposed within the cooperative. It was mainly sold to outside companies as an original offering, although this had not been considered initially. Loose history originates from individuals but may afterwards be encapsulated in processes and techniques. Actors use historical consciousness as a tool for trans­ form­ation and action. As such it is a way to constantly use and reuse the past in the present, to broaden and multiply future paths, and hence to innovate in practice. Individual histories that are collectively objectified allow the discovery and ex­ploit­ ation of synergies. People discover themselves and each other at once. So, they become actively involved, are more motivated, and get committed to each other. Their various collective projects take shape and do not necessarily correspond to the overall project led by the company or to their personal projects. They implement an organization within the overall organization and start a process of institutionalizing their business. The historical consciousness at the individual level is then linked to a new and specific tight organizational historical consciousness. We have seen that there is a historical consciousness in Coopaname that has a significant impact at both the institutional and individual levels. History is both tight and loose. Not only does history strengthen the company and the individuals, but it also allows it to innovate and be more resilient. Similarly, it allows actors to pause and take reflexive breaks, to objectify what they do and then go in motion again. The articulation of the two levels allows the members of this organizational community to align with each other and with the organization, which itself aligns with each of its members in a process of historical co-construction. The continuous recourse to history as historical consciousness makes it possible to familiarize both with the cooperative specificities and processes and with others. By alternating tight history and loose history as soon as they join, cooperators end up by hardly distinguishing between top-down and bottom-up history. The collective dimension of the practice of history fosters innovation and enhances the resilience of both the or­gan­ iza­tion and each of its members. Thus, history as historical consciousness is simultaneously both an organizational tool and a process at Coopaname. Its agency allows the organization and the actors to manage and practice both the ordinary and the extraordinary of organizational life. Tight history tends to provide mainly guidelines, whereas loose history tends to favor innovation. The movement is due to the articulation between both, and it

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facilitates the organizing gearing process. However, using history as a tool may sometimes appear less exciting, as we discovered by examining the frictions that sometimes emerged in the organization in various contexts. It was then possible to identify and address frictions at both the individual and collective levels.

11.4.3  Organizational Frictions between Loose and Tight History As we were able to develop relationships with many cooperators, our study includes data collected both publicly and privately, internally and externally, amongst or­gan­ iza­tion­al actors in various contexts. This includes the individual experience of p ­ eople who had left the cooperative, our intention being to obtain information about why someone had chosen to leave, and thereby to better study the frictions as they were experienced by actors. We interviewed people, chatted with them, watched their exchanges, and through archival studies and observation notes, examined how frictions were managed over time and across multiple contexts. Frictions were mainly of two types, either personally or professionally oriented, but we saw that they intermingled with each other. Most of those who contributed substantially to this study of frictions have left the company or partially withdrawn, but our data have been triangulated with various sources. We managed to bring respondents to more reflexivity and dug deeper into the reasons for their departure or partial withdrawal. Many cooperators live far from the company, in another department or even another country. While this obviously prevents much physical involvement in the company and hinders face-to-face communication, there are other dematerialized ways to participate. In addition, other cooperators who are already employed elsewhere remain in the company to develop their project in parallel, even if they do not spend most of their time there. If everybody is always free to intervene by giving his or her opinion on all matters discussed within the company, and all have great freedom of proposal and action, some people felt some dissonance. It is true that debate is always favored, and marginal contestation is most of the time seen as desirable. But tussles may emerge as soon as it takes the form of a formal dispute. Then, the blockages that occur exhaust participants, who complain that nothing gets done and that some subjects are left in the lurch. As for the protesters, they tend to become demotivated, feeling that they or others are not taken into consideration. This damages the image they had of the company. They are discouraged, feel ignored, and withdraw. Sometimes, they even leave the cooperative. They acknowledge that they had the opportunity to speak up and were encouraged to do so, but they feel they have not been listened to, or been able to make themselves heard. However, they continue to favor the model and say that they have no resentment, as the intentions of all those taking part in controversies were laudable. In hindsight, they acknowledge that they failed by stumbling more on problems of form than of substance. Spending several years in the company allowed us to see

210  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies that some of the most enthusiastic and involved people sometimes took a step back or even came out, as if they had burned their wings. Frictions at the organizational level also appeared to be caused by problems of organization and articulation between personal and professional life amongst those who managed the cooperative, but these were exacerbated by the business model of the organization. A lot of work is voluntary, especially from the cooperators who run the firm or cumulate the functions and roles. Another problem is that many co­oper­ ators show little or no interest in the overall project, even if most of them are enthusiastic about it. There are also many diverse status and jobs. The salaried entrepreneurs have very different salaries, sometimes very low or non-existent. Permanent employees must welcome, coach, train, and serve cooperators, and often manage their branch and do public relations. Both may cumulate their duties, with or without an employment contract. We saw emerge and then followed a major dispute caused by divergent views on the notion of obligation, some wanting to make it mandatory to become a member quickly, others pretending that the model would be damaged or led astray by this injunction. To overcome these differences, the cooperators initiated several col­lect­ ives. One was made up of associates who reflected about the economic model; another, open to all, examined how to consider other forms of remuneration than money; another looked at how social mandates could be shared by many people. Each time the process was the same: participants first agreed to take into account all opinions and problems. Then they looked into the past and researched why something was done or why that decision was made. By going back to the past and recontextualizing the issue, they not only identified the fundamental values to cling to, but also used them to build solutions that were mostly innovative. Whether at the individual or collective level, the cooperators continually carried out a collective action research approach by associating on a voluntary basis with all those who wished to participate in it. Despite all their efforts, they deplored that some seemed not to understand the social-historical significance of their organization and therefore “behave as consumers,”33 and also that only few people did everything, and were paradoxically accused of “grabbing power.”34 Nevertheless, many cooperators repeated that “Democracy requires daily work, exhausting but so exciting.”35 Our findings finally converge to consider history as a management tool that can have tremendous performative aspects, even more when tight and loose history are ar­ticu­lated to help the organization to deal with problems and achieve its objectives.

11.5 Discussion Many companies seem to have increasing recourse to history, as described by Suddaby (2016), who writes that “a new sensitivity to history” exists because ­organizations take advantage of it for legitimating actions, for giving more authenticity, for increasing status or social capital. But history is not only an object. Even if

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it relates to a view through the lens of the past, history as historical consciousness appears to be in some organizations, as we have demonstrated here, one of the most important management tools, thanks to its agency. This study was designed, not to generate a new theory, but to contribute to research by proposing to consider both tight history and loose history. To contribute to the literature, we first discuss organizational strategy through the four models of change proposed by Suddaby and Foster (2017) and confront our findings with history-as-fact, history-as-power, history-as-sensemaking and historyas-rhetoric. Then, we present how our findings seem to echo institutionalist theory, according to the demand of Suddaby et al. (2017) to re-enchant the world and institutions through magical thinking and a return to craft. Finally, we demonstrate how our proposed concepts of tight and loose history may be useful for management historians addressing organizational theory. Suddaby and Foster (2017) review theories of organizational change according to the implicit assumptions about history that they contain. They make them explicit in order to propose four different implicit models of change. Each is characterized by a diversely assumed objectivity of the past that goes along with a specific malleability of the future. History-as-fact assumes history as objective fact. It considers that change is a difficult process that can only be successful through extreme levels of episodic intervention, as it is associated with an assumption of deterministic fatalism. As a consequence, change becomes compulsory. It is due to an exogenous shock that affects the organizational structure which has no other choice than to mutate from one state to another one. This view is not consistent with our case, where or­gan­iza­ tion­al change is impelled by a continuous process of multifaceted action research scattered throughout the company. The history-as-power model depends on a view of history as objective fact but differs from the latter because it focuses on the power structure of the various coalitions within the organization. This view considers change as resulting from pressures and confrontations between internal entities. Thus, change is seen as being constrained because of intricately counterbalanced pressures for change and stability. In this view, human agency enacted through reflexivity and praxis is central for an inevitable change dependent on largely ideo-historical key mechanisms of change. This model seems to fit better with what we observed in Coopaname, where human agency occupies a preponderant place and has a driving role in the change process. It also differs, however, in that those who confront are not entities but individuals who for the most part do not know each other. Even if there is no doubt that coalitions do exist, the actors are careful to preserve democratic values and prin­ ciples. Indeed, everybody can intervene, take part in debates, and get involved in management and organizational processes. Constant efforts are made at every moment to promote actors’ involvement, through pedagogy, many meetings being open to all, and countless exchanges, including those posted on the internet forum. By better addressing the particular needs of participants and therefore changing, the

212  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies company serves the general interest better, and it thus becomes more solid, more innovating, and also more resilient. History-as-sensemaking assumes a phenomenological view of history (Weick, 1995), based on human cognition and interpretation rather than an objective set of immutable facts. As such, history is a process of understanding achieved in an iterative form of back and forth between the past and present, which sustains either change or continuity. Selective memory has a critical role in reconstructing the past, so that the history becomes credible again. The history-as-sensemaking approach places the emphasis on human agency and involves retrospectively creating shared interpretations of what happened. However, if this vision is not totally divergent from what we observed at Coopaname, it differs in one important respect: there was no “cosmology episode,” no shock coming from outside, that suddenly and profoundly affected actors, forcing them afterwards to reconstruct a new interpretative framework for meaning. Instead, the actors themselves routinely planned interruptions, such as reflexive breaks, to re-examine their practices, missions, and project, as well as how each one interacted with others. This internal procedure applied to individuals and to administrative bodies, as well as to all kinds of work collectives. The history-as-rhetoric model is a highly subjective view of history which regards the past as resulting mainly from interpretation, arguing that “the process of interpreting the past is highly agentic and can be deliberately manipulated for strategic purposes” (Suddaby and Foster, 2017: 31). As such, it takes the form of narratives and is for that reason malleable and open to revision. Thus, it is more biased by the present and future. History-as-rhetoric is revealed in the massive use of purposive storytelling through which managers seek to get organizational actors to enact a new future for an organization. This approach seems to be the most relevant to characterizing what we observed at Coopaname, at the institutional, operational, and individual levels. History-as-rhetoric works both as formal remembering, a set of techniques deliberately designed to shape organizational memories towards strategic ends, and as emergent remembering, a rhetorical reconstruction of a firm’s history through casual conversations and informal interactions. It serves both to promote continuity and to support change. According to Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank (2016), the agentic interpretive conceptualization of the past can be deliberately manipulated for strategic purposes. Historicity is in this cooperative crucial for organizational memory and identity, and it emphasizes the constitution of a firm as mnemonic community in which “the construction of membership through narratives of memory is the essence of re-membering” (Suddaby et al., 2016: 308). History-as-rhetoric assumes that the strategic intent must be based on a kernel of objective facts to ensure credibility and coherence, but also that it must be disguised in order to manipulate organizational members. “Credibility in rhetorical history, thus, is based on the same criterion as most storytelling but necessitates storytelling structures that capture convincing and believable accounts of the past” (Suddaby and Foster, 2017: 33). The collective, thus social, dimension of the process is then crucial for legitimization, as memory and membership create a sense of

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commonality and belonging in a given community. By participating actively in events, individuals develop their episodic memory, an emergent remembering that allows them to remember past autobiographical elements that they can rely on to predict the future and act. But as the details are lost with time, knowledge is no longer linked to a particular event and becomes general knowledge. Then, the memory becomes formal and semantic. This process is well described by neuropsychologists working on long-term semantic memory and contextual episodic memory.36 As such, the memory of consciousness and of knowledge can be shared thanks to a set of personal data that is accessible to our conscience and that we can express. At Coopaname we witnessed that once individuals considered themselves a member and were thus accepted by others, they made the stories of the past their own, even though the events had taken place well before their arrival. When presented through the lens of the history-as-rhetoric model, historical consciousness may prove to be a strategic management tool and a powerful legitimating agent. According to the model, it is deliberate and made by managers. The concept of rhetorical history describes the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stakeholders of the firm” (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn-Trank, 2010: 157), which gradually confers a collective identity on a community, and which thus can take full advantage of a collective memory, seen as a mnemonic capability by Coraiola, Suddaby, and Foster (2017). However, our work tends to demonstrate that it does not necessarily imply manipulation of individuals, although it still encompasses some persuasion. As shown by Smith and Simeone (2017), a rhetorical history implies appearing credible and therefore congruent with the wider historical social culture. Historical narratives must be based on facts and on storytelling structures that capture convincing and believable accounts of the past to ensure credibility (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). However, we highlighted that at Coopaname historical consciousness is used as a strategic, operational, and individual resource. The cooperative claims and advocates for a political vision of the firm (politics in the sense of “life of the city”). It places at the heart of its concerns a utopia and works to achieve a mission: collectively changing the firm and through it changing society as a whole. The politicized nature of the corporate use of the past is therefore clearly stressed here. The firm also uses history as a reflexive process to improve all operational and organizational aspects, such as creating new facilities and services that will benefit the whole community. At the individual level, work on historical consciousness reveals it as a very fruitful way of proceeding to instill and cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset. Historical consciousness is therefore far from being confined to a unique theoretical view of the past, as it always combines with practical concerns which are to satisfy the specific and realistic needs of entrepreneurs. The political view of the firm is coupled with material down-to-earth considerations. As a consequence, this resource not only boosts organizations’ and individuals’ capacity for innovation and resilience, but also enhances their responsiveness to grasp opportunities.

214  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Our study may also contribute to institutional historical research in terms of reenchanted organizations. Indeed, the research was conducted in a firm where people pursue an assumed utopia that aims to rethink business and work, and therefore collectively build and continuously adapt their business model. They move forward by returning to the future. And their return to craft is supported by centuries-old cooperative principles. The agency of historical consciousness supports the performativeness of the inquiry process, both as a full social experience, thanks to communities of inquiry, and as a conceptual tool. The company we studied is certainly an extreme case, chosen on purpose to explore historical consciousness. It supports the view of Wadhwani et al. (2018) and Suddaby et al. (2017), who propose to consider authenticity as a counterbalance to legitimacy, reflexivity in place of embeddedness, mimesis as an enchanted substitute for isomorphism, and incantation as a counterpoint to diffusion. The relevance of legitimacy has been recently questioned by many scholars who generally propose to replace it by authenticity, on the basis that legitimacy is often used top-down to persuade or punish. As shown for instance by Hatch and Schulz (2017), authenticity may be used bottom-up and it imparts power to people. Authenticity is a way not only to innovate but also to escape traditional relationships of power. We saw at Coopaname that people make mistakes but are not sanctioned as long as others consider that they have authentically sought to do well. In most cases, no one sees how to do better. However, if someone deliberately infringes the principles and the values of the company, the sanction is immediate, he or she is rejected straightaway by everybody, and what has been done is widely discussed and communicated. Reflexivity is, of course, a basic characteristic of entrepreneurs and practitioners. Our study emphasizes the pragmatist approach which advocates a more democratic view of organizations and a focus on educational concerns. The articulation of tight and loose history is an abductive social process of people which fabulates (Lorino, 2018) existential concern of the future collectively and contradictorily by inventing new practices according to fundamental human values and in the face of important economical and societal challenges. Here cooperators extensively use research action methods, keep asking questions, and constitute various communities of inquiry who focus on “the ghost of the future” (Lorino, 2018) through abduction. Therefore, we are in accord with Suddaby et al.’s “re-enchanted view of organizations in which cognizant, self-aware individuals form collective intentions to engage in institutional actions” (2017: 292). Proposing to replace embeddedness by reflexivity advocates more research focused on conversations about the life interest and life project of collectives, groups, and organizations: the “we”. The mimesis implies, according to these authors, a form of “sympathetic magic” that allows the copy to become more powerful than the original instead of being downgraded. Our findings demonstrate that by articulating both tight and loose history, actors managed to go from an unpretentious experimentation to a leading organization, always attempting to surpass itself to address more fundamental and

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larger issues. The role of language and rhetoric is highlighted in these processes, and may be presented as incantations, magical words that help people to transgress the laws of a dominant rationalist worldview, and which empower them to imagine other realities, pasts, and futures. As Suddaby et al. (2017: 294) write: “Their enchantment arises from the degree to which they reflect and reinforce the phe­nom­eno­ logic­al foundations of institutions.” Our work underpins Smith and Russell’s (2016) view of rhetorical strategies as a multilevel model of legitimacy process based on interactions between macro-level validity and micro-level evaluators’ judgments. They call on scholars of rhetorical history both to study the historical narratives produced by people at the base of the organization and to study how competing historical narratives interact within organizations. Through the concepts of loose history and tight history, we subscribe to their polyphonic approach to capturing historical narratives produced by different people within and around organizations, rather than just the narratives produced by managers, an approach which is also implemented by Lubinski (2018). Our research, based on the conceptualization of tight history and loose history as well as their interplay, advocates conducting long-lasting ethnographic studies by addressing both managers and lower-ranking organizational members and studying how they produce, receive, and articulate their own historical narratives. Furthermore, this allows the inclusion of many other data besides just narratives (Boje et al., 2016) and a better search for the potential instrumentality of all historical accounts (Durepos and Mills, 2012).

11.6 Conclusion Historical consciousness is undoubtedly a management tool, and our work demonstrates that even for a small and quite recent company, it can perhaps be the most relevant one. One of our main findings is that historical consciousness used as a management tool requires us to pay attention to both the intended purpose and the process set up to achieve it. Effectively involving all members in the process can increase the efficiency of the tool, but the tipping point between manipulation and autonomy is sometimes tenuous. To avoid falling into manipulation, the firm must constantly pay attention to ensuring pluralism. It will not become subversive as long as the process remains widely open to all. But once controversy is not possible, cannot be expressed, and/or is no longer considered, it may become so. A virtuous enterprise must, then, constantly ensure that there is room not only for debate, but also and most importantly for the expression of opposition; otherwise it will appear as a corrupt and dogmatic organization that manipulates and bullies its members. As pointed out by Mintzberg, “Effective organizations are communities of engaged human beings, not collections of passive human resources. These organizations have no tops or bottoms, no ‘leader’ who has to think for everyone else. Everyone is engaged; communityship is fundamentally indigenous.”37

216  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The limits of our research may lie in the fact that we examined a paradigmatic organization, a cooperative where all members are encouraged to articulate their own historical narratives in both tight and loose history. As the cooperative is almost a-hierarchical, further investigations should be conducted in more hierarchical ­capitalist-oriented organizations. We have no idea about how various traits of an or­gan­iza­tion relate to its tolerance for a diversity of historical narratives within the firm. Another limitation, of course, is the size of the company. Indeed, in a larger company, we do not know if it would be possible to observe identical processes.

Notes 1. I would especially like to sincerely thank Roy Suddaby and my three anonymous re­viewers for their very helpful suggestions. Without them, this chapter would not have existed. 2. Quote from an interview with the founder. 3. Quote from an interview with the founder. 4. Motto of the cooperative. 5. Translated by the Coopanamians BEC (Business and Employment Cooperative) into English. 6. Observation notes. 7. Quoted from company website. 8. Cooperate to undertake, own translation. 9. Source: internal archives. 10. Act 47 Law no. 2014–856 July 31, 2014, on Social Economy. 11. Observation notes. 12. Transcription of cooperative workshop. 13. We suggest translating “Bigre!” as “Oh gosh!” 14. Web archives. 15. Quoted from the annual activities report of 2016. 16. Example provided during a training session dedicated to newcomers. 17. Quoted from the discourses. 18. Quoted from an interview with the CEO and appearing many times in observation notes. 19. Observation notes and in various archives. 20. Quoted from the message posted to present the training. 21. Quoted from interviews. 22. Oral and written exchanges. 23. We noted this in the messages exchanged between participants including us. 24. Observation notes. 25. Our translation. 26. Concept appearing on the front page of many documents. 27. Metaphor very commonly used by cooperators. 28. https://www.ica.coop/en 29. Declaration of the VIth International Conference of UNESCO on Adult Education, Paris, March 19–29, 1985, often cited at Coopaname. 30. Our own translation of the preface of Desroches (1990).

Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool  217 31. Quoted from the IT system forum. 32. Quoted from interviews. 33. Quoted from interviews and observation notes. 34. Quoted from interviews and observation notes. 35. Observation notes. 36. It seems that two distinct neuronal networks coexist. Cf. Groussard et al. (2009) or Guillery-Girard et al. (2006), for ex­ample. 37. http://www.mintzberg.org/blog/transformation-from-the-top-how-about-engagementon-the-ground

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Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool  219 Peters, Thomas J., Waterman, Robert H., and Jones, Ian (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. London: HarperCollins. Seixas, Peter, and Peck, Carla (2004). Teaching Historical Thinking. In A.  Sears and I.  Wright (Eds), Challenges and Prospects for Canadian Social Studies (pp. 109–17). Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press. Smith, Andrew, and Russell, Jason (2016). Toward Polyphonic Constitutive Historicism: A New Research Agenda for Management Historians. Management and Organizational History, 11(2), 236–51. Smith, Andrew, and Simeone, Daniel (2017). Learning to Use the Past: The Development of a Rhetorical History Strategy by the London Headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Management and Organizational History, 12(4), 334–56. Stake, Robert (2005). Qualitative Case Studies. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 443–55). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Suddaby, Roy (2016). “Toward a Historical Consciousness: Following the Historic Turn in Management Thought.” M@n@gement, 1(19), 46–60. Suddaby, Roy, and Foster, William  M. (2017). History and Organizational Change. Journal of Management, 43(1), 19–38. Suddaby, Roy, Foster, William M., and Quinn Trank, Chris (2010). Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage. In Joel A. C. Baum and Joseph Lampel (Eds), The Globalization of Strategy Research (pp. 147–73). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Suddaby, Roy, Foster, William  M., and Quinn Trank, C. (2016). Re-Membering: Rhetorical History as Identity-Work. In Michael  G.  Pratt, Majken Schultz, Blake E. Ashforth, and Davide Ravasi (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity (pp. 297–316). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suddaby, Roy, Ganzin, Max, and Minkus, Alison (2017). Craft, Magic and the Re-enchantment of the World. European Management Journal, 35(3), 285–96. Triandis, Harry C. (2004). The Many Dimensions of Culture. Academy of Management Perspectives, 18(1), 88–93. Veyer, Stéphane, and Sangiorgio, Joseph (2006). L’entrepreneuriat collectif comme produit et projet d’entreprises épistémiques: le cas des Coopératives d’Activités et d’Emploi. Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat, 5(2), 89–102. Wadhwani, R.  Daniel, Suddaby, Roy, Mordhorst, Mads, and Popp, Andrew (2018). History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1663–83. Weick, Karl  E. (1976). Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–19. Weick, Karl E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations, Vol. 3. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yin, Robert K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 4th edn. Applied Social Research Methods, Vol. 5. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Zundel, Mike, Holt, Robin, and Popp, Andrew (2016). Using History in the Creation of Organizational Identity. Management and Organizational History, 11(2), 211–35.

12 Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management Abandoning and Embracing History Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen

12.1 Introduction This chapter investigates organizational change management in the wake of pri­vat­ iza­tion in a Scandinavian telecom from a historical perspective. Based on an ethno­ graphic study a quarter century after the company was privatized, we investigate how the past was appropriated by managers for the purpose of implementing per­ form­ance management in the company’s operations department. By addressing this topic, we join the emergent research stream on the “uses of the past” in or­gan­iza­ tions, which focuses on the way in which actors construct and use history for pur­ poses in the present (Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, and Popp, 2018). Additionally, we offer a distinct theoretical contribution by outlining an analytical framework where we combine Bourdieusian theory (1977) with a narrative approach (Boje, 2001) to analysis. This framework provides an alternative view of the impact of his­ tory on organizational change management studies by bridging objective and sub­ ject­ive elements of history, which, we argue, enables a different understanding of the constitution of history, and its impact on change management practices, while responding to calls for increased “historical consciousness” within the research field (Brunninge, 2009; Suddaby, 2016). The Scandinavian telecom was sold by the state in the early 1990s as a conse­ quence of the liberalization of the European telecommunications market (Greve and Andersen, 2001). The liberalization was a source of increased competition and inter­ nationalization, which led to the privatization of all state-owned telecommunication monopolies in the Nordic countries, carrying with it a significant rationalization and restructuring of the sector across the region (Jordfald and Murhem, 2003). Consequently, our case company was transformed from state-owned monopoly to shareholder-owned business in a competitive international market. The exposure to

Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen, Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management: Abandoning and Embracing History In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0012

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  221

competition made profitability the paramount concern of the company and set in motion a wave of streamlining measures, where managers viewed performance man­ agement as an integral part of this transformation. However, at the time of our inves­ tigation, twenty-five years post privatization, the implementation was con­sidered as still ongoing. In other words, the department had not managed to move on from the practices of the time of public monopoly to the practices envisioned in the competi­ tive environment post privatization, and therefore, one could argue that the past was alive in the present through organizational actors’ appropriation and enactment of the past in practice. This led us to address the following research question: In what ways did managers’ appropriation of history impact organizational change management practices in a Scandinavian telecom a quarter century after privatization?

