Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

Time, Temporality, and History in
Process Organization Studies

PE RS PECT IVES O N PRO CESS OR GANIZATION
ST UD IES
Series Editors: Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas
Perspectives on Process Organization Studies is an annual series, linked to the
International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, and is dedicated to the
development of an understanding of organizations and organizing at large as
processes in the making. This series brings together contributions from leading
scholars, which focus on seeing dynamically evolving activities, interactions,
and events as important aspects of organized action, rather than static
structures and fixed templates.
Volume 1: Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing

Editors: Tor Hernes and Sally Maitlis
Volume 2: Constructing Identity in and around Organizations
Editors: Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 3: How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization
Studies
Editors: Paul R. Carlile, Davide Nicolini, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 4: Language and Communication at Work: Discourse,
Narrativity, and Organizing
Editors: François Cooren, Eero Vaara, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 5: The Emergence of Novelty in Organizations
Editors: Raghu Garud, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 6: Organizational Routines: How They Are Created,
Maintained, and Changed
Editors: Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Claus Rerup, Ann Langley, and Haridimos
Tsoukas
Volume 7: Skillful Performance: Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence,
and Expertise in Organizations
Editors: Jörgen Sandberg, Linda Rouleau, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 8: Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life
Editors: Moshe Farjoun, Wendy Smith, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 9: Institutions and Organizations: A Process View
Editors: Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Volume 10: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Editors: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
Time, Temporality, and
History in Process
Organization Studies
Edited by
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby,
Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas
1
1
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.001.0001
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List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1. Core constructs in historical organizational studies 11
5.1. Progression of the structure of events through actual events 60
7.1. Example of a page planner from Local News101
7.2. Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy 106
8.1. Quality assurance at Alpha 124
8.2. The development of the quality routine at Alpha 129
8.3. Temporality shaping routine patterning 131
13.1. Analytical codes and categories 246
13.2. A framework of organizational memory work 247
Tables
5.1. Some core concepts of the events-based approach 58
7.1. Overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events 95
7.2. Deadline production vs. flowline production 105
8.1. Data structure 123
12.1. Objective structures of the field before and after privatization 227
13.1. Industry and financial characteristics of sample firms 244
14.1. Examples of historical metanarratives 269
List of Contributors
François Bastien is an Assistant Professor at inter-organizational relationships, particularly

the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, using the construction industry as an
University of Victoria. His research interests empirical setting.
include organizational theory, identity, and
Arne Lindseth Bygdås received his PhD in
culture. His objective is to better understand
Strategy and Management from NTNU (the
the complexity of identity within First
Norwegian University of Science and
Nations organizations in Canada and all
Technology), and is currently employed as
over the world.
senior researcher at the Work Research
William Blattner is Professor of Philosophy Institute at OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan
at Georgetown University in Washington, University). His research interests include
DC, USA. He is the author of Heidegger’s knowing and learning in organizations,
Temporal Idealism (Cambridge, 1999) and organizational creativity and innovation,
Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: A Reader’s practice-based research, and organizational
Guide (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2006). becoming.
Diane Ella Németh Bongers is Associate Diego M. Coraiola is Assistant Professor at

Professor at Universtity Paris Nanterre as the University of Alberta, Augustana
well as a coach for student entrepreneurship. Campus. His research focuses on strategy
Her research is oriented towards organiza- and change. He is particularly interested in
tions having a citizen-centered vision of the role of symbolic resources in the
business, and has a focus on philosophy, creation, perpetuation, and transformation
practice, and processes. of organizations, markets, and institutions.
His work has been published in contributed
Isabelle Bouty is Professor of Organizational
volumes and journals such as Strategic
and Strategic Management at the University
Management Journal, Journal of Business
Paris Dauphine PSL, in Paris. Her research
Ethics, Business History, and Management
explores the relationships between the
Learning.
individual, collective, and organizational levels
in organizational and strategic processes Stephanie Decker is Professor in
within processual and practice approaches. Organisation Studies and History at Bristol
Her research has been published in journals University. After completing her PhD in
such as Academy of Management Journal, history at the University of Liverpool in
Organization Studies, Human Relations, 2006, she held postdoctoral appointments at
M@n@gement, and Management Learning. the London School of Economics and
Harvard Business School. Since then she has
Lena E. Bygballe is an Associate Professor
held academic posts at the University of
and Head of Centre for the Construction
Liverpool and Aston Business School.
Industry at the Department of Strategy and
Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business William M. Foster is a Professor of
School. Her research interests lie within Management at the Augustana Campus of
themes related to innovation processes and the University of Alberta. His primary
x List of Contributors
research interests include rhetorical history, philosophy, which serves as a point of

social memory studies, service learning, and departure for better understanding how
business ethics. His work has been published actors enact their time on an on-going basis.
in books and in journals such as Journal of The focus on time construction derives from
Management, Journal of Management a desire to better understand how actors’
Inquiry, Business History and Journal of time construction may take different shapes
Business Ethics. He is the Editor of Academy and accommodate variations of near and
of Management Learning and Education and distant pasts and futures. Tor has published
serves on the Editorial Review Boards of more than a dozen books, among them A
Organization Studies, Academy of Process Theory of Organization which won
Management Review, and Business History. the George R. Terry Book Award at the
Academy of Management meeting in 2015.
Aina Landsverk Hagen received a PhD in
social anthropology from the University of Anthony Hussenot is a Professor in
Oslo for her work on collaborative creativity Organization Studies at Université Côte
among architects in Oslo and New York. Her d’Azur, France. He specializes in new ways of
MA was based on fieldwork in Teheran, Iran, working. In his research, he explores current
researching feminists, freedom of speech, and developments in the way we work, focusing
youth agency. She worked in several media on the relationship between these new
outlets as a desk journalist and copy editor, work practices and organizational
before moving on to become a researcher, dynamics. He has conducted studies on
currently at the Work Research Institute, various topics such as the digital nomad
OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan University). Her trend, the maker movement, the banking
work on innovation in media organizations sector, and education. His research has
focuses on topics like creativity, idea been published in various academic
development, and audience engagement. journals and edited books. One of his most
John Hassard is Professor of Organizational recent publications includes a book about
Analysis at the Alliance Manchester Business the maker movement and the events-based
School. Previously he was Head of the approach (in French).
Management School at Keele University,
Astrid Jensen (PhD Copenhagen Business
Visiting Fellow in Management Learning at
School) is Associate Professor of
Cambridge University, and a Postdoctoral
Organizational Communication at the
Fellow at London Business School. His
Department of Language and
research interests lie in organization theory,
Communication, and Director of the Centre
industrial sociology, and management history.
for Organizational Practice and
Tor Hernes is Professor of Organization Communication (OPC), University of
Theory and Director of the Centre for Southern Denmark. Her research interests
Organizational Time at the Department of include various aspects of organizational
Organization, Copenhagen Business School, communication. Recent work combines
and Adjunct Professor at USN Business theories of metaphor and narratives with a
School, University of South-Eastern Norway. practice-based perspective on organizational
In recent years, he has devoted increasing change, culture, and identity. Projects on
attention to the subject of organization and which she is currently working include
time. The main thrust of his work on time is counternarratives in and around organiza-
directed towards a situated, events-based tions, metaphor and narratives in mergers,
view inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s strategizing, and identity construction. She
List of Contributors xi
has published in international journals such organizations as organizing processes rather

as Organization Studies, English for Specific than organizational structures. Inspired by
Purposes, Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique the pragmatist concept of inquiry, he views
Appliquee, Culture and Organization, and organizing as actors’ ongoing dialogical
Qualitative Research in Organizations and exploration of and experimentation with the
Management. possible futures of their collective coopera-
tive action. He has published book chapters,
Henrik Koll received his PhD from SDU
articles in international top-ranking
(University of Southern Denmark),
journals, and the book Pragmatism and
Department of Language and
Organization Studies (Oxford University
Communication, for his work on change
Press, 2018; EGOS Book Award, 2019).
management and the strategic organization of
time in a Scandinavian telecommunications David Musson is an Associate Fellow of the
company. His research interests include the Said Business School, Oxford. He was
strategic organization of time, organizational formerly the Business and Management
change, temporal work in organizations, Editor at Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu’s theory of practice, strategy-as-
Juliane Reinecke is Professor of International
practice, organizational memory, and
Management and Sustainability at King’s
organizational identities. Before becoming a
Business School, King’s College London. She
researcher, he worked in management
is a Fellow at the Cambridge Institute for
consulting, specializing in change manage-
Sustainability Leadership and Research Fellow
ment. He is currently employed as a postdoc-
at the Judge Business School, University of
toral researcher at Malmö University, Sweden.
Cambridge, from where she received her PhD.
Ann Langley is Professor of Management at Her research interests include process
HEC Montréal, Canada, and Canada perspectives on global governance, sustain-
Research Chair in Strategic Management in ability, practice adaptation, and temporality in
Pluralistic Settings. Her research focuses on organizations and in global value chains. Her
strategic change, leadership, innovation, and work has been published in the Academy of
the use of management tools in complex Management Journal, Journal of Management
organizations, with an emphasis on proces- Studies, Organization Science, Organization
sual research approaches. She has published Studies, and Research Policy, among others.
over fifty articles and two books, most Juliane serves as Associate Editor of
recently Strategy as Practice: Research Organization Theory and Business Ethics
Directions and Resources with Gerry Johnson, Quarterly and on the editorial boards of
Leif Melin, and Richard Whittington Organization, Organization Studies and the
(Cambridge University Press, 2007). Journal of Management Studies.
Philippe Lorino is Emeritus Distinguished Michael Rowlinson is Professor of

Professor at ESSEC Business School. He Management and Organizational History at
advises the French Nuclear Safety Authority the University of Exeter. Before joining
about organizational factors of risk. He Exeter he worked at Queen Mary University,
served as a senior civil servant in the French London. He previously edited the journal
government and as a director in the finance Management and Organizational History
department of an international manufacturing before becoming a Senior Editor for the
company. He draws from pragmatist journal Organization Studies. He is a former
philosophy (Peirce, Dewey, Mead) and editor of the Association of Business
dialogism theory (Bakhtin) to study Schools’ Academic Journal Quality Guide.
xii List of Contributors
Gudrun Rudningen holds an MA in Visual Academy of Management Review. His

Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, research has won best paper awards from the
University of London, and works at the Academy of Management Journal and
Work Research Institute at OsloMet (Oslo Administrative Science Quarterly, and he has
Metropolitan University). Her research has twice been recognized by Thompson Reuters
mainly revolved around creativity, material as ranking in the top 1 percent of researchers
culture, digital technology, and organiza- in business and economics for citation
tional change. She is currently conducting impact. His research focuses on the critical
her PhD in Social Anthropology at the role of symbolic resources—legitimacy,
University of Oslo, on the digital transform authenticity, identity, and history—in
ation of the newspaper industry. improving an organization’s competitive
position. His current research examines the
Barbara Simpson is Professor of Leadership
changing social and symbolic role of the
and Organisational Dynamics at Strathclyde
modern corporation.
Business School and Distinguished Professor
of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg Anna R. Swärd is a Senior Lecturer at
University. Originally trained as a physicist, the Department of Strategy and
she brings the principles of action, flow, and Entrepreneurship at BI Norwegian Business
movement to bear on the social processes of School. She received her PhD in 2013 and
creativity, innovation, leadership, and change. has since focused on research within the
Her current thinking is also deeply informed field of strategy, in terms of understanding
by the philosophies of the American the processes of coordination, cooperation,
Pragmatists, especially George Herbert Mead’s trust, and practice within and between
integration of sociality and temporality. organizations.
Andrew David Allan Smith is a Senior Ingrid M. Tolstad is a social anthropologist

Lecturer in International Business at the and senior researcher at the Work Research
University of Liverpool Management Institute, OsloMet (Oslo Metropolitan
School. He is a historical organization University). Based on fieldwork among
studies scholar whose research deals with hipsters in Williamsburg, New York, her MA
the relationship between cultural evolution presents an analytical model for the notion
and how firms create and exploit competi- of coolness, while her PhD in musicology
tive advantage. He has published in from the University of Oslo is an ethno-
journals including the Journal of graphic case study of a Swedish music
Management Studies, Journal of Business production company in the making. She
Ethics, Enterprise and Society, Business mainly researches creativity, innovation,
History, Political Studies Review, and digitalization, and the development of
Multinational Business Review. Andrew organizations within the fields of media, art,
completed his PhD at the University of and culture, having a keen interest in the
Western Ontario in 2005 and his BA at methodological potential and implications
Queen’s University Belfast in 1999. of citizen participation in research.
Roy Suddaby is the Winspear Chair of Rory Tracey is a doctoral graduate of the
Management at the Peter B. Gustavson Department of Work, Employment and
School of Business in Victoria, Canada, and Organisation at the University of
a Chair in Organisation Theory at the Strathclyde. His research focuses on
Management School of the University of technology and its role in the emergence of
Liverpool, UK. He is the past Editor of the novelty in organizations. Specifically, he is
List of Contributors xiii
interested in the nature of technique, and Design Engineering of the Delft University
how design-led practices provide a structure of Technology. His research approach is
for the generation of new forms. inspired by pragmatism and engaged
scholarship, combining practice and process
Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com)
theory for researching between practice and
holds the Columbia Ship Management Chair
theory. The topics of his research combine
in Strategic Management at the University of
his backgrounds in organization studies and
Cyprus, and is a Professor of Organization
design studies to study organizations,
Studies at Warwick Business School,
design, strategy, innovation, and organiza-
University of Warwick, UK. He has
tional designing. Alongside his PhD, he
published widely in several leading academic
discusses management and organization
journals, including the Academy of
classics as a host of the Talking about
Management Review, Strategic Management
Organizations Podcast.
Journal, Organization Studies, Organization
Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Alia Weston is Associate Professor of
Human Relations. He was the Editor-in- Creative and Business Enterprise at OCAD
Chief of Organization Studies from 2003 to University, Toronto. She has expertise in
2008. His research interests include: business management and design, and her
knowledge-based perspectives on organiza- research is focused on understanding how
tions; organizational becoming; the creativity and business can contribute to
management of organizational change and positive social change. Key themes in her
social reforms; the epistemology of practice; research include exploring creative resist-
and epistemological issues in organization ance in resource-constrained environments,
theory. He is the editor (with Christian and how alternative business practices can
Knudsen) of The Oxford Handbook of contribute to solving key challenges in
Organization Theory: Meta-theoretical society.
Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Elden Wiebe (PhD, University of Alberta) is
He has also edited (with N. Mylonopoulos)
Associate Professor of Management, Leder
Organizations as Knowledge Systems
School of Business at The King’s University,
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and (with
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His primary
J. Shepherd) Managing the Future: Foresight
research interests are time/temporality in
in the Knowledge Economy (Blackwell, 2004).
relation to organizations, organizational
He is also the author of the book If Aristotle
change, and strategic management, and
were a CEO (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 2004).
spirituality in the workplace. He has
Anne Live Vaagaasar is an Associate published in Perspectives in Process
Professor at the Department of Leadership Organization Studies, Organization, Journal
and Organization, and Head of the Project of Business Ethics, Journal of Management
Management Executive Portfolio. Her Inquiry, Management and Organizational
research interests lie within themes related to History, Journal of Religion and Business
project management and leadership, Ethics, and Healthcare Quarterly. He is
knowledge development and integration, co-editor (with Albert J. Mills and Gabrielle
innovation processes, and inter-organizational Durepos) of the Sage Encyclopedia of Case
relationships. Study Research.
Frithjof E. Wegener is a PhD candidate in Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors

the Department of Design, Organization, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
and Strategy at the Faculty of Industrial Rutgers University, New Jersey. His main
xiv List of Contributors
areas of interest are cognitive sociology and Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable
the sociology of time. His recent publica- (Princeton University Press, 2018). He is
tions include The Elephant in the Room: currently working on a book on formal
Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford theorizing. In 2003 he was awarded a
University Press, 2006); Ancestors and Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016 he
Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and received the Rutgers University Faculty
Community (Oxford University Press, Scholar-Teacher Award, and in 2017 he
2011); Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social received the Society for the Study of
Structure of Irrelevance (Oxford University Symbolic Interaction’s Helena Lopata
Press, 2015); and Taken for Granted: The Mentor Excellence Award.
Series Editorial Structure
Editors-in-Chief
Ann Langley, HEC Montréal, Canada, [email protected]
Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus, Cyprus and University of Warwick, UK, process.
[email protected]
Advisory Board
Hamid Bouchikhi, ESSEC Business School, France
Michel Callon, CSI-Ecole des Mines de Paris, France
Robert Chia, University of Strathclyde, UK
Todd Chiles, University of Missouri, USA
François Cooren, Université de Montréal, Canada
Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Martha Feldman, University of California, Irvine, USA
Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy
Cynthia Hardy, University of Melbourne, Australia
Robin Holt, University of Liverpool, UK
Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School, UK
Sally Maitlis, University of British Columbia, Canada
Wanda Orlikowski, MIT, USA
Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University, USA
Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois, USA
Georg Schreyögg, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Barbara Simpson, University of Strathclyde, UK
Kathleen Sutcliffe, University of Michigan, USA
Andew Van de Ven, University of Minnesota, USA
Karl E. Weick, University of Michigan, USA
Editorial Officer and Process Organization Studies Symposium Administrator

