Introduction

Vaujany, François‐Xavier de; Mitev, Nathalie; Laniray, Pierre; Vaast, Emmanuelle

doi:10.1057/9781137432124.0004

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In this view, time emerges from the transformation of materiality, rather than vice versa. For example, Vaujany, Mitev, Laniray and Vaast (2014) discuss how organizations are constituted by material artefacts through time. Other organizational scholars have discussed how material objects may affect people’s construction of the past (Abbott, 2001; Blagoev, Felten, & Kahn, 2018; Hatch & Schultz, 2017; Schultz & Hernes, 2013) and help them reconstruct salient features in order to imagine a different future.…”

Section: Processual and Epochal Temporalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Material Temporality: How materiality ‘does’ time in food organizing

Hernès

Feddersen²,

Schultz

2020

Organization Studies

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The organic and hence perishable nature of food makes it particularly useful for understanding how the temporal dimension of materiality influences organizing and innovation. We present, as our main theoretical contribution, the concept of ‘material temporality’ to account for the transformation of materials in time and their imagined states at different moments across time, which we label processual and epochal temporality, respectively. Our empirical study shows how two organizations in the beer and dairy industries searched for novel solutions in their past and future. We show how the organizations’ potential for more consequential innovation was greater when they engaged distant past or future epochal temporalities. However, distant epochal temporality may also become uncertain and contested through the lens of ongoing processual temporality. We discuss the implications of material temporality for industries other than food and for organizing in relation to the natural environment.

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