By addressing this question, we draw attention to the subjective and performative elements of history—that is, the ways in which actors sometimes consciously and strategically, though often unconsciously and pre-reflexively, mobilize the past for present purposes (Wadhwani et al., 2018). The underlying assumption of this focus is the notion of history as a socially constructed symbolic resource (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010). This conception notably breaks with predominant repre­ sentations of history within organizational change management research which treat history as objective facts (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). History in this predominant view is seen as synonymous with a past which is fixed forever once it has occurred (Brunninge, 2009). Thus, the research field spans two radically different conceptions of history: one that emphasizes its manifest objective functions, and another that stresses its latent interpretive elements (Suddaby, 2016). This chapter offers an alter­ native conception of history, one which holds the potential to advance our under­ standings of the impact of history on organizational change management by bridging objective and subjective elements of history. We integrate Bourdieu’s notion of practice with the emerging literature on or­gan­ iza­tion­al uses of the past. We argue that Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital are particularly well suited for the purpose of this chapter in two ways: first, the framework is based on a historical epistemology in which our being with history, or time, is perceived as a key component to understanding social life (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992); and second, the framework is based on an integrating view of social life that takes its intrinsic dual character into account by integrating its sub­ ject­ive and objective features (Gorski, 2013). Consequently, from this perspective, “the social world is essentially accumulated history” (Bourdieu, 1986: 46), and his­ tory is neither fully objective nor fully subjective as social life transpires through ongoing dialectical adjustments between subjective and objective temporal struc­ tures (Bourdieu, 2000). Bourdieu demonstrates this interrelation by stating that each human action brings together two states of history: objectified history, i.e. history which has accumulated

222  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies over time in artefacts, materials, customs, etc.; and embodied history, in the form of habitus. Through practical experience, habitus and field as two modes of existence of history attune to each other, thereby endowing actors with a practical sense which allows them to appropriate the legacy of history in practice (Bourdieu, 1981). In this sense, practical activity that is generated by a habitus that is adjusted to the field becomes an act of temporalization through which actors “transcend the immediate present via practical mobilization of the past and practical anticipation of the future inscribed in the present” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 138). We complement Bourdieu’s theory of practice with a dynamic and embodied notion of narratives, understood as a way of linking objective and subjective per­ spectives of time (Cunliffe, Luhman, and Boje, 2004). It is by analyzing the narra­ tives of organizational actors that we are able to see how actors establish a link between past and present, i.e. how stories of the past are appropriated by manage­ ment and strategically incorporated into the stories of the present, as a strategic nar­ ration of history (Barry and Elmes, 1997; Cunliffe et al., 2004). In our analysis, we include utterances that convey ongoing events, or the “lived experience” of story­ tellers (Boje, 2001), in the form of more fragmented antenarratives, as well as more canonical narratives of past sequences, with temporal sequences (a canonical char­ acteristic of narrative) either explicit or inferable. The strength of our theoretical framework is that it enables us to understand the impact of history or the appropriation of history on practices of organizational change management as a way of bridging the objective elements of historical facts with the subjective elements of historical narratives. In other words, we understand history as both a structuring and a structured structure, (Bourdieu, 1990), which through enactment and narrative construction plays a constitutive and performative role in the continuous production and reproduction of organizational orders (Wadhwani et al., 2018). The chapter is structured as follows. First, we review key aspects of the change management literature in relations to its treatment of history. Then, we move on to present our analytical framework, after which we illustrate our argument through the analysis of the narratives of organizational actors. We conclude the chapter with reflections on the significance of the findings of the chapter including the underlying value of our analytical framework.

12.2  Literature Review In 2001, Pettigrew, Woodman, and Cameron identified the inclusion of history and time as an underdeveloped dimension of organizational change studies and called out extant research for being too universal and underestimating the impact of his­ tory, context, and temporality. At the time, the literature was dominated by episodic views of change as movement from one state to another (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Consequently, the literature was concerned with developing stage-models (e.g.

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  223

Kotter, 1995; Lewin, 1947; Schein, 1992) for managers to plan and implement change (MacKay and Chia, 2013; Weick and Quinn, 1999). History rarely featured as a focal point of analysis in this research; however, the implicit underpinnings of an episodic linear conception of change is that of the past as unchangeable facts. Hence, time and history in this view are seen as metaphysical realities which can only be ob­ject­ ive­ly accounted for (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). The “historic turn” has brought increased interest to historical analyses in or­gan­ iza­tion and management studies (Brunninge, 2009). Subsequently, the research field has witnessed the rise of the “uses of the past” approach, which is concerned with the various ways that organizations use history for business purposes (Wadhwani et  al., 2018). In this view, history is conceived as a socially constructed rhetorical device, which can be shaped and manipulated by organizational actors for strategic purposes (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Studies of change management have embraced this approach and recognized the use of history as an important underutilized asset in managing organizational change (Carroll, 2002; Gioia, Corley, and Fabbri, 2002; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). Yet, despite the turn to history and the booming interest in historical analyses, there is still room for further development of “historical consciousness” in or­gan­iza­ tion­al change management research (Brunninge, 2009). Suddaby (2016) explains “historical consciousness” as an openness to discuss the ontological and epis­temo­ logic­al constitution of history and engage in development of approaches that can bridge the structural–objective–positivist elements of historical truth and the ­constructivist–interpretive–subjective elements of historical narrative. The reason why this is important is that the ability of actors to appropriate history strategically, as well as habitually, hinges on history’s objective functions. Thus, to fully ­understand the impact of history or the appropriation of history on practices of organizational change management, bridging is essential. In this chapter, we offer such a bridge by means of an analytical framework based on Bourdieu’s concepts in combination with a narrative approach to experience. The dialectical interrelation between habitus and field enables us to show how history is simultaneously being carried, and enacted, and carries actors. Thus, in other words, actors’ ability or inclination to appropriate and narrate history in certain ways is itself a product of historical acquisition (Bourdieu, 1981).

12.3  Analytical Framework The essence of our analytical framework is the relationship between the historiciza­ tion of social structures, i.e. fields, the historicization of individual actors, i.e. hab­ itus, and practice (Steinmetz, 2011). We understand practice as the doing by social actors which takes meaning and value in a particular field; reflected in the sociohis­ torical trajectory of actors through their position in the field, the capital possessed, and their habitus (Gomez, 2015).

224  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies To Bourdieu, the social world is made up of relational fields, which can be under­ stood as microcosms carved out of larger social structures, governed by distinct ­logics, which define the rules and resources that are legitimate in that particular field (Bourdieu, 1990). In this sense, fields are historically embedded as they form sep­ar­ ate spaces, with their own stakes and their own agreed-upon logics, which did not exist before (Steinmetz, 2011). Therefore, any social inquiry should start by defining the field in which the investigated phenomenon is situated by reconstructing the historical genesis of the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). As fields are relation­ ally configured, the organizing principles of a field are always rooted both in the history of the field itself and in the history of its relations to the larger fields in which it is embedded (Steinmetz, 2011). Hence, while the tempo of the field is connected to that of other fields, each field too has its own synchrony, rhythm, and pace. Thus, actors’ temporal consciousness, experience, and meaning of time are conditioned by their specific position in the field (Atkinson, 2019). Fields are always occupied by a dominant and a dominated group of actors seek­ ing to achieve personal advantage, and control of the mechanisms of the field, through ongoing position-takings, guided by the field-specific capital (Steinmetz, 2011). In that sense, capital represents the stakes and resources over which actors continuously struggle. Consequently, to define the boundaries of a field requires empirical determination of what species of capital are active and within what limits (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Thus, the distribution of capital across the field represents the structure within it, at a given point in time, and governs the field dynamics by determining the chances of success for practices (Bourdieu, 1986). The amount of capital in one’s possession defines actors’ relative distance from necessity, which contributes to the structuring of their temporal consciousness, including their sense of their own trajectory, i.e. of being “up and coming” or “on the decline.” In this sense, the temporal consciousness of actors makes certain experiences likely or unlikely, and certain actions and strategies objectively possible or impossible. Thus, awareness of time can be viewed as the form in terms of which one’s life experience is organized (Atkinson, 2019). The habitus of actors can be understood as the active presence of past socialization in a body. It is the product of the milieu in which socialization takes place and where humans become culturally knowledgeable through their engagement in a particular environment (Bourdieu, 1990). It generates the practical sense of what to do in spe­ cific situations, within the conditions that apply to a field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The inherently historical nature of habitus is captured in the following ­definition: It is a “system of dispositions—a past which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices” (Bourdieu, 1977: 82). In other words, the habitus is a system of layers of enduring and transposable dispositions integrating all past experiences. Consequently, the ­dispositions acquired in the past are at every moment part of present actions and perceptions, because the habitus is constantly subjected to ex­peri­ence, and, by the same token, transformed by these experiences (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015).

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  225

Therefore, habitus always produces history on the basis of history (Wacquant, 2016). Habitus is both individual and collective; individual in the sense that all actors have their own unique historical trajectories, and collective in the sense that it is acquired in a social environment (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015). Consequently, actors who occupy similar positions develop a similar habitus which is attuned to the field of which it is the product and unattuned to others (Wacquant, 2016).

12.3.1 Narratives Narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change (Herman, 2009), as it connects past, present, and anticipated future. Through these connections, narratives “can be seen as stories of our experience in time, grounded in events linked together in a temporal way” (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 272). However, stories and narratives are not just retrospective reflections of past events, but situated, responsive performance, where the past is interpreted through the pre­ sent, and where the past and the future exist in our embodied experience (Menary, 2008) of the present. In other words, narratives are “lived embodied experiences” (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012: 64) that are “structured by the sequence of embodied and embedded experience, perceptions, and actions” (Menary, 2008: 75). By com­ bining this perspective on narratives with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, we under­ stand narratives as embodied, learned, and generative, and as products of a “narrative habitus” (Fleetwood, 2016), where narratives can be understood as social action rooted in social structure. In other words, narrative is the “hinge” between individ­ ual and society, which allows us to focus on the relationship between the individual and social structures, and to see narratives as products of the logics of construction applying to a field (Fleetwood, 2016). This perspective provides us with a unique theoretical and analytical framework that enables us to capture the subjective experiences of organizational actors in their social and historical contexts. Drawing on inspiration from Fleetwood (2016), who argues that habits include the inculcation of narrative dispositions, we pay attention to how social structures shape narratives and human actions, through actors’ per­ ceptions and representations of themselves and their world. Narratives can therefore be seen as forms of social action generated by habitus, where social structures are reproduced through repetition and through use. Thus, as well as reproducing the field, narratives also have “the power to change it” (Fleetwood, 2016: 183). We thus argue that the narratives are a means of taking the history of the field into possession and using it in practice. In our analysis, we adopt a broad definition of narratives to refer to sequenced accounts, which include temporality, plot, and linear coherence, i.e. narratives with a beginning, middle, and end, but also narratives as fragmented, nonlinear “ante­ narratives” lacking overall meaning (Boje, 2001). Boje (2001) defines antenarratives as fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative

226  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies speculations that offer an alternative to the classical understanding of narrative as “coherent, linear and ordered tale.”

12.4  Study Context We investigate how managers appropriated history for the purpose of implementing performance management in the operations department of a Scandinavian telecom, and how this appropriation impacted change management practices. The study took place during the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2018. The operations department was organ­ ized in twenty teams of approximately twenty-five technicians. One technician in each team acted as union representative for his team. Each team was led by a manager and the management team was led by a regional director. The work of the department was divided into the two categories of installation and service. The former concerned installation of new digital solutions and systems, and the latter concerned repair and maintenance of the systems that transport cable signals. The department serviced both private and corporate customers in a large regional area and had multiple com­ pany locations scattered over the region with headquarters in the center. At the time of our ethnographic study, the department had been presented with a threat of being outsourced. Subsequent negotiations between the company and the union had averted the threat temporarily by agreeing on a so-called “inhouse business case.” The case included enforcement of key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance management in the sense that specific targets were to be reached for the department to avoid outsourcing. In light of this increased pressure, the technicians also had to waive their “on-the-clock” lunch break and thus, work half an hour longer each day. An important aspect in the context of these negotiations was the so-called Nordic model of work and welfare, which is an organizing principle that is unique to the Nordic countries (Ervasti, Fridberg, Hjerm, and Ringdal, 2008). The central features of the model are: a high rate of unionization among employees, a national hier­arch­ ic­al system of collective bargaining, and the strong presence of trade unions at the workplace level (Kettunen, 2012). The employment schemes of the model included tenured civil servant positions with seniority-based pay and pension. However, after privatization and the increased focus on profitability, new employment schemes were implemented based on a minimum-wage system and performance-based pay (Jordfald and Murhem, 2003). In this sense, privatization significantly altered the logic of practice and put the legitimacy of the principles of the Nordic model under pressure. Hence, the organizing principles of work, including terms of employment, became an object of struggle and opposed positions formed between technicians and managers—the former as proponents of the traditional organizing principle based on the Nordic model, and the latter as proponents of a new organizing prin­ciple based on performance management (Bourdieu, 2005). We sum up the struggle between the two battling logics of practice in table 12.1 below. The table demonstrates the radical changes in objective field structures before and after company privatization.

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  227 Table 12.1  Objective structures of the field before and after privatization

Company objectives Governing values Employment schemes Dominant organizing principle

Before privatization

After privatization

Serve the public Community Solidarity Loyalty Seniority-based pay Tenure

Maximize profit Productivity Efficiency

The Nordic model

Minimum-wage system Performance-based pay Low security of employment Performance management

We argue that the telecoms of the Nordic countries constituted a field as the organ­ izing principles of the Nordic model provided these telecoms with similar condi­ tions of existence and similar stakes that were unique compared to the rest of Europe. Furthermore, we argue that the threat of being outsourced made the case company of this chapter, and the operations department in particular, subject to a particular struggle that allows us to analyze this department as a field (e.g. Bourdieu, 2005) embedded in the larger field of telecoms in the Nordic countries.

12.5 Methods 12.5.1  Data Collection The majority of data were collected during a six-month ethnographic study in the fall of 2016, where twenty-two interviews and more than thirty days of observation studies were conducted. An additional three interviews were conducted in the fall of 2018. The data were collected by the chapter’s first author, who was granted access to assume the role of participant observer in the department (Hasse, 2015). The author observed managers and technicians in all aspects of their work including manage­ ment meetings, team meetings, town hall meetings, and breaks. Observations were documented in field notes and written out at the end of each workday. The author was also granted access to internal documents such as email correspondence, KPI reports, and meeting minutes. Furthermore, to understand the structuring forces that set the framework for privatization and, thus, to achieve a micro and macro dialectical theorization of our study, we included secondary data in the form of a considerable body of textual material. This included union newsletters, reports on the developments within the telecommunications sector in Scandinavia, and research articles from peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Greve and Andersen, 2001; Jordfald and Murhem, 2003). The total amount of data constitutes the base of our understanding of the objecti­ fied history—that is, company privatization and the subsequent field-level changes,

228  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies including the implementation of performance management—while the exhibited interviews and field notes are elected because they in a special way provide illustra­ tions of the subjective and embodied experiences of these changes. The total of twenty-five interviews were split between: three with the regional director, six with technicians (of which three were union representatives), and six­ teen with managers. The duration of the interviews ranged from forty-five to ninety minutes and all except two interviews were recorded and transcribed. Inspired by Kvale and Brinkmann (2009), the interviews were set up according to a thematically arranged semi-structured interview guide. The focal point of the interviews was a variety of questions concerning the organizational changes in the department, including the implementation of performance management. Additionally, inform­ ants were asked to provide information about their personal historical trajectories or the career path that had led them to their current position with the company.

12.5.2  Data Analysis Data were coded in cycles in an inductive deductive combinational approach follow­ ing the recommendations developed by Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (1994). In the first cycle, the entire dataset was coded by the first author, with the codes deriv­ ing inductively from the data. This resulted in several themes or analytical ­categories, of which the theme organizational transformation emerged, under which the ­category of history arose. The coding was then linked to Bourdieu’s theoretical ­concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and the history of organizational practices. Working iteratively between data and our analytical understandings, this part of the analysis connected the historicization of the organization (field) and the historiciza­ tion of the managers (habitus). A final detailed sub-coding by both authors identified the narrative constructions of technicians and managers within the category of history. In that process, we iden­ tified three storylines: 1) the department as a field of struggle, 2) abandoning history, and 3) embracing history. The department as a field of struggle. The department was narratively constructed as a site of conflict between technicians and managers, and between the “good old days,” when the union was strong (e.g. “In the old days, . . . back then there was a dif­ ferent unity because people could talk to each other”) and the present organizing principles of performance management (e.g. “we will be outsourced if we do not perform”). Abandoning history. This storyline emerged from the narratives of the managers when they told about the past as something they needed to move away from to strengthen management positions (e.g. “it has been the guiding star all the time to do away with these old civil servants . . .”). Embracing history. We identified this storyline from the narratives of the man­ agers about the past as something the managers could “utilize” to their advantage

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  229

(e.g. “. . . So, the cooperation between me and the union representative, I would say, is a big part of making things work”). Following our approach to narratives, we acknowledge all types of statements that had narrative qualities in the sense that we see them as part of the ongoing story work (Gabriel, 2004).

12.6 Results The analysis is divided into three parts, based on the above storylines. The first part will serve to illustrate the structure and dynamics of the field as a structuring struc­ ture by exhibiting the stakes and the struggle between management and technicians. The second and third parts of the analysis are concerned with the two plots of aban­ doning and embracing history. Thus, where the first section is intended to carve out the field of struggle to which the habitus of managers were adapted, the focus of the later sections is on the strategies and practices via which the managers temporalized themselves by producing and reproducing history: in other words, their strategic appropriation and narration of history in practice.

12.6.1  The Department as a Field of Struggle The transformation from state-owned to shareholder-owned organization in the early 1990s had altered the company’s logic of practice as pursuit of new kinds of goals was now essential to secure company survival. Competitiveness and profitability became the paramount concerns and performance management, consequently, became the primary organizing principle. These organizational changes had initiated a slow but steady redistribution of symbolic capital and an increase of management power at the expense of the technicians and the union over the years. At the time of our study, the added pressure of the outsourcing threat enhanced the urgency of performance and delivery on KPIs. This put the management team under pressure to manage the implementation and enforce performance management. However, this renewed change management focus also made clear the chasm between the traditional logic of practice versus the new logic of practice, as the restructuring of field positions and power resulted in opposed position-takings by managers and technicians—the for­ mer as proponents of performance management as an organizing principle, and the latter as proponents of traditional organizing principles based on the values of the Nordic model. In this sense, the presence of two battling logics of practice made the department a field of struggle between a narrative of the necessity of performance for the sake of the future and a narrative of nostalgia and reminiscence of “good old days.” The struggle is illustrated in an extract from a story told by a technician with more than thirty-two years of seniority with the company, a technician who also assumed the role of union representative. He explains what it was like when he first came into

230  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies the company when it was a public monopoly, and how the distribution of power had changed, since then. 1) . . . I must say, it was a culture with a lot of time for a lot of things, and the employees and the union actually had a really significant amount of power, they really did. And if I am to look at it today, it is no way near comparable. Then, the tables have turned. A great union man once told me that we had no more worlds left to conquer, as in, we could not think of anything more to negotiate for . . . the great battles are not as easy to find as they used to be. So, I think it is easier for management to push through with their ways than it is for us to resist . . . people are not willing to sit down and strike like they were in the old days. (Interview, Technician A, union representative)

The extract points to how the union had enjoyed a great deal of power prior to pri­ vat­iza­tion, where favorable working conditions for the technicians had been negoti­ ated. However, it also indicates how this power had declined over the years in favor of management as performance management had altered the mechanisms of capital distribution. The decline of union power had also affected the community of the technicians, as their primary trump card, strikes, no longer seemed to have the same impact. In the following, the technician explains how the new ways of organizing had also affected the comradeship and community amongst technicians. 2) In the old days, we met at one of our meeting points for instance in the city where we also had a meeting point. People met in there and there were really a lot of technicians who met up every morning, together. And then, you could sit there and talk about, well we are also bloody dissatisfied with this and that . . . You do not do that today because today, we take the vehicles home. We go to work from our home address . . . back then there was a different unity because people could talk to each other. (Interview, Technician A, union representative)

From the extract, we see how the new organizing principles are set in opposition to the “good old days” of power, community, and unity amongst technicians. The nos­ talgic undercurrent suggests that the technicians were remembering former ways of being a (good) technician and they mourned the loss of the organizing principles of the public monopoly, where such dispositions had been acquired. The next extract from another technician and union representative, also with thirty-two years of se­ni­or­ity, explains how the organizational changes post privatization had impacted the loyalty and spirit of the technicians: for instance, as a consequence of the out­ sourcing threat and the subsequent negotiations, which resulted in the technicians having to waive their “on-the-clock” lunch. 3) It turns up, you know, it is sort of regularly every three-four-five years, so it has been there for many years; then, this outsourcing ghost turns up, you know . . . and

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  231 I think, gradually, people have lost some morale in this corporation, you know. I think, gradually, people do not really care . . . that is how I feel these days. It is like, it does not even matter anymore. (Interview, Technician B, union representative)

The extract speaks of a kind of emotional disengagement from their jobs and a loss of loyalty and dedication to the company on behalf of the technicians and an increase in the divide between them and the management team. This is also reflected in the story from one of the managers, who was a technician at the time of the “in-house business case” negotiations. 4) . . . We said yes to sell our paid lunch to get allowed to stay “in-house,” and just to make a little bit of a story to it, then one can say that at the next meeting we had, I think, we were twenty technicians, I almost believe that eight of them had taken black tape around their arms as mourning bands, now that the company had ripped them off and sold their lunch break. (Interview, Manager A)

In the extract, we see how two opposed positions formed as the technicians blamed the company for their loss of the structures and organizing principles of “the good old days,” which had provided them with favorable working conditions. On the managerial side, however, the “in-house business case” enhanced the necessity of performance as the department was fighting not just for market shares but also to avoid being outsourced to an outside competitor. 5) We will be outsourced if we do not perform. The workplace of the future depends on present performance. They think it is just a threat and we hear loads of excuses. It is just funny how some can [be on target] and that is what we need to keep on building on. (Field notes, Regional Director)

The added competitive pressure post privatization and the subsequent outsourcing threat rendered the future present in consciousness as something which was no longer given, as survival depended on the department’s ability to perform, be profit­ able, and generate economic capital. As a result, department objectives and the logic of practice were significantly altered. Consequently, the once dominant but grad­ ual­ ly decimated organizing principles of the Nordic model were continuously brought into question or delegitimized by management in light of competition. This is reflected in the next extract when a manager points to the powerful presence of the union, and the habitus of technicians acquired during the times of public monopoly, as hampering change management effort. 6) But we also have a culture where the union has been a part of things for many many years and this means that the technicians are thinking: What can the company do for me and not the other way around. And then they are incredibly naive

232  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies at times . . . the fact alone that it was very close with the business case that we were outsourced. It was very close. They do not have a clue about it. They believe they won this and that means on a somewhat naive level they say we just keep going the way we always would have gone, and things will be fine. (Interview, Manager B)

We have sought to illustrate the structure and dynamic of the field by drawing atten­ tion to the distribution of capital and power between technicians and managers. We have identified the department as a field of struggle between two different logics of practice: one based on the principles of the Nordic model of work and another based on performance management. Also, we have demonstrated how the objective struc­ tures of institutionalized organizing principles and the dispositions shaped by them can be very enduring. This is illustrated by the way the favorable working conditions of technicians, and their habitus, were seen as an obstruction to achieve the per­ form­ance necessary to secure survival. In other words, we see how the past was nar­ ratively inscribed in the present, placing limits on the chances of success for change management practices.

12.6.2  Abandoning History In the following part of the analysis, we demonstrate how the limits of the con­ straints inscribed in the department as objectified history inclined and enabled the managers to appropriate history via strategic narrations of the past as an obstruction to the desired company future. On the basis of the managers’ experience and socio­ historical trajectories in the field of struggle, we identify how the managers put to work these historical structures as they were simultaneously carried by and carrying history in practice. The continuous struggle over capital is shown in the following extract of an inter­ view with a manager who had been with the company for twenty-nine years. 7) . . . we continuously streamline and slim our organization and regardless of which organizing measures we have conducted; it has been the guiding star all the time to do away with these old civil servants . . . Now the union is decimated . . . but it is still strong compared to when you look outside the company. (Interview, Manager C)

The extract suggests that strategic organizing for capital accumulation and the seiz­ ure of power included finding ways to undermine the strong position of the union and the old civil servants, whose habitus was not adjusted to the objective structures under which one was expected to function after privatization. Part of this strategic organizing included termination of the old principles for hiring and firing employees.

