Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
P ERSPECTIVES ON PROCESS ORGANIZATION STUDIES
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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List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1.
7.2. Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy
8.1.
8.2.
8.3.
13.1.
Tables
5.1.
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
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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
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 transformation 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
Frithjof E. Wegener is a PhD candidate in the Department of Design, Organization, and Strategy at the Faculty of Industrial
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.
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.
Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His main
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, ann.langley@hec.ca
Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK, process. symposium@gmail.com
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, process.symposium@gmail.com
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 continuity 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
“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 organizational 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
“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
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 diminished 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 acknowledge 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 possible without the category of time” (Sorokin and Merton, 1937: 615), time and history are foundational concepts that underpin our understanding of processes.
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 undertheorized. 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 conceptual 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 assumption of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of objectivity 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 independent 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 process may well have reflected the subject of study—standardized industrial processes and predictable bureaucratic practices. However, as scholars have started to appreciate 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
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 “temporally embedded process of social engagement.” They focus on situating agency “within the flow of time,” approaching agency as “informed by the past (in its habitual 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 conceptualize “the flow of time”. If temporality is understood as an external and objective measure of process, the question is how time shapes agency—for example, how the time horizons actors consider when contemplating past and future events influence competitive behavior (Nadkarni, Chen, and Chen, 2016). In contrast, if temporality is understood as a cultural construction of socially accepted temporal norms (Zerubavel, this volume), the question is reversed: how does agency shape conceptions 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
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 reconstructed to serve the interests of powerful actors in the present? The “objectivity question,” thus, arrives handinhand with the “agency question.” The agency question 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 critical 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 ultimate manifestation of modern agency, with a seemingly irrepressible capacity to subordinate all forms of human experience and expression to commercial selfinterest. A growing stream of studies, captured under the broad construct of rhetorical history, 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 stakeholders 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 organizations, 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 analysis and with a focus on different concepts and phenomena. The next three chapters, based on the PROS 2018 keynotes, provide important foundations for our understanding 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 “protention” to explain how we are able to experience things as changing or processes as
unfolding. By “retaining” the prior elements of experience and “protaining” or anticipating future elements of experience, we are able to grasp the continuing relevance 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 inaugurating 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 forwardlooking 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 temporal 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 constitutive 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 occurrences 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 duration 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 bestknown 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 women’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, temporality—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 artificial and consequential for how social life is experienced and organized. A key insight
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 sociotemporal 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 EventsBased 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 themselves 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 present moment is always codefined 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 projects. 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 eventbased approach reconciles the process philosophical 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 inadequate 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 creative 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 nurture mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness as enablers for creative action.
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 deadlineoriented production of the daily printed newspaper to a continuous cycle of online news production 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 temporality of the 24hour 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 temporal 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 construction company called Alpha, they demonstrate how routine patterning is a continuous 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 organizations, 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 shortterm and longterm performance 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 subjectively 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
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 argument 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 processoriented 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 selfexpressive way (termed “loose history”). Based on the study of a French cooperative, Bongers concludes that the skillful blending of objective (collective) and subjective (individual) rhetorical histories and the embedding of individual memories in collective organizational 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 problematization of objective and subjective experiences of the past, her study usefully points to a fascinating possibility that traditional tensions common to most organizations 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 objective and subjective history is reinforced by Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen’s