Sophia Tzagaraki, [email protected]
Endorsements
“As we become more willing to convert reified entities into differentiated streams,
the resulting images of process have become more viable and more elusive.
Organization becomes organizing, being becomes becoming, construction becomes
constructing. But as we see ourselves saying more words that end in ‘ing,’ what must
we be thinking? That is not always clear. But now, under the experienced guidance of
editors Langley and Tsoukas, there is an annual forum that moves us toward con
tinuity and consolidation in process studies. This book series promises to be a vigor-
ous, thoughtful forum dedicated to improvements in the substance and craft of
process articulation.”
Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor
of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, University of Michigan, USA
“In recent years process and practice approaches to organizational topics have
increased significantly. These approaches have made significant contributions to
already existing fields of study, such as strategy, routines, knowledge management,
and technology adoption, and these contributions have brought increasing attention
to the approaches. Yet because the contributions are embedded in a variety of differ-
ent fields of study, discussions about the similarities and differences in the applica-
tion of the approaches, the research challenges they present, and the potential they
pose for examining taken for granted ontological assumptions are limited. This
series will provide an opportunity for bringing together contributions across differ-
ent areas so that comparisons can be made and can also provide a space for discus-
sions across fields. Professors Langley and Tsoukas are leaders in the development
and use of process approaches. Under their editorship, the series will attract the
work and attention of a wide array of distinguished organizational scholars.”
Martha S. Feldman, Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public
Management, Professor of Social Ecology, Political Science,
Business and Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA
“Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will be the definitive annual volume of
theories and research that advance our understanding of process questions dealing
with how things emerge, grow, develop, and terminate over time. I applaud
Professors Ann Langley and Haridimos Tsoukas for launching this important book
series, and encourage colleagues to submit their process research and subscribe to
PROS.”
Andrew H. Van de Ven, Vernon H. Heath Professor
of Organizational Innovation and Change, University of Minnesota, USA
xviii Endorsements
“The new series—Perspectives on Process Organization Studies—is a timely and

valuable addition to the organization studies literature. The ascendancy of process
perspectives in recent years has signified an important departure from traditional
perspectives on organizations that have tended to privilege either self-standing
events or discrete entities. In contrast, by emphasizing emergent activities and recur-
sive relations, process perspectives take seriously the ongoing production of organ
izational realities. Such a performative view of organizations is particularly salient
today, given the increasingly complex, dispersed, dynamic, entangled, and mobile
nature of current organizational phenomena. Such phenomena are not easily
accounted for in traditional approaches that are premised on stability, separation,
and substances. Process perspectives on organizations thus promise to offer power-
ful and critical analytical insights into the unprecedented and novel experiences of
contemporary organizing.”
Wanda J. Orlikowski, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and
Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
“The recent decades witnessed conspicuous changes in organization theory: a slow
but inexorable shift from the focus on structures to the focus on processes. The
whirlwinds of the global economy made it clear that everything flows, even if change
itself can become stable. While the interest in processes of organizing is not new, it is
now acquiring a distinct presence, as more and more voices join in. A forum is
therefore needed where such voices can speak to one another, and to the interested
readers. The series Perspectives on Process Organization Studies will provide an excel-
lent forum of that kind, both for those for whom a processual perspective is a matter
of ontology, and those who see it as an epistemological choice.”
Barbara Czarniawska, Professor of Management Studies,
School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden
“We are living in an era of unprecedented change; one that is characterized by
instability, volatility, and dramatic transformations. It is a world in which the
seemingly improbable, the unanticipated, and the downright catastrophic appear to
occur with alarming regularity. Such a world calls for a new kind of thinking: think-
ing that issues from the chaotic, fluxing immediacy of lived experiences; thinking
that resists or overflows our familiar categories of thought; and thinking that accepts
and embraces messiness, contradictions, and change as the sine qua non of the
human condition. Thinking in these genuinely processual terms means that the
starting point of our inquiry is not so much about the being of entities such as
‘organization’, but their constant and perpetual becoming. I very much welcome this
long overdue scholarly effort at exploring and examining the fundamental issue of
process and its implications for organization studies. Hari Tsoukas and Ann Langley
are to be congratulated on taking this very important initiative in bringing the
process agenda into the systematic study of the phenomenon of organization. It
promises to be a path-breaking contribution to our analysis of organization.”
Robert Chia, Professor of Management, University of Strathclyde, UK
Endorsements xix
“This new series fits the need for a good annual text devoted to process studies.
Organization theory has long required a volume specifically devoted to process
research that can address process ontology, methodology, research design, and analysis.
While many authors collect longitudinal data, there are still insufficient methodo-
logical tools and techniques to deal with the nature of that data. Essentially, there is
still a lack of frameworks and methods to deal with good processual data or to
develop process-based insights. This series will provide an important resource for all
branches of organization, management, and strategy theory. The editors of the series,
Professors Ann Langley and Hari Tsoukas are excellent and very credible scholars
within the process field. They will attract top authors to the series and ensure that
each paper presents a high quality and insightful resource for process scholars. I
expect that this series will become a staple in libraries, PhD studies, and journal edi-
tors’ and process scholars’ bookshelves.”
Paula Jarzabkowski, Professor of Strategic Management,
Aston Business School, UK
1
Time, Temporality, and History in
Process Organization Studies
An Introduction
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley,
and Haridimos Tsoukas
Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization

studies. Until recently, both time and history have been treated implicitly in most
social science research—as important aspects of context, but never important
enough to incorporate explicitly into theory. Time has always been an assumptive
element of causality in processes of social change, yet “most social and behavioral
scientists pay little attention to the temporal factors involved in their research” (Kelly
and McGrath, 1988: 10). History, similarly, is a critical element in accounts of social
change, yet contemporary sociology has, typically, relegated history to the dimin
ished status of “background context” in explanatory accounts (Alford, 1998).
Today, however, both time and history have begun to occupy prominent positions
in contemporary studies of organizations. Management scholars openly acknow
ledge a “historic turn” in organizational research (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Mills,
Suddaby, Foster, and Durepos, 2016) as well as a turn towards temporality (Reinecke
and Ansari, 2015; Slawinski and Bansal, 2015; Granqvist and Gustafsson, 2016).
Leading management journals are replete with special issues encouraging more
research on temporality and history. This volume and the conference from which it
derives stand testament to the recent foregrounding of time and history as focal
objects of organizational study.
Scholarship in process organization studies (Langley, 1999; Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002) has played a pivotal role in raising awareness of the importance of
time and history in understanding organizational change. While many definitions
of process theory exist (Van de Ven, 1992), its core ontology is to consider “how
and why things—people, organizations, strategies, environments—change, act
and evolve over time” (Langley, 2007: 271). Since “[no] concept of motion is pos
sible without the category of time” (Sorokin and Merton, 1937: 615), time and
history are foundational concepts that underpin our understanding of processes.
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization
Studies: An Introduction In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy
Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley,
and Haridimos Tsoukas.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0001
2 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
For instance, understanding a process as ever becoming highlights its temporal

trajectory—the “patterning of events that stretches back into time and extends
into the future”—and the work of actors in continually reconstructing such a
trajectory (Hernes, 2017: 603).
Despite the growing interest in temporality and history, their precise relationship
to processes of change remains woefully under-theorized. While there are emergent
strands of theory—i.e. rhetorical history (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010;
Suddaby, Coraiola, Harvey, and Foster, 2019) and organizational temporality
(Fine, 1990; Hassard, 2001; Hernes, 2014)—these strands have yet to coalesce into a
paradigmatic statement of either disciplinary identity or theoretical significance for
organizational scholarship. Both subjects lack what Kuhn (1967) would describe as a
defining “puzzle” or anomaly in how we understand organizational change or
“becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). Relatedly, we lack a coherent set of concep
tual tools that can be applied to ongoing research directed to addressing the puzzle.
Collectively, the chapters in this volume devoted to understanding temporality
and history as a central element of process offer a glimpse of both a defining puzzle
and a set of emergent conceptual tools that might be useful for scholars engaged in
historical and temporally sensitive organizational research. Before elaborating their
contribution to the emergent theoretical scaffolding of historical and temporal
organizational scholarship, we first present the puzzle and its evolution in prior
literature.
1.1 The Puzzle: Questioning Objectivity and

Agency in Process Studies of Time and History
The central puzzle shared by most chapters in this volume challenges the assump
tion of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of object
ivity in historical narrations of the past. In terms of temporality, scholars have often
struggled to move beyond chronological conceptions of “clock” time (Ancona,
Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman, 2001). As a result, time is often seen as inde
pendent from actors and activities. Actors are being driven by deadlines and they
structure their activities around seemingly objective timelines, such as the hours of
the day measured by clock time or the seeming objectivity of calendar time marking
the seasons or moments in one’s lifetime. As Hassard et al. and Simpson et al. suggest
(this volume), the traditional focus on time as a linear and objective measure of pro
cess may well have reflected the subject of study—standardized industrial processes
and predictable bureaucratic practices. However, as scholars have started to appreci
ate the complexity of multiple, overlapping processes in an accelerating society, these
conceptions of time seem at odds with the temporal experience of organizational
actors.
The way we conceptualize time and temporality is critical for process organization
studies since it shapes how we view and relate to organizational phenomena—as
An Introduction 3
unfolding processes or stable objects—and how we view agency in general (Reinecke

and Ansari, 2015, 2017). In their influential paper on agency, Emirbayer and Mische
(1998: 962) place temporality at the heart of agency as they define agency as “tem
porally embedded process of social engagement.” They focus on situating agency
“within the flow of time,” approaching agency as “informed by the past (in its habit
ual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative
possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and
future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer and
Mische, 1998: 962).
In order to further advance our understanding of temporality and agency in
organizational research, we must return to the foundational question of how we con
ceptualize “the flow of time”. If temporality is understood as an external and object
ive measure of process, the question is how time shapes agency—for example, how
the time horizons actors consider when contemplating past and future events influ
ence competitive behavior (Nadkarni, Chen, and Chen, 2016). In contrast, if tem
porality is understood as a cultural construction of socially accepted temporal norms
(Zerubavel, this volume), the question is reversed: how does agency shape concep
tions of time? This opens up a much wider range of possibilities of how actors may
influence the sociotemporal orders they live in.
Similarly, the central puzzle shared by the chapters focused on history challenges
the assumption of objectivity in historical narrations of the past. Put more explicitly,
each raises the question “can history ever be objective?” Questioning the objectivity
of accounts of the past is not unique to historical organization studies. Historians
place this question at the center of their epistemological debates on historiography,
particularly as their discipline has been challenged by critiques from other social
scientists, most particularly from social historians. Perhaps the best articulation of
“the objectivity question” for historians was provided by Chicago social historian
Peter Novick:
The assumptions on which it [the objectivity question] rests include a commit-

ment to the reality of the past, and to truth as a correspondence to that reality; a
sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and above
all between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independ-
ent of interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it
accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts it must be abandoned. Truth is
one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist in history are “found” not “made”.
Though successive generations of historians might, as their perspectives shifted,
attribute different significance to events in the past, the meaning of those events
was unchanging. (Novick, 1988: 1)
As Novick’s quote demonstrates, the objectivity question is not a single question, but
rather an admixture of epistemological and ontological challenges to scientific
rationality that characterized the postmodern turn in the social sciences and
humanities some decades ago by writers as diverse as Thomas Kuhn, Michel

Foucault, and Clifford Geertz.
An important corollary to the objectivity question, if the answer is “no,” is “what
are the limits of subjective reinterpretation of the past by interested actors?” That is,
if historical accounts of the past are interpretations subject to the myopia or outright
bias of the narrator, what are the limits to which the past can be creatively recon
structed to serve the interests of powerful actors in the present? The “objectivity
question,” thus, arrives hand-in-hand with the “agency question.” The agency ques
tion is also not new to historical scholarship. The subjective interests of the narrator
of history have been the subject of speculation since the time of Herodotus, but have
become increasingly prominent through powerful challenges from scholars in crit
ical theory (Foucault, 1964), archeology (Veyne, 1988; Assman, 1995), sociology
(Zerubavel, 1996), and literary criticism (White, 1973), among others.
The agency question is arguably more relevant in organizational theory, inasmuch
as the organization has come to represent the ultimate form for the expression of
rationalized agency in contemporary society. The corporation is perhaps the ultim
ate manifestation of modern agency, with a seemingly irrepressible capacity to sub
ordinate all forms of human experience and expression to commercial self-interest.
A growing stream of studies, captured under the broad construct of rhetorical his
tory, has begun to document the various ways in which managers in organizations
engage in the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stake
holders of the firm” (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010: 157). The growing
empirical accounts of the use of rhetorical history in organizations not only reinforce
the validity of both the “objectivity” and “agency” questions in the context of organ
izations, they also strengthen the need for a coherent conceptual vocabulary through
which ongoing research can begin to address these questions.
1.2 Contributions to this Volume: Exploring Time,