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  233 8) They are still living in the times of last-in, first-out . . . back in the day there was a ranking and if you wanted to fire a civil servant ranked number twenty-two on the list, you had to fire number twenty-one, twenty, and so on all the way down to first. So, there was a security of employment you did not see anywhere else. The last-in, first-out principle is officially terminated. It does not exist anymore . . . So, it is productivity and if you are not productive, then you are out. But they are not there yet. They still believe in last-in, first-out. (Interview, Manager B)

As reflected in the phrases “they are not there yet” and “they still believe in,” capital accumulation from the viewpoint of the managers was associated with the notion of moving on from the past by breaking with the old values, beliefs, and organizing principles. As a result of the ongoing struggle, and the pressure and urgency of per­ form­ance caused by the “in-house business case,” the notion of abandoning the past became a way of cementing management’s position of power by promoting per­form­ ance management as the dominant principle of capital accumulation. In the narra­ tives of managers, this delegitimization of the past was expressed by the term “special culture,” which was positioned as an obstruction to the desired company future. 9) We are dealing with a culture which previously offered opportunities for . . . ample opportunities for coordinating and plan my day, to go to the hairdresser, and make breaks, and take a nap, or take an hour or two breaks, and so on . . . this we have done away with among other things by putting GPS tracking on the utility vehicles. (Interview, Regional Director)

The GPS tracking system provided management with an additional tool for control and surveillance of the technicians to support the ongoing streamlining of the dayto-day operation. Also, it reduced the relative autonomy of technicians and strength­ ened management’s position of power. As the extract also indicates, the GPS was considered a necessary measure to do away with the old culture. Hence, in the extract, the narrative of the past as an obstruction to the envisioned future of the department is enforced. The narratives of a “special culture” were dominated by frequent uses of “the old” and “the young,” delegitimizing past values by referring to it as for instance “ancient culture.” This is reflected in a selection of extracts from interviews with two different managers. 10) There are some who have been here for 30, 33 and 34 years, and some who begin to approach a 10-year anniversary. Thus, I would like to say that young, new forces have come in, who have a different worldview than those born in the ancient culture. (Interview, Manager D) 11) It is incredible how some of the employees just cannot get past that—it’s like tunnel vision completely . . . they think they are the center of the world and that the whole world should revolve around them—it’s not going to be like that again— so MOVE ON now . . . (Interview, Manager E)

234  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Following the narratives of the managers, we especially note that the “special cul­ ture” reconfigures and reinterprets the past in light of the ongoing present, where young and new employees are seen as making things move a bit faster, and where historically bound practices are devalued by a more profit-oriented narrative, i.e. where “old people” and “ancient cultures” are positioned in opposition to efficiency and performance. To sum up, in this part of the analysis, we have shown how the habitus of the managers, as a product of historical acquisition in the departmental field of strug­ gle, enabled them to appropriate history by strategically constructing a narrative of the past as an obstruction to the envisioned future of the department. By construct­ ing this narrative, the managers strategically put the historical structures of the field to work in their change management practice. Because their habitus is the product of the embodiment of these historical structures, i.e. rules and regularities of the field, it allowed the managers to transcend the immediate present by mobilizing the past that was inscribed in the present. In other words, the lines of action engen­ dered by a habitus adjusted to the field included the construction of this narrative as a means of strategic position-taking and capital accumulation in the field, while at the same time reproducing the structures of the field to which the habitus of managers was adjusted.

12.6.3  Embracing History As shown in the above, the practical experience in the departmental field of struggle had endowed the managers with a practical sense that enabled them to re-enact and narrate history the way their habitus inclined them to perceive it. Thus, the de­legit­ im­iza­tion of the “old culture” was part of a strategy or practice which made sense to them under the constraints of the struggle which they took part in. Next, we demon­ strate how this practical sense also allowed the managers to appropriate history in another way, which expressed itself in their change management practice as involve­ ment of—and collaboration with—their teams’ union representatives. In other words, although management on the one hand constructed the narrative of “the old culture” as an obstruction to the envisioned organizational change, their practical sense simultaneously enabled them to utilize “the old culture” to their advantage via strategic appropriation of the legacy of history. Manager B provides an example of how this played out in practice. 12) There are conflicting interests, but I have chosen to say: Why should I punish a man for being sick when I can call [my union representative] and say to him: Now, this guy has been sick three times. It is unacceptable. Try having a talk with him because otherwise, I will need to have a talk with him. And then, he has a talk with him, and it works itself out . . . I could have chosen the hard way and had disgruntled employees, but I have chosen to involve him. (Interview, Manager B)

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  235

Our takeaway from this story is that the conflict between the two opposed logics of practice, or the narrative of the necessity of moving on from the past versus the narrative of “the good old days,” was still constitutive of the dynamic and struc­ ture of the field. However, instead of abandoning the values and organizing prin­ ciples of the past completely, the managers had learned to utilize the union representatives as facilitators of organizational change. This was reflected in the story of Manager A when he reflects on his collaboration with his union representative. 13) They [the union] take up much space in general, but if you can manage to turn it around, to make him feel better, not that he is to take on management, but at least to clear up the support that you might have . . . things are much easier . . . So, the cooperation between me and the union representative, I would say, is a big part of making things work. (Interview, Manager A)

The way this collaboration or appropriation of history hinged on experience, under­ stood as the gradual adjustment of the habitus of managers to a field constituted by two competing logics of practice, is illustrated by the story told by Manager C, who had been with the company for twenty-nine years. It was almost like a boxing match . . . and it has been that way, I mean, like there had to be war instead of cooperation. I think sometimes, management could have done things differently, because sometimes when a decision had been made for us to do something, they would be like: Now we are just going to go at them hard . . . we have the right to be in charge, but that is not what you get the most out of. There are always some union representatives who like to feel important and stuff, and I do not understand; just give them something so they can sit in the corner and work with it and feel they are a part of running things. I mean, we get them on our team in that way . . . Now, he [the regional director] is doing something. He is involving them a lot.

The extract offers an outline of the historical development of the battle between managers and technicians; it illustrates the power struggle in which management had claimed their right to manage the department and attempted to outpunch the powerful union by taking a hard line against it. However, over the years, the man­ ager explains, the approach had changed to a more involving and collaborative strat­ egy. We interpret this strategy as a product of the managerial habitus or in other words the gradual embodiment of the historical structures of the field. Thus, as a product of historical acquisition through their experience in the department, the habitus of managers made it possible for them to appropriate history via the utiliza­ tion of the power of the union representatives, which, as a kind of legacy of history, still shaped the objective potentialities of present practices. In this sense, the way managers managed change was shaped by the dialectical interplay between the

236  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies objectified historical structures of the department and the subjective construction and enactment of these structures in practice.

12.7  Discussion and Conclusion In this chapter, we have examined organizational change management in the op­er­ ations department of a Scandinavian telecom a quarter century after the privatiza­ tion of the company. We have examined how management’s appropriation of history impacted their change management practices during implementation of per­form­ ance management in the department. By combining Bourdieusian theory with a narrative approach to analysis, we have outlined an alternative historical perspective, promoting an understanding of history as both a structuring and a structured struc­ ture (Bourdieu, 1990). In light of this perspective, we have aspired toward a “his­tor­ ic­al consciousness” (Suddaby, 2016) by engaging with questions concerning the ontological and epistemological constitution of history and its impact on or­gan­iza­ tion­al change management. Moreover, our analytical framework has enabled us to draw together the objective elements of historical facts with the subjective elements of historical narratives; thus, we have been able to explain how the objectified his­ tory of the department as a field, and the subjective history of the habitus, were brought together in practice. In this way, we have shed light on the impact of the largely unexplored interaction between these two modes of existence of history (Suddaby, 2016) on the ongoing production and reproduction of organizational orders in the context of organizational change. In other words, through this his­tor­ ic­al perspective, we have shown how the ability or inclination of managers to appro­ priate history for the purpose of implementing performance management was shaped by the dialectical interplay between the objectified historical structures of the field and the subjective construction and enactment of these structures in practice. We have zoomed in on narratives as a vital component of the situated responsive performance through which the managers temporalized themselves via practical mobilization of the past in the present. In this sense, we have shown how the narra­ tives as a form of social action were produced by the managers’ historically transmit­ ted dispositions, acquired through experience in the field of struggle, while simultaneously reproducing and gradually changing the field through strategic nar­ ration of history, as their habitus inclined them to perceive it. We identified two dis­ tinct narrative appropriations of history which impacted the practice of change management, both of which were engendered by the habitus of managers adjusted to the constraints of the relations of force that constituted the departmental field. The first, which we categorized as “abandoning history,” emerged as a delegitimizing nar­ rative of the past as an obstruction to organizational change and, thus, to the envi­ sioned future of the department. The second, which we categorized as “embracing history,” emerged as a utilization of union representatives as important facilitators for organizational change. Through these findings, we illustrated how the practice of

Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  237

change management was impacted by management’s appropriation of history, which was itself a product of the dialectical interplay between history as a structuring and a structured structure. Based on our results, and by drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts as well as an epis­ temo­logic­al emphasis on being with history and time, we argue that the framework we have outlined is easily integrated within the current literature on organizational uses of the past. By reconceptualizing history into a complex habitus and field ­dialectic, we are reminded that organizational actors have a history, and that they are the product of the history of the whole social field and of the accumulated experience within a specific subfield. Practice therefore becomes a product of a habitus that is itself a product of historical acquisition (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Hence, we see potential in this framework to move research on uses of the past forward in at least two significant areas. First, by embedding organizational actors’ uses of the past in a field within fields, the framework provides an inherently contextualized concep­ tion of uses of the past. We therefore argue that the framework provides an ­opportunity to extend current work (e.g. Lubinski, 2018; Mordhorst, 2008) concerned with the way in which the use of historical narratives intertwines with organizational fields and society at large. Second, by emphasizing the way practices arise from ­habituated tendencies and embodied history rather than from purposeful, ­goal-oriented initiatives, the framework provides a solid starting point for further exploration of the non-rational and pre-reflexive ways in which history performs organizational work; an area that so far has received limited attention (Wadhwani et al., 2018).

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Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management  239 Kvale, S., and Brinkmann, S. (2009). Interviews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lewin, K. (1947). Group Decision and Social Change. Readings in Social Psychology, 3(1), 197–211. Lubinski, C. (2018). From “History as Told” to “History as Experienced”: Contextualizing the Uses of the Past. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1785–809. doi:10.1177/0170840618800116 MacKay, R. B., and Chia, R. (2013). Choice, Chance, and Unintended Consequences in Strategic Change: A Process Understanding of the Rise and Fall of NorthCo Automotive. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 208–30. Menary, R. (2008). Embodied Narratives. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(6), 63–84. Miles, M.  B., Huberman, A.  M., and Saldaña, J. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mordhorst, M. (2008). From Counterfactual History to Counter-narrative History. Management and Organizational History, 3(1), 5–26. Pettigrew, A. M., Woodman, R. W., and Cameron, K. S. (2001). Studying Organizational Change and Development: Challenges for Future Research. Academy of Management Journal, 44(4), 697–713. Schein, E.  H. (1992). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2nd edn. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Steinmetz, G. (2011). Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology. Cultural Sociology, 5(1), 45–66. Suddaby, R. (2016). Toward a Historical Consciousness: Following the Historic Turn in Management Thought. M@n@gement, 19(1), 46–60. Suddaby, R., and Foster, W.  M. (2017). History and Organizational Change. Journal of Management, 43(1), 19–38. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Quinn Trank, C. (2010). Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage. In J.  Baum and J.  Lampel (Eds), The Globalization of Strategy Research (pp. 147–73). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Suddaby, R., and Greenwood, R. (2005). Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(1), 35–67. Tsoukas, H., and Chia, R. (2002). On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–82. Wacquant, L. (2016). A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus. Sociological Review, 64(1), 64–72. Wadhwani, R.  D., Suddaby, R., Mordhorst, M., and Popp, A. (2018). History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1663–83. Weick, K. E., and Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organizational Change and Development. Annual Review of Psychology, 50(1), 361–86.

13 Memory Work Corporate Archivists and Long-Term Remembering in Organizations William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby

13.1 Introduction Memory is important to organizations (e.g. Booth and Rowlinson, 2006; Kieser, 1994; Munir and Phillips, 2005; Rowlinson and Procter, 1999; Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Usdiken and Kieser, 2004). Organizations remember their history through anniver­ saries, commemorative books, and museums (e.g. Delahaye et al., 2009; Nissley and Casey, 2002; Stigliani and Ravasi, 2007), recollect and forget aspects of or­gan­iza­ tion­al identity and culture (e.g. Anteby and Molnár, 2012; Ravasi and Schultz, 2006), and recall traditions and rituals that are perceived as being central to the organiza­ tion’s core values and operations (e.g. Dacin and Dacin, 2008; Dacin, Munir, and Tracey, 2010). Memory is also deemed important because of the way that memories can affect organizational decision making and actions in the future (e.g. Brunninge and Melin, 2009). In all, memory has a powerful impact on the way organizations conduct their business and achieve their goals. Despite the importance of memory in organizations, there is surprisingly little research about how organizational memories are created and maintained. Most research in the area of organizational memory has focused on knowledge manage­ ment, i.e. the collection, retention, and retrieval of organizational information. In these studies, organizational memory is conceptualized either as reified facts or information that can be catalogued and stored for future use or as the repositories where that information is stored. Although this informational metaphor has value, it omits consideration of the interpretive aspects of memory. That is, with a few not­ able exceptions (e.g. Rowlinson et al.,  2010; Schultz and Hernes, 2013), there has been a limited amount of research on the process by which organizational memory is socially constructed.

William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby, Memory Work: Corporate Archivists and Long-Term Remembering in Organizations In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0013

Memory Work  241

This more nuanced notion of memory as a process of collective interpretation has generated growing interest from management and organizational scholars (e.g. Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Rowlinson et al., 2010). However, there is still the need to develop a more granular and process-oriented understanding of social memory in organizations. This study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the activities through which social memory is constructed and reconstructed in organizational settings. We investigate the strategies of organizational memory construction in Fortune 500 firms. Drawing on interviews with the archivists and historians in eleven of the largest corporations in the United States we provide a framework for understanding the practices underpinning the memory work of corporate archivists and historians. That is, we show that these professionals manage both the short-term memory as defined by organizational learning theorists as well as the more long-term remem­ bering process encompassing the management of corporate heritage (e.g. or­gan­iza­ tion­al artifacts, oral histories, firm legends, past events, iconic images and previous emotions) and its transformation into active organizational memories. We use the term memory work to capture these two sets of activities and analytically elaborate the practices through which archivists and historians rework raw materials from the past and transform them into a vivid collective memory. The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section we review the literature on social and organizational memory. This is followed by the description of our research methods and the presentation of our results. In the conclusion we synthesize our findings and discuss the theoretical implications of the organizational function of corporate archivists and historians in organizational memory work.

13.2  Organizational Memory Research in organizational memory can be divided into two main approaches. Early research treated organizational memory as a reified collection of objective facts. The key challenge for an organization, in this approach, is to identify the best way to structure the collection, retention, and retrieval of specific facts in order to enhance its performance. An emerging stream of research, however, challenges this ­structural-functional approach to organizational memory by conceptualizing it as an ongoing process of subjective interpretation, narration, and reconstruction of the past in an effort, not to improve performance, but rather to create a sense of ­common identity. We elaborate each of these approaches in turn. The most common conception of organizational memory is as a body of informa­ tion about the organization. Walsh and Ungson (1991) constructed the first model of organizational memory (OM) defined as “stored information from an organiza­ tion’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions.” The organizational challenge is to devise a set of steps whereby an organization acquires, retains, and retrieves the stored information. To emphasize the objective nature of organizational

242  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies memory, Walsh and Ungson (1991) observe that organizational memory is stored in specific receptacles or “bins.” All organizations have storage bins, according to Walsh and Ungson (1991). They identify five internal bins (individuals, culture, trans­form­ ations, structures, ecology) and one external bin (external archive) that serve as the “structure of memory” of the organization. Walsh and Ungson (1991), thus, see organizational memory through the metaphor of a library in which the largest chal­ lenges are in deciding what books to collect, how to find the book you want and how to prevent the gradual erosion of the collection. Most subsequent research on organizational memory adopts this functional and objective position. So, for example, considerable research has been devoted to iden­ tifying appropriate ways to store information in organizations. Centralized storage is seen to be better for retrieval than dispersed storage (Alavi and Leidner, 1999; Olivera,  2000); the loss of key employees can impede information retrieval (Becker, 1993; Huber, 1991) and codified information is easier to store and retrieve in organizational memory than is tacit or implicit information (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Calls for future research on organizational memory, largely, adopt the assumption that memory is codified information and the greatest challenge is to understand the ideal structure to improve its acquisition, storage, and retrieval (Argote, 2012; Argote and Ingram, 2000; Walsh, 1995). Increasingly, however, the conceptualization of organizational memory as a library or a computer system has attracted criticism. The core critique is that it adopts a reductionist model of memory as, largely, an isolated act of discrete events—acquisi­ tion, storage, and retrieval—that ignore the collective elements of social memory. In response to the functional and presentist approach of the OM model, Rowlinson et al. suggest that organizational memory is a subset of social memory. They note that organizations have been notably absent from discussion of collective mnemonic communities. Corporations and business organizations, not-for-profits, sports teams, fraternal organizations, and clubs all function as mnemonic communities that shape and define members’ memories and how they ultimately remember. Organizational memory, they argue, can often take the form of brands (e.g. Balmer,  2011; Urde, Greyser, and Balmer, 2007), corporate commemorations (e.g. Gough, 2004), and cor­ porate museums (e.g. Nissley and Casey, 2002). Moreover, they connect the develop­ ment of social practices of remembering in organizations to the process of developing an organization’s identity. These “or­gan­iza­tion­al mnemonics” are the various activities and rituals that organizations use as technologies of remembrance. Recent theory and empirical research suggests that the active management of organizational memory is an organizational capability that can lead to a strategic advantage (Coraiola, Suddaby, and Foster,  2017; Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010). For example, Foster, Suddaby, Minkus, and Wiebe (2011) show how managers build a competitive advantage by creating social memory assets, or com­ pelling narratives that link organizational identities to individuals’ identification with both their nation state and their local community. Using the Canadian quickserve restaurant Tim Horton’s as their exemplar, they demonstrate how the company

Memory Work  243

differentiates itself from its competitors by appropriating elements of Canadian col­ lective memory. A series of recent studies demonstrate an emerging understanding that or­gan­iza­ tion­al memory is more than the mechanical storage and retrieval of information about the past (e.g. Anteby and Molnár, 2012; Do, Lyle, and Walsh, forthcoming; Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Schultz and Hernes, 2013). Organizational memory also has a collective memory component in which elements of the past are used sub­ject­ ive­ly and interpretively to construct a common and coherent firm identity. While these studies highlight the absence of social memory in our understanding of or­gan­ iza­tion­al memory, we still have little knowledge about the process by which social memory is routinely constructed in organizations. This study extends our under­ standing of organizational memory by elaborating the processes by which large cor­ por­ations that have formalized collective memory as a core organizational capability engage in the production and reproduction of organizational memories. We extend the Walsh and Ungson (1991) model of organizational memory by incorporating a detailed analysis of the process by which corporate historians and archivists contrib­ ute to the social construction of organizational memory. Before presenting our results, however, we describe the methods and empirical context used to explore the social elements of organizational memory.

13.3 Method 13.3.1 Context Our primary data consist of semi-structured interviews with corporate archivists and/or corporate historians1 from eleven companies listed among the Fortune 500 largest publicly traded American companies as measured by revenue. In our sample the average amount of revenue generated by the companies was $45.8 billion, the average net income was $2.9 billion, and the average market capitalization was $67.8 billion. The firms in our sample employed, on average, 145,800 people.2 A full description of each of the firms in the sample can be found in Table 13.1. For the corporation to be included in the sample, their archivist had to be either an employee of one of the firms or hired as a contractor to manage the company’s archival collection. Our sample was developed first by determining which Fortune 500 corporations employed corporate archivists. To do so we consulted the Directory of Corporate Archives that is collected and maintained by the Business Archivists section of the Society of American Archivists. We then contacted the largest of these firms and asked for interviews. After each interview we would ask our interview subject for the names of other archivists at Fortune 500 who they felt might be inter­ ested in participating in the study. The archivists were contacted directly by one of the research team members and arrangements were made to visit them at their place of work. We conducted

Telecom Engineering Consumer goods Transportation Retail Financial Consumer goods Manufacturing Telecom Transportation Consumer goods

A B C D E F G H I J K

SE NW SE SE MW MW MW MW MW SE MW

US region

* All financial data collected from 2012 Forbes Fortune 500 list. ** All financial data in $bn. ^ Employee data collected from each firm’s 2011 10K form.

Industry

Company 100–150 50–75 25–50 25–50 50–75 25–50 5–25 5–25 5–25 50–75 50–75

Revenue**

Table 13.1  Industry and financial characteristics of sample firms*

2.5–5.0 2.5–5.0 7.5–10.0 0.5–1.0 2.5–5.0 0.5–1.0 1.0–2.5 0.5–1.0 1.0–2.5 2.5–5.0 2.5–5.0

Net income** 175–200 50–75 150–175 5–25 25–50 N/A 25–50 10–25 10–25 75–100 50–75

Market value**

250,000+ 150,000+ 125,000+ 75,000+ 350,000+ 2,500+ 25,000+ 5,000+ 20,000+ 350,000+ 125,000+

Number of employees^

Memory Work  245

s­ emi-structured interviews at eleven companies over a one-year period. Interviews took place on site at the company headquarters or at the company’s off-site archives. Two team members conducted most interviews; however, a few inter­ views were conducted by a single researcher. In total, fifteen archivists were inter­ viewed. The interviews ranged in length from forty-five minutes to two hours. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Company and archivist informa­ tion was made anonymous to ensure that neither the archivist nor the company could be identified. This produced over 300 single-spaced pages of interview text for analysis. We also collected supplemental textual information about each company’s archives. In some cases, the researchers were provided with materials (e.g. books, pamphlets, computer files) that pertained to the activities of the archivists. These materials were also supplemented with data collected from the websites of each organization. The materials were used as a secondary data source. In many cases, the members of the research team were given a tour of the organization and the archives. Most of the archivists were eager to show the research team how they used the artifacts and materials from the archive at the company. This included not only a detailed, guided tour of the company’s archives but also a tour of the organization and the sites at the firm where historical and archival materials were on display. The information collected during these guided tours was used to enhance the research team’s understanding of the company and the role of the archivists in their organization.

13.3.2  Data Analysis We used a combination of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and the Gioia method (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton,  2013) to analyze the data. We began our analysis by reading through each of the interview transcripts. Each researcher high­ lighted important words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs related to the past, memory, history, and remembering. At this first-order stage we made sure to “adhere faithfully to informant terms” (Gioia et al., 2013: 20) and we made sure that we made “little attempt to distill categories.” Our primary task was to be careful to use the words and phrases of the informants when developing our first-order concepts. At the end of our first pass through the data, we had over 100 different first-order terms that we then used in our second-order analysis. The second-order analysis focused on synthesizing the first-order concepts into larger theoretical constructs. We looked for similarities and differences between the concepts and we looked for emergent themes in these concepts. Second-order themes were developed as we started to apply our knowledge of the theoretical con­ cepts to guide our evaluation of what we were seeing in the data. It is at this point that our knowledge as researchers became more pronounced when looking for pat­ terns, connections, and prominent themes across the different informants.

246  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies First-order categories

Second-order themes

Deep dives New employee orientation

Recollecting

Inspiration Making history work Has to be active

Interpreting

“Part of something bigger” Evangelizing Stories about people Coherence

Storytelling

Encourage use Sharing

Memorializing

Utility Both an art and a science More than records management

Acquiring and retaining

Like a religious archive Fact finding Quick and mundane

Retrieving

Aggregate dimension

Long-term memory

Organizational memory work

Short-term memory work

Figure 13.1  Analytical codes and categories

Next, we consolidated the themes down into broader aggregate dimensions. These aggregate dimensions are the culmination of the early evaluation and analysis of the data in its natural state along with our theoretical knowledge applied to the data. Finally, we placed the categories, themes, and aggregate dimensions into a data structure. This data structure (see Figure  13.1) is useful for two reasons. First, it offers a visual representation of how the concepts, themes, and dimensions are con­ nected together. Second, the data structure demonstrates how the analysis of our data progressed from the initial raw interview data to a more coherent and cogent explanation of what is happening in the organization. From our analysis we developed a model of organizational memory work that elaborates the processes involved in the social construction of organizational mem­ ory (see Figure 13.2). We now turn to our results.

13.4  Findings: Organizational Memory Work Our data analysis suggests that corporate historians and archivists engage with the structural and functional elements of memory acquisition, storage, and retrieval, as outlined by Walsh and Ungson (1991). In addition, our data suggest that the con­ struction of the social memory of the organization is another important dimension of the work they develop. While the traditional view of memory as the result of ­organizational learning focuses on managing the recent past for immediate cor­por­ate use, the social memory approach emphasizes long-term processes of remembering

Memory Work  247 ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY WORK Short-term memory work

Long-term memory work

Acquiring

Archiving

Recollecting

Reinterpreting

Retaining

Memorializing

Retrieving

Discarding

Storytelling Building heritage

Figure 13.2  A framework of organizational memory work

and forgetting in which interpretation and narrativity are key components. In the fol­ lowing we introduce an integrative framework of memory work that brings together the processes of construction of short and long term organizational memory.

