Editorial

Abstract

In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, his character Estragon has a line that goes: 'Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.' On the surface of everyday life's consciousness, this is often how waiting seems, and frustration or boredom or foreboding may count as its principal states at this relatively unexamined and seemingly 'empty' level. However, since at least the time of Henri Bergson, studies in temporality have taken theoretical insights into the social practice of waiting to profound depths and to a profusion of human realms. As our journal's founder, Barbara Adam (1998) wrote in her theory of 'timescapes', time (and waiting as an element of the experience of time) is produced socially, and is produced and shared in common as temporal contexts. Waiting, traditionally, has been something that our societies have sought to quantify in terms of the clock or calendar. But the much more interesting question must be: what is it to experience waiting? This issue begins with a series of seven original essays that explore this very question from a range of perspectives that constitute a diversity of 'timescapes' in their distinctive subject-matter. Waiting, we read, can be painful and felt vicariously in the waiting of others; it can be experienced distinctively as gendered; waiting can be even experienced as enjoyable; and can be a particularly felt experience at a life stage; or be an inescapable element in organisations, and therefore a temporality to be understood from the perspective of employees (Bailey, 2019). Our issue then delves further into the time of organizations, with a second theme that once again shows the vibrancy and diversity in time studies across the world today. In this selection of original research our authors unpack the everyday temporal relationships within the workplace. This is expressed in research that looks at, for example, a dramaturgical approach to the time of the workplace, inspired by Erving Goffman (Rosengren, 2019); the temporality of sex workers in Vietnam's Mekong Delta (Lainez, 2019); and a very insightful and thought-stirring essay on a subject many readers who are academics, especially early career scholars, will be familiar with-the labour time devoted to formal, instrumental and bureaucratic tasks (Noonan, 2019).