Temporality, and History in Process Studies
Each of the remaining chapters in this volume explicitly or implicitly address the
objectivity and agency questions for organizations, albeit at different levels of ana
lysis and with a focus on different concepts and phenomena. The next three chapters,
based on the PROS 2018 keynotes, provide important foundations for our under
standing of how actors experience and may influence process, temporality, and
history.
In Chapter 2, “Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative: A Heideggerian Approach,”
William Blattner examines the phenomenological conditions of how we are able to
experience a process as unfolding in time, and how we render the process intelligible
by selecting what aspects of the past matter and the direction of where it is going. To
do so, Blattner introduces us to Edmund Husserl’s account of “retention” and “pro
tention” to explain how we are able to experience things as changing or processes as
An Introduction 5
unfolding. By “retaining” the prior elements of experience and “protaining” or

anticipating future elements of experience, we are able to grasp the continuing rele
vance of a previous situation and its continuation. Blattner then draws on Heidegger’s
phenomenology of time, and in particular, the notion of “temporal aspect” to explain
how we distinguish what is relevant to the present from what is not, as well as to
anticipate the direction that a process is taking. The temporal aspect is captured by
the distinctive grammatical features of language, as in the perfect tense of “have
done,” but is also expressed in the logic of narrative frames, which move from inaug
urating event toward resolution. Drawing on examples ranging from literature to
politics, Blattner uses these phenomenological insights to explain how the way we
relate to the past, and what we select as relevant to current concerns, informs our
forward-looking ambition to influence the processes we experience as unfolding.
These insights into the temporality of processes are complemented by Tor Hernes’
chapter, “Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality” (Chapter 3).
Hernes takes up the challenge to conceptualize the notion of temporality as the tem
poral extension of the present moment. He does so by drawing on the notion of
“event” and Whitehead’s epochal theory of time to suggest that events are constitu
tive of organizational temporality. Events can explain how the present “now” extends
into the future so that a sense of continuity is created despite the continual perishing
of time. The important point here is to understand that events are not just occur
rences that are accomplished in any particular moment. Instead, events are defined
by their becoming an event even after the actual event has occurred, and their dur
ation is defined by the time it takes for events to become events. The illuminating
example of how events become events is Hernes’ discussion of US President Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address. Despite being one of the best-known speeches in US political
history, the speech was barely noticed when President Lincoln first delivered it in
1863. The Gettysburg Address only became “that” speech over a century later as its
message of progress and democracy was evoked in a range of civil rights and wom
en’s movements. The Gettysburg speech is still becoming “the” speech each time it is
read aloud in American classrooms, keeping the event alive by translating it again
and again in light of a newly emerging present. As this example suggests, temporal
ity—the extension from the present “now”—can be understood in terms of the
becoming of events.
In Chapter 4, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel introduces a sociocultural perspective
on temporality. In his chapter, “The Sociology of Time,” Zerubavel is concerned with
the collective experience and organization of time. This concerns social norms and
traditions of measuring, reckoning, and organizing time, or the sociotemporal order
through which social groups temporally organize their lives. Zerubavel stresses that
this sociotemporal order contrasts with the physiotemporal order. The former is
artificial and based in cultural conventions even if it is experienced as absolute and
inevitable. Hence, our collective conception of time as a finite resource, which is
reflected in common expressions such as “spending” or “saving” time, is both artifi
cial and consequential for how social life is experienced and organized. A key insight
of the sociology of time is its political dimension, which enables us to explore the
relation between power and time. The authority to impose or change a sociotempo
ral order is both an expression of political power as well as a means to reinforce it. In
sum, Zerubavel’s sociocultural perspective sheds light on the tension of how time
can be experienced as objective clock time while being an artificial imposition on
people’s temporal experience.
In Chapter 5, “Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of
Temporality: Introducing the Events-Based Approach,” Anthony Hussenot, Tor
Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty address the fundamental question of the ontology of
temporality, and its implications for the study of organizations. The authors reject a
realist understanding of time as a standardized and external dimension of process.
Instead, they build on process philosophy and suggest that temporality is expressed
through events. Actors make sense of the indivisible flow of temporal experiences in
terms of distinguishable events and gain a sense of continuity by positioning them
selves in relation to their history, the present moment, and an expected future. Not
unlike Blattner’s discussion of retention and protention—the capacity to retain the
immediate past and anticipate the immediate future—the core idea is that the pre
sent moment is always co-defined by a sense of past, present, and future events.
From this perspective, organizing becomes the organizing of events. Such a view can
capture contemporary organizational phenomena such as project or freelance work,
where workers are simultaneously oriented toward multiple, partly interrelated pro
jects. Here, organizing does not mean creating and enacting predictable structures
and routines but navigating these multiple projects around multiple yet overlapping
event temporalities. In sum, the event-based approach reconciles the process philo
sophical notion of temporality as an indivisible flow or duration with people’s desire
to order their experience along a timeline with distinguishable temporal categories,
without resorting to the notion of clock time.
In Chapter 6, “The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World,” Barbara
Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston further add to a conceptual move away from
clock time as they seek to better understand and theorize the temporal dimensions
of creativity. Their starting point is the dilemma that clock time, with its realist (or
objectivist) focus on the ordered succession of past, present, and future, seems inad
equate as a basis for understanding the ways in which creative work is practiced and
temporally resourced. The authors contrast realist and idealist orientations to time,
and conclude that although clock time is pervasive in modern Western societies, it is
more suited for the control and prediction of recurring processes than the flexibility
and flow of creative practice. Simpson and her colleagues propose the concept of
timefulness as an alternative foundation for understanding the temporality of cre
ative practice. Timefulness resonates with the idealist view of becoming time and
describes the temporal experience of emergence that is inherent to any creative
action. Timefulness evokes multiple temporalities as emergent resources that nur
ture mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness as enablers for creative action.
An Introduction 7
Whereas Simpson et al. argue that creative work requires rethinking temporality,
Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen
(Chapter 7) provide an empirical illustration of how this might be accomplished—
moving from deadlines and linear working to a continuous flowline. In their chapter,
“Flowline at Work: Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations through
Metaphor,” Bygdås et al. show how actors have agency in shaping the temporality of
their work, even though they might take the temporal structures of their working
lives as objective facts. Based on an ethnography of a newsroom, the study shows
how journalists navigate the temporal transformation from the deadline-oriented
production of the daily printed newspaper to a continuous cycle of online news pro
duction and distribution. However, internalized temporal structures make it difficult
to imagine a different rhythm. In producing the printed newspaper, the journalists
had been working towards a daily deadline for the print edition, which provided a
temporal configuration for their working day. Producing and publishing news online
requires a different temporality, and challenges journalists to adapt to the temporal
ity of the 24-hour news cycle. This required a temporal reimagining of their activity.
The study explores how the introduction of a new metaphor—from deadline to
flowline—helped actors to reimagine what they were doing and to change the tem
poral structuring of their work practices. In sum, the study shows how temporal
structures are interlinked with how news production is practiced and its meaning
defined, and vice versa.
In Chapter 8, “Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning,” Lena Bygballe, Anna
Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar explore how temporality shapes the creation and
recreation of routines. Based on a process study of a quality routine in a large con
struction company called Alpha, they demonstrate how routine patterning is a con
tinuous flow between past, present, and future enactments of the routine. However,
temporal conflict is salient in the creation and recreation of a quality routine.
Organizational actors must negotiate multiple coexisting temporalities in organiza
tions, such as different pace or time horizons between company headquarters and
project teams. But conflicting temporalities can also be productive in creating
changes in routine patterning so as to reconcile short-term and long-term perform
ance in quality work.
The notions of temporal shaping and flowlines at work suggested by the authors
of the two previous chapters take on a new meaning in Chapter 9, “Capturing the
Experience of Living Forward from within the Flow: Fusing a “Withness” Approach
and Pragmatist Inquiry” by Frithjof Wegener and Philippe Lorino. Whereas most
empirical process scholars tend to focus on time, temporality, and history from the
perspective of looking backward at the past (whether or not this past is seen as sub
jectively experienced), Wegener and Lorino argue for a perspective that is interested
in capturing the forward movement of life. They do so by integrating the pragmatist
ideas of Dewey and James with the “withness” thinking proposed by John Shotter
(2001). This is a creative methodological approach that builds strongly on various
strands of process philosophy. It emphasizes living forward within the flow of

experience along with others to intervene in the continually shifting present. From
this perspective, researchers both share temporal experience with the subjects they
research (rather than looking back at it “objectively” from the outside) and to action
in the present, thereby “putting themselves in the making” (paraphrasing the
authors’ reference to James).
The next chapter, “Organizational Time in Historical Perspective,” by John
Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson (Chapter 10), more explicitly
problematizes the objective understanding of time in organizations. Their core argu
ment is that many organizational theorists and sociologists have unreflexively
adopted a “realist, structural or determinist explanation of time at the expense of
ethnographic, interpretive or process-oriented ones.” The authors argue, very much
in line with the perspectives of several other contributions mentioned above, that
time needs to be considered as a process of subjective interpretation. Hassard et al.
offer an important cautionary tale about the dangerous tendency of social scientists
to emulate the assumptions of the natural sciences. By assuming that time is linear,
monotonic, and stable, there is an implicit assumption that the object of study
experiences acts of change in a similarly linear, monotonic, and stable process (Kelly
and McGrath, 1988). But anyone with even the slightest degree of life experience
understands that humans’ subjective experience of time is quite distinct from its
objective expression. Hassard et al., thus, expose a critical issue about the messiness
of time as a central construct in process theory, raising a foundational question for
theorists: how might we integrate objective and subjective aspects of time in process
theory?
In Chapter 11, “Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool,” Diane Ella
Németh Bongers extends the paradox of the subjective experience of time in two
dimensions. First, she focuses on history rather than time as the key dimension to be
analyzed. Second, she accentuates the contrast between objective and subjective
expressions of history by analyzing differences in the narration of the history of an
organization in a formal, collective, and institutional way (termed “tight history”)
and the narration of history in an informal, individual, and self-expressive way
(termed “loose history”). Based on the study of a French cooperative, Bongers con
cludes that the skillful blending of objective (collective) and subjective (individual)
rhetorical histories and the embedding of individual memories in collective organ
izational processes and routines contributed to the rapid growth and success of this
new form of cooperative organizing, which has grown rapidly to become one of the
largest worker cooperatives in Europe. While Bongers’ analysis reinforces the prob
lematization of objective and subjective experiences of the past, her study usefully
points to a fascinating possibility that traditional tensions common to most organ
izations may be resolved by strategically integrating the tensions between objective
and subjective accounts of the past.
Bongers’ core insight regarding the organizational advantages of bridging object
ive and subjective history is reinforced by Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen’s
An Introduction 9
ethnographic study of historical practices inside a Scandinavian telecom, twenty-five

years post-privatization (Chapter 12). Their chapter, “Appropriating the Past in
Organizational Change Management,” focuses on the various practices used by
managers to implement a performance management system in the firm’s operations
department. The study shows how managers skillfully used historical accounts to
simultaneously encourage employees to abandon those elements of the objective
past that were perceived to be impediments to change and embrace other elements
of the objective past that were perceived to enhance change. Koll and Jensen adopt a
Bourdieusian perspective of objective and subjective history, in which history can be
understood to be both objective (events and chronology) and subjective (something
carried in human consciousness) at the same time. The challenge for the managers is
to convert elements of objective history into subjective experience which, according
to Bourdieu, requires a sophisticated understanding of their commensurability. That
is, they must understand that the present is not simply what is objectively experi
enced in chronological time, but rather is premised on those elements of the past
that can be kept alive in our consciousness and thereby influence our experience of
the present.
A slightly different approach to analyzing and managing the inherent tension
between subjective and objective history is offered by William M. Foster, Elden
Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby’s “Memory Work,”
an empirical study of corporate archivists and historians in Fortune 500 firms
(Chapter 13). Instead of focusing on differences between individual and collective
memories, Foster et al. draw attention to differences in corporate histories that arise
between historical narratives that draw from short- versus long-term organizational
memory. They observe that “the further away in the past memory reaches, the richer
the possibilities for reinterpreting the past and the larger the avenues for reconstruct
ing past memories.” In other words, recent history is perceived as more objective than
long-term history and, as a result, is more amenable to reconstructive interpretation.
In Chapter 14, “Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical
Effectiveness,” Andrew Smith builds on the emerging theme of rhetorical history by
introducing the construct of meta-historical narratives. Smith’s core argument is that
any effort to use history strategically is constrained, not necessarily by the objective
elements of the past (the brute facts of the past), but, critically, by the degree to
which the argument is consistent with prevailing metanarratives of history in the
collective memory of the intended audience. Smith describes four prototypical his
torical metanarratives—Marxist, Liberal Progressive, Dispensational, and Declinist.
This is an intriguing extension of the concept of rhetorical history, in large part
because it introduces a degree of constraint to the agency of history-based rhetorical
strategies. The latter are constrained not so much by what Suddaby and Foster (2017)
call “objective history” as by the extent of congruence with prevailing myths that
constitute acceptable historical accounts—i.e. “interpretive history.” This is an
important insight since the constraint Smith imposes on how history can be subject
ively reconstructed depends not on “what actually happened” but, instead, on the
extent to which a reconstructed history resonates with prevailing cultural myths or

metanarrative interpretations of the past.
Finally, Chapter 15 by David Musson, “The Life and Work of Edith Penrose:
Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective,” illustrates the
weaving together of multiple histories, and the ways in which organizational and
particularly process scholars may learn from them. The chapter recounts the embed
dedness of Edith Penrose’s work in a particular historical context and in relation to
her own personal history. It also reveals how others picked up and subjectively rein
terpreted her work, which only became famous many years after she penned it,
recontextualized in other times and different circumstances. The chapter concludes
by reminding us of the value of the kind of rich, thick, and wonderfully detailed
scholarship that Edith Penrose and others of her time engaged in, and inviting us to
consider whether our own work, influenced by the frenetic chase of article publica
tion, measures up to the standards of past eras.
1.3 An Emergent Model