13.4.1  Short-Term Memory Work Acquisition and Retention. As with Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) construct of or­gan­ iza­tion­al memory, our model begins when the organization acquires various ma­ter­ ials that are used in the development of organizational memory. These include, but are not limited to, artifacts, documents, web pages, promotional material, clothing, legal documents, oral histories, and company books. Utility is the overriding factor in the retention of the raw materials at all of the corporations we visited, and arch­iv­ ists exercise a high degree of autonomy and judgment about what objects will be retained. We anticipated that there would be specific protocols around what was acquired, what was retained and what was to be discarded. This, however, was not the case. The predominant answer we received about what was kept and/or removed from the collection was that the archivist possessed tacit knowledge by which they discerned what remnants of the organization had the most use. Although there were some broad guidelines that each company had around retention of records and artifacts, surprisingly most of the archivists said that they “just knew” what to keep and that the process was similar to sorting mail when you get back from vacation. Archivist I describes his view of the process:

248  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies It’s also an art and a science . . . And the art comes from long experience with the company, with a lot of the people in the company, with the customers and it’s very analytical. I mean, I’m pulling all these factors together in my head and I’m making a decision in a lot of cases and it really does require experience. (Archivist I-1)

The primary criterion for retention, thus, was the archivist’s assessment of the object’s utility. Utility has two meanings in this context. The first is use from a func­ tional standpoint. This means that there are a number of things that are kept because they still provide some functional use to the organization. In this category are legal documents and other official management papers related to specific d ­ ecision-making activities. These usually fall under the purview of records management, but often there are additional records that fall into this category for which the archivist is responsible. The second way utility is defined is the archivist’s assessment of whether and how the raw materials will be used to construct the organization’s memory. The archivists understand that although they are under pressure to meet the needs of the different functional departments, they also have a responsibility to develop a specific, consist­ ent corporate message that is communicated to stakeholders of the firm. The utility of many of the acquired materials comes from being an essential component of many corporate initiatives designed to address stakeholders inside (i.e. employees) or outside (i.e. customers, suppliers) the corporation. As Archivist C-1 observes, “our collection is defined by use . . . if people aren’t using it then we have to question why we’re collecting it.” In other words, archivists only keep things that they feel will be useful in future memory work. Retrieval. Consistent with Walsh and Ungson (1991), our archivists engaged in daily practices of archival retrieval. It begins with a request from another depart­ ment. The archivist first evaluates the request, finds the information, and then pro­ vides the information that best answers the question they have been asked. These requests, whether by email, phone or in person, require the archivist to access the raw materials that comprise the knowledge base of the organization’s archive. Typically, the archivist will be required to fact check, provide material for a market­ ing campaign or ensure that the contents of a speech are correct. Most requests are relatively routine and typically involve an explanation or con­ firm­ation that the stated date, location of a product launch, or founding date is correct. Such retrieval leads to the production of organizational facts that then become part of the general understanding and memory of the organization. This process mirrors the description of organizational memory put forward by many researchers (e.g. Argote, 2012; Fiedler and Welpe, 2010; Walsh and Ungson, 1991), who adopt a structural-functionalist view of organizational memory as mere information. However, despite the prominence of the acquisition, storage, and retrieval func­ tions in prevailing models of organizational memory, the archivists informed us that this activity forms only one part of their overall role in the corporation:

Memory Work  249 . . . for me it’s a history program and that all goes in with the idea of making history work, that it’s much more broader than the idea of we’re just storing stuff, which I think is kind of the connotation or the impression people have when you talk about archives. (Archivist B-1)

In fact, we found that much of the archivists’ time is not spent on activities devoted to structuring and organizing the archival material with a view to creating a scientifically accurate account of the past, or to facilitating the ­ ­expedient storage and retrieval of information. Instead, much of their time is devoted to interpretive work in which the archivist accesses the material and ­creatively reconstructs memories of the organization that responded to specific issues in the present. This activity, which draws more directly from notions of social memory, reflects a complementary dimension of memory work, which we elaborate in the following section.

13.4.2  Long-Term Memory Work We observed four broad categories of long-term memory work devoted to con­ structing the social or collective memory of the organization. The categories are recollecting, interpreting, storytelling, and memorializing, and describe recurring patterns of activity in which the intended outcome is not a comprehensive account of the organization’s history but rather the development of an argument about the past, be it a narrative, the meaning of an artifact, or an input to the development of a product. The clear objective of the corporate archivist in this phase of activity is the conversion of the raw archival material into heritage. By heritage we mean the assem­ blage of historical information, narratives, and artifacts to construct memories in the present. Following Nora (1989) we acknowledge a sharp distinction between his­ tory and memory, which are often treated synonymously. Rather, our data suggest that these four activities (recollecting, interpreting, storytelling, and memorializing) are devoted to very different purposes than the objective reconstruction of the past. Instead, they are devoted to an interpretive reconstruction of the past to specific communal ends defined in the present. In the balance of this section, we elaborate these four categories of memory work and revisit the distinction between history and memory in our discussion. Recollecting. A key element of memory work is the recollection of historical raw materials to address a specific issue from the present. As noted above, the issue could be to source material for a marketing campaign, to address an allegation of past mis­ conduct by the corporation or to create a defense in a patent or copyright violation. In all cases, the corporate archivist acts as a strategic partner with the marketing division, corporate legal counsel, and/or strategic planning group. A key first step in addressing the issue is for the corporate archivist and his or her team to conduct a “deep dive” into the archives.

250  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies A deep dive occurs when the archivist engages in a prolonged and extensive search into the archive to find archival material that is relevant for resolving a press­ ing strategic issue. Throughout the process the archivist views him or herself as a guide who collects and displays what is contained in the archive. At Company C their archivists conduct deep dives with all their marketing agencies. In our archives we have the space, we created a space, a showcase for what we call the deep dives for the marketing group . . . our marketing group brought them down to the archives and I set up an entire display of our history of soccer. All the way back to 1921, our first print ad. Thirties we have some material related to the Berlin Olympics and then FIFA itself beginning in 1950. Just to walk them through—okay we have a long relationship [with soccer], it’s not just brand new. (Archivist C-2)

As the archivist explains, the deep dive is more than just a tour of the archives and a collection of dusty boxes. The deep dive is both a focused hunting expedition defined by a specific question about what the company has done in the past, and based on a clear understanding of how that information might be strategically used in the pre­ sent. Deep dives may also be used to construct specific narratives used to socialize new employees to the organization: Another way I would put it is we do a history presentation, a couple of us for our new employees, we call it NEO, which is New Employee Orientation. There’s a presentation, actually now it’s held here at the museum which was the way it should be. So there’s Company H History 101, the presentation I’m giving I guess I would call it Company H History 102. It’s more for people who may have been here for a while and I wanted, like the museum we wanted this presentation to include at least a couple of things that would make . . . people to say “I didn’t know.” (Archivist H-1)

Deep dives, thus, are the essential first steps of the corporate archivist. They are a clearly defined procedure through which the professional archivist begins the pro­ cess of taking objective archival material and assembling it in a fashion that best serves a specific and strategic narrative purpose. It is the first step in a process designed to aid in the creative reconstruction of historical events and is an essential component in the process of converting history to heritage. Recollecting precedes interpretation, which is the next stage in this process. Interpreting. Interpretation is the process of constructing heritage from history. For archivists it is an important part of creating heritage to ensure that management understands where it comes from. . . . what is valuable . . . to the company is the heritage, but you can’t have the heri­ tage without the history. And that’s, see and that’s the one thing, that’s always my

Memory Work  251 argument with my management and with the people that I have to go to for ­budgets and stuff is you like this heritage stuff, this is great but you know it doesn’t just come out of thin air. This is the only reason you get these stories is because we keep that history, you need to support that . . . the heritage is what they see as valuable they don’t see the history in the way that, they don’t see that as being valuable. (Archivist B-1)

Once the significance of the raw materials is determined, specific organizational elem­ents are selected to play a distinct and prominent role as part of the past of the organization. This could mean, for example, that a speech is chosen to be a key sup­ porting document for the construction of a narrative about the organization’s found­ ing. Because there are so many organizational raw materials, it is not correct to suggest that they all are part of the heritage of the organization. What makes the raw materials of the organization a piece of heritage is when the archivist interprets what the raw materials mean to the organization and then creates ways for it to become an important piece of the organization’s fabric. Similarly, the process of creating heritage is not an end in and of itself. The key to heritage is that it needs to be used. Thus, the process of constructing heritage is developed with the end point of creating something that has use and can be used in the present. As the archivist chooses the raw materials that will be molded into a piece of company heritage, they do so with an end goal in mind. Of importance at this stage is the role that interpretation plays in the construction and use of organizational heritage. Although structural-functional memory work requires some interpretation of facts and selection of dates, for all intents and pur­ poses, this work is a process of finding the right information and retrieving that knowledge when asked. In the process of social memory work, the construction of heritage is dependent on the interpretation of what the raw materials mean in rela­ tion to the mnemonic community that the archivist is trying to address. Heritage is constructed for a particular purpose and not every piece of organizational history will be relevant to what the archivist wants to achieve. . . . heritage is very flexible. I think some people think heritage is sort of carved in stone, it is what it is, but the thing is, in any given rich history environment—and this company is over eighty years old—there is more heritage than you could ever use or talk about so what I do is look for ways to make the past history support what we are doing now and show the connections to both our customers and our employees . . . So I see heritage as being very—it can be very new and the story changes constantly. (Archivist I)

Consequently, when the raw materials are turned into heritage it is because the sig­ nificance of the raw materials has been elevated and the meaning of these raw ­materials has been determined by the archivist. What results is the creation of a tool that can be used for numerous organizational purposes.

252  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Storytelling. The next stage in creating the memory of the organization is “story­ ing” the heritage. By this we mean the process by which the archivist elaborates nar­ ratives about the organization’s history and archives to infuse meaning, significance and value, for the present. That is, the archivists strategically narrativize the corporate heritage by embedding issues of the present in stories about the past. This strong role of the archivist requires that they use the organization’s heritage as the key component of the stories that are told throughout the organization. Yeah, actually, we’ve actually had some discussions. As to whether I should change the name of the department to the Department of Story Telling. Or have our title to change to Story Tellers. Because that is what we do every single day. (Archivist C-1) But I think the more valuable position, I think the one that keeps this operation going and gives back more to the company is being the corporate historian, being the story teller, being the person who can interpret the history and make it useful. (Archivist B-1)

As both archivists observe, their role is to engage in the process of continually creat­ ing and maintaining company’s narratives. They build stories that have resonance with their stakeholders and can be continually retold. The archivists also understand the strategic importance of shaping the narrative to the specific issues relevant to key stakeholders of the organization. Archivist I-1, for example, who works for a technology firm, describes a marked shift away from consumer-oriented historical narratives after a strategic realignment in the firm: When we split from Company X, they took the consumer side of the business and we became more wholly business-to-business. So now a lot of the stories we loved to tell that had a real consumer focus are no longer as relevant, they’re interesting, they’re fun, but they’re not really as relevant. So I didn’t drop them entirely but I downplayed them a little more and looked for more proof points in the business-to-business side of things and I brought those forward. So yes in a way, it’s not that they weren’t there all along. It’s just what do you have time to talk about and you can’t talk about 600 milestones so you pick the ones that res­ on­ate the most with who you are and where you are going. (Archivist I-1)

In this way the archivists delineate the key stories that need to be placed in the organization’s memory. As “keepers of the organization’s memory” (Archivist K-1) the archivists are actively engaged in the process of strategic storytelling, a key stage in converting history to heritage that paves the way to the further conversion of heri­ tage into collective memory. Drawing on the heritage of the organization, the arch­iv­ ist can use the past to shape and strengthen the uniqueness of the organization and construct a coherent and common identity for the individual employee and the cor­ por­ation. This process of creating heritage and building organizational stories is an important, if not required, skill of corporate archivists. Storytelling serves as a key

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stage in the process of converting raw history of the firm into targeted and strategic memories. By emphasizing elements of the past in the context of the present, cor­ por­ate archivists engage in the practice of infusing historical gravitas into relatively routine organizational activities in the present. Memorializing. The final component of the model is memorialization. Memorialization takes place when the stories, which are centered on the heritage of the organization, are packaged and communicated to the different stakeholders of the organization. It is at this stage when the stories of the organization are crystal­ ized into the organization’s memory and put into an easily understandable format. Memorialization involves reactivating the past and making it present again in the lives of the managers, employees, and other important corporate stakeholders. Memorialization can take multiple forms and can focus on different groups. The primary means of memorialization is through the narratives disseminated by the archivists. Many of the archivists are called upon to give presentations to the employ­ ees, while others have blogs and web pages that focus on the various stories and events from the organization’s past. When these archivist narratives are internally directed, memorialization is addressed to the employees of the organization and often takes the form of a company newsletter or newspaper. When the archivist nar­ ratives are externally focused, memorialization targets customers and, in some cases, enthusiasts and fans of the company. Regardless there is a key understanding that an essential part of creating the company’s memory is telling the stories. Archivist B describes the narrative memorialization and the reason for it when he states: I’m writing a history paper every day and then I have a regular column in our in­tern­al . . . newspaper that I write, so every month I’ve got to come up with a new subject, and it’s all historical research, trying to come up with some new angle and then always focusing on how does this relate to our brand, how can it be inspirational, it’s because it goes back to that history has to work so I’m not just telling fun stories . . . it has to be something that the general audience can say you know I really got some inspiration out of that or that really helped me understand some part of the company. You know there’s got to be a purpose to it and so that’s a lot of what we do, everything, I try to tie it back to how does it, how does it support the business or how does this support the brand.

Another frequent, but less common form of memorialization is the corporate museum. In many instances the archivist would act as the museum curator. In other cases, the archivist would work closely with the curator of the museum to select items for display and to determine how to tell the stories and convey the significance of the heritage piece to their audience. Most of the museums we saw were for in­tern­al use; however, there were some occasional instances where the corporation either has a public museum or is closely associated with a public museum. Once again, in these instances the archivist had an important role in shaping the message associated with the display pieces.

254  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies The heritage wall is another interesting form of memorialization used in the cor­ por­ate setting. These visual representations of the company’s history were located in prominent positions in the corporation, such as in the lobby of the corporate head­ quarters, employee meeting areas and dining spaces, and in central corridors and passageways. These heritage walls varied in their levels of sophistication and com­ plexity. Some displays are comprised of glass cases that enclose a single artifact. Others are complex, interactive multimedia displays. Despite the vast differences between these heritage walls, they were all, for the most part, visual narratives of the corporation’s accomplishments. The overriding connecting factor in this final stage of social and collective mem­ ory work is that the archivists are responsible for disseminating the stories of their organization through the various mediums at their disposal. After the stories are constructed around the company’s heritage they need to be presented to the key stakeholders of the corporation. The goal of the archivist is to create coherence in the organization and to demonstrate the relevance of the past to current business prac­ tices. In so doing, the archivists solidify and sediment the narratives of the cor­por­ ation, thus creating the organization’s memory.

13.5 Discussion Our chapter presents a framework of organizational memory work, defined as the strategic construction of short- and long-term memory in organizations. We demon­ strate that Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) definition of organizational memory is but a dimension of the short-term memory of the organization. The archivists and his­ tor­ians we interviewed stressed that these activities were relatively routine and con­ stitute the more mundane kind of memory work applied to the management of active information from the recent past. Their key strategic function, however, comprised the work with the more long-term memory of the organization and the generation of useful versions of the past for the organization. Long-term memory work describes this process, which is largely interpretive in nature and draws heav­ ily from the professional experience and judgment of the professional archivist and his or her team. Our model thus extends Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) view of organizational mem­ ory. First, organizational memory work is highly strategic. Our informants were emphatic that their activities are structured around defined corporate goals, includ­ ing strategic marketing and product development, brand management, facilitating a positive working culture and strategic human resources management, and creating a solid corporate identity. The strategic importance of their role is reflected in the position occupied by the archivists in the corporate hierarchy. Several of the ­corporate archivists in our dataset have direct access to the top management team of their organizations. Some report to the vice president in charge of corporate strategy or strategic marketing. Moreover, memory work was devoted to the strategic goals of

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the firm, such as smoothing the discontinuities of organizational change, integrating new hires into the collective, and creating historical narratives designed to protect the intellectual property of the firm. Second, memory work is much more interpretive than factual. The traditional approach to organizational memory has focused on what is known by the ­organization at a specific point in time. This view, however, overlooks the immense amount of interpretive judgment on the part of the firm in deciding what material to collect and how it will be retrieved and presented. More importantly, it undervalues the high degree of work involved in the ongoing attribution of meaning and value that corporate archivists provide. The key contribution of this research, thus, is the insight that organizational memory is not simply a static storehouse of information or a library, but rather is an ongoing process of hermeneutic interpretation and skill­ ful storytelling. Organizational memory is not a thing, but rather is an ongoing and engaged process of elaboration and reconstruction of memories of the more recent and historical past. It must be noticed that the size of the organization is a boundary condition of our framework. Our research was based on Fortune 500 companies and, as a result, it might apply only to large organizations with well-developed division and specializa­ tion of labor and with enough resources to support the provision of a couple of cor­ por­ ate archivists and historians. Smaller organizations might exhibit similar activities to the ones described in our framework. However, we anticipate that in these cases specific roles would probably not be created to deal with these activities and they would probably be coupled with other groups of tasks. The combination of professional expertise, role specialization, and authority over the voice of the past of the organization is more likely associated with large, old organizations, with ac­tiv­ ities in various countries. A second boundary condition concerns the role of corporate historians and arch­iv­ists in the construction of the collective memory of the organization. In this chapter, we have restricted our analysis to the work of these two groups of profes­ sionals. This does not mean that they are the only ones responsible for the social construction of the past of the organization, or even the most important category of actors. Managers and employees, for instance, might have large leeway in interpret­ ing the past and constructing their own versions of the bygone days of the ­organization. The distinctiveness of archivists and historians lies in the fact that they are trained professionals in the study of the past and have the authority within the structure of the organization to generate sanctioned official versions of the past. As such, they tend to have a better sense of purpose, intentionality, and enhanced reflexivity when dealing with issues about the organizational past. In addition, their authoritative voice and their invested resources in memory work increase the chances that the versions and interpretations about the past that they construct will have more resonance than other competing understandings. In any case, though, their ability in shaping the social memory of the past within the organization remains an empirical question.

256  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

13.6 Conclusion Our study offers a fresh conceptualization of organizational memory. Specifically, we describe the process by which the raw archival material of an organization is con­ verted to practical utility in the organization. That is, our model describes the pro­ cess by which the past is strategically reconstructed in the form of short- and long-term organizational memory. In other words, much of what the organization remembers is defined through the memory work of corporate historians and arch­iv­ ists. Organizational memory is much more interpretive than prior models have acknowledged. Previous research characterized organizational memory as largely a process of information management, ignoring the critical subjective importance of deciding what was collected, stored, and retrieved. Organizational memory, as a practice, is less factual or scientific and more creative and entrepreneurial. Rather than representing the past, it is an act of re-presenting the past.

Notes 1. For the remainder of the chapter we will refer to the interviewees as archivists. Although many of the people we interviewed consider themselves both historians and archivists, most have the formal title of corporate archivist. 2. All numbers are drawn from firm performance in 2011.

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258  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Munir, K. A., and Phillips, N. (2005). The Birth of the “Kodak Moment”: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Adoption of New Technologies. Organization Studies, 26(11), 1665–87. Nissley, N., and Casey, A. (2002). The Politics of the Exhibition: Viewing Corporate Museums through the Paradigmatic Lens of Organizational Memory. British Journal of Management, 13(S2), S35–45. Nonaka, I., and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. Olivera, F. (2000). Memory Systems in Organizatons: An Empirical Investigation of Mechanisms for Knowledge Collection, Storage and Access. Journal of Management Studies, 37(6), 811–32. Ravasi, D., and Schultz, M. (2006). Responding to Organizational Identity Threats: Exploring the Role of Organizational Culture. Academy of Management Journal, 49(3), 433–58. Rowlinson, M., Booth, C., Clark, P., Delahaye, A., and Procter, S. (2010). Social Remembering and Organizational Memory. Organization Studies, 31(1), 69–87. Rowlinson, M., and Procter, S. (1999). Organizational Culture and Business History. Organization Studies, 20(3), 369–96. Schultz, M., and Hernes, T. (2013). A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity. Organization Science, 24(1), 1–21. Stigliani, I., and Ravasi, D. (2007). Organizational Artefacts and the Expression of Identity in Corporate Museums at Alfa Romeo, Kartell and Piaggio. In L.  Lerpold, D.  Ravasi, J.  Van Rekom (Eds), Organizational Identity in Practice (pp. 197–214). London and New York: Routledge. Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., and Quinn-Trank, C. (2010). Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage. In J.  Baum and J.  Lampel (Eds), Advances in Strategic Management: The Globalization of Strategy Research (pp. 147–73). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Urde, M., Greyser, S. A., and Balmer, J. M. T. (2007). Corporate Brands with a Heritage. Journal of Brand Management, 15(1), 4–19. Usdiken, B., and Kieser, A. (2004). Introduction: History in Organisation Studies. Business History, 46(3), 321–30. Walsh, J. P. (1995). Managerial and Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane. Organization Science, 6(3), 280–321. Walsh, J. P., and Ungson, G. R. (1991). Organizational Memory. Academy of Management Review, 16(1), 57–91.

14 Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness Andrew David Allan Smith

14.1 Introduction There is growing interest among management academics in the phenomenon of temporality, which has been defined as the relationship between perceptions of time and of other phenomena (Zaheer, Albert, and Zaheer,  1999; Bakken, Holt, and Zundel,  2013; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van De Ven,  2013; Hernes and Schultz, 2016; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017; Kim, Bansal, and Haugh, 2019). The turn towards the study of temporality has been paralleled by the “historic turn” in man­ agement and organization studies (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2013; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2014). In a paper that played an important role in the historic turn, Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank (2010) identified rhetorical history as a key source of competitive advantage. Suddaby et al. (2010, p. 162) argue that by creating and disseminating historical narratives about their firm, managers can communicate more persuasively with “employees, customers, and/or the general public,” thereby allowing the firm to achieve its objectives. Organization studies scholars have pub­ lished extensively on how managers use the past rhetorically (Foster, Suddaby, Minkus, and Wiebe,  2011; Anteby and Molnár,  2012; Decker, 2014; Maclean, Harvey, Sillince, and Golant,  2014; Ybema,  2014; Rowlinson, Casey, Hansen, and Mills, 2014; Ravasi and Phillips, 2011; Foster, Coraiola, and Suddaby, 2016; Suddaby and Foster, 2017; Hatch and Schultz,  2017; Smith and Simeone, 2017; Donzé and Smith, 2018). Whenever a manager uses a historical narrative in communicating with another person, they are doing so as a means to some end, such as making workers proud to be part of the organization or securing the loyalty of customers. Rhetorical ef­fect­ive­ ness denotes the ability of a particular rhetorical device to change the thinking, and ultimately the action, of a listener (Ruebottom, 2013). If the listeners do not accept the historical narratives produced by the firm, the firm’s expenditure on the produc­ tion of historical narratives will be wasteful. Unfortunately, the existing research in Andrew David Allan Smith, Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew David Allan Smith. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0014

260  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies organizational studies on rhetorical history has given us a very limited understanding of why historical narratives differ in their rhetorical effectiveness, as Foster and Lamertz (2017) note. The research on rhetorical history thus rests on incomplete microfoundations, which matters because it impedes our understanding and ability to produce research on rhetorical history that is both rigorous and useful to stake­ holders. The microfoundations movement in management (e.g. Felin, Foss, and Ployhart, 2015) has called on researchers to reflect on how factors at the level of the individual (e.g. cognitive biases) influence outcomes at the meso level of the or­gan­ iza­tion and the macro level of society. This chapter will help to put the existing litera­ ture on rhetorical history onto a stronger microfoundational basis while identifying some areas for future research. When coupled with the work of White (1975) on historical narratives, the psy­ cho­logic­al research on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias helps us to arrive at an explanation of how historical narratives differ in rhetorical effectiveness: the major determinant of whether a given historical narrative will be persuasive to a lis­ tener is its degree of congruence with the listener’s historical metanarrative rather than its truthfulness. Some readers, particularly those trained as historians, might be inclined to think that the rhetorical effectiveness of a given historical narrative would be closely connected to the narrative’s faithfulness to the surviving evidence. In an ideal world, perhaps, listeners would decide whether to accept a historical narrative based on scrutiny of the available evidence and a careful process of fact checking using historical documents. It is indeed the job of a historian in a university to undertake this sort of research. However, we know that the painstaking scholar­ ship of academic historians has an extremely limited capacity to dispel popular belief in historical narratives that are wholly or partially inaccurate. Consider the case of Vimy Ridge, a First World War battle around which Englishspeaking Canadians later constructed an elaborate mythology. In the English-speaking regions of Canada, Vimy Ridge is today remembered as one of the greatest and most consequential battles of the First World War. According to the standard narrative, Vimy Ridge in northern France was the site of an unaided Canadian victory that was of such great magnitude that Canada was soon accorded a status with the British Empire equal to that of Great Britain itself. Countless Canadian children have been told that Vimy Ridge was “the birth of a nation.” In 2009, a group of history professors published a book that methodologically examined all of the major factual claims that are part of the myth of Vimy Ridge. For instance, they showed that roughly equal numbers of Canadian and British soldiers participated in the battle, which meant that present-day Canadians are wrong to regard it as a uniquely or distinctly Canadian victory. One of the contributors to the book examined the correspondence of the German officers involved in the battle and concluded that the Germans did not regard it as a significant defeat, particularly when compared to the other military reversals they experienced in April 1917. The historians also showed that this particular battle was regarded as of only modest importance by contemporaries and was neither decisive neither in the outcome of

Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness  261

the war, which ended more than a year later, nor in the subsequent moves by diplomats to establish Canada as an equal partner with Britain in the empire. The claims in the book were backed up by meticulous research that involved the analysis of contem­ poraneous historical documents. Despite the publication of this book, the myth of Vimy Ridge as a great and decisive battle remains cherished in the English-speaking regions of Canada. In recent years, visual references to the Battle of Vimy Ridge have been added to Canadian banknotes and passports (Cook, 2014). Canadian tourists continue to flock to the site of the battle, ignoring nearby Canadian battlefields that were of equal or greater importance to people at the time. In short, the existing historical narrative about Vimy Ridge has survived the efforts of myth-busting his­ tor­ians to destroy it with an arsenal of facts. The case of Vimy Ridge illustrates why a historical narrative’s degree of truth and factualness is not the sole or even the major factor that determines whether it will be accepted by listeners. Indeed, some firms have been able to get away with dis­sem­in­at­ ing completely untrue historical narratives for lengthy periods. In 2000, the clothing retailer Abercombie and Fitch created a chain of stores called Hollister that sold mer­ chandise inspired by California’s surfer culture. To promote interest in the new chain, the company’s managers created the entirely fictitious narrative of the firm’s founder, one John Hollister Senior, who graduated from Yale in 1915. According to this narra­ tive, which was told to all employees and many customers, Hollister established the first store in California in 1922 after a stay in present-day Indonesia. This historical narrative even included a romantic subplot, as the company explained how Hollister met his wife, “Meta,” and founded a surfing dynasty. In 2009, an investigative report by British journalists uncovered that this entire historical narrative was a lie. These reporters concluded that John Hollister had never existed and the historical narrative had been created in an Ohio office building in 2000. The announcement of this his­ tor­ic­al deceitfulness does not appear to have damaged the reputation of the firm with consumers. Indeed, the marketing academic Jonathan Reynolds declared that the journalists’ findings were a “moot point” (BBC News, 2009). It appears that the ficti­ tious nature of Hollister’s historical narrative did not prevent it from being effective. The use of historical narratives is likely to be strategically efficacious whenever the narratives of the speaker are congruent with the listener’s historical metanarratives and with the ontological and cosmological commitments that underpin the listener’s historical metanarratives. Whether or not the historical narrative is true is far less important in predicting its rhetorical effectiveness. Lack of congruence between his­ tor­ic­al narrative, metanarrative, and ontological commitments will produce cogni­ tive dissonance and will cause the speaker’s historical narrative to be rejected by the listener. Following Bentley (2006), ontological commitments are defined here as an individual’s beliefs about the nature of existence and humanity’s place in the uni­ verse. These ontological commitments can be derived from a religion or another source and can encompass cosmological beliefs. A metanarrative is a master narrative that embodies a generalization or pattern of how reality is believed to work (Lyotard, 1979; Megill, 2007). A historical narrative

262  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies is an account that assembles selected facts from the history of a community or ­communities into a coherent pattern (Carr,  1991). A historical metanarrative is a mode of interpreting historical events that provides individuals with a pattern that allows them to attribute meaning to a wide range of phenomena in different geo­ graphical locations and historical periods (White, 1975). Historical metanarratives are, thus, typically stories about the history of the entire human race, world, or even universe. One example of a historical metanarrative is Marxism, which provides people with a coherent account of human history that begins with barbarism and slavery, includes the capitalist present, and concludes with fully developed socialism, the terminal stage of history in the Marxist scheme. Christians who accept that the Bible is literally true and that the world was created in six days and will end at Judgment Day use a different historical metanarrative to understand the world than secular people, who use modern science’s account of the world, beginning with the Big Bang and including events such as the extinction of the dinosaurs that go unmentioned in the Bible. Individuals adopt historical metan­ arratives that are congruent with their ontological commitments. Since historical metanarratives rest on ontological commitments, which themselves vary dra­mat­ic­ al­ly between cultures, the historical metanarratives that individuals learn differ from one culture to the next (Woolf, 2011). While all of the historical metanarratives used as illustrative examples in this chapter are the products of the Western cultures that are familiar to the author, readers should remember that individuals in other cul­ tures would use their own historical metanarratives to understand the world. Historical metanarratives structure our responses to historical narratives. For instance, someone who uses the aforementioned Christian fundamentalist historical metanarrative to understand the world is unlikely to be persuaded by a narrative of a particular historical episode if that narrative is grounded in a historical metanarra­ tive that is incompatible with their core beliefs. The academic historian Yuval Noah Harari, who is a self-described atheist, has produced a historical narrative that describes an episode in which modern humans migrated out of Africa about 100,000 years ago and then replaced the Neanderthals and the other human species that had previously colonized other continents (Harari,  2014). A Christian fundamentalist would reject Harari’s narrative not because she disagrees with his interpretation of a particular piece of the archaeological evidence but because his historical narrative is incompatible with her historical metanarrative. Having first decided to reject Harari’s narrative, the Christian fundamentalist reader would be highly motivated to search for any flaws in Harari’s use of evidence. Although the hypothetical example in the previous paragraph might seem to be far removed from the types of managerial historical narratives that are the focus of rhetorical history researchers, the same cognitive processes that govern listener acceptance and rejection of historical narratives apply. Since the term “rhetorical” appears in this chapter, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the origins of the word itself, which comes from the ancient Greek rhḗtōr, or public speaker. The democratic nature of polities such as Athens and the need to persuade large numbers of citizens

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to vote in favor of particular proposals meant that the art of oral persuasion became a major focus of leading thinkers. Since classical antiquity, the educational institu­ tions charged with training future members of Western ruling elites have including some form of training in rhetoric in their curriculum to allow students to become more effective persuaders in public fora, courtrooms, and the marketplace of ideas (Murphy,  1974). In modern capitalist societies, the art of rhetoric is frequently researched by those who study business communication (e.g., Palmieri, Rocci, and Kudrautsava, 2015; Harmon, Green, and Goodnight, 2015; Hoefer and Green, 2016). From antiquity to the present, students of rhetoric have long been taught that they need to consider which types of arguments are most likely to be effective on a given target audience (Schiappa, 1992). We also know that effective communicators give careful consideration to which types of metaphors will work best in a given context (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). This insight is congruent with the work of the literary theorists (Burke, 2018) who focus on audiences and their reactions in the course of trying to understand the functions of drama and literature. In determining whether a listener is likely to accept a manager’s historical narrative, the key concepts are cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance denotes the mental discomfort (mental stress) experienced by an individual who simultaneously attempts to believe two contradictory ideas. This discomfort often occurs when the individual encounters information that is incompatible with their prior beliefs (Akerlof and Dickens, 1982). Confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998) is the tendency of people to interpret new information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs. In the environments in which our ancestors evolved, confirmation bias and the ability to deceive oneself into believing one’s own narrative were likely adaptive, which explains why these phenomena are found so frequently in present-day humans (Mercier and Sperber, 2011; Smith, Trivers, and Von Hippel, 2017).

14.2  Historical Metanarratives that Shape our Thinking Each of the world’s civilizations has produced at least one historical metanarrative that structures how individuals interpret historical phenomena around them. While these historical metanarratives are often rooted in a culture’s dominant religion, there are often competing historical metanarratives within cultures (Woolf, 2011). In present-day Western countries, the dominant historical metanarrative is known as the “liberal-progressive,” “linear-progressive,” or “Whig” conception of history. This historical metanarrative stresses that conditions in each period of history are su­per­ior to the period that went before. In this metanarrative, technological and moral pro­ gress are closely linked (Butterfield, 1931). According to this linear historical metan­ arrative, each generation has been better off than its parents’ in material wealth, technological capabilities, intellectual sophistication, and moral development. The implication of this reading of history is that the future will be even better than the

264  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies present. The modern progressive historical metanarrative was anticipated in classical antiquity by Philo of Alexandria, who used it to make sense of conditions at the height of the Roman Empire, a time of relative stability and affluence (Sandmel, 1979). However, it did not become dominant in Western cultures until much later. From the fall of the Roman Empire until the middle of the eighteenth century, few people in Western societies used progressive historical metahistorical narratives to understand the world. During this period, most members of the educated elite who knew Latin instead used a declinist metanarrative, a polar opposite historical metan­ arrative, to interpret phenomena around them. The declinist historical metanarra­ tive held that progressive corruption was a universal constant and that human history was characterized by steady decline from an earlier period of moral perfec­ tion and material comfort. According to this theory, modern Europeans could never hope to recreate the levels of material and intellectual sophistication achieved in ancient Greece and Rome, but they could hope to improve their miserable condi­ tions by intensive study of classical texts. This metahistorical narrative, which had its origins in the works of Hesiod and other authors in classical antiquity, depicted human history in terms of five stages associated with progressively baser metals that begins with the Golden Age and ends with the present Iron Age (Griffiths, 1956). The declinist metanarrative is congruent with the many examples of decay that one observes in everyday life, which helps to explain why so many pre-Enlightenment Westerners found it to be plausible. Cyclical historical metanarratives, which preclude the possibility of either per­ man­ent progress or decline, were also present in the thinking of Western people, especially peasants who saw little evidence of material change and whose lives were dominated by seasonal cyclicality (Smith, 2002). Other medieval and early modern Westerners, particularly devout Christians whose knowledge of history came from reading the Bible, subscribed to a dispensationalist metanarrative that began with the Book of Genesis and ended with Armageddon and Judgment Day. In Christianity, the practice of thinking about history in this fashion, which is known as dispensa­ tionalism, exerted a considerable influence on Europeans in the Middle Ages and Reformation (Witherington, 2005; Sandeen, 2008). In the twenty-first century, a version of this historical metanarrative continues to influence how large numbers of people in some parts of the United States conceptu­ alize the past and predict the future. For instance, it informs how many conservative Americans think about foreign and domestic policy and predict the future, with such predictions often involving an event called “The Rapture” (Turner, 2017). In the secular countries of western Europe, there are now relatively few individuals who use the dispensationalist historical metanarrative to understand the world, with the exception of some Protestants in Northern Ireland, where dispensationalism is sometimes used to interpret historical events such as the 1690 Battle of the Boyne as well as present-day politics (Gribben, 2007). It should also be noted that cyclical his­ tor­ic­al metanarratives continue to be used to understand the world, both by thinkers associated with the nationalist right (Farrenkopf, 2001) and by other authors inter­ ested in the rise and fall of civilizations (McNeill, 1989).

Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness  265

How did linear-progressive historical narratives come to dominate the thinking of most people in Western liberal democracies? The early eighteenth century witnessed a clash between European thinkers who used progressive historical metanarratives to understand the world and those who subscribed to declinist historical metanarra­ tives. During this so-called “Battle of the Books,” writers debated whether the ancient Greeks and Romans were truly superior to modern Europeans (Nisbet, 1994). The advocates of a progressive metanarrative argued that since the ancients did not know about the existence of the New World and lacked modern inventions such as gun­ powder, they could not have been superior to moderns. This argument against the declinist metanarrative was persuasive in the eyes of many contemporaries, with the result that progressive historical metanarratives came to dominate the thinking of Western individuals during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Spadafora, 1990). By 1800, most educated Westerners, even those who were devout Christians, viewed the world through some sort of linear-progressive historical metanarrative. Indeed, nineteenth-century theologians invented ways of reconciling the linear-progressive historical metanarrative with Christianity via a doctrine called postmillennialism, which taught that Christians had a duty to accelerate the rate of human progress via good works, campaigning for social reform, and so forth (Moorhead, 1984). The progressive historical metanarrative espoused by Enlightenment thinkers informed the thinking of many Western classical liberals of the nineteenth century. The metanarrative influenced a particularly strong force over the intellectuals asso­ ciated with Britain’s Whig party, which advocated a package of reforms such as the extension of the electoral franchise, economic deregulation, abolition of slavery, and such humanitarian reforms as a sharp reduction in the number of offences pun­ish­ able by death. For Whig reformers committed to progress and a linear conception of history, the term “medieval” became the ultimate term of abuse and “modern” a term of high praise. In England, as in other countries, those who subscribed to the progressive historical metanarrative created narratives of national history that were congruent with the overall metanarrative, which held that the human race as a whole was inevitably moving towards greater progress. For this reason, the progressive his­ tor­ic­al metanarrative associated with liberalism is still often referred to as the “Whig conception of history” (Butterfield, 1931). Although the political issues important to the historical Whig Party have long been resolved, the Whig-style ways of viewing past, present, and future remain deeply entrenched in Western culture, and in the historical metanarratives that academics (e.g. Max Weber and his intellectual descendants in management schools) use to understand phenomena. The late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a rival metahistorical narrative that shared the Whigs’ belief that the world was inevitably moving towards greater progress, but which was associated with a very different political ideology, namely socialism. The Marxist account of history posits that humanity is inevitably moving through teleological stages such as: primitive barbarism, feudalism, capitalism, and finally Communism, the utopian society at the end of history (Bernstein, 1981). The classical Marxian conception of progress and historical in­ev­it­ably was rooted in a worldview that was militantly atheist and which was informed by the ontological

266  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and epistemological theories of Hegel, a conservative philosopher who influenced Marx. Neither the Marxist historical metanarrative nor any of the national historical narratives derived from it would be logically tenable if one subscribed to a different set of ontological and epistemological commitments, such as the belief that a ben­ evo­lent deity controlled the course of human history and that this deity’s actions could be influenced by prayer. We know from the research of historians who have studied the decision making of the leaders of the Soviet Union that these individuals used the Marxist historical metanarrative to make sense of their world and to com­ municate with others. The metanarrative also shaped how Soviet leaders responded to crises such as the German invasion of 1941. For instance, the belief in the his­tor­ ic­al inevitability of Communist victory informed the battlefield decision making of Soviet generals during the Second World War, often with catastrophic consequences for the enlisted men under their control, who were forbidden from making tactical retreats (Merridale, 2006a; 2006b). After the fall of Communism in 1989, relatively few people used the Marxist ­historical metanarrative to understand the world. Indeed, as early as 1979, the Parisian intellectual Jean-François Lyotard was able to claim that incredulity toward all historical metanarratives, including Marxism, was a defining feature of presentday thought. In Western countries today, linear progressive or Whig historical met­ anarratives are typically associated with the worldviews of those at the center of the political spectrum. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “end of history” metanarrative articulated by Francis Fukuyama was a popular lens for interpreting the world (Fukuyama, 1989). Fukuyama, who worked in the adminis­ tration of George H. W. Bush, argued that some form of liberal-democratic capital­ ism, the social order exemplified by the United States and its NATO allies, was the terminal point of history. This reading of history led Fukuyama to predict that future political conflict would involve arguing about the details of public policy within a framework in which all of the major issues had been settled by universal acceptance of democracy and capitalism. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, which vividly demonstrated that not all political actors accepted the liberal-democratic social model represented by the NATO countries, Fukuyama’s historical metanarra­ tive fell into disuse as an interpretive lens. Fukuyama today uses less optimistic metahistorical narratives in his studies of national decline and the erosion of democracy (Fukuyama, 2014). Today, the two leading exponents of the liberal-progressive historical metanarra­ tive are the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer (2011) and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (2017). Singer (2011) regards the expansion of the “circle of ethical concern” that began during the Enlightenment as evidence of a directional trend in history towards greater moral progress. In developing this historical metanarrative, Singer explains that while people have always sought to act ethically towards their kinfolk and neighbors, evidence of concern for the welfare of distant individuals is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Singer’s metanarrative links a wide variety of

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phenomena ranging from the anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century to modern animal rights campaigns in a single narrative arc of moral progress. Since Singer published it in the 1980s, his historical metanarrative has become pervasive in our culture, which is one of the reasons why Singer has been called the most influ­ ential moral philosopher of his generation (Specter, 1999). Singer’s historical metan­ arrative now informs the making of philanthropic strategies in Silicon Valley (Effective Altruism, 2018) and papers that appear in elite management journals (e.g., Arnold, 2013; de George, 2017). Singer argues that the main causal mechanism that has driven the expansion of the circle of ethical concern in recent centuries is the growing influence since 1700 of the writings of moral philosophers. This historical metanarrative accords tre­ mendous importance to Singer’s own profession, as he is a philosophy professor. Steven Pinker, who advances a similarly optimistic historical metanarrative, pre­ sents his readers with a more complex, multicausal explanation for the alleged tendency of people to become kinder and more ethical with each generation (Pinker, 2011). Pinker argues that moral progress had been driven by such vari­ ables as the emergence of stable governments, democratization, the com­mer­cial­ iza­tion of societies and the growth of international trade as a percentage of GDP, as well as the growing influence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philo­ sophers. Although Pinker clearly disagrees with Singer about the causal mech­an­ isms that drive moral progress, he nevertheless agrees with Singer that it is a real phe­nom­enon that requires ex­plan­ation. Like Singer, Pinker is a public intellectual with a significant influence on our culture. Pinker frequently writes for the New York Times and his optimistic theory of history was explicitly endorsed in a speech by President Obama (Matthews, 2015). The iconoclastic British philosopher John Gray has attacked the rather upbeat and positive historical metanarratives of Singer and Pinker. Gray argues that while there is abundant evidence of a tendency towards technological progress over the course of history, there is no force pushing human beings towards progressively more eth­ ic­al behavior (Gray, 2004; 2018). In fact, he suggest the opposite is more likely to be the case. Although Gray’s political stance is difficult to categorize as either left-wing or right-wing, his writings on economic, political, and environmental issues exhibit a strong dislike of globalization and neoliberalism and of many of the values of the contemporary Anglo-American left, such as multiculturalism and secularism. Gray has endorsed Brexit, which is a policy preference favored by the extreme left and extreme right of the UK political spectrum and is anathema to most centrists. As other researchers have noted, conservative nationalist movements are generally hos­ tile to optimistic historical metanarratives and tend to construct pessimistic his­tor­ic­al narratives that emphasize national decadence and racial degeneration (Farrenkopf, 2001). In the twenty-first century, such narratives are used by the popu­list right to suggest that life was better in the past and that societies are being destroyed by largescale immigration, unpatriotic corporations, and the erosion of traditional gender

268  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies norms. Such pessimistic historical narratives are conveyed in slogans such as “Make America Great Again” (Butters, 2017). Gray’s pessimistic his­tor­ic­al narrative needs to be associated with this political stance. Within the field of management, there are thinkers who clearly reject all or part of the liberal-progressive historical metanarrative that centrists use to understand the world. Of course, linear-progressive historical metanarratives, such as that created by Max Weber, continue to influence how many management academics conceptu­ alize social change. However, a recent paper by Suddaby, Ganzin, and Minkus (2017) challenged the idea that the world is inevitably and irreversibly moving towards Weberian rationality by providing examples of this process being reversed in some areas. For instance, they discuss “the resurgence of fundamentalist religion, the rejection of sensible science and an increasingly tribal populism” as well as the “resurgence of craft modes of production.” Suddaby et al. are thus presenting their readers with data that are more congruent with a cyclical conception of history than a linear progress historical metanarrative. Although Suddaby et al. (2017) do not use the term “historical metanarrative,” they are effectively challenging the historical metanarrative associated with Weber, Singer, and Pinker by presenting a cyclical conception of history.

14.3 Summary Historical narratives, the stories that people use to make sense of events in their organizations and countries, are related to historical metanarratives, the grand stories about the sweep of human history that people use to comprehend the place of humans in the universe. In deciding whether to accept a given historical narrative, a listener will determine whether it is consistent with the historical metanarrative to which they subscribe. Historical narratives and historical metanarratives are closely connected to ontological systems that individuals use to make sense of their world. To be credible to a listener, a manager’s historical narrative must be consist­ ent with their historical metanarratives and other elements of their worldview, including their ontological commitments. Consistency will trigger the psy­cho­ logic­al mech­an­ism of confirmation bias, which will encourage the listener to accept the speaker’s historical narrative. Too much inconsistency between these elements will result in cognitive dissonance, an unpleasant experience. Each his­tor­ ic­al metanarrative comes with its own set of historical keywords that only make sense of those who use that historical metanarrative to understand the world. When narrators insert one of these keywords into their historical narrative, they are con­ necting to a historical metanarrative. Table 14.1, which gives examples of different historical metanarratives and their associated keywords, illustrates the relationship between rhetorical history, historical narratives, historical metanarratives, and onto­ logical commitments.

Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness  269 Table 14.1  Examples of historical metanarratives Historical Metanarrative

Population that Uses This Historical Metanarrative To View the World

Individuals Who Use This Historical Metanarrative

Keywords Associated with the Historical Metanarrative

Marxism

Communists, chiefly in the twentieth century

Karl Marx Lenin Stalin

Liberal progressive

People at the center of the political spectrum

Francis Fukuyama (in the 1990s) Peter Singer Steven Pinker

Dispensationalism

Fundamentalist Rev. John Hagee Protestants in the US and Northern Ireland

Declinist

Anti-globalization right in US, France, UK

“Historical inevitability” “Late capitalism” “Higher stage of history” “Dialectal materialism” “Transition to Communism” “That’s a medieval practice” “Optimism” “Progress of reason” “Overcoming superstition” “Solutions” “Garden of Eden” “Let’s go back to God” “End time prophecy” “Mark of the Beast” “The Rapture” “Armageddon” “Global elite” “Things were better in the good old days” “Race suicide” “Make America great again” “Take back control”

Oswald Spengler Steve Bannon

14.4  Direction for Future Research on Rhetorical History The major determinant of whether a given historical narrative will be persuasive to a listener is its degree of congruence with the listener’s historical metanarrative. We now need to subject this claim to empirical testing. I see three different ways of con­ ducting such research: laboratory experiments, field experiments, and ethnographic research. One possible laboratory experiment would involve comparing the rhet­ oric­al effectiveness of historical narratives that are congruent with the listener’s pre­ ferred historical metanarrative with the rhetorical effectiveness of narratives that are incongruent. At the start of the experiment, each subject would be asked questions to identify which historical metanarrative she uses to view the world. The historical

270  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies narrative would be presented and then the subject’s reaction to it would be gauged to test my claim that narrative–metanarrative congruence is the major determinant of whether a listener will accept a given historical narrative. A variation of this method would involve conducting field experiments in partner­ ship with companies (Chatterji, Findley, Jensen, Meier, and Nielson, 2016). We could use field experiments to test my claim that a major determinant of whether a given historical narrative will be persuasive to a listener is its degree of congruence with the listener’s historical metanarrative. The United States would be an ideal location to conduct such a field experiment, given that the US population is now highly polar­ ized into groups that use different historical metanarratives to understand the world. Since the historical metanarratives used by individuals to understand the world are associated with observable traits, we should be able to reliably identify which social media users employ dispensationalist, declinist, and progressive his­tor­ic­al metanarra­ tives to understand the world. Social media technology allows us to judge the ef­fect­ ive­ness of particular messages on different groups within the popu­la­tion (e.g. by measuring how much time an individual spends reading a text or the propensity of readers to click a given link). By using field experiments, we could help to uncover relationships between the historical metanarratives and ontological commitments of individuals and their responses to the historical narratives produced by firms. Another possible avenue of research would involve an ethnographic study of how managers use historical narratives. This research, which might involve shadowing the professionals who produce historical narratives for firms, would allow us to compare the effectiveness of a given historical narrative on individuals who use dif­ ferent historical metanarratives and ontological systems to make sense of the world. The United States would be an ideal empirical context in which to study this issue since that country is characterized by a single dominant language and the existence of subcultures that are associated with very different historical metanarratives and ontological commitments and which are geographically concentrated. In some parts of the country (e.g. Boston and San Francisco), it is probable that most people would view the world using a linear-progressive historical metanarrative and ontological system similar to that of Steven Pinker. These shared ontological and cosmological commitments would shape how individuals respond to historical narratives pro­ duced by companies. In other regions of the country, substantial numbers of people view the world using very different historical metanarratives, such as those derived from fundamentalist Christianity (Froese and Bader, 2010). Firms that operate in all parts of the country (e.g. automakers, national retail chains) and which use rhet­ oric­al history must therefore construct historical narratives that will resonate with people from these different subcultures (e.g. Republican voters in Arkansas and lib­ erals in Massachusetts). In an intriguing paper on how a US handgun manufacturer used historical narra­ tives, Poor, Novicevic, Humphreys, and Popoola (2016) found that the firm used historical narratives to connect the company with national historical narratives related to the westward expansion of the United States and thus a particular reading of

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American history. In my view, Poor et al. are right to argue that historical narratives are important in helping this firm to function, for without the historical narratives that surround US gun culture and the Second Amendment, US politicians would be more likely to impose European-style restrictions on gun sales, which would hurt this company. One could follow up the study of Poor et al. by seeking to determine whether an American’s preferred historical metanarrative (liberal progressive, Christian dispensationalist, secular declinist, etc.) influences the likelihood that he or she accepts the various historical narratives that Colt and its allies in the National Rifle Association have produced. I would predict that individuals who have internal­ ized the Christian dispensationalist and declinist historical metanarratives would be more receptive to Colt’s historical narratives than someone who uses the historical metanarrative produced by Steven Pinker. Alternatively, we could research the extent to which multinational firms need to tailor their rhetorical history strategies in response to national differences in how listeners evaluate historical narratives. In 2011, IBM spent lavishly on a worldwide campaign to mark the anniversary of its establishment in 1911. The campaign, which was coordinated by Paul Lasewicz in New York, involved using texts, films, and innumerable events to teach IBM’s history to workers, customers, and other stake­ holders across the world. Customized historical narratives were created for dis­sem­ in­ation to IBM executives, ordinary workers, and even “heads of state and world leaders” (Lasewicz, 2014: 113). Lasewicz has asserted that IBM’s centennial celebra­ tion was very effective at promoting organizational identity and brand recognition in the markets in which IBM operates. Indeed, he provides some quantitative evi­ dence to support the view that the centennial made workers prouder to belong to IBM and that the historical narratives produced during IBM’s centennial increased the value of the firm’s brand (Lasewicz, 2015). Lasewicz is probably correct to say that the historical narratives produced by IBM in 2011 were rhetorically effective when considered on a worldwide basis. However, it would be helpful to know whether cross-national variations in the historical met­ anarratives and ontological systems people use to understand the world mediated the responses of listeners to IBM’s historical narratives. Did people in highly secular­ ized countries such as the Netherlands respond differently to IBM’s historical narra­ tives than did people in Brazil, a country with higher church attendance rates? How did individuals in non-Western cultures who use historical metanarratives derived from belief systems such as Islam and Confucianism evaluate the plausibility of the historical narratives emanating from Lasewicz’s office in Armonk, New York? We cannot yet answer such questions, but ethnographic and field experiment research along the lines I have proposed has the capacity to enrich our understanding of how the rhetorical history strategies of firms actually work. Future research on the determinants of listener acceptance of historical narratives could be enriched by drawing on the institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012). Institutional logics have been defined as “socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs

272  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton and Ocasio,  2008: 101). Institutional logics are collections of values and norms that frame how individuals make sense of institutions and decide which practices are legitimate (Bertels and Lawrence, 2016). Modern societies are characterized by ten­ sion between different logics. For instance, each of the key institutions of American society (the market, bureaucracy, democracy, nuclear family, and Christianity) is guided by its own distinct logic (Alford and Friedland, 1985). Individuals differ in the extent to which they accept institutional logics: a staunch socialist who believes in the abolition of all markets would reject any narrative that is informed by the market’s institutional logic. Similarly, an “anarcho-capitalist” who favors the aboli­ tion of the state and the advent of a society in which only markets are used to co­ord­ in­ate human action would similarly reject narratives that are informed by the institutional logic of democracy. We would therefore expect that the rhetorical ef­fect­ive­ness of historical narratives would vary according to which institutional ­logics a given listener accepts. I conclude by encouraging researchers interested in how managers and firms use historical narratives to engage with the evolutionary psychology research that helps us to understand why people like listening to narratives and why historical narra­ tives can be rhetorically effective (Gottschall and Wilson,  2005, Wilson and Wilson,  2007; Kenrick and Griskevicius,  2013; Kluver, Frazier, and Haidt,  2014). This research suggests that the attributes of human psychology that power the rhet­ oric­al history strategies of firms are deeply rooted in millions of years of evolution, which bequeathed to modern humans a propensity to enjoy listening to narratives, particularly narratives about the past of their own group. In the evolutionary en­vir­ on­ment, in which human beings lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, group origin stories appear to have served to promote group identity and cohesion, espe­ cially in the face of competition with other groups for resources. By listening to such stories, the members of some tribes come to believe that they are all descended from a heroic founder. These beliefs may or may not be true, but they are functional (Gottschall, 2012). In modern economies, large organizations tell inspirational ori­ gin stories about corporate founders, as in the case of the Desjardins financial group, which tells stories about its founder Alphonse Desjardins (Basque and Langley, 2018). As Foster et al. (2011) show, a Canadian coffee chain faced with the intrusion of a foreign competitor used historical narratives to associate itself with military con­ flicts in Canadian history. It is no accident that corporate historical narratives frequently invoke themes such as group solidarity, kinship, and the threat posed by outsiders that would have been familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We must remind ourselves that the managers in glass offices who create historical narratives for electronic dis­sem­in­ ation are of the same species as the hunter-gatherers who enjoyed fireside stories about heroic group founders. Although competition between firms in an established market economy is peaceful, unlike the intergroup conflicts that were common in

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the evolutionary environment, it can give rise to the same basic emotions. The ­evolutionary psychologists’ insight that human beings are “storytelling animals” (Gottschall and Wilson, 2005) can help management researchers to understand why rhetorical history can be such a powerful tool for managers.

