Organizational Time: a Dialectical View

Abstract

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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