The chapters in this volume not only help to define and elaborate the two paradigm-
defining puzzles for studies of time, temporality and history around the questions of
objectivity and agency, they can also be fitted into an emerging model defined by
four constructs that flow between the chapters but require further development and
clarification (Suddaby, 2016). The constructs are historical time, events, rhetorical
history, and historical metanarratives. As presented in the various chapters, these
constructs adopt an implicit hierarchy on a continuum from those constructs that,
in typical academic discourse, tend to be used more often to describe objective elem
ents of history and temporality to those that tend to be used more often to describe
subjective elements.
Time tends to be presented more typically as an objective rather than a subjective
concept in mainstream research, despite the observation, strongly evident in many
of the chapters in this volume, that it can be both. This is the core argument of
Hassard et al., which builds on a long history of social science scholarship that forms
the core of process theory (Hernes, 2014). Time or temporality, however, is a foun
dational construct inasmuch as it is the defining characteristic of both processes and
history (Büthe, 2002). Despite our awareness of its subjective–objective duality,
however, the vast bulk of research in the social sciences has tended to present time,
largely, as an objective construct (Kelly and McGrath, 1988). Many of the chapters in
this volume challenge us to reach beyond this.
Events are also a foundational construct of both process theory (Langley, 1999)
and history (Griffin, 1992). While theorists in both domains acknowledge that the
event is considered the primary building block of both social processes and societal
history, they also acknowledge that events are typically organized and presented in
narrative form (see Pentland (1999) for process theory and Butterfield (1981) for
An Introduction 11
history). It is in the act of constructing the narrative, the selection of events to

include, their sequence, and emphasized significance, through which the objective
and subjective elements of events intermingle. Despite our awareness of this, histor
ians tend to ascribe natural and reified properties to an event once it has been
recorded and preserved in documentary form. Events, therefore, rightly or wrongly
have acquired an aura of positivist objectivity, despite our awareness that they are
susceptible to interpretive reconstruction (see, for example, Hernes in this volume).
Events, thus, occupy a position of assumed objectivity that is slightly less than, but
close to, the assumed objectivity of time in academic discourse for both process the
ory and historiography.
Rhetorical history, by contrast, has been explicitly theorized to stand at the inter
section of objective and subjective understandings of the past (Suddaby et al., 2010;
Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Metanarratives build on the construct of meta-history
first defined by Hayden White (1973) who argued that historians do not “discover”
history so much as “make it” by taking events and organizing them in a narrative
structure, with sequence, plot, and ideological interpretation. Perhaps unsurpris
ingly, the narrative plots of history fall into predictable archetypes that reinforce
prevailing cultural myths. On the objective–subjective hierarchy, metanarratives of
history occupy a position that is clearly more subjective than objective and, as dem
onstrated by Smith’s argument (this volume), offer a counterpoint to the objectivity
test of positivist history (“did the events really happen?”) by posing a symbolic
standard of legitimacy (“does the story resonate as true?”).
Together the four constructs cohere along a continuum from those that are pre
sented and understood to be constructs premised predominantly as objective under
standings of time and history (including historical time and events) to those
constructs premised predominantly as subjective understandings of time and his
tory (rhetorical history and historical metanarratives). The continuum (see
Figure 1.1) represents two poles by which both the legitimacy and validity of data
collected under the rubric of each construct are typically assessed. More particularly,
as the chapters by Koll and Jensen and Foster et al. suggest, as the continuum moves
from objective to subjective poles, the opportunities for human agency in the inter
pretation of each construct increase.
Subjective High agency
Historical metanarrative
Rhetorical history
Narratives
Events
Historical time
Objective Low agency
Figure 1.1 Core constructs in historical organizational studies

Narratives are a final thematic construct threaded through several papers.

Narrative is, of course, an explicit element of Smith’s historical metanarratives, and
narratives are an important component of the growing stream of research on rhet
orical history (Suddaby et al., 2019; Gill, Gill, and Roulet, 2018; Foster, Coraiola,
Suddaby, Kroezen, and Chandler, 2017). But narrative is also an important, yet
implicit, element of how we conceptualize and use events and time as constructs in
process organization studies more generally. Varying assumptions about the narra
tive ordering of time—its sequence, emphasis, and meaning—is at the core of
Hassard et al.’s description of different subjective experiences of time as linear, cyc
lical or fragmented. Events, similarly, are typically presented in narrative fashion,
often without any reflection on the part of the researcher as to how the choice of
narrative structure used to present an event as data might affect the legitimacy of
characterizing the event as data (but see Hussenot et al. in this volume for a richer
rendering).
Narratives, however, are inherently interpretive rhetorical devices. As White
(1978) has so eloquently argued, our use of narrative in discourses of time, events,
processes, and history is as much an analytical tool, with important epistemological
and ontological implications, as any choice of theoretical frame or methodological
technique in the social sciences. Yet we have little understanding of how our choice
of narrative structure relates to the plausibility or validity of truth claims that we can
make about our observations. How do our choices of sequencing, actors and their
motivation, and emplotment of our narratives delimit the objectivity of a historical
or process narrative? Conversely, how do prevailing cultural metanarratives influ
ence our choices of sequencing, character, and emplotment? History and time are
unique and exciting contexts for extending our understanding of organizational
processes.
1.4 Concluding Remarks

Collectively, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the value of creating a dialogue
between process philosophy, temporality, history, and organizational scholarship. As
is evident from this volume, process philosophy inspires a deeper exploration of the
very nature of time, temporality, and history. As a result, it challenges the assump
tion of time as an objective measure of processes as well as the assumption of object
ivity in historical narrations of the past, but it also provides scholars with novel
intellectual resources to move beyond these assumptions. In turn, a focus on tem
porality and history can also advance process organization scholars by exploring the
“stuff ” of process: while temporality and history are implicit in the question of how
and why organizational actions and structures emerge, develop, grow or terminate
over time, a more explicit focus can add valuable insights and inspirations for empir
ical inquiry into processes. We hope this volume is just the beginning of such an
ongoing dialogue, and will inspire scholars to continue this fertile avenue of research.
An Introduction 13
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2
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative
A Heideggerian Approach
William Blattner
This chapter examines the phenomenological conditions of the possibility of our

experience of process—specifically, our experience of narrated process. It begins
with Husserl’s account of retention and protention, which are the capacities by which
we retain the immediate past and anticipate the immediate future. This allows us to
experience processes, which must be grasped in their temporal extension in order to
make sense. The chapter then turns to Heidegger’s contributions to the analysis,
where it offers a novel approach to Heidegger’s phenomenology of time. By examin-
ing the way in which the experience of process requires both sorting what we retain
into what is relevant and what is not, as well as sorting what we anticipate into what
sensibly continues the current process and what does not, a different axis of temporal
analysis comes into view: temporal aspect. Temporal aspect expresses the internal
temporal structure of what we understand. I focus on the Perfect aspect (which
expresses the relevance of the past to current matters) and the Telic aspect (which
expresses the directionality or teleology of current matters into the future). I show
how Heidegger analyzes these temporal aspects as part of his account of what he calls
“originary temporality,” and how his analysis can be used to shed light on narrative
understanding, and so, of how we understand ourselves and what we are up to.
2.1 Experiencing Process: The Husserlian Background

In his seminal research into time-consciousness, Edmund Husserl explored the con-
ditions that make it possible for us to experience a process as unfolding in time.1 He
argued persuasively that to understand this fundamental cognitive capacity, we must
posit more than just memory and anticipation. We must posit two more basic cap
acities, which he dubbed “retention” and “protention.” I will explain some of the
fundamentals of Husserl’s results, and that will set us up to dig into more complex
questions that touch on self-understanding and narrative.
Think of the experience of watching a process—say, a yacht pulling into a marina.
You watch the boat glide toward the dock. It moves from point A at t1 to point B at t2
William Blattner, Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative: A Heideggerian Approach In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process
Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas,
Oxford University Press (2020). © William Blattner.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0002
to point C at t3 (say, from the mouth of the marina to the middle of the marina, and
then to the dock). To be able to experience the process of the yacht gliding, you must
not only see it at points A, B, and C in sequence, but you must also at t2 retain that it
was at point A at t1. Your experience at t2 is not just of a yacht at point B, but rather,
of a yacht at point B that was earlier at point A. You experience the yacht as moving,
in motion. In other words, when you see the yacht at point B, you see it at point
B-as-having-earlier-been-at-point-A. If you did not see it this way, you would not
see the yacht as gliding. Rather, your experience would be more like seeing a single
frame of film at each moment, with no continuity. Your experience would be similar
in some respects to that of the protagonist, Leonard, of the film Memento, who suf-
fers from anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from creating new memories
(Nolan et al., 2002). Or perhaps your experience would be more like that of an
Alzheimer’s patient.2
Husserl distinguished the retention that is required to see the yacht as gliding
from memory in a more full-blown sense. Let us call memory in the more full-blown
sense “recollection.”3 If you today recollect the scene that unfolded yesterday, of a
yacht gliding into a marina, you are re-living or re-experiencing the experience you
had yesterday.4 To do that, you must, as it were, “re-wind and re-play the tape of
your experience.” As you re-experience the yacht at point B, you re-experience it as
at point B-having-earlier-been-at-point-A. The important thing here is to recognize
that such overt recollection embeds its own internal form of retention.
Husserl paired retention with a parallel future-directed capacity he called “pro-
tention.” As you watch the yacht glide into the marina, you anticipate that it will
move from point B to point C (e.g. toward the dock). While observing it at point B,
you not only see it as having been at point A, but also as heading toward the dock. If
you did not anticipate any specific future or range of possible futures for the yacht,
then it could just as well turn into a goose and take flight as glide toward the dock.
Just as with retention and recollection above, we must distinguish between proten-
tion and expectation.5 You can overtly envision and work through in your mind
several possible outcomes of the process of the yacht sailing into the marina: it can
dock at a slip; it can run into the dock; it can make a U-turn and head back out to
sea; etc. When you do so, each moment of your pre-visioning involves internal pro-
tentions that structure the momentary expectation of the yacht heading in some
definite direction, just as recollection is partly constituted by internal retentions.
The observation that as you see the yacht at point B, you anticipate or protain a
range of possible futures, points us toward another important element of Husserl’s
analysis. Because the future is experientially open,6 protention is far more indeter-
minate than retention. In retention, you retain what you have in fact experienced.
There is room for false retention, error, and so on, but even when your retention is
erroneous, you retain a single recorded series of experiences.7 As you watch the
yacht sail into the marina, you “protain” a range of possible continuations of the cur-
rent experience. You can understand what happens if the yacht crashes into the dock
or if it makes a U-turn and heads back out to sea. These futures were well within the
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative 17
range of intelligible continuations of your experience. If, however, the yacht turned
into a goose and took flight, you would not be able to understand your experience.
This transformation was not within the range of possible developments that you
protained.
Husserl’s fundamental contribution to the analysis of our capacity to experience
processes as they unfold is that our experience of such a process at any given time
requires that we retain earlier phases of the process and protain a range of possible
future phases. Without retention and protention, you would only see the yacht at
point B at time t2, but could not see it as in motion from point A to point C.
2.2 Tense and Aspect: On the Way from Husserl

to Heidegger
Now, at t1 you see not just the yacht, but a great many other things as well. There’s a
seagull gliding above the yacht. There is a hotel behind the yacht. There are puffy
clouds in the sky. And so on. Of course, as you watch any particular passing scene,
you are tracking many things at once. At t2 you likely retain not only the yacht at
point A, but the clouds in such and such a configuration, the sun reflecting off the
hotel in this specific way, etc. In so far as you are tracking the movement of the yacht,
however, the position of the clouds and the sun reflecting off the hotel are not
important. At any given time, moreover, there are a large number of “data points” in
your experience to which you are not attending. This has been demonstrated in
experiments on “change-blindness.”8 The point is, at t2 you do not just retain the
yacht at point A; you retain the yacht at point A as relevant to your experience of the
yacht at point B. The temporal character of the retention is not just that it retains the
past, but that it retains the past as relevant to the present. This retention is character-
ized not just by tense (reference to the past), but also by temporal aspect. At this
point, a quick introduction to the linguistic distinction between tense and aspect is
in order.
In linguistics, “tense” refers to the assignment of states of affairs to times
(Comrie, 1976: 1–2). In English and other Indo-European languages, we have sev-
eral mechanisms for indicating tense. We can inflect our verbs, so “I walked,”
“I walk,” “I will walk.” We can also use temporal adverbs, such as “yesterday,” “today,”
and “tomorrow.” Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, are not inflected and
so use temporal adverbs and other devices to signal tense (Lin, 2006).9 In linguistics,
“tense” refers to whatever mechanism a given language deploys in order to indicate
the temporal position of the situation described. The qualification “in linguistics”
may sound pedantic, but it is important, because we must distinguish between the
way linguists use “tense” and the way grammarians often do. Most of us were taught
by our English teachers that the present, simple past, and present perfect are three
distinct tenses. These grammarian’s tenses are not the linguist’s tenses in the strict
sense. They are combinations of the linguist’s tenses and aspects.
In linguistics, aspects are defined as “different ways of viewing the internal tem
poral constituency of a situation” (Holt, 1943, as quoted by Comrie, 1976: 3). The
Perfect10 aspect represents “the continuing relevance of a previous situation”
(Comrie, 1976: 56), and the Non-perfect is the absence of such relevance. What
English grammarians call “the present perfect,” e.g. “I have flown to Greece,” com-
bines the present tense with the Perfect aspect, signaled in English by the helping
verb “have” and the past participle “flown.” The sentence “I have flown to Greece”
(present perfect), as opposed to “I flew to Greece” (simple past), sounds odd unless it
is used to construct some relation, and so indicate some relevance, of these past
flights to the current topic of discussion. If a police interrogator asks me to chronicle
my actions during the third week of June, I might enter into the log, “On Monday,
June 18, from 11:20 to 13:20, I flew to Greece from Munich.” If, instead, I’m answer-
ing a question about the experience of flying to Greece, I might say, “I have flown to
Greece. Ask me anything you want.” That I have flown to Greece explains why I’m
willing to offer advice.
It is important to note, however, that one cannot read linguistic aspect directly off
of the surface grammar of a sentence. There are several reasons for this. For one
thing, spoken language, and eventually the written language it shapes, sometimes
substitutes and conflates distinct linguistic forms. So, for example, in spoken
German, das Perfekt (the present perfect) has largely supplanted das Präteritum (the
simple past). As Comrie puts it, “In discussing the Perfect, it is important not to be
misled into thinking that every form that is labelled ‘Perfect’ in the grammar-book
in fact expresses perfect meaning” (Comrie, 1976: 53). This does not mean that
German has lost track of the difference between the Perfect and Non-perfect aspects,
but only that it uses other ways of expressing the distinction. Second, one salient
feature of dialectical variation within a language is precisely variations in the way in
which tenses and aspects are expressed. Some dialects express a greater range of
aspects directly through morphological variation than do others, e.g. African-
American Vernacular English in contrast with Standard American English
(Wolfram, 2004). Thus, the examples I gave above (“I flew to Greece.” and “I have
flown to Greece.”) are merely meant to indicate the underlying structures of aspect
in ordinary language. We are interested in the underlying structures, not the surface
grammar.
To return now to the main thread of the argument, when we distinguish the elem
ents of what we retain that are relevant to our current experience from those that
aren’t, we are drawing a distinction that can be expressed linguistically by the use of
the Perfect and Non-perfect aspects. We have moved beyond tense to aspect. My
hypothesis is that Heidegger’s conception of what he calls “originary temporality”
(ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit) is an account of the centrality of temporal aspect to
human experience. Now, this chapter is not primarily a reconstruction of Heidegger’s
philosophy, and so I will not devote time to justifying my reading of Heidegger in
detail.11 In Being and Time and its neighboring texts, Heidegger develops an account
of originary temporality. Whatever else it is, originary temporality is at least a
successor notion to Husserl’s conception of time-consciousness. It is an account of