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Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness  275 Hernes, T., and Schultz, M. (2016). A Temporal Understanding of the Connections between Organizational Culture and Identity. In A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 356–71). London: Sage. Hoefer, R. L., and Green, Jr, S. E. (2016). A Rhetorical Model of Institutional Decision Making: The Role of Rhetoric in the Formation and Change of Legitimacy Judgments. Academy of Management Review, 41(1), 130–50. Kenrick, D. T., and Griskevicius, V. (2013). The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter than We Think. New York: Basic Books. Kim, A., Bansal, P., and Haugh, H. M. (2019) No Time Like the Present: How a Present Time Perspective Can Foster Sustainable Development. Academy of Management Journal, 62(2), 607–34. Kluver, J., Frazier, R., and Haidt, J. (2014). Behavioral Ethics for Homo Economicus, Homo Heuristicus, and Homo Duplex. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 123(2), 150–8. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., and Van De Ven, A. H. (2013). Process Studies of Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13. Lasewicz, P. C. (2014). The View from the Ivory Tower: The Academic Perspective on the Strategic Value of Corporate History and Heritage. In A. Bieir (Ed.), Crisis, Credibility, and Corporate History (pp. 103–22). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lasewicz, P.  C. (2015). Forget the Past? Or History Matters? Selected Academic Perspectives on the Strategic Value of Organizational Pasts. American Archivist, 78(1), 59–83. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, G. Bennington and B.  Massumi (Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. English translation 1984. Maclean, M., Harvey, C., Sillince, J.  A.  A., and Golant, B.  D. (2014). Living up to the Past? Ideological Sensemaking in Organizational Transition. Organization, 21(4), 543–67. Matthews, D. (2015). How Obama’s Optimism about the World Explains his Foreign Policy Vox, February 10. Available at: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/10/8001973/ obama-world-getting-better McNeill, W. H. (1989). Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Megill, A. (2007). Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mercier, H., and Sperber, D. (2011). Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74. Merridale, C. (2006a). Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army, 1939–45. Journal of Contemporary History, 41(2), 305–24. Merridale, C. (2006b). Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. London: Macmillan.

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15 The Life and Work of Edith Penrose Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective David Musson

15.1 Introduction Organizations exist in time, and history provides the means to study not only ­or­gan­iza­tions in time, and over time, but also the historical context of research, and the evolution of a discipline. Biography, by definition historical, affords the opportunity of studying the life of an individual and how context, events, and opportunities may shape their lives and work. In the case of Edith Penrose we have an excellent biography by Angela Penrose (2017) which sheds light on Edith’s own eventful life, and the experience and mind of a pioneering and original scholar for whom an historical approach to or­gan­iza­ tions was essential to understanding their growth, and the accumulated resources that both enabled and constrained growth, as she set out in her most famous work, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (Penrose, 1959; 2009). We also have the benefit of an extensive and rich secondary literature as well as some retrospective assess­ ments by Penrose herself on the development and reception of her work (Penrose, 1985; 1994). In this chapter my aims are to bring together these separate but interwoven his­ torical strands to explore her life and work; to show how an historical approach underpinned her celebrated and influential work on the growth of firms; to offer some reflections on how we “read” the classics; and in turn to show how an under­ standing of the classics can shed light on the evolution of management and or­gan­ iza­tion studies, and how the dominant and determining priorities of research are in themselves shaped by their historical context, and change over time. Sixty years ago, Edith Penrose’s The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was first published. The book is still widely read and discussed—and perhaps more now than at any time since its first publication. In this retrospective re-examination of the book—and the author’s life—I want to explore a number of overlapping questions about the relationship between a scholar’s “life,” “work,” and “times”; the durability

David Musson, The Life and Work of Edith Penrose: Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © David Musson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0015

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of certain classic texts; our “reading” of the “classics” in management and or­gan­iza­ tion studies, and in doing so to reflect on the evolution of the field. Penrose’s book is certainly a “classic”: Strategic management does not have many classics. Granted it is hard to have established and recognized classics in a field that is not only very young (reaching back only to the 1950s), but also very fragmented. But there is a handful of books that most strategy scholars would recognize as truly classic contributions to the field. Among these is Edith Penrose’s Theory of the Growth of the Firm. (Foss, 2002: 147)

John Kay described the book as “a jewel of a volume” in the Financial Times, and it has that brightness and luminosity which enables readers to pick it up and look at it from different angles to inform and illuminate their own thinking in their own domain. Using similar imagery, Richard Blundel (2015) writes of the way different scholars have focused on “selected facets of the study.” One of the remarkable char­ acteristics of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is how this has been—and con­ tinues to be—the case. Initially, in the 1960s, the main debate was within economics on the theory of the firm—its growth and optimum size; this evolved in the late 1960s and 1970s, partly due to the changing focus of Penrose’s own work, to the multinational firm and international business. From the late 1980s, with the growth of business schools, the development of strategic management and, in particular, the emergence of the resource-based view of the firm, the book became an essential reference point for debates on the resource-based view (RBV) and, relatedly, know­ ledge in organizations. Along the way it has also nurtured discussion in the fields of business history, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more recently of different approaches to research in organization studies, including critical realism (Clark and Blundel, 2007), “engaged scholarship” (Kor, Mahoney, Siemsen, and Tan, 2016), and stakeholder approaches to the corporation (Kay, 2019). Penrose’s work and life will be the subject of a special issue of the Strategic Management Review (Buckley and de la Torre, 2020). In sum, it is hard to think of a book that has reached into, and been taken up by, so many areas of management research. In this chapter I will focus on some of the “facets” of Penrose’s argument that will be of interest to the organization studies community, facets that, perhaps surprisingly, actually provide an important foundation for a book that many have regarded over narrowly as a “treatise in economics.” I also want to consider why it is that this book has proved so durable and influen­ tial, and more generally reflect on the role of the “classics” in the social science, including management and organization studies. To do that I will draw on Art Stinchcombe’s famous article, “Should Sociologists Forget Their Mothers and Fathers” (Stinchcombe, 1982), in which he sets out a number of functions that clas­ sic texts can serve in the social sciences. With this useful framework we can then assess the continuing influence and legacy of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm,

280  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and, further than that, reflect on the development of organization studies, which was—as a field—taking shape at the time Penrose was researching and writing the book in the mid- and late 1950s, a context, environment, and time which also shaped the work of many early pioneers in the field, and one that was very different from the contemporary research environment. But first, in wishing to explore the relationship between “life,” “work,” and “times,” let us rehearse some of the main details of this remarkable woman’s life.

15.2  The Life We now have the great benefit of knowing a good deal more about Edith Penrose’s life and work through the recently published, carefully researched, and very readable biography written by her daughter-in-law, Angela: No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose (Penrose, 2017). Edith Penrose was born in California in 1914, and her life spanned the course of the twentieth century. She studied Economics at Berkeley in the 1930s, became a researcher at the International Labor Organization first in Geneva in 1939, and later, when the office was relocated, in Montreal. During the war she worked as a research assistant at the US Embassy in London, returning to the US after the war to work with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She began her “formal” academic career signing on to do a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1947, aged thirty-three—as what would now be termed a mature student. The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was published when she was in her mid-forties, and she later moved on to become an expert on the oil industry, multinationals, and the economies of the Middle East, as well as an inspirational teacher and mentor to many. Her life had been eventful, and not without tragedy. Marrying soon after graduat­ ing, her first husband was killed in a mysterious hunting accident, whilst she was bearing their child. Working as a research assistant to an English economist at Berkeley, Ernest Penrose (“Pen”), she moved with him to the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, to which he had been recruited by John Winant, the newly appointed director of the ILO, leaving her young son with her parents in California. A close ally of Roosevelt, and a great supporter of the New Deal, Winant was appointed to be the US Ambassador in London in 1940, and he was keen that “Pen”—and Edith—should work with him in London during the war. Penrose and Edith developed a close relationship, and married in 1944, he forty-nine and she twenty-nine. In 1945 her brother Jack, a pilot in the US Airforce, was shot down and killed in Italy. In 1947, Winant, who had been the most important linchpin in the relationship between the US and Britain, and between Roosevelt and Churchill in the difficult early years of the war, and a much-admired public figure in Britain during the war, took his own life. Edith suffered an even greater loss, just as she was beginning her

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master’s degree, when Pen and Edith’s son Trevan, aged two, died from an infection resulting from a dirty needle used in a routine injection. With typical energy she nevertheless threw herself into her academic work, beginning her PhD on the patent system in 1948, which she completed in 1950. This was published as The Economics of the International Patent System in 1951, and she became a lecturer in political economy at Johns Hopkins in the same year. She then joined the research team studying the growth of business firms, a project characteristic of the climate of post­ war reconstruction, and the role social scientists might play in public policy and research. As Fritz Machlup wrote in 1948 when supporting her application for a Fellowship Award from the American Association of University Women in Washington: Mrs Penrose is the most unusual woman I have ever come in to contact with. I have never thought it possible that a person could do as many things at the same time and do them as efficiently and well. Her ability and intelligence, together with her drive and industry would make her an outstanding performer in almost any field.  (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 116)

This is borne out by memories of most people who met her, or who worked with her. Her dynamism and sharp intelligence are often remembered, and it goes without saying that to achieve the success and respect that she did as a woman in the maledominated world of 1950s and 1960s academia was remarkable, not made any easier by the numerous “interruptions” to her “career,” moving from country to country, and the demands of her family responsibilities. No wonder she wrote in one of her letters to Machlup, when getting ready to leave the US for the last time in 1957: “And, as I have often said, I need a wife” (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 150). The research and writing of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was a major project and effort for her from the time of joining the research project through to delivery to the publisher, Blackwell, probably at some point in 1958. She worked hard at it, initially in the US, and then later in Australia—but had to fit the work in alongside all her other commitments and challenges—family life, her work at Johns Hopkins, playing a key role in the defense of Owen Lattimore against the charges of McCarthy’s House of Unamerican Activities. She seems to have worked out many of the core ideas of the book at quite an early stage, but the writing took time and was difficult. Her supervisor, Fritz Machlup, played an important role as guide and correspondent in a relationship of equals sometimes carried out through correspondence across the world. In this cor­res­pond­ ence she reveals many of the challenges she faced—getting the argument right, dealing with uncertainties, moments of loss of confidence, and generally meeting the exacting standards she set herself. The style is clear, written mainly in non-technical language and showing a relentless logic, line of enquiry, and ex­plan­ation. It moves from basic principles and ideas—her definition of the firm, the “image,” the role and work of managers, knowledge and experience, resources—to size, diversification, merger

282  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies and acquisition, in the later chapters. The more “tech­nical” or academic parts of the book are largely kept to the numerous footnotes which reveal the extent and scope of her reading, and her command of the relevant academic debates. It is a bold and creative book written with purpose, wit, and style. A number of fundamental views about the subject matter, and indeed more gen­ erally her outlook and what has recently been termed her “stance” (du Gay and Vikkelsø, 2017), come through the text. First, as she herself pointed out, and in con­ trast to dominant work on the firm at the time, there was a desire to study and understand the workings of actual firms—the “insides” as she referred to them. Related to this was a recognition of the role of management and teamwork in or­gan­ iza­tions, and the associated collective and cumulative knowledge. In terms of her approach to her work, she was broad in her reading and willing to seek ideas and insights from beyond her own discipline and training. She believed that any theory should be able to explain the “facts,” and in developing her theory combined in­duct­ ive and deductive reasoning. Developing her “single argument” was ambitious and far reaching, and in the book she showed a remarkable capacity to develop and sus­ tain a sophisticated and original argument, and express it in clear, deceptively straightforward language, committed as she was to write a book that would be useful beyond the academic world. If we think “reflexively” about Penrose and some of her own most important ideas, we can see that she brought her own “image” and outlook to her work, and that she was someone who made best use of her own “productive opportunities.” More or less as soon as the book was finished Pen and Edith left the United States—never to return to live there permanently. Disgusted by what McCarthyism revealed about American culture of the 1950s, Pen, in particular, resolved he would not want to bring up their young family there. This decision took them initially to Australia, and then to Iraq where they both worked at the University of Baghdad. As ever coming to terms with the situation in which she found herself, Edith started to learn Arabic and began her research on oil, the multinationals, and the political economy of the Middle East, which was to become the focus of her work for the next decade or more. She was appointed to a joint position at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the London School of Economics (LSE) in the mid1960s, and was widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the oil industry (but that is another story). On her “retirement” she moved to INSEAD to be Director of Research from 1978 to 1984, when Pen died. She then moved to Cambridge to live with her son Perran, and his wife Angela, until her death in 1996. She very much “moved on” from work on the firm. Whilst it informed her study of multinationals, she only returned to it in a mostly retrospective manner when her work gained greater attention in the 1980s and 1990s—first when giving a lecture to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the book at Uppsala in 1984 at the invita­ tion of Lars Engwall, and then, when fully retired, enjoying the “Indian summer” of recognition that came with the growing importance of the resource-based view of the firm in the 1980s and 1990s. She attended the Strategic Management Society

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conference as an invited guest in San Francisco in 1989; and the Prince Bertil Symposium on the Dynamic Firm, in Stockholm in 1994, her last academic meeting, and for which she wrote her last paper—later published, posthumously, as “Strategy/Organization and the Metamorphosis of the Large Firm” in Organization Studies in 2008. Whilst she did “move on,” it is clear that she felt there was an underlying historical thread that ran through her work in the 1950s and 1960s. In the preface to the col­ lection of essays, The Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil and Other Essays published in 1971, she wrote: At first glance it might seem that the three subjects dealt with in these essays written over the last twenty years could hardly be more diverse . . . Oddly enough, however, these subjects are connected by the same type of historical logic that characterizes the diversification of an industrial firm: the logic in the simple principle that one thing leads to another.  (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 189)

One of the factors that drove Edith’s work on the growth of firms was her dissatisfac­ tion with research done in (mainstream) economics, which she felt did not explain how firms grew. Not committed to mainstream economics, she was always prepared and keen to look elsewhere for insight and “answers” to the question she posed her­ self. Whilst in Australia, she knew several anthropologists and through them became interested in how people behave and adapt to environments. This led to an interest­ ing exchange with Machlup about the work of Ruth Benedict. Edith wrote: It is interesting, though, to ask [another question!] why she is one of the most noted anthropologists, and I have a theory. There are probably more careful observers, more accurate reporters, more logical thinkers, but none of them achieves the note she has. Her strength is precisely the thing that gives rise to the weakness you complain of—the fact that she develops more generalized theories in to which to place a mass of data. This catches the human mind, helps make sense of things. The writer capable of sweeping and original, and withal relatively simple theory-making, providing he (sic) isn’t too far off the beaten track of the traditions in his science, is the one with impact. The “tidiers up”, the “clarifiers” come along behind, with perhaps cleaner analysis and more clear-cut distinctions. The same holds for Margaret Mead, and David Riesman. (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 182)

And perhaps, as her grandson Jago suggests in his summary of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm in the biography, she may also have been describing herself in this fascinating comment that reveals something of her own approach: the breadth of her (inter-disciplinary) interests and reading; and a view that prefigures Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated ideas on paradigms and “normal science,” with the “tidiers up” being the puzzle solvers of normal science.

284  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies She also had ambition and a vision for the book, revealed in the rich cor­res­pond­ence with Machlup. As Jago Penrose writes, “As well as an explorer and pioneer, Edith saw herself as an artist, and The Theory of the Growth of the Firm as a work of art”: This will be a good book [she writes in 1955—four years before publication]. I have a real conception of it as a whole, it will not be a treatise on economics alone, but a work of art with a theme, balance, recurring rhythms, contrasts and symmetries. It should so hang together that it doesn’t raise an eyebrow anywhere but flows naturally and inevitably. My dream is high for it, I shall fall short, but I shall get close enough. (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 182, from correspondence with Machlup, November 1955)

15.3  The Work—The Theory of the Growth of the Firm It was indeed “a good book,” and it was also more than “a treatise on economics,” although that is how it may have been seen by many for much of the book’s own “life.” In this section I want to highlight some of the striking features of the book, and also why it is more than “a treatise on economics,” drawing as it does on a range of ideas from other disciplines—notably, business history, sociology and psychology, and the emergent field of organization theory—albeit in an understated way, but in a manner that is crucial to the development of Penrose’s theory and argument. There is now an extensive, rich, and extremely good secondary literature on The Theory of the Growth of the Firm which summarizes and debates many of her key arguments, and I have no intention, nor probably the ability, to rehearse that here. In his excellent summary Blundel (2015) distils her single argument into six “compo­ nents”; Kor and Mahoney (2000) describe “10 major original ideas” that inspire twenty-two research questions; and Perran Penrose and Christos Pitelis (2002) sum­ marize her ideas in thirteen points. My purpose is to draw Penrose’s work to the attention of the broad community of organization studies researchers, and to present and parse some of her ideas that prefigure and chime with many subsequent and current debates in organization studies, notably ones that are of particular interest to understanding the role of temporality and history. What is immediately striking is how bold and ambitious a goal she set herself—to investigate, theorize, and explain the growth of firms from first principles. At the time there was much discussion in economics about the optimum size of a firm, but few people had explored how firms grew and what may both enable and constrain that growth. As she put it in the preface to The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, “Just one word of warning: this book deals with familiar concepts but in an unfamiliar way and the reader is cautioned not to treat the introductory chapters lightly; they are essential to the analysis to follow. The entire study is essentially a single argument no step of which can be omitted without the risk of misunderstanding later conclu­ sions” (Penrose, 1959: xlviii).

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Simply put, the book moves from the micro (some understanding of individual decisions by managers), through the meso (the management, operation, per­form­ ance, and opportunities of the firm as an organization in its competitive environ­ ment) to the final chapters on the macro environment and considerations of policy in the economy as a whole. It is the “essential” introductory chapters that underpin the whole, and which are of most interest to organization studies, as it is here that she “prefigures” many important ideas later developed within the field. Some of her fundamental proposi­ tions were as follows: • A firm is a purposive human organization—“all the evidence we have indicates that the growth of a firm is connected with the attempts of a particular group of human beings to do something” (Penrose, 2009: 2)—thus recognizing the cen­ tral role of agency and management in the organization. • Defining her objective and research question as wanting to understand the growth of firms, Penrose was inevitably interested in dynamics, change, and process. Indeed, she explicitly and repeatedly in the opening pages of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm refers to the “process of growth”—her italics. “I am primarily concerned with a theoretical analysis of a process” (2009: 3). For her, “process” was an unfolding stream of activities in an organization over time, and this inevitably led her to stress the importance of studying an or­gan­ iza­tion’s history. • Any study of growth had to be based on and consistent with the experience of a real-world organization. In her case this was her detailed study of the Hercules Powder Company over the course of its history, originally intended to be included in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm but cut by the publisher in the interests of space, and later published by Penrose in the Business History Review in 1960, winning the annual Newcomen Society best article award (Penrose, 1960). • Sensemaking—from her experience of studying the managers at Hercules, Penrose was very conscious that they made decisions based on experience, hunch, and their understanding and perception of their own firm and its place in the market—limited rationality in conditions of uncertainty. This she termed, after Boulding, the “image” that managers have in their minds. “In order to focus attention on the crucial role of a firm’s inherited resources, the environment is treated in the first instance, as an ‘image’ in the entrepreneur’s mind of the possibilities and restrictions with which he is confronted, for it is after all, such an ‘image’ which in fact determines a man’s behavior: whether experience confirms expectations is another story” (Penrose, 2009: 4–5). And later: “The environment has not been treated as an objective ‘fact’ but rather as an ‘image’ in the entrepreneur’s mind; the justification for this procedure is the assumption that it is not the environment ‘as such,’ but rather the environment as the entrepreneur sees it, that is relevant for his actions” (2009: 189). As Foss

286  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies (2002: 156) argues, this is a subjective and constructivist view that probably signals the influence of Machlup and Austrian economics on her thinking. Although she does not write about this influence explicitly herself, this has been explored by several critics (Foss, 2002; Powell, Rahman, and Starbuck, 2010; Connell, 2007; Spender, 2014). • Collective knowledge, teamwork, and experience—anticipating the distinction between “explicit” and “tacit knowledge,” she referred to the former as “ob­ject­ ive” knowledge, which can be “transmissible to all on equal terms” (Penrose, 2009: 48). The latter she refers to as “experience,” “which can never be transmit­ ted; it produces a change—frequently a subtle change—in individuals and can never be separated from them” (2009: 48); and further “an administrative group is something more than a collection of individuals who have had experi­ ence of working together, for only in this way can ‘teamwork’ be developed. Existing managerial personnel provide services that cannot be provided by personnel newly hired from outside the firm, not only because they make up the administrative organization which cannot be expanded except by their own actions, but also because of the experience they gain from working within the firm and with each other enables them to provide services that are uniquely valuable for the operations of the particular group with which they are associ­ ated” (2009: 41–2). • Resources, capabilities, and competences—and the services they render. “In all of the discussion the emphasis is on the internal resources of a firm—on the productive services available to a firm from its own resources, particularly the productive services available from management within the firm” (2009: 4). Here we can see the ideas that prefigure the most common and familiar takeup of Penrose’s ideas in the general area of strategy and management studies, in the “resource-based view” of the firm developed in the 1980s and 1990s by Teece, Wernerfelt, Barney, Spender, Mahoney, and others. (The transmission, conduits, and to-ing and fro-ing between Penrose’s ideas and the work of these later scholars would make an interesting research project in itself.) After setting out these “essential”—and I would emphasize organizational—ideas in the opening five chapters, the book moves to the more conventional economics ter­ ritory/discourse of size, diversification, acquisition, small and large firms, industrial concentration and so on. Stepping back from the specifics and substance of her ideas, it is worth stress­ ing some other characteristics of the work. The book is indeed written with great clarity, freshness, flair, and wit. At the same time, one cannot but be impressed by the unrelenting logic and sense of enquiry as she builds her “single argument.” There is a sense of a very sharp, agile, and clear-thinking mind at work, and one that all the time is balancing some fundamental juxtapositions of any good social science enquiry—induction and deduction; history and theory; and process and structure.

