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This study examined how owners and top management team members in firms that are growing very rapidly socially construct time so as to facilitate rapid growth. A blend of interview and text-based qualitative methods was used to study some firms that have achieved rapid growth and some that have yet to do so. Analysis led to the identification of several thematic patterns regarding the enactment of time. The first was simultaneity: informants appeared to sustain a simultaneous focus on the events actually occurring in the present and the outcomes desired in the future, so that strategies to deal with the present are emergent but the goals and time-frames for obtaining them remain relatively fixed. The second was selectivity: rather than passively accepting the time-frames of key customers or employees, these firms sought out customers and staff who shared a pace and movability of enacted time in congruence with the firms’ goals. The third theme was shaping: top managers in rapid-growth firms adopted or developed systems and procedures that allow them to shape the enactment of time throughout their organizations. The paper concludes with some propositions about the nature of enacted time in firms that are more versus less successful in growing rapidly.

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IMF policies have been widely criticized in the aftermath of the Asian crisis. Key critics questioned the appropriateness and the sequencing of financial liberalization programs which, along with insufficient monitoring and inadequate prudential regulations, left the financial sectors of the affected countries highly leveraged and exposed. This paper examines the impacts of similar reforms on the efficiency of the banking system in Tunisia, a country whose economy has been reshaped by the IMF/World Bank prescribed economic adjustment plans since 1987. Using various DEA models and panel data covering the period 1992-1997, we evaluate the individual effects of each component of the reforms on the banking industry overall.Meanwhile, we compare the effects on banks because of the different ownership structures over time. We also pay particular attention to specific factors that have kept the financial sector in Tunisia relatively stable in the midst of the global market turmoil caused by the Asian crisis.

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