the capacities in virtue of which we are able to grasp time, both the time of the world
around us and the time of our own experience. Heidegger’s term for the past element
of originary temporality is “Beenness,” “Gewesenheit,” which is an abstract noun
built on the past participle of the verb “sein,” “to be.” By constructing a term built on
the past participle, Heidegger signals the centrality of the Perfect aspect. He also
associates the future element of originary temporality with the “for-the-sake-of-
which,” the “Worum-willen,” which refers to the goal-directed nature of action. We
may connect this with the Telic aspect, which we will discuss shortly.
So, we can see that Heidegger adds a crucial component to Husserl’s analysis of
time-consciousness. In order to track the movement of the yacht in the marina,
I must not only retain the past phases of the experience, but also sort the elements
retained into those that are relevant and those that are not. Husserl would never
have denied this, of course, but he also did not see that there is a specifically tem
poral character to the sorting. That temporal character is expressed linguistically in
the Perfect aspect.
We may make a parallel point about the future, about protention. We saw above
that protention explains why, if the yacht suddenly turns into a large goose and takes
flight, you would not be able to make sense of the experience. There is a difference,
however, between not being able to understand what happens and being surprised
by what happens. If the yacht is gliding toward its slip, but rather than edging up to
the dock to be moored, it crashes into the dock (perhaps the pilot is inebriated), you
would be surprised. This surprise is based on your understanding of what the yacht
is doing in gliding into the marina: it is aiming to dock. You would likewise be sur-
prised, though less shocked, if the yacht made a U-turn and headed back out to sea.
The point here is that as you see the yacht glide from point A through B to C, you
anticipate that it will slow down and ease up to the dock to be moored. You under-
stand the process as having a direction and a natural ending. Anticipating the future
as consummating a process is a telic form of anticipation.
In linguistics, the Telic aspect conveys that the verb’s action inherently aims at
some completion, whereas the Atelic aspect conveys that the verb’s action does not
(Comrie, 1976: 4–48). Consider the contrast between “The yacht is drifting in the
water” and “The yacht is sailing into the marina.” The first statement implies no goal
or end-state for the yacht. The yacht could be abandoned. A teenager could have
stolen it and taken it for a joyride. The owner might be a devotee of absurdism and is
in the water with her yacht with no plan of action at all. The second statement speci-
fies a goal or end-state for the movement of the yacht: to dock in the port. Both
statements point to protention, for you would be uncomprehending if the yacht
adrift in the water turned into a goose. The second statement, however, says more; it
implements the Telic aspect, for it describes the yacht as heading somewhere.
To sum up our results to this point, retention and protention enable us to
experience ongoing processes. We must retain or remember the prior elements
of experience and protain or anticipate future elements of experience in order to be
able to experience objects as undergoing change or processes as unfolding. Heidegger

supplements Husserl’s analysis by introducing the phenomena of relevance and
direction: we sort what we retain into what is relevant to the present and what is not.
We sort what we protain into what would consummate the current direction of
experience and what would not.
2.3 Narratable Processes

Our analysis thus far has proceeded at a fairly abstract level. Let us now get a little
more concrete and look more specifically at our understanding of human events.
When we try to relate some (series of) human event(s), we generally rely on narra-
tive: we tell a story. Stories come in many forms, but common to all forms of story, at
least on standard analyses, are a beginning, middle, and end. Very roughly, the
beginning of a story presents the crisis, upheaval, or change that sets the chain of
events narrated in motion. The end of the story brings the crisis to some sort of reso-
lution. The middle of the story effects the transition from crisis to resolution. Of
course, it’s possible to relate (I won’t say “narrate”) a series of human events without
placing them into this sort of format. One can offer a mere chronicle, log, or list of
events that takes no stand on the shape of the events related. Such chronicles are
more the raw material for understanding events than the presentation of such an
understanding itself.12 Further, as twentieth-century literature, film, and television
have shown, it’s not necessary to use a conventional beginning-middle-end format
in order to build a gripping experience for the audience. Neither of these exceptions
to the norm undermines the central point, however: we typically relate human events
in the form of a story, a narrative. Let us work with an example, the story of the 2016
US Presidential Election.
In order to tell any story, we must select a beginning and an end, the bookends of
the story, if you will. The beginning and the end must be properly paired. With what
event does the story of the election begin? Is it with Donald Trump’s declaration of
candidacy in June 2015? Is it with Hillary Clinton’s declaration two months earlier?
Or does it begin with President Obama mocking Trump at the 2011 White House
Correspondents’ Dinner? Each of these events is a “turning point,” in the sense that
it embodies a significant change or unsettling in the course of events. Each of these
turning points indicates a distinctive issue that is at stake in the narrative. When he
declared his candidacy, Trump famously attacked Mexican immigrants to the United
States, whom he accused of being rapists and drug dealers.13 Focusing on these facts,
the narrative is framed as the rise and triumph of a nativist politician. One might
choose to end this particular narrative with Trump’s executive order on immigration
policy on January 25, 2017.14 If we begin the story with Hillary Clinton’s declaration
of candidacy, the narrative might be framed as the attempt to “shatter the glass ceil-
ing” in American politics. It might then end with her concession speech in the wee
hours of November 9, 2016, in which she stated that “some day someone will [shat-
ter the glass ceiling] and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.”15
A narrative frames a course of events in part by selecting what is at stake in the

story. What is at stake in the story is at issue in the events. As the narrative develops,
it moves toward resolution. The resolution of the story must be connected with its
inaugurating event in some intelligible way. The forms of intelligibility here are those
that are governed by the logic of narrative. Analyzing that logic is a large task, one
that has been taken on, principally, by literary theorists.16 For our purposes, we need
only acknowledge that there is some such logic in play. The point of these observa-
tions is that as one follows a narrative, one retains what has already happened in so
far as it is relevant to the development of the story, and one projects possible devel-
opments of the story, aiming toward some denouement. Thus, the same capacities
that underlie our ability to deploy and understand the Perfect and Telic aspects lin-
guistically also underlie our ability to frame and grasp narratives.
Narrative relevance and narrative conclusion are distinctive forms of relevance
and conclusion, and so they point toward more specific developments of the capaci
ties that underlie our grasp of the Perfect and Telic aspects. Let us call them the
“narrative Perfect” and “narrative Telic.” The narrative Perfect and the narrative Telic
are much closer to what Heidegger has in mind with the originary past and future,
for he presents originary temporality as the structure of the being of Dasein
(Heidegger’s term for human being)—that is, a logico-grammatical structure of our
self-understanding. It would be precipitous to identify the narrative Perfect and Telic
with originary temporality tout court. To endorse such an identification would
require that we defend the thesis that the understanding of human life is always nar-
rative, or always capable of narrative formulation. David Carr argued for such a the-
sis in his Time, Narrative, and History (Carr, 1986). I have argued against Carr’s
analysis, at least as an interpretation of Heidegger (Blattner, 2000). Over the past
decade or so there has been a renewed interest in the question whether the under-
standing of human life, according to Heidegger, is narrative in form (Fisher, 2010;
Roth, 2018). I do not have the space here to delve into this debate, and this essay is
not an exercise in the close interpretation of Heidegger’s text. So, let me simply
stipulate for the purposes of this analysis that the narrative Perfect and narrative
Telic, or more precisely, our capacities to understand those temporal aspects, are
closely related to the originary past and future, even if the former do not exhaust the
latter. Nonetheless, I will focus on the narrative phenomena as stand-ins for the
more exhaustive analysis, for it will allow me to offer some final elements of
Heidegger’s overall argument.
2.4 Non-successive Temporality

Heidegger also famously denies that originary temporality is a successive phenom
enon. He writes, “The future is not later than Beenness and the latter is not earlier
than the present” (Heidegger, 1979: 350). On the approach I am developing, this
comment not only makes sense, it is clearly true (a virtue!): the Telic aspect does not
succeed the Perfect aspect. Indeed, either aspect may be combined with any tense to
form a more complex phenomenon, such as the future perfect (“Lulu will have eaten
her food.”) or the past Telic (“Rosie was chasing a mouse.”).
This observation–that temporal Aspects are not ordered successively, as the tenses
are–is reflected in the possibilities of narrative as well. Elsewhere (Blattner, 2019) I
have used Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) as an example of a narrative in
which what is at issue in the novel shifts dramatically mid-story. We start off think-
ing that it is a novel about a Jewish professor at a small New England college who
gets himself into hot water with the students and other members of the faculty by
using language that is construed as racist. We find out part of the way through that
the protagonist, Coleman Silk, is in fact a light-skinned Black man himself, who has
“passed” as white for most of his adult life. This shift in the narrative focus of the
novel reconfigures both what is relevant about Silk’s past and the possible trajector
ies the plot might take, and it does so in the middle of the novel. This does not
change any of “the facts” that the narrative relates, but it reconfigures them. This is
possible because the Perfect aspect of relevance and the Telic aspect of projecting
forward are not directly tensed phenomena. They can shift mid-story without the
past having to change. What is now relevant about the past, and so how the past now
matters to the story, has changed, as does which possible futures now make sense as
intelligible denouements of the story.
Now, one might object, a novelist can play all sorts of narrative tricks on us, but
that’s the fun of fiction. Life doesn’t change like that. In fact, however, it can.
Conversion experiences are paradigms of such shifts in the aspectual character of
our lives as we live them. Let me work through one well-documented example of a
political conversion to make the point.
In Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,17 Justin Vaïsse (2010: 58–62)
describes the emergence of neoconservatism as a potent force in the politics of the
United States from the early 1960s through to the administration of George W. Bush.
One critical phase of the development of neoconservatism took place in 1967, at the
time of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states. At its most schematic level,
a group of American Jewish intellectuals18 moved from an affiliation with mainstream
American liberalism19 of the sort associated with presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy to a new form of conservatism. Along the way,
they re-evaluated the wisdom of the US involvement in Vietnam, coming to see that
conflict in a new way and to support it. The key to the change of heart was a realign-
ment of the Arab–Israeli conflict with the bipolar Cold War.
In response to the Suez Crisis of 1956, some of the Arab states, most notably Syria
and Egypt, sought military aid from the Soviet Union. Further, the revolutionary
Arab nationalism of the Ba’ath Party in Syria and Iraq drew the Soviet Union further
into the geopolitics of the Middle East. Finally, the Palestine Liberation Organization
received both material and ideological support from the People’s Republic of China
and the Soviet Union, both of which aimed to bolster national liberation move-
ments. By the time the Six-Day War erupted in 1967, the Arab–Israeli conflict had
become aligned with the Cold War. Many American Jewish intellectuals were deeply
devoted to the state of Israel as the new homeland for Jews after the Holocaust. This,
along with the oppression of Soviet Jewry, led them to see the Soviet Union as a
principal enemy of the Jewish people and the nationalist Arab states as outposts of
Soviet influence.
This new alignment of the Arab–Israeli conflict with the Cold War led some of
these intellectuals to reassess the US involvement in Vietnam. One assessment of the
Vietnam conflict took the relevant background to be national liberation from colo-
nial and postcolonial occupation, and so it saw the Viet Cong as a national liberation
movement. Another assessment took the relevant historical background to be the
Cold War and the containment of Soviet expansionism, and so it saw Soviet support
for the Viet Cong as evidence of Soviet expansion into southeast Asia. These con-
trary assessments hardened as the scope and brutality of the US intervention in
Vietnam escalated. For those for whom the Arab–Israeli conflict was more person-
ally central, however, from 1967 on the Vietnam War started to look more like the
Arab–Israeli conflict. The US involvement in Vietnam came to be seen not so much
as a continuation of criminal colonial occupation as a necessary front in the Cold
War against the Soviet Union.
So, we can see here a change in the way in which the past is relevant to current
concerns, a shift in Perfect-aspect attributes. This shift goes hand-in-glove with a
shift in the dominant Telic-aspect attributes of the situation as well. Those who saw
the relevant background to be colonial and postcolonial occupation and liberation
focused their energies on ending the Vietnam conflict. Those who saw it the other
way focused on defending South Vietnam and winning the war. The “conversion”
experienced by the emerging cohort of neoconservatives was a shift from the former
to the latter perspective.
Now, one might object that this is not really a conversion. After all, aren’t conver-
sions experiences in which one comes to see oneself as a new individual, as did Saul
after being struck blind on the road to Damascus? The question presumes that con-
version requires an experience of radical transformation in which one feels as if one
has become a “new person.” However, research into the sociology and psychology of
conversion has shown that sometimes individuals report discovering who they
“always were”; other times they report a fundamental change in who they are
(Johnston, 2013). The neoconservatives saw their shift as a reinforcement of who
they always were (defenders of freedom and democracy), and so their experience
does in fact fit some models of conversion. Now, the answer to the question whether
the emergence of neoconservatism really constitutes a conversion is less important
to my argument than what we may learn from thinking about the question itself. For
Heidegger, the question whether one is “the same individual” who now sees the
world differently or “a new individual” is not important. In fact, it is the wrong ques-
tion. It is a question framed in terms of continuity and discontinuity.
The difference between continuity and discontinuity turns on the way the phases
of a person’s life are arranged in time, and the traditional problem of personal iden-
tity, as framed in these terms, is a question of whether an entity (the person, the
subject) endures through change. Arrangement in time and enduring are matters of
what Heidegger calls “intratemporality” (Innerzeitigkeit) (Heidegger, 1979: §80),
which is essentially a way of talking about temporal position. Temporal position is