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Some of this is enabled by a genuinely open-minded and interdisciplinary enquiry. The core references are to economics texts, but in addition to these she was reading business histories, psychology, and the existing and emergent literature in organization theory (Barnard, from whom she borrowed the term “authoritative communication,” operating in what she referred to as the “area of co-ordination”; and Herbert Simon). “The influence of ‘organizational structure’ has been particu­ larly stressed by the ‘organization theorists,’ ” she wrote, citing an early article of Cyert and March). Her open-mindedness and interdisciplinary range have been par­ ticularly commented on by two leading interpreters. Blundel writes: “Retracing Penrose’s ambitious journey requires a series of leaps across disciplinary boundaries, and the spanning of multiple levels of analysis” (Blundel, 2015: 100); and similarly, Lazonick comments: “For the vast majority of economics graduates, the integrated research agenda, inherent in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, represented, in my view, simply too great a methodological leap” (Lazonick, 2008: 72). We should also remember that this was a book written by a mature woman scholar in her forties, with three young children, a host of competing demands and responsibilities, no clear career path or affiliations, and all sorts of interruptions. Indeed, when the book was actually published she was out of a job, applying unsuc­ cessfully for a post at Cambridge, having famously driven, in the summer of 1959, from Iraq to the UK for her interview. How was she able to write such a book? Any answer to this question needs to consider the person herself; her life experience; the support she had from those around her; and the scholarly and research culture of the times. We know from Angela Penrose’s biography and the testimony of others that she was remarkably intelligent, with a broad range of interests and a lively engage­ ment with the world and the situations in which she found herself. She also had great energy and a capacity for work. In the preface to The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, Edith Penrose cites her greatest debts as being to her supervisor and mentor Fritz Machlup, well known as a leading economist of the Austrian school who had emigrated to the US before the war; and also to her husband Francis Penrose, a distinguished economist and policy adviser in his own right. Machlup became a lifelong friend; and “Pen” was an exact­ ing and supportive life partner and collaborator with a wide range of experience, to say the least. Prior to her formal academic career at Johns Hopkins she had under­ taken several important policy research projects at the International Labor Organization (ILO) and at the US Embassy during the war. Due to her and Pen’s role there she met and got to know many leading economists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. The culture and climate of much academic research in the post­ war period for those who had been through the war was pragmatic and applied—the purpose was to engage with the challenges of the real world and attempt to make the world a better place. This outlook is a consistent thread that runs throughout her work. Dividing her life into different stages, the writing of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm can be seen as just one, which we might refer to as stage 3—stage 1 being research work before and during the war; stage 2, the beginning of her academic

288  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies career (her master’s and doctoral work); stage 4, her work on the oil industry and the Middle East; stage 5, her time at SOAS and the LSE; and finally stage 6, her research leadership at INSEAD. At every stage, alongside her academic work she involved herself in practical, political, and policy issues. This blending and intertwining of life and work is a good example of the scholarly vocation described by C. Wright Mills in “On Intellectual Craftmanship,” his appen­ dix to The Sociological Imagination (Wright Mills, 1959). Published in the same year as The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, here is another committed scholar of that same generation, seeking to bridge theoretical work and practical and political engagement. He writes, offering advice to the young scholar: It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable figures within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such disassociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other . . . you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work (1959: 215–16)

He might well have been describing Edith Penrose. The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has proved itself to be a “classic,” not only in its durability and influence, but also in its “generative” capacity to stimulate research, debate, and enquiry in so many different areas—particularly latterly in different areas of management and organization studies, broadly defined. The point is that all these interpretations show the range and richness of the book. It seems entirely appropriate that Blundel refers to different “facets” of her work—like a jewel it can be turned in order to illuminate different qualities from different angles.

15.4  The Classics—How Do We “Read” Them, and What Can We Learn from Them? The book is a “classic”—in terms of its originality; its enduring influence in several successive fields; the remarkable freshness of the writing; and the discussion that repays reading again and again. But classic works can themselves become codified in a kind of academic shorthand. The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is regarded as an early statement of the RBV; Burns and Stalker (1961) is “about” mechanistic and organic forms of organization; Selznick (1949) is “about” formal and informal power in bureaucracies—and we can often overlook the richness of these books by thinking that all we need to know is the “thumbnail” summary. So how should we view the classics, and how should we “read” them? Art Stinchcombe offered some useful pointers in his 1982 essay, “Should Sociologists

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Forget Their Mothers and Fathers” (Stinchcombe, 1982). He described six functions of classics. The first function is to serve as a “touchstone” or exemplar of excellence that we can hope to emulate. The second is to provide “developmental tasks” to make minds more complex. A third function is “small coinage” to act as shorthand for identifying one’s perspective and orientation. Fourth, the classics help us to under­ stand the genealogy of fundamental ideas in a field, the lineage from the trunk to the branches and twigs, where the trunks are rich in fundamental concepts that can lead to the creation of new ideas. Fifth, they can be used in routine science as a source of hypotheses that have not yet been fully explored. Finally, the classics have a ritual function to bind together the profession and give it a sense of shared history. Jerry Davis and Meyer Zald added some other characteristics of classics, suggest­ ing that they offer the opportunity to review and re-read them, notably to under­ stand how we might have misread authors and to consider their work anew; another was that they give us the opportunity to understand authors in their social (and research) context. They suggested we should ask: What is the intellectual, social, and disciplinary context in which these classic works are written and why are they seen in their time as important, or if neglected unimportant. What is the process by which the canonical works are established as part of the foundational writings for a field or subfield? Are there aspects of the classic works that are given a specific interpretation or reading, so that later generations use the work in a somewhat different manner that earlier uses? (Davis and Zald, 2009: 637)

Certainly, Penrose serves some of Stinchcombe’s functions—the book is indeed a “touchstone”—a fine example of what serious, intelligent, well-grounded, and wellwritten enquiry is about. Classics as models of good work is the original sense of Thomas Kuhn’s muchabused notion of “paradigm”. A paradigm is a case of a beautiful and possible way of doing one’s scientific work. A touchstone then is a concrete example of the virtues a scientific work might have, in a combination that shows what work should look like in order to contribute to a discipline. . . The touchstone function is to furnish the mind with intellectual standards, not to furnish it with hypotheses . . . I believe that the reason we need such touchstone is that first class science functions with aesthetics standards as well as with logical and empirical standards. (Stinchcombe, 1982: 2, 5)

This view clearly chimes with Penrose’s own ambitions of producing “a work of art with its own rhythms and repeating themes.” The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has also clearly been generative of much further research (the “routine science” function)—and strikingly, as mentioned, in several different areas over the course of the book’s life, this being a good example of what Thornton refers to as “live re-interpretation” (Thornton, 2009).

290  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Du Gay and Vikkelsø in their book For Formal Organization, offer another more recent interpretation of classic scholarship in management and organization studies. They assess developments in the field and draw a distinction between what they refer to on the one hand as the “classical stance,” and on the other as the “metaphysical stance” in organization studies. The core of their argument is that the main focus of organization studies should be the organization itself (the formal organization) rather than a range of perhaps abstract organizational processes. In their view the classical stance included several features: . . . characterized, inter alia, by a pragmatic call to experience, an antithetical attitude to “high” or transcendental theorizing, an admiration for prac­tical scientific focus of enquiry (in the Weberian sense of a “disciplined pursuit of knowledge” . . ., a dissatisfaction and devaluation of explanation by postulate, and, not least, a practical focus on organizational effectiveness, for instance, born of a close connection to “the work itself”, or . . . “the situation at hand”. Du Gay and Vikkelsø (2017: 18)

When reading and returning to the “classics” we may inevitably draw some compari­ sons with later and contemporary research and writing. A noticeable trend that has taken place in a number of recent reviews and reflections on the current state of organization studies is for some leading contemporary scholars to “return to the classics” in one way or another. Du Gay and Vikkelsø invite us to reconsider the work of Chester Barnard, Wilfred Brown, and Wilfred Bion as examples of “the clas­ sical stance.” In a similar vein, Alvesson, Gabriel and Paulsen (2017) extol the work of C. Wright Mills in their book Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say. Commenting on Jerry Davis’s assessment of the field of organization studies, in which he brilliantly uses the metaphor of Winchester House, Steve Barley pro­ vides another example, writing: Importantly, our understanding of bureaucracy was not initially built on journal papers but rather on deep and lengthy studies usually published as books. I have in mind many of the books we now consider the classics of our field . . . Most were based on field studies or significant historical research. I propose that there was a reason our understanding of bureaucracy was significantly shaped by research published as books. First, extensive and intensive research was necessary for gathering the kind of data necessary to understand the bureaucratic phe­nom­ enon. Second, books provided the space and freedom to work through the complicated implications of what the researchers discovered and learned . . . But alas, we once again find ourselves up against the constraints of how our profession has evolved. Even though we need deep studies of how organizations and employment relations are changing, our field does not easily reward such research, and it has all but totally devalued the book as a form of communication. (Barley, 2016: 7)

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When leading figures in a field express strong misgivings about current develop­ ments and scholarship, we should take note. Why is this the case? Can one imagine leading economists having such reservations and misgivings about the state of their discipline? Am I and these others merely elderly figures looking back to a golden era, when we should be shuffling off the stage? Or is there an issue of concern, and something to be learnt from these classic works—not just in terms of the particular insights and defining concepts these scholars developed, but more importantly in the way they went about their work? It seems clear, though, that an argument can be made that much of social science in the 1950s and the post-war period was characterized by a problem-driven agenda, with ambitions to produce ideas and findings of policy and social value, which stands in contrast to the concerns Alvesson et al. (2017) raise about “gap filling” and other “self-generated conceptions” in contemporary scholarship.

15.5  Classics and the “History” of Organization Studies Although we are all aware of a kind of lineage within the field of organization studies—scientific management, human relations, organizational sociology, the Tavistock tradition, contingency theory, resource dependency, neo-institutionalism, labor process, power-knowledge, postmodernism, process studies, identity, etc., etc.—perhaps we lack an overarching history of organization studies that attempts to situate the development of the field in the broad social, political, and academic con­ text of the time and the likely values and “images” that scholars may have brought, and do bring, to their work in different eras. One sketching out of a periodization of the field was offered by Jim March (March, 2007), in which he took the vantage point of certain key political moments to consider developments in the field—his chosen vantage points being 1945, 1968 and 1989—and highlighted the ways in which “significant features of the field were molded by the moods and prejudices associated with academia after three critical events in 20th century history.” His article, titled “The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945,” based on an address given at the conference of the European Organization Studies Group (EGOS) in Bergen in 2006, was a typical blend of the perceptive, playful, provoca­ tive, and positive. He describes EGOS as a: broad association of scholars brought together by the myth of organization studies, by the idea that such a thing exists (or might exist) and by the idea that we are, however uncomfortably, united in a common endeavor. The myth of a distinct field of organization studies cannot easily be sustained by a contemplation of either our teachings, our writings, or our research. It is sustained by our hopes. (March, 2007: 10)

292  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies Edith Penrose was a scholar of the first period—the Second World War and its aftermath in the 1950s—of reconstruction, the establishment of a new postwar world order, and more relevant for our purposes what Jim March referred to as “a mood of the 1950s which was optimistic about social science and its possibilities for becoming a science that served an enlightened society through rational analysis and social engineering based on systematic, quantitative research” (2007: 14). He contrasted this “mood” with that of European scholars shaped by the 1960s, who were more pessimistic, and “an intelligentsia that had, compared to the immediate postwar group, substantially less positive attitudes about the academic establish­ ment, about business, about science, about mathematics and numbers, about males and the intellectual prejudices attributed to them, about the older generation, about progress, and about things associated with North America, but most of all about the quantitative methods and the mathematical theoretical forms that were hallmarks of the earlier period” (2007: 14). March notes that amongst the European refugees to the USA in the 1930s who shaped significantly large areas of American social science in the 1950s were two of Penrose’s main mentors—Joseph Schumpeter and, more directly influential, Fritz Machlup—her supervisor, collaborator, friend, and correspondent over many years. (Interestingly, Jim March lists Edith Penrose amongst the group of distinguished European scholars with an interest in organization who established themselves after the war. Even the smartest amongst us can make mistakes— it is fair to say, though, that her life had been a transatlantic one from 1939 onwards.) From her initial research at the ILO in Geneva in 1939, through her work as a researcher at the American Embassy in London during the war, and her work with Eleanor Roosevelt drafting the International Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s—all undertaken before she began her academic “career”—it is hard not to imagine that a significant motivation for her work and research was a positive (not necessarily positivist) view of social science, and its role in addressing social and policy issues, pursuing an agenda set by problems in society, rather than “internal” scholarly debates. As far as we know, she was also a pragmatist—hard working and focused on par­ ticular tasks and problems, to which she brought a remarkable intelligence, curiosity, and acuity. She was a free thinker who was courageous and independently minded in her disciplined approach to the research question she had set herself. She brought her own “image” to the study of the firm—regarded as a purposive organization, composed of human agents using their collective knowledge to take advantage of the “productive opportunity” presented to them, much as she did her best to make the most of the “productive opportunities” she was presented with in the unexpected and varied contexts in which she found herself—in London during the war; con­ fronting McCarthyism in higher education in the US; making the most of the research team on the firm in the postwar US economy at Johns Hopkins; moving to Baghdad and becoming one of the world’s leading experts on the oil economy, the Middle East, and the role of multinationals; establishing a dynamic center for Middle

The Life and Work of Edith Penrose  293

Eastern studies at SOAS; and late in life inspiring the emerging generation of ­scholars at INSEAD, and researchers in the resource-based view of the firm in strat­ egy, entrepreneurship, organizational knowledge, etc. She was demanding of herself, and of others—as recalled by a former student: “Among her many friends, col­ leagues, and students, Edith will always be affectionately recalled for her style of vigorous, frank and democratic engagement in academic discourse. Her sharp and acute intelligence could be readily engaged in the correction of evasive and illogical thinking of any kind” (O’Brien, 1997: 643). The interest that developed in her work in her “Indian summer” was not of her making—but rather resulted from the recognition by a wide range of scholars in several different areas of management and organizations of the creativity, rigor, and insight of her thinking. We can learn much from her life and her work. Whilst March’s three moments of 1954, 1968, and 1989 are indeed key global political events, the first two—to my mind—provide more useful milestones for understanding the evolution of organization studies than 1989. Although for some 1989 may have signaled the highly dubious “end of history” and what March described as the triumph of markets, if one wants to understand the evolving con­ text of higher education and the environment and culture of social science research, 1979, seen generally as the beginning of the period of neoliberalism, would seem more significant. Soon after this two significant developments in higher education took place: the rapid growth of business schools and business education through the 1980s and 1990s; and, perhaps more importantly for understanding trends in aca­ demic research, the introduction of a range of performance measures and standard­ ized outputs in the form of journal articles that have become determinant features of academic careers. This is the context of the “gap filling,” incremental, problemdriven, inward-looking research culture bemoaned by critics such as Alvesson et al., Davis, and Barley. Thus “classics” can serve not just as exemplars of fine work, and as foundation blocks or stepping stones in the evolution of a discipline, but also as a guide to understanding different research environments, cultures, and “outputs.” The schol­ arly environment of the 1950s appears to have offered opportunities for the detailed study of organizations over time, strong supportive collegial cultures, the norms of “long form” book writing and reading, a more open interdisciplinary intellectual context with closer roots to the disciplinary “trunks” of economics and sociology, and a strong ethos of the values and virtues of applied social science. All this seems very different from the instrumental, incremental, narrower context of the—iron­ic­al­ly much larger—academic world that has evolved since the 1980s, with its claims to applied relevance. Perhaps organization studies lacks a detailed intellectual and institutional history that might trace these developments in the way that Marion Fourcade has done for economics in her comparative study of developments in that discipline across the twentieth century in the US, the UK, and France. In addition to describing how national institutional dynamics structure disciplines, the book “tells the story of the political and economic forces that have shaped the professional

294  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies identities, practical activities, and disciplinary projects of economists” in different countries over time (Fourcade, 2010: xiv). The relationship between history and organization studies is an important and fruitful one, most notably in the use of a historical perspective and methodology in understanding the evolution and character of organizations over time. A historical perspective also offers the opportunity to understand the evolution of a discipline, as Fourcade has shown. A prime source for doing this is reading the “classics” to gain some understanding of the context in which they were written, and also to trace their enduring and important influence. The work of Edith Penrose provides a case in point, and presents us with the sources to examine a third important element in the relationship between history and organization studies—the context and develop­ ment of an individual scholar’s life and work. There is a great deal to be learnt from her work, and her life, and no substitute for reading The Theory of the Growth of the Firm as a “touchstone” of creative and enduring scholarship.

A Note on Sources The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was first published in the UK by Blackwell in 1959, and in the US by Wiley. A second edition—with an Introduction by Martin Slater, was published by Blackwell in 1980, and in the US by M. E. Sharpe. The second edition was put out of print in the 1980s. The 3rd edition was published in 1995 by Oxford University Press, with a new Foreword by Edith Penrose. The 4th edition was published in 2009 to mark the 50th anniversary of the o ­ riginal publication. This included a new Introduction written by Christos Pitelis, and Penrose’s Foreword to the 3rd edition as an Appendix. This fourth edition was reset, and consequently repaginated—not making things easy for scholars wishing to cite the work! As a rough guide, references to the 2009 edition are 4–5 pages before the 1959 edition. The case study of the Hercules Powder Company which Penrose intended to include as an Appendix in the original edition, but which was excluded at the publisher’ insist­ ence—because it would make the book too long and add cost—was published as an ­article in the journal Business History Review in 1960. This essay is highly derivative and draws on several main sources: Penrose, Edith (2009). Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penrose, E.  T. (1960). The Growth of the Firm—A Case Study: The Hercules Powder Company. Business History Review, 34, 1–23. Penrose, Angela (2017). No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pitelis, Christos (Ed.) (2002). The Growth of the Firm: The Legacy of Edith Penrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Life and Work of Edith Penrose  295 There is extensive commentary on Edith Penrose’s work in journals—some of the more interesting articles are those by Michael Best, Richard Blundel, Carol Connell, Nicolai Foss, Yasemin Kor, William Lazonick, Andy Lockett, Joe Mahoney, and Alan Rugman.

Other References Alvesson, M., Gabriel, Y., and Poulsen R (2017). Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barley, S. (2016). 60th Anniversary Essay: Ruminations on How We Became a Mystery House and How We Might Get Out. Administrative Science Quarterly, 61(1), 1–8. Blundel, Richard (2015). Beyond Strategy: A Critical Review of Penrose’s “Single Argument” and its Implications for Economic Development. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 22(1), 97–122. Buckley, P., and de la Torre, J. (2020). Strategic Management Review: Special Issue on The Work of Edith Penrose. Burns, T. and Stalker, G. M. (1961). The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock. Clark, P., and Blundell, R. (2007). Penrose, Critical Realism and the Evolution of Business Knowledge: A Methodological Reappraisal. Management and Organization History, 2(1), 45–62. Connell, C. M. (2007). Fritz Machlup’s Methodology and ‘The Theory of the Growth of the Firm’. Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, 10(4), 300–12. Davis, G. F., and Zald, M. (2009). Sociological Classics and the Canon in the Study of Organizations. In P. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations (pp. 635–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Du Gay, P., and Vikkelsø, S. (2017). For Formal Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foss, N.  J. (2002). Edith Penrose: Economics and Strategic Management. In C.  Pitelis (Ed.), The Growth of the Firm: The Legacy of Edith Penrose (pp. 147–64). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fourcade, M. (2010) Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kay, J. (2019). The Concept of the Corporation. Business History, 61, 1129–43. Kor, Y. Y., and Mahoney, J. T. (2000). Penrose’s Resource-Based Approach: The Process and Product of Research Creativity. Journal of Management Studies, 37(1), 99–139. Kor, Y. Y., Mahoney, J. T., Siemsen, E., and Tan, D. (2016). Penrose’s “The Theory of the Growth of the Firm”: An Exemplar of Engaged Scholarship. Production and Operations Management Journal, 25(10), 1727–44. Lazonick, W. (2008). Business History and Economic Development. In Geoffrey G. Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Business History (pp. 68–95). Oxford: Oxford University Press. March, J. (2007). The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945. Organization Studies, 28(1), 9–19.

296  Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies O’Brien, P. K. (1997). Edith Penrose, 1914–1996: In Memoriam. Middle Eastern Studies, 33(3), 643–4. Penrose, E. (1971). The Growth of Firms: Middle East Oil, and Other Essays. London: Cass. Penrose, E. (1985). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm Twenty-Five Years After. Uppsala. Penrose, P., and Pitelis, C. (2002). Edith Elura Tilton Penrose: Life, Contribution, and Influence. In C. Pitelis (Ed.), The Growth of the Firm: The Legacy of Edith Penrose (pp. 17–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Powell, T., Rahman, N., and Starbuck, W. (2010). European and North American Origins of Competitive Advantage. In J.  Baum and J.  Lampel (Eds), The Globalization of Strategy Research (pp. 313–51). Bingley, UK: Emerald. Selznick, P. (1949). The TVA and the Grass Roots. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Spender, J.-C. (2014). Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity and Enterprise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stinchcombe, A.  L. (1982). Should Sociologists Forget their Mothers and Fathers. American Sociologist, 17(1), 2–11. Thornton, P. H. (2009). The Value of the Classics. In P. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations (pp. 20–38). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright Mills, C. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Index abductive turning point  148 Abercombie and Fitch, Hollister narrative  261 abstract time  78–9 acceleration and creative processes  70, 71–4, 76, 77, 80–1, 81–3 and linear metaphors of time  172 action-guiding anticipations  143, 144, 150–1 action research case study (Local News) 94–109 and the withness approach  139, 143, 144, 157 actor-network theory, and historical consciousness 192–3 actual events  59–60 Adam, B.  77, 79 agency  3, 10, 11 and events in sequential time  31 and the flow of time  3 in the growth of the firm  285 past, present and future  3 and routines  117–18 agency question in historical scholarship  4 in organizational theory  4 airport analogy, flowline metaphor of news production 104–6 alienation 175 Alvesson, M.  290, 291, 293 ambitemporality 133 ancient Greece Eleatic philosophers  75 kairos/cronos views of time  52, 77 and rhetoric  262–3 Ancona, D.G.  30 Anno Domini chronology  172 Ansart, S.  133 Apple  69, 83 appreciative inquiry  139, 144, 158 Arab-Israeli conflict  22–3 archaic societies, cyclical metaphor of time in  172 archeology 4 archivists, and organizational memory work  9, 241, 243–54, 255 Aristotle 40 arresting moments  142, 143, 150, 154 artifacts of retrospect  138–9 artificial intelligence  31 AT& T  69

Atleic aspect in linguistics  19 Augustine, St  74 Confessions  29, 32–3, 34, 172 authenticity of historical consciousness  192, 214 resoluteness and the authentic life  24–5 Bakhtin, M.M.  142, 143, 146, 150 Bannon, Steve  268 Barden, A.  75 Barley, Steve  290, 293 Barnard, Chester  290 Bastien, François  9, 240–56 Beagle, Peter, The Last Unicorn 48 becoming flows of  81 future 79 organizational 138 of routines  118 temporality 80–1 time  71, 73, 75, 77, 83 being time  71, 84 Being and Time (Heidegger)  18, 24 Benedict, Ruth  283 Bentley, M.  261 Bergen, M.  128 Bergson, Henri  34–5, 52, 55, 75, 80, 81 on abstract and concrete time  78–9 Berlin Wall  266 Bion, Wilfred  290 Bitektine, A.  192 Blattner, W.  4–5, 6, 15–26, 79 Bluedorn, A.C.  30, 50, 131 Blundel, Richard  279, 284, 287, 288 Boje, D.M.  193, 225 Bongers, Diane Ella Németh  8, 189–216 Bourdieu, Pierre  9 field  221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 228–32, 235, 237 habitus  221, 222, 223–4, 228 theory of practice  220, 221–2, 223–5 Bouty, Isabelle  6, 50–63 Braverman, Harry  177 Labour and Monopoly Capital 176 Brexit 267 Brown, S.L.  70 Brown, Wilfred  290 Burns, T.  288 Bush, George W.H.  266

