Images of Time in Work and Organization

Hassard, Juliet; Grint, Keith

doi:10.4135/9781446218556.n13

Cited by 61 publications

(89 citation statements)

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“…Under this perception, the present and the future have little resemblance with the past, and thus the knowledge of what has passed may be of little help to acting in the present or the future (Hassard, 1996). This view is likely to develop in organizations with an orientation towards action, as these 26 tend to see planning as a ritual of little importance and with few results (Mintzberg, 1994).…”

Section: Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Organizational Time: a Dialectical View

Cunha

2004

Organization

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We present twelve propositions constituting a contribution to a contingency view of time in organizations and synthesize apparently opposite perspectives of time. To articulate them, we relate the 'planning', 'action' and 'improvisation' strategic orientations to the 'dependent', 'independent' and 'interdependent' perspectives of the environment. Then, we relate these strategic orientations related to approaches to the problems of scheduling, synchronization and time allocation. 'Action' strategies rely on event time to handle scheduling, use entrainment to synchronize with their environment and view time as linear. 'Planning' strategies use even time to handle scheduling, impose their internal pacing upon t he environment and view time as cyclic. 'Improvisation' strategies use 'even-event' time to handle scheduling, synchronize via 'internal-external' pacing and hold a spiral view of time. Our argument strengthens the case for a more deliberate approach to time in organizations and favors a dialectical view of organizational phenomena. Keywords: action, contingency, dialectics, improvisation, planning, synthesis, time. 3 It is hard to find many explicit debates in the organizational literature on time. However, this tranquility is only apparent. If we look at the ongoing debates in the strategy literature, we can relate some of the most important of them to time -related issues. The debate between the so-called 'design ' and 'learning' schools (Ansoff, 1991; 1 994;Mintzberg, 1990Mintzberg, , 1991Mintzberg, , 1994 echoes the difference between cyclic and linear perspectives of time. The 'design' school, which contends that the best performing organizations are those that plan their future, often assumes that the past is a good guide to the future, an assertion shared by those who see time as a cyclic phenomenon where the past is often a template for the future. The learning school, which contends that the best performing organizations are those that act out their future, often asserts that relying on the past is a threat to the future, mimicking, in a way, the unimportance of the past shared by those who see time as a linear phenomenon, never threading the same path twice.Time has also been used explicitly to address other debates i n the field of organization studies. One of the most recent of such attempts was Brown and Eisenhardt's (1997) use of the concept of 'even time' to strengthen the case in favor of incremental strategies. These authors demonstrated that successful new product development processes were those that were time-paced and not those that were eventpaced. This means that instead of relying on discrete external events (event time), such as a new product launch by a competitor, companies should act according to the rhythm it set for itself (even time), launching a new product every six months, for example. Taken as a whole, these three instances reflect the realized and potential contribution that research on time has in store for those concerned with the strategy process. However,...

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Section: Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Organizations face three major time -related issues: scheduling, synchronization and allocation (Hassard, 1996). Each of these issues can be handled via two different orientations towards time.…”

Section: Scheduling Synchonization Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Time: a Dialectical View

Cunha

2004

Organization

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“…Hassard (2000) notes that time has generally been viewed as a measurable and sequential commodity of the industrial process, where the past is unrepeatable, the present transient and the future infinite and exploitable. Hence, time has been viewed as a Taylorist 'hegemonic discourse' centring on 'precision, control and discipline ' (p. 17).…”

Section: Temporality and Meaningful Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each individual is part of numerous social temporal orders and therefore individuals' experience of time is both subjectively constituted and intersubjectively produced through social structures and patterns (Hassard, 2000;Muzzetto, 2006), such that 'social time' is an 'expression of a collective's rhythm of activity' (Bergmann, 1992: 83). Jobs and organisations further have their own time structures and characteristic time pacing (Langley et al, 2013).…”

Section: Temporality and Meaningful Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time reclaimed: temporality and the experience of meaningful work

Bailey

Madden

2016

Work, Employment and Society

149

179

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The importance of meaningful work has been identified in scholarly work across a range of disciplines. However, empirical studies remain sparse and the potential relevance of the concept of temporality, hitherto neglected even in wider sociological studies of organisations, has not been considered in terms of the light that it can shed on the experience of work as meaningful. These two disparate bodies of thought are brought together to generate new accounts of work meaningfulness through the lens of temporality. Findings from a qualitative study of workers in three occupations with ostensibly distinct temporal landscapes are reported. All jobs had the potential to be both meaningful and meaningless; meaningfulness arose episodically through work experiences that were shared, autonomous and temporally complex. Schutz's notion of the 'vivid present' emerged as relevant to understanding how work is rendered meaningful within an individual's personal and social system of relevances.

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“…The most obvious example is the milestone chart, an instrument for measuring objective time. Milestone charts also re ect a long-standin g tradition in organizational studies where time is understood to be a commodity that is objective, linear, homogeneous, and divisible (able to be partitioned by rational human mental process), with a value commensurate with its divisible parts (Hassard, 1996).…”

Section: Speci C Implementation Characteristic Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Issues in Information and Communication Technology-Enabled Organizational Change: Evidence From an Enterprise Systems Implementation

Sawyer¹,

Southwick²

2002

The Information Society

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In this article we highlight temporal effects in information and communication technology-enabled organizational change. Examples of temporal effects are explored in the context of one organization's efforts to implement an enterprise-wide information system. Temporality is presented as having two aspects, with the rst being the well-recognized, linear and measured clock time. The second aspect of time is that which is perceived-often as nonlinear-and socially de ned. We nd that temporal effects arise both in changes to the structure of work and in differences among groups in how time is perceived. Evidence suggests that both speci c characteristics of the implementation and of the enterprise systems' technologies further exacerbate these temporal effects. We conclude with suggestions for how to incorporate a temporally re ective perspective into analysis of technology-enabled organizational change and how a temporal perspective provides insight into both the social and technical aspects of the sociotechnical nature of enterprise systems.

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Images of Time in Work and Organization

Cited by 61 publications

References 0 publications

Organizational Time: a Dialectical View

Organizational Time: a Dialectical View

Time reclaimed: temporality and the experience of meaningful work

Temporal Issues in Information and Communication Technology-Enabled Organizational Change: Evidence From an Enterprise Systems Implementation

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