expressed linguistically in tense. Temporal aspect is a different phenomenon, and as
we have seen, it is not intrinsically a successive phenomenon. Heidegger comments
that if the terms “already” and “ahead,” as expressions of the originary past and
future, respectively, had standard tensed significations, “Care would then be con-
ceived as an entity that occurs and elapses ‘in time’ ” (Heidegger, 1979: 327). One of
the central theses of Being and Time is that Dasein, human reality, does not “occur
and elapse in time,” which means that the language of intratemporality is inappro-
priate to it. This seems like an odd thesis, for if my life did not occur and elapse in
time, that would suggest that I am atemporal, perhaps divine. So, surely, Heidegger
cannot mean this. What does he then mean?
Heidegger’s point is that the logico-grammatical structure of human reality is
more like temporal aspect than like tense. Everything we experience and are occurs
and elapses in time in some sense. So, to say that my life runs its course in time does
not distinguish the structure of my life from any other process I might encounter,
such as the sun setting or a bird molting. One of the most prominent targets of
Heidegger’s philosophical critique is the propensity of Western philosophy to con-
ceive all phenomena on the model of what he called “the present-at-hand” (das
Vorhandene), what occurs, changes, and develops. We can see this in the way in
which traditional Western philosophy has approached questions of personal iden-
tity. It treats personal identity as much like the identity over time of any object. Sure,
persons are more complicated than many objects, and they embody a wider range of
properties than many objects—in particular, psychological properties. In a trad
itional analysis, this just means that there is more diverse fodder for the analysis. It
doesn’t change the basic set of structural phenomena philosophers focus on: con
tinuity, change, enduring.
Heidegger points us toward a different sort of logic by which to analyze the tem
poral integrity of a person’s character. Rather than focusing on personal identity
through time, continuity through change, Heidegger focuses on the coherence of the
Perfect-aspect relevance of the past with the Telic-aspect direction of the future.
Before their “conversion,” the future neoconservatives were ambivalent about the
Vietnam War, as many Americans were. After their conversion, the neoconserva-
tives took the history of Soviet expansionism and alignment with nationalist liber
ation movements as most relevant to understanding Vietnam. This new
understanding of the relevance of the past is paired with a new forward-looking
ambition to influence US foreign policy in the direction of redoubling its efforts in
the Cold War. The measure of the coherence or integrity of their understanding and
ambition is the “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) of the way they press forward into
their ambitions. Resoluteness is, roughly, the way in which an authentic life is experi
enced.20 Authenticity,
. . . however, is only possible, in so far as futural Dasein can be its ownmost “as it
already was,” that is, its “Beenness.” Only so far as Dasein is as I have-been can it
come toward itself in such a way that it comes back to itself. Dasein is authentic
ally futural as having authentically been. (Heidegger, 1979: 325–6)
Through this lens we can see why Heidegger did not use the language of personal
identity in his existentialist analysis of authentic human life. It is not just that
Heidegger was not interested in questions of personal identity, as if this simply
reflected his philosophical taste. Rather, he would argue that focusing on personal
identity distracts us from the existential questions that his analysis allows us to ask,
questions about the nature of resoluteness, rather than enduring and identity; ques-
tions about failing to face up to what already matters about the past and failing to
respond to what we are called upon to do. To ask these questions we must use a dif-
ferent philosophical language, and the distinctive grammatical features of that lan-
guage are captured by temporal aspect, not by tense. The distinctive temporal
structure of our self-understanding, as we ask these questions, is not a matter of
tense and intratemporality, but of affect and originary temporality.
In summary, then, Heidegger’s argument maintains that in order to understand
our lives, we need more than merely Husserlian retention and protention; we need
the capacity to grasp at least what is expressed by the Perfect and Telic temporal
aspects. These capacities enable us to distinguish what is relevant in past experience
from what is not, as well as to anticipate the development of a process toward its
consummation. One standard way in which we understand and relate human affairs
is by way of narrative, and narrative also requires the ability to grasp the Perfect and
Telic aspects. The specifically narrative forms of the Perfect and Telic aspects enable
us to understand human life. These temporal aspects are time-related, but not
directly tensed. They exhibit a different kind of logic or grammar than does tense,
and this explains how we are able to understand ourselves and others even through
significant changes in what matters to us. The coherence or integrity of a human life
or human process is constituted by an appropriate pairing of what is relevant about
the past with where the life or process is heading. This pairing is not directly a state-
ment about what was and will be, however. It is not a statement about tensed phe-
nomena (qua tensed), but rather about the temporal aspects exhibited by the
phenomena.
Notes
1. The locus classicus for Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness may be found in Husserl
(1966b), translated into English as Husserl (1991). Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness
was first edited by Martin Heidegger and published in 1928 as Husserl (1980), translated
into English as Husserl (1966a).
2. This is a non-scientific observation of my father’s final years.
3. I use the term “recollection” deliberately to invoke Kant’s analysis from the A-edition
Transcendental Deduction (Kant, 1998). Kant did not distinguish between Husserlian
retention and what I am here calling “recollection,” and this compromises his analysis.
4. Of course, there are many forms of memory. For example, one can remember that one
saw a yacht glide into the marina without reliving the experience, “replaying the tape.”
The subtle distinctions here are not important to the main thrust of the argument.
5. We are forced to provide stipulative, quasi-technical definitions of these words, since
ordinary English cannot carry the weight of drawing these distinctions.
6. We need not take a stand on whether it is metaphysically open. Our reflections are
phenomenological.
7. This is part of what makes the “alternative memories” of Juliana Crain in The Man in the
High Castle so unsettling: she has memories of events that she does not understand her-
self to have experienced, that appear to belong to “a different timeline” (Spotnitz, 2015).
8. For a useful set of demonstrations of the point, see Kevin O’Regan’s website: http://nivea.
psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#CB.
9. The title of Lin’s article (“Time in a Language without Tense: The Case of Chinese”) could
be misleading to the casual reader. Chinese has semantic but not morphological tense.
That is, verbs do not change form (through inflection), so tense-meaning is conveyed in
other ways. If Chinese did not have semantic tense, it would not be able to represent
states of affairs as occurring at different times.
10. I will follow Comrie’s practice of capitalizing the names of aspects, so as to distinguish
them from the common names for certain combinations of tense and aspect in ordinary
grammar. So, “the perfect” is sometimes used in English to refer to the combination of
the present tense and Perfect aspect. Also note that the Perfect aspect is not the same as
the Perfective aspect. The latter refers to sentences that represent an event as a single,
complete temporal whole, rather than carving up the internal temporal architecture of
the event (Comrie, 1976: 16).
11. I defend this approach as a reading of Heidegger in “Originary Temporality and Aspect
in Heidegger’s Early Thought” (in preparation). This essay represents a significant revi-
sion of my reconstruction of Heidegger’s phenomenology of time (Blattner, 1999).
12. Philosophers of history have discussed the distinction between narratives and chronicles
at some length. For canonical statements of the distinction, see Walsh (1958) and White
(1980).
13. “Choice Words from Donald Trump,” New York Times, “First Draft,” June 16, 2015.
14. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-public-
safety-interior-united-states/.
15. https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/hillary-clinton-concession-speech/index.
html.
16. For an enduring classic in the genre, see Kermode (2000).
17. Vaïsse draws heavily on the analysis offered by Klinghoffer (1999).
18. Paradigmatically, Nathan Glazer, who was a professor of sociology first at the University
of California, Berkeley, and then at Harvard, and Martin Peretz, who subsequently
became the publisher of The New Republic. The latter journal was founded in 1912 as a
venue of progressive thought of the sort aligned with Theodore Roosevelt. Under Peretz’s
leadership, it became a vehicle for neoconservatism.
19. Some of these intellectuals were originally socialist or communist, rather than liberal.
20. Technically, it is the mode of “disclosedness” (Erschlossenheit) or self-revelation charac-
teristic of an authentic life (Heidegger, 1979: 296–7).
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3
Events and the Becoming of
Organizational Temporality
Tor Hernes
3.1 Introduction
St Augustine’s (1992) conundrum was how time could be extended from the sound
of drops from the water clock that simply disappeared as soon as they appeared.1
Yet, without extension from the events of drops there could be no time. Since St
Augustine’s Confessions, philosophers such as Mead and Whitehead have drawn
upon the notion of events to understand the extension of the experience of time
from the present into past and future. Although events are referred to abundantly in
the organizational literature, they escape for the most part adequate definitions as to
their ontological and epistemological nature. For the most part, events are seen as
accomplished entities, primarily defined by their importance or their sequential
ordering, or both. However, this definition ignores the emergent nature of events
referred to by philosophers of time (McTaggart, 1908). What makes this omission
serious is that the understanding of events is closely tied to how we define time
itself. Importantly, events help actors define their pasts and futures in the present.
They may also help actors establish their future trajectory with selected events
from their past. At another level of analysis, conceptualizing time as events opens
the way for explaining the complex dynamics involved when actors move along in
time by engaging in the interplay between continuity and change. It may be argued
that every act carried out is an act of both continuity and change. Every act is an
act of continuity by bringing forward something from the past and envisaging
something similar in the future. On the other hand, it is also an act of change
because, as pointed out by Mead (1932), every new act is by definition an act of
novelty.
Actors are forever finding themselves in an ongoing present (Schultz and Hernes,
2013), suspended between past and future. Hence, a first step towards a more
dynamic theory of organization and time is to theorize pasts and futures. Useful
distinctions have so far been drawn between past and future events (Bluedorn and
Tor Hernes, Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization
Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Tor Hernes.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0003
Standifer, 2006; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) and further distinctions

are beginning to be drawn between near and distant past as well as future events
(Schultz and Hernes, 2020). Extending from a past versus future distinction to a
near versus distant distinction is an important next step in theorizing and empirical
research. Organizational scholars have begun to show the roles that distant past and
future events may play in organizations. For instance, analyses show how evoking
the distant past may engender different dynamics from that of the nearer past (Hatch
and Schultz, 2017; Schultz and Hernes, 2013; Suddaby et al., 2010). There is also an
emerging literature on the influence that may (or may not) be exerted by distant
futures on organizations, as indicated in the literature on organizations and the
environment (Slawinski and Bansal, 2012; 2015; Bansal and DesJardine, 2014; Wright
and Nyberg, 2017). Such analyses reveal dynamics that are very different from analyses
focused on near futures only, such as those framed by strategic horizons (Schultz
and Hernes, 2020). The useful term “temporal depth,” employed to describe the
overall span between the outer limits of future and past horizons, was introduced by
Bluedorn (2002: 114). Bluedorn offered the definition of temporal depth as “the tem-
poral distances into the past and future that actors typically consider when contem-
plating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen.” However, it
remains to look more into how different segments across temporal depth are brought
into interaction with one another by actors and what the effects are on how they
structure their processes in the present (Hernes and Schultz, 2020). Although there
is a growing literature addressing the enactment of pasts and futures in the present,
research still needs to explain how enactment of pasts and futures is done in the
present, because the present represents continuity and change.
3.2 On Sequential Time and Events

Investigations into organization and time have traditionally worked with a concep-
tion of time as sequential, also known as the clock time or Newtonian time.
Sequential time has served the purpose of understanding the influence of time
organizations (Adam, 1998), by providing measures such as speed and duration
(Adam, 1998), timing (Elias, 1992), and acceleration (Rosa, 2005). An important
aspect of sequential time is how it influences the definition and ordering of events.
Importantly, in a sequential view of time, events tend to be interpreted against a
backdrop of sequential time (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006). Ancona et al. (2001,
p. 648) exemplify this view in noting that “The events don’t just transpire every day;
they occur at specific times throughout the day.” This implies that events are ordered
according to a sequential view of time, whereby an event, once it has taken place,
remains that event forever (McTaggart, 1908). Events may be ordered causally, such
as a previous event leading to a later event. Another way of ordering relates to the
apparent importance of the event. Some events are defined as more consequential
than others. When events are seen as taking place against a backdrop of sequential
Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality 31
time, it also has important consequences for understanding organizational change

and continuity. On the one hand, events such as a sudden change in market condi-
tions, or the introduction of artificial intelligence in a company, represent discon-
tinuity by interrupting and diverting the normal flow of events. Such changes are
called events because they stand out as important. Moreover, they are attributed
agency due to their chronological ordering dictated by sequential time. For example,
a seemingly important event will be seen to impact less important events when there
is a short time lapse between them. On the other hand, less important events may be
seen to accumulate to cause a major event.
When events are seen as consequential for future events, they are defined accord-
ing to a sequential view of time. A purely events-based approach as seen through the
lens of process ontology, on the other hand, departs from the assumption of sequen-
tial time being the primary means of ordering time. An events-based view works
from the assumption that time is in events (Hernes, 2014a; see also Hussenot,
Hernes, and Bouty in this volume, Chapter 5). Events, on this view, are not ordered
by a priori importance given by sequentially ordered causality (such as one event
being defined as particularly important because it precedes a period of change). On
the contrary, in an events-based view, events simply cannot be given importance a
priori, because they are never assumed to stay constant in any way. Once they
emerge (and if they do), they will be constantly subject to redefinition as they recede
into the past while actors move forward in time, encountering new experiences. An
events-based view as derived from process ontology can only see events as becom-
ing, and that becoming has no beginning or end. In this view, events are time and
define the very meaning of being in time, because they provide actors with a sense of
where they are headed as they move through time. Consistent with process ontology,
events are forever in the making; they are temporal phenomena that have taken
place in the past, may take place in the future, or are potentially about to emerge in
the present.
Events are ontologically different from sequential time because they signify direc-
tionality in time by expressing actors’ movement from past to future, but without
being suggestive of sequence as the only feature that expresses direction in time.
They serve the purpose of providing a sense of where actors are, where they emerge
from and where they are headed, as articulated in the present. If we speak of a
twelve-month duration, it is less important from a sequential time point of view
whether that duration took place in the past or is expected to take place in the future.
With events, this becomes very different. Whether an event has taken place or is
expected to take place becomes important, and whether an event has taken place in
the near or the distant past may become equally important, because of the importance
of expressing directionality of actors’ movement through time. Whereas it may be sig-
nificant whether or not one event preceded other events, sequence plays a subsidiary
role determined by whether or not it adds meaning. It is of less importance that two
events are three years apart than whether one took place before the other, because in
the latter case the former event forms a past to the latter and the latter event may
have been a possible future for the former event (Feddersen, 2019). Because
organizational actors may be seen as temporal phenomena, in the sense that at any
one time they exist in a temporal present suspended between past and future, an
important focus becomes how they weave together their past and future events. Also
on this view, they define themselves by the ways in which they perform and provide
continuity to ways in which they weave together events as they move through time.
Note that continuity, as defined here, is not about the automatic continuation of
activity, but about the ongoing process of weaving together events in order to create
a sense of continuity. The weaving together of events takes place in what we call the
present. However, in the literature, the present seems to have been taken somewhat
for granted as an undefined temporal placeholder for past and future. What has been
overlooked is the immanent dynamics between present, past, and future, which is
the focus of the next section.
3.3 The Event of a Drop and the Experience of a Song