298 Index Business History Review 285 business process re-engineering  72 Bygballe, Lena  7, 116–34 Bygdäs, Arne Lindseth  7, 89–111 calendar time  2, 45 calendrical contrasts  48 French Revolutionary calendar  48 Cameron, K.S.  222 capitalist economy and linear time  172, 173–4 and social acceleration  72 carefulness  82, 83–4 Carr, David, Time, Narrative and History 21 causal ordering of events  30–1 Cavendish, Ruth  179–80, 181–2 change events and the present  35 and time as events  29 see also organizational change change-blindness 17 Chaplin, Charlie  174 Chen, J.  70 Chia, R.  80 Christianity as a historical metanarrative  262, 264, 265, 270, 271 and linear time  172 and political time  48 chronos view of time  52 circular views of time  46–7 Clark, Peter  99, 111, 176, 179, 180, 182–4 classical antiquity see ancient Greece classic texts and the history of organization studies  291–4 reading and learning from  288–91 role of in social sciences  279 Clegg, S.  57 clock time  2, 5, 30, 45 and creativity  71, 75, 76–7, 81 hegemony of  174–5 and industrialisation  173–4 and news production  91, 105 and the ontology of temporality  6, 50, 51, 53 Coghlan, D.  157–8 cognitive biases  260 cognitive dissonance  260, 263, 268 Cold War  22–3, 24 collective memory  61 collective time  178 commonality of events  40 communities of inquiry  149–50, 153, 155, 157 and historical consciousness  214 Comrie, B.  18, 19 concrete time  78–9 confirmation bias  263, 268

conscresence 37 Conservative nationalism  267–8 continuity of events  29, 30, 31 in discontinuity  41–2 the Gettysburg Address  5, 37–40 and temporality  58, 60–2 Coraiola, Diego  9, 240–56 Cornelissen, J.P.  92, 110 coupling, and historical consciousness  190 coworking 62–3 creativity flow of  70–1 and language  146 temporal dimensions of  6–7, 69–84 credibility, and rhetorical history  212 critical realism, in organization studies  279 critical theory  4 Cromwell, Oliver  37 cultural myths see historical metanarratives culture and temporality  61 and time  45–7 Cunliffe, A.L.  54 cyclical historical metanarrative  264, 268 cyclical-qualitative tradition of time  169, 170, 179 cyclical time  12, 172 and news production  109 Czarniawska, B.  70 Czikszentmihalyi, M.  70–1 Davis, Jerry  289, 290, 293 days, sociotemporal order of  45 deceleration  71, 73–4, 81 Decker, Stephanie  9, 169–85 declinist historical metanarratives  9, 264, 265, 268 Deleuze, Gilles  55 Deroy, X.  57 Descartes, René  172 Desjardins, Alphonse  272 Dewey, John  7, 142, 150, 153 dialogue, situated  143, 145–7, 152–3 digital nomadism  62–3 discontinuity of events continuity in  41–2 the Gettysburg Address  37–40 dispensational historical metanarratives  9, 264, 268 distant future events  59 distant past events  29–30 Ditton, Jason  179, 180–1 dualisms, predefined  62 Du Gay, P.  290 duration  46, 47 of events  57 norms of  44 and the present time  32 Durkheim, E.  177, 178, 179

Index  299 ecology of routines  119 Eisenhardt, K.M.  70, 123 Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History 172 embeddedness and historical consciousness  214 in routine patterning  127 embodied history  222, 234 emergence, concept of  6 emergent leadership  78 emergent temporality  79, 81 Emirbayer, M.  3, 35, 41 employees and organizational time  179–85 temporal autonomy for  176 engaged scholarship  279 Engwalls, Lars  282 Enlightenment  75, 76 and historical metanarratives  265 episodic memory  213 episodic view of change  223 epochal theory of time (Whitehead)  5, 35–7, 41 continuity and discontinuity  37–40 Essen, A.  118 ethnographic conceptions of time  177–8 European Organization Studies Group (EGOS) 291–2 European telecommunications market, liberalization of  220 Evans-Pritchard, E.E.  179 events 10–11 assumed objectivity of  11 and the becoming of organizational temporality  5, 29–42 causal ordering of  30–1 frequency of  44 narratives of  10–11, 12, 20–1 ongoing events and the lived experience of storytellers 222 and organizational temporality  5 resolution of  21 and sequential time  30–2 timing 44 and Whitehead’s epochal theory of time  3, 35–7, 41 events-based approach to temporality  6, 52, 55–63 applying 58–9 implications and contributions of  60–3 notion of an event  55–6 organization as a structure of events  56–8 relevance for studying contemporary organizations 62–3 evolutionary psychology, and rhetorical history 272–3 experience time  105

experimentation, and pragmatist inquiry  149, 153, 154 explicit knowledge, Penrose on the growth of the firm  285–6 Fachin, G.F.  139 family structure, and social acceleration  72 field, Bourdieu’s concept of  221, 222, 223, 224, 225 in Scandinavian telecoms company study  228–32, 235, 237 field experiments, in rhetorical history  269–70 Financial Times 89 finite conception of time  45–6 First World War, narrative of Vimy Ridge  260 Fleetwood, J.  225 flow of creativity  70–1 flowline metaphor, of news production  7, 89, 90, 93, 103–10, 110–11 flow of time  3 Follett, M.P.  138, 160 Ford, Henry/Fordism  174, 176 Fortune 500 firms, study of organizational memory work in  9, 240–56 Foss, N.J.  279, 285–6 Foster, William M.  9, 11, 211, 240–56 Foucault, Michel  4 Fourcade, Marion  293–4 freelancing 62–3 French Revolutionary calendar  48 frequency of timing  47 Fry, Art  82 Fukuyama, Francis  266, 268 the future the becoming future  79 and living forward  141 and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim  79 relationship of past, present and future  32–3 future events  29–30, 31–2, 35, 41 dating 44 and the ontology of temporality  6, 53, 54–5, 55–6, 58, 59–60 and the present time  32 future orientation, in routine patterning  119, 124, 127–8, 131–2, 133 Gabriel, Y.  290, 291 Ganzin, M.  268 Geertz, Clifford  4 Gelfand, M.J.  190 generative metaphors  92–3, 110–11 flowline  7, 89, 90, 93, 103–10, 110–11 Gettysburg Address  5, 37–40 Gilmore, David  33 Giota method of data analysis  245–6 global economy, and clock time  76

300 Index Google  69, 83 Graebner, M.E.  123 Gray, John  267 Grazia, Sebastian de  174 Time, Work and Leisure 172 Grey, C.  72 gross time  46 Gurvich, Georges, The Spectrum of Social Time 178 habitus, Bourdieu’s concept of  221, 222, 223, 223–4 in Scandinavian telecoms company study  228, 232, 234, 235, 237 Hagee, Rev. John  268 Hagen, Aina Landswerk  7, 89–111 Haley, U.C.  193 Harari, Yuval Noah  262 Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 174 Hartog, François, Presentism and Experiences of Time 178 Hassard, John  8, 9, 10, 12, 169–85 Hatch, M.J.  192, 214 Hegel, Georg  172, 266 Heidegger, Martin  75, 79, 80, 81, 82 Being and Time  18, 24 intratemporality 23–5 originary temporality  15, 18–19, 20, 21 phenomenology of time  5 “helical” time  172 Helin, J.  161 Hercules Powder Company  285, 294 heritage walls  253 Hernes, Tor  5, 6, 11, 29–42, 50–63, 78 Herodotus  4, 172 Heron, J.  95 historical consciousness and actor-network theory  192–3 as a management tool  8, 189–216 and organizational change management  220, 223, 232–6 see also loose history; tight history historical metanarratives  11, 12, 261–8 Christianity  262, 264, 265, 270, 271 declinist  9, 264, 265, 268 defining 261 and historical narratives  268 linear-progressive  263–4, 265, 266–8, 270 Marxism  9, 262, 265–6, 268 see also rhetorical history historical narratives  213, 259–60, 268 historical reconstruction, and cultural myth  9–10 historical time  10, 11 historical turn, in organizational research  1–2 history abandonment of  232–4, 236 embodied  222, 234

embracing 234–6 end of history metanarrative  266, 293 impact on organization change management studies  220, 222–3 objectivity question in  3–4 organization studies  1, 291–4 subjective interpretation of  4 uses of the past in organizations  220, 221, 223 see also rhetorical history history-as-fact model, of organizational change 211 history-as-power model, of organizational change 211 history-as-rhetoric model, of historical consciousness 212–13 history-as-sensemaking 212 hourly rhythms  45 Howard-Grenville, J.A.  119, 120, 131, 132, 133 HP 69 Hubert, H.  177–8 The Human Stain (Roth)  22 hurry sickness  72 Hussenot, Anthony  6, 50–63 Husserl, Edmund  34 retention and protention  4–5, 15–17, 19–20, 25, 79 hypothesis, and pragmatist inquiry  148–9 IBM 271 idealist views of time  75, 77, 78–80, 81 Idea Propeller tool  103 identity and temporality  61 ILO (International Labour Organization)  280, 287, 292 immanence of past, present and future events  54–5, 58 in the structure of events  58–9 Whitehead’s epochal view of time  38–9 impulse, and pragmatist inquiry  148 industrial societies and clock time  174–5 and linear metaphors of time  170, 172, 173–4 social cycle research  177–84 innovation projects  69 institutional logics  271–2 intepretive history  9–10 International Labour Organization (ILO)  280, 287, 292 inter-subjective concept of time  91 intratemporality 23–5 Intuit Canada  69 Ireland, discontinuities of time  37 James, William  7, 8, 33, 142, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151 Jensen, Astrid  8–9, 11, 220–37

Index  301 Johnson, M.  109, 173 just-in-time production  72 kairos view of time  52 Kay, John  279 Kierkegaard, S.  140 King, Martin Luther  38, 39 Koll, Henrik  8–9, 11, 229–37 Kor, Y.Y.  284 Kuhn, Thomas  2, 4, 283, 289 Kundera, Milan, Slowness  73, 81 laboratory experiments, in rhetorical history  269–70 labor process theory  170 Lakoff, G.  109, 110, 173 Langley, A.  139 language background of  143 in dialogue situations  146–7 grammar and the temporal aspect of  5, 17–18 withness approach to  147 Lasewicz, Paul  271 late modernity  70, 72–3 Lattimore, Owen  281 legitimacy of historical consciousness  214 of loose history  192 symbolic standard of  11 of tight history  191 Lenin, V.I.  268 Lewin, K.  157 liberal-progressive historical metanarratives  9, 263–4, 265, 266–8 Lincoln, Abraham, Gettysburg Address  5, 37–40 linear-progressive historical metanarratives  263–4, 265, 266–8, 270 linear views of time  12, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 169, 170, 172 events 57 and industrial societies  170, 172, 173–4, 175 linear-quantitative tradition  169–70, 174, 176 and news production  7, 109, 110 rethinking the linear tradition  175–7 linguistics, tenses and aspects in  17–18, 19 LinkedIn  69, 83 liquid journalism  89 literary criticism  4 living forward  140–1, 143, 152 abduction and experimental action  153–4 loose history  8, 189, 190, 191–4, 214–15 legitimacy of  192 narratives 193 organizational frictions between tight and loose history 209–10

power of  192 research study  196, 203, 204–9 Lorino, Philippe  7, 119, 138–62 Lubinski, C.  193, 212 Lyotard, Jean-François  266 Machlup, Fritz  281, 283, 284, 287, 292 Mahoney, T.  284 management, microfoundations movement in 260 managers, and historical narrative research  270, 272 March, Jim, The Study of Organziations and Organizing since 1945  291–2, 293 Martela, F.  160 Marxism 176 as a historical metanarrative  9, 262, 265–6, 268 Marx, Karl  266, 268 Das Kapital 172 Matelli, G.  111 mathematic conception of time  46 Mead, G.H.  29, 35, 41, 55, 75, 79–80, 81, 82, 142 and pragmatist inquiry  150 Pragmatist Maxim  79 measured time  46 measuring time  44 Memento (film)  16 memory see organizational memory work Merton, Robert  178–9 meta-historical narratives  9, 11 metaphors  92, 109–11 comparison model  110 conceptualizing time and temporality  171–4 and dialogue  147 of organizational memory work  242 performing metaphorical events  106–9 see also generative metaphors; linear views of time Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson)  173 microfoundations movement in management  260 Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination 288 mindfulness  82, 83–4 Minkus, A.  268 Mische, A.  3, 35, 41 Missonier, S.  54, 55 mobilities 83 months, sociotemporal order of  45 moral progress, historical metanarrative of  267–8 Morgan, Gareth  92, 93 Images of Organization 171 movement 83 multinational firms, historical narratives  271 multiple histories, weaving together of  10 multitasking 72 Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization 173 Murphy, Arthur  80

302 Index museums, corporate  253 Musson, David  10, 278–94 narratives  12, 225–6 conclusion 21 embodied  222, 225 of events  10–11, 12, 20–1 historical  213, 259–60, 268 loose history  193 narratable processes  20–1 narrative habitus  225 narrative temporality  54 and organizational change  142, 233–4 and organizational memory work  241, 242–3, 253 plot 40 of prospect  139 relevance of  21 rhetorical history  12, 191 strategic narration of history  222 see also historical metanarratives Nayak, A.  159 near past events  29–30 neoliberalism 293 net time  46 news production  7, 89–90 case study (Local News) of flowline metaphor 92–109 deadline regime  7, 89, 90, 91, 98–101, 104, 105, 109 “digital first” strategy  95, 99, 102, 105, 109 digital platforms  105 liquid journalism  89 moving to a continuous flowline  7, 89–111 online  89–90, 109 page planners  100–1 technology-accelerated 70 time and temporality in news organisations 90–2 Newtonian time  30, 52, 76–7, 172 non-successive temporality  21–5 Nordic model of work and welfare  226–7, 231, 232 Northern Ireland, discontinuities of time  37 Novick, Peter  3 Obama, Barack  267 objective concept of history  8, 9, 221, 221–2, 223, 236 objective concept of time  5, 6, 8, 10, 53, 75, 79, 91, 171, 222 objective knowledge, Penrose on the growth of the firm 285–6 objectivity question in history  3–4 O’Brien, P.K.  293 OMEN research project  95, 109

ontological commitments, and rhetorical history  261, 268, 270 ontology of temporality  6, 50–63 events-based approach to  6, 52, 55–63 and the onotology of time  50–1, 52–5 ontology of time  50–1, 52–5 organisational time  175–6 Organisational Transitions and Innovation-Design (Clark and Starkey)  176 organisations, historical narratives of  259–60 organizational becoming  138 organizational change in the growth of the firm  285 and historical consciousness  211–12 and organizational memory work work  255 time and history in  1–2 withness approach to  142–3, 145, 151 organizational culture, and historical consciousness 190 organizational memory work  9, 240–56 approaching the past in  9, 220–37 deep dives into archives  249–50 defining  241, 254 heritage walls  253 importance of  240, 254–5 interpreting  247, 250–2 interpretive nature of  255 library metaphor of  242 long-term  9, 241, 247, 249–54 memorialisation  247, 253–4 recollection  247, 249–50 retrieval  247, 248 role of corporate archivisits/historians in  241, 243–4 short-term  9, 241, 247–9 and size of organization  255 social construction  240 storytelling  247, 249, 252–3 structural/functional approach to  241, 251 organizational scholarship  12 organizational temporality  2 events and the becoming of  5, 29–42 organizational time in historical perspective  8, 169–85 foundational thinking on time and temporality 170–5 organization frictions, between loose and tight histories 209–10 organizations creativity in  69–72 events-based approach to  52, 55–63 organizations characteristics as temporal phenomena 60–1 role of in temporal frames  53 organization studies  1, 279, 280 classical and metaphysical stances in  290

Index  303 core constructs in historical  11 history of  291–4 originary temporality, in Heidegger  15, 18–19, 20, 21 Orlikowski, W.J.  140 ostensive routines  117, 118 pace, in routine patterning  126–7, 130, 130–1, 132 Paleolithic artists  74 paradigms  283, 289 passing time  46 the past history and uses of the past in organizations  220, 221, 223 and living forward  141 and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim  79 and narratives of organizational actors  222 relationship of past, present and future  32–3 past events  29–30, 31–2, 34–5, 41 dating 44 and the ontology of temporality  6, 53, 54–5, 55–6, 58, 59–60 past orientation, in routine patterning  119, 124, 125–6, 127 Peck, C.  189, 193 Peirce, C.S.  153–4 Pelto, P.J.  190 Penrose, Angela, No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose  278, 280, 287 Penrose, Edith  10, 278–94 Economics of the International Patent System 281 Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil and Other Essays 283 and the history of organization studies  292–4 life  280–4, 287–8, 292–3 “Strategy/Organization and the Metamorphosis of the Large Firm”  283 Theory of the Growth of the Firm 278–80, 281–2, 283, 284–8, 294 Penrose, Jago  283, 284 Penrose, Perran  284 Penrose, T.F.  289 Perfect-aspect attributes  5, 18, 19, 21–2, 24, 25 performance management, study of Scandinavian telecoms company  9, 220–1, 226–37 performative routines  117, 118, 119 personal identity, and Heidegger’s intratemporality  24, 25 pessimistic historical narrative  267–8 Pettigrew, A.M.  222 phenomology, experiencing a process unfolding in time  4–5, 15–17 Philo of Alexandria  264 philosophy, temporal analysis in  170–1

physicotemporal order  5, 44–5, 48 physics 75 Pinker, Steven  266, 267, 268, 270, 271 Pink Floyd, “Time”  33–4, 35, 36–7, 39, 40 Pitelis, Christos  284 Plato 52 playfulness  82, 83–4 political conversion, non-successive temporality in 22–4 politics of time  6, 47–8 Poor, S.  270–1 Post-It Notes  82 postmodernism  171, 179 Poulson, R.  290, 291 power of tight history  191 and time  5, 47 practising time  77–81 pragmatist inquiry  139, 140, 147–9, 147–57, 150–2 abduction and narration  153–4 community of inquiry  149–50, 153, 155, 157 and experimentation  149, 153, 154 and hypothesis  148–9 and impulse  148 methodological requirements for  151–7 Pragmatist Maxim (Mead)  79 the present extension of time from  29, 32 and living forward  141 and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim  79 and narratives of organizational actors  222 relationship of past, present and future  32–3 present events  31–2, 41 and the ontology of temporality  6, 53, 54–5, 55–6, 58, 59–60 present orientation, in routine patterning  119, 124, 126–7, 131–2, 134 primitive societies  179 process in the growth of the firm  285 process consulting  144, 158 processes unfolding in time  4–5 process ontology continuity in discontinuity  41–2 events-based approach to  31–2 on organizational change  144 and pragmatist inquiry  152 and the withness approach  157, 158 process organization  12, 77 process philosophy  6, 8, 12, 55 process theory  1, 10 process as withness  139, 141–5 productive dialogue  144 product life cycles  76 projectification of work  51

304 Index project team work  70 protention and retention, in Husserl  4–5, 15–17, 19–20, 25, 79 qualitative time  47, 169, 170, 184 quality routine, Alpha research study of  120–30, 130–3 Raelin, J.A.  157–8 Ratnecke, J.  133 Rawlinson, Michael  9 realist views of time  75, 77, 81, 82–3, 169 Reason, P.  95 reckoning time  44 reflection-in-action  140–1, 146 reflexivity, and historical consciousness  214 relational-processual ontology  139 relational-responsive attitudes  144 resoluteness, and the authentic life  24–5 resource-based view (RBV) of the firm  279, 286, 288 retention and protention, in Husserl  4–5, 15–17, 19–20, 25, 79 retrospective illusion  138 Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say (Alvesson, Gabriel and Poulson)  290, 291 Reuters Digital News Report  89–90 rhetorical history  2, 4, 10, 11, 193, 212–13, 215, 262–3, 268 directions for future research  269–73 historical metanarratives and rhetorical effectiveness  9–10, 259–73 narratives  12, 191 and organizational change management studies 223 subjective-objective duality in  11 see also historical metanarratives Richtermeyer, G.  131 Ricoeur, P.  40, 52, 54 Rindova, V.  118–19 Roman Empire  264 Roman time  172 Roosevelt, Eleanor  280, 292 Roosevelt, F.D.  280 Rorty, R.  149–50 Rory, Tracey  6–7, 69–84 Rosa, H.  70, 71, 72–3, 81 Roth, Philip, The Human Stain 22 routine patterning  7, 117–34 Alpha study of  7, 120–30, 130–3 and temporality  7, 130–3 Rowlinson, M.  242 Rowlinson, Michael  9, 169–85 Roy, Donald  179, 180, 182 Rudningen, Gudrun  7, 89–111 Russel, J  192, 215

Saylors, R.  193 Scandinavian telecoms company, change management study of  9, 220–1, 226–37 Schein, E.H.  146, 147 Schón, D.A.  92–3, 140, 146 Schultz, M.  192, 214 Schumpeter, Joseph  292 Scientific Management  175 Second World War  280–1 invasion of the Soviet Union  266 Seixas, P.  189, 193, 212 self-employment  62–3, 174 Selznick, P.  288 semiotics of time  47 sense-making, Penrose on the growth of the firm 285–6 sequential ordering of time  47 sequential time  44 and events  30–2, 35 service sector  176 Shotter, John  7, 139, 142, 143–4, 147, 150, 158, 160, 161 Silver, Spence  82 Simon, Herbert  287 Simpson, Barbara  6–7, 69–84, 119 Singer, Peter  266–7, 268 situated creativity  149 situated dialogue  143, 145–7, 152–3 Slow Cities  74 Slow Democrats  74 Slow Food movement  74 Slow Radio  74 Smith, Adam  175 Smith, Andrew  9–10, 12, 192, 215, 259–73 social acceleration see acceleration social change and social acceleration  73 time and history  1 social cycle perspectives  177–9 ethnographic exemplars for organizational research 179–84 social groups, and the organization of time  5, 44 socialism 265–6 sociality, and temporality  79–80, 82 social media  270 social memory  242–3, 245–7, 248 social rhythms  44 social time  171 socio-cultural time  45 sociology of time  5–6, 44–8 culture and time  45–7 political time  47–8 the sociotemporal order  5, 44–5, 48 sociotechnical systems design  176 solar year  45 songs, and events  33–4, 35, 36–7, 39, 40

Index  305 Sony 69 Sorokin, Pitirim  45, 178–9 Soviet Union  48, 266 space, and the ontology of time  53 speed and time  46 Spengler, Oswald  268 Stalin, J.  48, 268 Stalker, G.M.  288 Standifer, R.L.  50 Starkey, K.  176 Stinchcombe, Art, ‘Should Sociologists Forget Their Mothers and Fathers?’  279, 288–9 storytelling, in organizational memory work  247, 249, 252–3 Strategic Management Review 279 stress  72, 73, 76, 83 and news production  91, 99 structural poses  183–4 subjective concept of history  8, 9, 221, 222, 223, 236 subjective concept of time  8, 10, 11, 50, 75, 79, 91, 171, 222 see also ontology of temporality substantialist view in organisation studies  60 Suddaby, Roy  9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 240–56, 268 Swárd, Anna  7, 116–34 symbolism of timing  47 tacit knowledge, Penrose on the growth of the firm 285–6 Talking About Organizations podcast  138, 140 Taylor, F.W. /Taylorism  72, 175 Technics and Civilization (Lewis)  173 technological determinism  174–5 technology, and social acceleration  72 Teleic-aspect attributes  5, 19, 21–2, 24, 25 temporality  5, 12, 91 defining 259 in Heidegger  15, 18–19, 20, 21, 23–5 non-successive 21–5 ontology of  6, 50–63 in routine development  117–19 in routine patterning  7, 119–34, 130–3 temporal consciousness  224 temporal depth  30 temporal dimensions of creativity  6–7, 69–84 temporal directionality  77 temporality turn in organizational research  1–2 the temporal trajectory  2 see also ontology of temporality; organizational temporality temporal language  5, 17–18 temporal sequences, and narratives  222 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy)  174 Thatcher, Margaret  37

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class 172 “Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” 173–4 Thornton, P.H.  289 3M  69, 82 tight history  8, 189, 190–1, 193–4, 214–15 legitimacy of  191 organizational frictions between tight and loose history 209–10 power of  191 research study  196–204 time famine  72 timefulness  6, 80–1, 82 acceleration and creative practice  81–3 time horizons, in routine patterning  120, 123, 126–7, 130, 131, 132 time impoverishment  76 timelessness  80, 82 Time, Narrative and History (Carr)  21 time orientation, in routine patterning  120, 123, 125–7, 131–2 time scarcity  173 Tolsted, Ingrid M.  7, 89–111 trade unions, and the Nordic model of work and welfare  226–7, 230, 235 Tsoukas, H.  145, 146 Turner, S.F.  118–19 Ungson, G.R.  241–2, 243, 246, 247, 248, 254 United States Civil War and the Gettysburg Address  37–40 historical metanarratives  264, 266, 270, 272 institutional logics  271–2 McCarthyism  281, 282, 292 neoconservatism 22–3 Silicon Valley  267 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  280, 292 Vaagaasar, Anne Live  7, 116–34 Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement 22–3 video-ethnography 154–5 Vietnam War  22, 23, 24 Vikkelsø, S., For Formal Organizations 290 Wadhwani, R.  214 Walsh, J.P.  241–2, 246, 247, 248, 254 water clocks  29, 33 Weber, Max  265, 266 weekly rhythms  45 Wegener, Frithjof  7, 138–62 Weick, K.E.  130, 139, 141, 151, 161 Weston, Alia  6–7, 69–84 Whig metanarrative  263–4, 265 White, Hayden  11, 12, 260, 261

306 Index Whitehead, A.N.  29, 55, 58 epochal theory of time  5, 35–7, 37–40, 41 Wiebe, Elden  9, 240–56 Winant, John  280 withness approach  7–8, 139–40 action-guiding anticipations  143, 144, 150–1 arresting moments  142, 143, 150, 154 comparison with other research approaches  157–9 data, analysis and theorizing  154–7 future research  161 and living forward  140–1, 143 process as withness  141–5 role of the researcher  144–5

to language  147 see also pragmatist inquiry Wittgenstein, L.  142, 150, 158 Woodman, R.W.  222 worker cooperatives  8 research study of historical consciousness and  194–209, 211, 212, 216 yearly rhythms of social life  45 Zald, Meyer  289 Zbaracki, M.  128 Zeitz, J.  37, 39 Zeno 32 Zerubavel, E.  5–6, 37, 44–8