Philosophers have wrestled with the question of what it means to be within time
since St Augustine’s Confessions in the fourth century ad. Perhaps somewhat ironic
ally, questions related to time arose before time as we know it became a subject of
discussion. Although St Augustine referred to measuring time, his primary concern
was duration and being in the temporal present, the “now.” He raised the perennial
question of what it means to be in the present, and consequently, about the extension
of the present. He asked, for example, whether the present can have any extension at
all, and if so, what happens then to what we call time. Consistently with the Greek
philosophers who wrote several hundreds of years earlier, such as Zeno (fourth
century bc), he deduced logically that the present cannot have duration, because a
given duration would imply that it could be divided into two half-durations, each of
which could be divided into two half-durations in turn. The p rocess of dividing
could thus continue ad infinitum, rendering the very idea of duration meaningless.
On the other hand, he argued, in the present we think of things having endured
in the past, just as we think of events coming towards us in the flow of time. The
flight of a bird flying towards us takes place as duration, which is the future of it
flying past us. As we watch the bird, we have a sense of duration until it flies past us.
As the bird flies past us and disappears into the distance, there is likewise a d
uration
of its moving away from us, which is the duration of the past of the experience of it
passing above us. However, we cannot appreciate those durations in a constant
present because they change during the flight, and for the same reason the present
cannot have definite duration. At the same time, there is a present, insisted St
Augustine, because in order for future to become past there must be passage in
time, and that passage can only take place in the present. In other words, without a
present there can be no future or past, and hence there would not be time, which is
a most serious matter!
The problem, however, as posed clearly by St Augustine, is the relationship

between the present, the past, and the future, the point being that the present cannot
be an isolated moment in the flow of time that has no relationship to either past or
future. Remember that the flight of the bird is observed continually in a present,
which changes with the distance that the bird is from the observer. At the same time,
the present cannot be part of the past or future because, as he points out, in the pre-
sent the past is no more and the future is not yet. In order to show a way out of this
temporal conundrum, he coined the expression distentio animi, which expresses the
“stretching out” of time from the present. This, according to him, was made possible
by human consciousness (he used the word “soul”). As to the experienced present, it
could be likened to a drop of water; a drop of time. It has been pointed out that the
expression “drop of time” employed by St Augustine is not completely random, as
water clocks were employed during his epoch to keep track of time during the day. It
is conceivable that he contemplated “the world at a drop of water” inspired by the
sound of the water clock. How fitting that James (1890) would speak of “drops of
experience” several centuries later. The elegance of the conception of a drop is that
drops simply become in order then to perish, leaving questions about how they con-
nect, and consequently how continuity is possible, and ultimately the role of change.
Still, while there is agreement among philosophers that the present is a unique
experience that can never be repeated, there has been disagreement about how to
theorize extension from the punctuated, drop-like experience of being in the pre-
sent. How does one extend from ticks of a clock?
Songs are composed of “ticks,” which, in various ways, provide simultaneous con
tinuity and change during the song. The song “Time” by Pink Floyd begins with an
instrumental and partly cacophonic prelude, which includes ticking clocks, chiming
bells, and alarms as a backdrop to the musical instruments. Then the lyrics, sung by
David Gilmore, begin as follows,
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
Try and imagine hearing the song for the very first time. There are the instruments
and sounds of clocks, bells, and alarms. Then there are the words, starting with
“Ticking away the moments that make . . .” For each word we get an increasing sense
of the direction of the song. As we hear the first word “Ticking,” our thoughts may
be brought back to the sounds of the clocks and alarms in the prelude that went
seconds before. The lyrics move on to express the futility of catching up with time
and the repetitive nature of time as we grow older. When we first listen to the song,
the experience of it is inevitably provisional, until the instrumental, rhythm, and
lyrics come together as a whole. As the song comes to an end, we are left with the
experience of something novel, something different from what we have heard before,
and something that stands out as distinct from our flow of experience. Is this an
event? Well, it was an event in the making as we were listening to it. Once it’s over,
we are aware that we have experienced something that we can look back on as a
composite experience, as “I have now heard ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd.” Listening to the
song becomes an event as the listening reaches closure (Hernes, 2014a) and we can
say, “I heard this song yesterday.” What remains to be seen moving forward is the
making of the “eventness” (Bakhtin, Morson, 1991) of the event. I will return to this
below.
Each tone may be seen as an event, and among the events that stand out in “Time”
is each tick of a clock. Songs are instructive (and a popular means among philo
sophers to illustrate the passing of time) because they combine the incremental dis-
covery of the song as novel tones emerge while the overall song is being discovered.
The experience is temporal in the sense that the listener moves along from the
beginning until the end of the song, gradually discovering what the song is about
through the experience of encountering new notes, which become connected to
notes that have passed, but the connecting between the novel note and those that
have passed requires a sense of continuity, and a sense of continuity requires a recog-
nition of pattern in turn. At the beginning one does not know what will come next,
but the overall composition emerges and becomes increasingly distinct as the song
comes to an end.
Most philosophers limit their discussion to the experience of discovering the
melody and confine their analysis to the time during which the song is being played.
Much like Bergson’s work, the theorizing of time relates to introspective processes,
whereby the experience of time is confined to the individual mind—what Husserl
(1991) called the internal consciousness of time. What gets overlooked is what hap-
pens as the melody, once it is over, becomes part of a broader pattern of events over
time; when the pattern becomes that of listening repeatedly to that melody, and even
more importantly, the social experience of making it into a collective event. What is
the difference in the experience, for example, between having listened to Pink Floyd’s
“Time” in one’s teens, then having become engrossed with it over the years, and then
having it played at one’s anniversary or wedding? We will listen to it and experience
it again and again, identifying with the melody as it is being played. But we may at
the same time bring forth those times and their corresponding circumstances in
which we heard it. Those circumstances are often brought about socially, and some-
times materially. Someone may have attended a concert with Pink Floyd, others may
have heard “Time” under other circumstances.
The question remains, however, does listening to the song with close friends, in a
crowd, played through immaculate sound systems, under a starry sky, make it into
an event? Let us not forget St Augustine’s saying that the past is no longer (and the
future is not yet). If the past is no longer, it is gone forever, and can only be retrieved
through the experience of the present. The past is hostage to the imagination pro-
jected on it from the present. There is no other option for retrieving a past event
because, as pointed out by Bergson (2010: 128), it is counterfeit of what has taken
place; likewise, as Mead (1932: 30) pointed out, past events are forever unattainable,
and even continual reconstructions will not approach them with increasing exact-
ness (Hernes, 2014a: 41). Past (and maybe future) events may be ordered in the pre-
sent by being distinguished from one another, but only through the present
experience. They cannot be held “alongside” the present in any independent, separ
ate form, but only as part of the “permeated whole” as it is experienced in the
present.
We are back to the point that the present represents continuity. But continuity is
not “just continuity,” as pointed out above. Some analysts, such as Emirbayer and
Mische (1998), seem content to posit the present as that which holds together past
and future. In this view we can see actors struggling to match a past running away
from them with a future coming toward them. On such a view, the role of the
present is to ensure some sense of continuity between past and future events. It is
therefore important not to underestimate the agency of the present event by under-
estimating the fact that actors make choices in the present as to which past and
future events to assemble in order to make the present event into that present event.
As mentioned above, in an events-based view of time, events provide temporal
directionality to actors, which signifies more than simply connecting past and future
events. The present has its say, even though actors do not know the eventual impact
of their actions, and its say is expressed through its ability to create a sense of con
tinuity, which enables a sense of change in turn.
3.4 Events as Continuity or Discontinuity in Whitehead

Events offer a means to better understand the interplay between continuity and dis-
continuity (or change). It is not difficult to understand how each novel tone in a song
is an instant of both continuity and discontinuity. As continuity, each novel tone
extends a melody that has already been under way for a while and may be experienced
as continuity of the ongoing melody. At the same time, it constitutes an experience
of discontinuity because it is, well, novel. As Mead (1932: 239) wrote, “there is a tang
of novelty in each moment of experience.” Similarly, for Whitehead, process is the
continual becoming of the world, which is simultaneously a process of continuity
and novelty. Temporal experience arises from the “goings-on” in the world
(Whitehead, 1920: 75), and those “goings-on” are what he called events. Events come
in all shapes and sizes. They can be microscopic or they can be macroscopic. What
matters, according to Whitehead, is how they connect to make up a totality of
experience, because they are inherently relational; they constitute and define one
another, and in so doing they become what they are. However, for them to become
events, they would have to have their own internal constitution, therefore each event
would be an accomplishment and hence different from all other events, even though
other events would be mobilized in the making of that event (such as assumed in a
sequential view of time).
The way in which events are theorized depends in large part on how continuity
versus discontinuity in time is understood. Although Whitehead subscribed to a
view of time as direct experience of temporal flow (Hughen, 1985), he argued that
the only way to understand time is as residing in epochs. Epochs, however, are not
defined by temporal limits or demarcations. An epoch, which may be defined as an
event, is defined by its becoming. Events become, and the duration of their becoming
is defined as the time it takes for them to become events. As much as this may be
counterintuitive to many people, it is consistent with a becoming, a process ontology
view. The event becomes an event as it has reached self-realization (Rosendahl, 1996),
for it then to perish as that event. A volcano becomes a volcano through its eruption
for it then to perish as a volcano. The eruption may have been in the making for
thousands of years, with thousands of interacting or related geological and meteoro
logical minor and major events. A birthday party becomes a birthday party through
its realization, for it then to perish as a birthday party, or, at least, as that birthday
party. Listening to “Time” by Pink Floyd becomes an event as and when its unity, its
wholeness as that song, is accomplished, when at the end we have a sense of having
listened to a piece of music that is different from other pieces of music in its whole-
ness. The time through which it unfolds is not of the essence. It is not important, for
example, what status our experience is at when we are 2 minutes 21 seconds into
the song. What matters is the sense we have once it is finished, and that experience
is in the making throughout the song. It is a continuous experience marked by the
discontinuity of the accomplished song. While listening to it we have an emerging
sense of what it will become once it is finished, but we are not fully aware of its
wholeness before it is over. The ending could still hold surprises that change the
experience as a whole.
In Whitehead’s epochal theory of time, the experience of listening to the song
becomes a provisional event. When it is over, it is over as that event. In other words,
there is an experience of discontinuity. Discontinuity, for Whitehead, was necessary
in order to move through time, for how can we experience being in the flow of time
without a succession of discontinuous epochs (events)? Hence his insistence that
“Time is sheer succession of epochal durations” (Whitehead, 1925: 158). Elsewhere
he wrote, “Temporalisation is not another continuous process. It is an atomic succes-
sion.” For example, a business meeting becomes an event as and when a decision has
been made that satisfies the basis for the meeting. When the decision has been made,
the meeting reaches closure (Hernes, 2014a) and becomes an event.
A Whiteheadian reading might treat listening to the song as the becoming of an
event. There is a continuous experience of listening to the song, but the experience
is directed towards the accomplishment in the form of an event. The experience is
temporally framed by its becoming. While listening to it we are conscious of moving
from its beginning towards its anticipated ending, at which time the event becomes
that event of the accomplished melody. At the accomplishment of the melody, when
we are satisfied that we have grasped the experience of having heard the melody,
there is discontinuity, as another event may be in the making. There are nevertheless,
in Whitehead’s conception, seeds of continuity while we listening to the song, which

he termed “concrescence”; the becoming of “the one” (song) as it internalizes its
relatedness to other occasions of listening, which by the same token becomes consti-
tutive of its uniqueness. Since process represents a striving towards continuity, the
disparate experiences are connected retrospectively in order to create a sense of con
tinuity. Hence Whitehead’s well-known phrase that “There is becoming of continu
ity, but there is no continuity of becoming” (Whitehead, 1929: 35).
3.5 Becoming of Events, Discontinuity and

Continuity: The Gettysburg Address
Following Whitehead’s theory of time dictates that the song became an event for the
listener during the time it was played. Once the music is over, the accomplished
event remains, ready to be integrated in some form or other into other events.
Whether or not it will take part in future experiences depends on how successive
events address it and make it part of their respective becoming. In other words, the
becoming of the trajectory through time of the event will be decided by the encoun-
ters it makes with other events. As pointed out above, the chronological time that
sets them apart is not of relevance. As perspicaciously noted by Zerubavel (2003:
38), “In Irish time, 1651 and 1981 were only moments apart.” One explanation of
this observation is that 1981 was an amplification of 1651; 1651 saw hunger and dis-
ease resulting from Cromwell’s war on the Irish at Limerick, whereas 1981 saw a
hunger strike among republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The adversary in
1651 was Oliver Cromwell whereas in 1981 it was Margaret Thatcher. Evidently, the
two events would represent discontinuity at the time, yet decades later they may be
seen as forming a sense of continuity as well as of discontinuity.
The main question to be addressed is how, in an epochal view, continuity of events
is assembled from a discontinuous experience events. It will be argued below that the
making of continuity is central to the very making of organizations. In order to pro-
vide an illustration of the making of continuity of events over time, I resort to
American political history. The following contains excerpts from Zeitz (2013), where
he illustrates how President Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, maybe the best-
known speech in American political history, which took place on November 19, 1863,
and lasted less than three minutes, is still in the process of becoming “that speech.” It is
no less relevant today in view of recent events in the U.S. including huge street demon-
strations and removal of historical monuments. The Gettysburg battle, which took
place on July 1–3, 1863, was a battle with huge casualties and marked at the same time
a turning point in the American Civil War. The battle was won by Union forces.
Edward Everett, the former governor of Massachusetts and a noted orator, spoke
first, and for over two hours. Then Lincoln rose to give a few remarks. . . . And that
was that. At the time, Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg was regarded as an
important political moment, but little more. A search of 15 major American

newspapers from 1864 through 1889 yields just a handful of mentions of the
Gettysburg Address. When Hay and his colleague John Nicolay published their
monumental, 10-volume biography of Lincoln in 1890, they devoted eight pages
to Everett’s keynote address, and only two pages to Lincoln’s. . . . As memories of
the war faded in the 1880s and 1890s, and as Jim Crow stamped out the brief
moment of racial liberalism that the Civil War helped catalyze, Americans adopted
a new ritual of Blue and Gray reunions, in which aging veterans relived their battle-
field achievements.
. . .
In fact, soldiers’ letters and diaries written during the war suggest that they did
indeed understand what they were fighting for. Moreover, at the time of its deliv-
ery, the Gettysburg Address—in which Lincoln signalled a new moral turn in the
war—was widely understood [although] in its immediate aftermath, an Ohio
Democrat denounced the speech as a “mawkish harangue about this ‘war for
freedom’ of the negro.”
. . .
To be sure, not everyone stripped the document of its broader implications. In
New York, proponents of women’s suffrage opened a meeting with recitation of
the speech, followed by a lecture on “The Next Steps in Political Reform.” For
many African-American audiences, the Gettysburg Address would remain, as it
had always been, a proclamation wedding the Civil War to the emancipationist
project.
. . .
Ironically, the speech became famous just as America forgot what it meant.
Readings of the Gettysburg Address became an obligatory part of Memorial Day
celebrations at public schools, municipal ceremonies and regimental reunions.
. . .
It would take several decades before the modern civil rights revolution compelled
most white Americans to reacquaint themselves with the ideological aspects of
the Civil War. In so doing, they would come to rediscover a speech that was first
forgotten, then remembered and finally, a century after its delivery, understood.
(The reference here is to Martin Luther King and his 1963 “Gettysburg address.”)
In a “Whiteheadian” reading, the story of the Gettysburg address is a story of the
becoming of successive events, which could become otherwise, i.e. take on another
directionality. It offers the possibility to analyze how the experience of time as dis-
continuous may enable a sense of continuity through time. In what follows I focus
on three aspects of the making of events and their mutuality as a means to under-
stand how continuity may emerge through time.
The becoming of the speech at the time. The speech itself had a message, which was
one of progress and democracy. It reminded the people present of the “real” struggle,
which was about creating a novel society based on equality, a struggle that would
honor those who died at the Gettysburg battle. The text of Lincoln’s address does not
mention the divide between confederates and unionists, between north and south
(once again becoming a central topic in contemporary political debates in the US).
Although he could foresee many battles lying ahead before the end of the war, the
accomplishment of the address lies in its very message of an underlying struggle for
an equal and free society. It is not difficult to appreciate how Whitehead’s epochal
view of time works here, as the speech is aimed at its own accomplishment, like the
song by Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s speech remained more or less ignored by
many people in the years that followed and was not recognized “as the speech it was.”
The message of the address was authored to signal that the soldiers had chiefly fallen
in the cause of a more equal society. It is important to note, however, that the mes-
sage of the speech was not lost on the soldiers who wrote letters from the battlefield
before the address, which reflected a deeper sense of what they were going into bat-
tle for than beating the enemy. The fact that the message was reflected in those let-
ters suggests that there were multiple previous events at which they had participated,
which had influenced their ideas about the cause they were fighting for. It is not
unreasonable to infer that the address was a synthesis of multiple previous occa-
sions, which made it into an event, however insignificant the attention it received at
the time.
Mutual becoming between successive events and the Gettysburg address. In Zeitz’s
account, successive events served to uphold two different versions of the address.
Newspaper articles and the military commemorations were mostly about the battle
between unionists and confederates, and underplayed or ignored the message of
Lincoln’s address. At other events, however, such as readings of the speech at elem
entary schools across the US, the message of the address was beginning to take hold.
The latter stream of events has had the most impact, as shown by the fact that Martin
Luther King’s famous speech in Washington DC 100 years later made implicit refer-
ence to Lincoln’s address. It is worth noting that in the first part of the twentieth
century, events took place in the women’s movement and with African-American
audiences at which the address was also evoked. Clearly, such events became what
they became by evoking Lincoln’s intended theme of the address. This is where
Whitehead’s notion of immanence and time comes in handy. As to the relations
between successive events and the address, two observations may be made about
their mutual relationality. Firstly, the address is kept alive as it is evoked in the pre-
sent event. When it is read out loud in a classroom, teacher and pupils evoke that
event (assuming they know its context) through the words they utter together and
perhaps the discussions they have about the address. Because the actual context of
the address cannot be evoked, the address is evoked not so much on its own prem-
ises, but on the premises accorded to it by the present event. As the address is uttered
by school children and their teacher, it is experience in that context, and not the
original context. Secondly, while the address is being recreated in the schools, the
school events are equally created by the evocation of the address. Much the way lis-
tening to “Time” by Pink Floyd is accomplished as an event, reciting the address
makes the recitation into an event. This is what Whitehead referred to as imma-
nence: school children imagine Lincoln giving the address as they recite it, and
thereby their recitation becomes the event of reciting the address. The word “imma-
nence” is not to be taken lightly, because it signifies the internal connecting of events
(Hernes, 2014a; 2014b). The word “connecting’ ” may in fact be too weak in the case
of Whitehead’s theory, because immanence implies that two events become “mutu-
ally constitutive”; they create one another as they make incursions into one another
in mutually constitutive processes of becoming. It is possible to take the metaphor
event further and say that the events become one whole.
Creating continuity from discontinuity. We might ask ourselves, “what’s the use of
considering events immanently as mutually constitutive?” The answer, following
Whitehead, is that the experience of each event related to the address represents a
temporally discontinuous experience. But on the other hand, nothing can become
anything without continuity. Events extend temporally from momentary experience;
this is the only way they can transcend their momentary nature as a drop of experi
ence, as postulated by St Augustine. It is through extension of events that there is
“becoming of continuity” (Whitehead, 1929: 35). Continuity is usefully explored as a
dimension of the immanent mutual processes of becoming between events.
Continuity cannot be limited to comparison of “similar” events. There is little simi-
larity, for instance, between the Gettysburg address and school children reciting it.
Continuity is created not through sameness of events, but rather through their com-
monality. What connects the address and the school recitations is a common under-
lying concern or theme, which enables in turn the becoming of both the address and
the school recitations as events. Without commonality it is hard to see how exten-
sion of events may take place through time. Commonality may perhaps be likened
to the notion of plot in narrative theory, originally advanced by Aristotle (1996) and
pursued by Ricoeur (1984). In poetry, for instance, plot is what keeps disparate
actions together in an intelligible account, partly because it has a known ending.
However, whereas plot may be inferred from the outside and analytically imposed ex
post, the view taken here is that commonality is a process of continual activity
among actors in the constitution of events, which means that it cannot be settled in
advance. Commonality can only be an immanent process, linking events internally
to one another (Hernes, 2014a), and can only be emergent, which does not imply
that it has no form. The commonality established by the military commemorations
with the event served to extend a mistaken interpretation of the address, which was
in some senses rectified by school recitations, African American audiences and the
women’s emancipationist movement, as they established a different line of common-
ality with the address. Hence commonality, and consequently continuity, is contin-
gent, which means that it may be curtailed, thwarted or reinforced by the immanent
processes that constitute events.
3.6 Continuity in Discontinuity

There is a need to know more about the making of events, partly because the making
of events can enable us to get to grips with the becoming of organizational continu
ity as a temporal process. By discussing the becoming of events against a backdrop
of Whitehead’s epochal theory of time, it may be seen how events embody both con
tinuity and discontinuity. Whitehead’s approach emphasizes how discontinuity is
necessary for continuity to be established, while leaving open the nature of continu
ity. Everyday life in organizations is full of discontinuities. However, without extract-
ing continuity from those discontinuities, the very idea of organization is rendered
pointless. The advantage of contemplating becoming of continuity as done by
Whitehead is that it applies to a range of organizational phenomena. For example, it
helps answer central questions posed in organizational identity research, such as
“who are we becoming?” (Schultz and Hernes, 2013). If organizational identity is to
have meaning, it logically needs to represent becoming of continuity of some sort,
but emerging from discontinuities.
Others who have written persuasively about events and agency include Emirbayer
and Mische (1998), whose paper draws heavily on Mead’s notion of time and events.
However, because Mead assumes the naturally emerging continuity between events
as they happen, there is no particular need for Emirbayer and Mische to search for a
stronger sense of temporal agency than what is expressed through the making of the
present via its relationship with past and future. When temporal experience is seen
as discontinuous, on the other hand, there will be stronger demands on temporal
agency represented in the becoming of events to play a more active role in the mak-
ing of organizational continuity and, consequently, the organization as a whole. If
immanence and commonality of events are decisive for continuity, as suggested
above, it becomes important to study in more detail how events come into being and
how their immanence with other events unfolds over time and how they become
reconstructed through the experience of discontinuity. Such a view enables continu
ity (as well as change) to be studied through the acts of the actors themselves as they
face dilemmas and alternatives in evoking past and future events. It requires above
all that events are not accorded eventness (Bakhtin, in Morson, 1991) a priori, but
that their eventness is allowed to emerge through time as they become enrolled into
other events to take part in the becoming of those other events. Here lies the poten-
tial of the notion of epoch as sustaining that which has begun, while it is developing
its totality as an event, like a song or a speech.
Finally, a few words about continuity and discontinuity. On a conventional view,
continuity may be seen as a sign of no change; the steady state of things that perse-
vere in the absence of agency for change. Hence the idea that change, not continuity,
requires agency (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). A process ontological view would
see it very differently, and siding with Whitehead (1920; 1925; 1929), continuity
requires agency, because in a changing world continuity requires effort (Hernes,
2014a). Most process scholars would readily agree with this argument, because a
basic assumption of process ontology is that any persisting state of affairs requires
agency. Nevertheless, until now the notion of continuity has received less attention
than the notion of stability. The two concepts relate to time, albeit somewhat differ-
ently. Whereas stability is seen as a state of affairs that persists over time, continuity
signifies the extension of acts or events through time. This implies that continuity
cannot be taken for granted, and equally important, it is contingent and may thus
become otherwise, and it is the becoming otherwise that we may label “change.”
Note
1. I am most grateful to Juliane Reinecke for helpful comments on an earlier version of the
manuscript.
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4
The Sociology of Time
Eviatar Zerubavel
Forty-three years ago, in a journal article titled “Timetables and Scheduling: On the
Social Organization of Time,” I introduced the notion of a “sociology of time”
(Zerubavel, 1976: 87). Having since then written five books (Zerubavel, 1979,
1981/1985, 1985/1989, 2003, 2011) and many articles further fleshing out that
notion, here are what I consider the main components of this distinctive perspective
on temporality.
4.1 A Sociotemporal Order

As its very name suggests, the sociology of time explores its distinctly social dimen-
sion. Unlike the psychology of time, it thus focuses on its pronouncedly collective
experience and organization. Its units of analysis, therefore, are not individuals but
social groups ranging from mere couples to entire civilizations.
Dealing with the suprapersonal aspect of temporality means, for example, dealing
with traditions of measuring (“seven minutes”) and reckoning (“10:54”) time as well
as of dating past (“1658”) and future (“next Wednesday”) events. It also means deal-
ing with norms of duration (such as how long one should mourn the death of a par-
ent), sequence (such as eating sweets only after the main course), timing (such as the
appropriate age for retiring), and frequency (such as what we consider “too often”).
Yet while avoiding the strictly personal, the sociology of time is also careful not to
mistake the merely impersonal for the truly universal and thus not to conflate the
sociotemporal order with the natural, physicotemporal order. In order to do so, it
focuses on whatever lies between the personal and the universal. As such, it deals
with unmistakably social conventions such as the ones underlying teachers’ and
nurses’ (in sharp contrast to hunters’ and fishermen’s) work/rest rhythms or the fixed
times at which we brush our teeth rather than when they get dirty.
Unlike the physicotemporal order, the sociotemporal order is based on artificial
rather than natural constraints. This is most pronouncedly exemplified by social
rhythms that, though they may seem to us natural, are actually based on unmistak
ably artificial units of time. That is true not only of the television “season” or the
academic semester but also of the day, the month, and the year, let alone the hour
and the week.
Eviatar Zerubavel, The Sociology of Time In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane
Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Eviatar Zerubavel.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0004
The Sociology of Time 45
As one of our major standard units of time, the day is based on the time it takes
the earth to complete a full rotation on its axis. Yet is it nature that dictates that it
would “begin” at midnight (or, as in Judaism and Islam, at sunset)? Is it nature that
generates 23- and 25-hour days when we shift to and from daylight-saving time?
And is it nature that makes us abruptly gain or lose a day upon crossing the
International Date Line?
Consider also the month, another major standard unit of time originally based on
the period from one new moon to the next. Yet while seemingly a product of nature,
our 30- or 31-day (or, in February, 28- or 29-day) calendar month is defined strictly
mathematically as a precise multiple of the day and is thus but an artificial approxi-
mation of the actual 29.5306-day lunation.
That is also true of the year, another seemingly natural standard unit of time,
based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, on which we base our annual as
well as multi-annual (elections, Olympics) rhythms of social life. After all, in sharp
contrast to the actual solar year, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46
seconds long, our calendar year too is defined strictly mathematically (and thus arti-
ficially) as a precise multiple of the day. Furthermore, it is clearly not nature that
determines the length of the 354- or 355-day Islamic calendar year, let alone the
260-day Central American and 210-day Indonesian divinatory calendar years
(Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 50–8). Nor, for that matter, is it due to nature that the year
“begins” on different days in different calendars (and as in the case of the fiscal and
academic years even within the same society) or that it constitutes the very basis on
which we reckon age.
The need to avoid conflating the sociotemporal and physicotemporal orders is
even clearer when one considers the weekly rhythm, which, whether based on a
seven-, four-, six-, ten-, or nineteen-day-long cycle, has nothing whatsoever to do
with nature (Zerubavel, 1985/1989). Nor, for that matter, does the hour, the standard
unit of time on which we base our very notion of “clock time,” which is strictly
mathematically and thus utterly artificially defined as a precise fraction of the day.
4.2 Culture and Time

We have thus far examined one component of the distinctive perspective that soci
ology brings to the study of time. Yet as implied in Pitirim Sorokin’s notion of “socio
cultural” (rather than “physicomathematical”) time (Sorokin, 1943: 158–225), there
is much more that it offers the student of temporality. Let us examine, for instance,
some major ways of collectively experiencing time with which we are all very famil-
iar. Given such familiarity, they may actually seem to us quite natural and therefore
inevitable. A closer examination, however, reveals that they are anything but.
Consider, first, our conception of time as a finite and thereby irrecoverable
resource, which is at the heart of our experience of “not having enough time” and of
the effectively utilitarian way we think about “spending” a month, “investing” three
years, “saving” twenty minutes, or “wasting” an evening. Our effort to minimize the
amount of “unused” time is evident, for example, in our attitude toward waiting and
commuting, not to mention in our very notion of “killing” time. Such a pronoun
cedly pragmatic approach to time also underlies our cultural valorization of speed,
as evidenced by the expressway, the supercomputer, the microwave oven, the scien-
tific abstract, and even the “quickie,” let alone the very idea of simultaneous con-
sumption or “multitasking.”
A further manifestation of the role of culture in how we view time is its mathem
atical conception as an abstract quantity of duration totally independent of context.
The hours and minutes that our parking meters and egg timers measure, for instance,
are utterly removed from any concrete physicotemporal context such as the season
or time of day, and so are our running and swimming records. And it is such a view
of time that also allows us to schedule our various daily and weekly activities in the
exact proportions we wish to be involved in them (Zerubavel, 1999: 14–17).
Viewing time as an abstract quantity of duration also explains how we can “move”
a thirty-minute appointment from one day to another as well as add and subtract
hours and minutes when calculating what time to set our wake-up alarm for in order
to be on time for an early-morning meeting. It is likewise manifested in the way we
dissociate measured time from passing time, such as when what we officially measure
in basketball games as three minutes may actually last twenty! Such a fundamental
distinction between “net time” and “gross time” (Zerubavel, 1981/1985: 62–3) is also
exemplified by the way we combine sick days we accumulate over several years into a
single continuous three-week sick leave, the way college professors’ “tenure clock”
figuratively “stops” when they take a maternity leave, as well as the way delivery
times are calculated in terms of a number of “business days,” effectively skipping
weekends and holidays.
Yet another manifestation of the role of culture in how we experience temporality
are both our linear and circular views of time. Effectively based on the notion of
irreversible processes such as growing up or aging and unique events such as birth
and death, the linear view of time underlies the way we date events chronologically.
“2019” thus refers to a point in time we experience as absolutely later than “1982,”
which is definitely not true of the temporal relations between “7:16” and “11:38,”
“Monday” and “Friday,” or “October” and “June,” all of which presuppose a circular
view of time. (Though clearly antithetical to each other, however, those two views are
by no means mutually exclusive, as exemplified by the way Jews bless God on
Hanukkah for the miracles he performed “in those days at this time”—that is, at that
point in history yet on these particular days of the calendar year.)
The circular view of time is the basis for mythically synchronizing historical and
calendrical time by invoking the notion of actual repetition (Eliade, 1957/1959), yet
also far less dramatically for viewing the week, for example, as a series of periodically
recurring non-historical “types” of days. As Mark Twain allegedly quipped, even if
history does not actually repeat itself it nevertheless “rhymes.” Although a yoga class
last Tuesday, therefore, may not be identical to a yoga class next Tuesday, they are
nevertheless both instances of the very same periodically recurring “type” of event.
That certainly adds an element of predictability to the sociotemporal order. Unlike
nighttimes or summers, for example, Saturdays may not be part of nature, yet we can
nevertheless expect them to “behave” in a way we would not expect from “a Monday”
or “a Wednesday”.
4.3 The Semiotics of Time

As implied in the above, we often view certain time periods not just as abstract
quantities of duration but also as having certain qualities marking them as effectively
distinct from durationally identical time periods that do not have those qualities.
Such a pronouncedly qualitative view of time boils down to a fundamental distinc-
tion between special, “marked” periods and ordinary, “unmarked” ones, whether we
experience it circularly (such as the difference between annual holidays and the
mere intervals among them [Hubert, 1905/1999]) or linearly (such as the contrast
between highly “eventful” historical periods and those collectively considered
“empty lulls” [Zerubavel, 2003: 25–34]).
Such a pronouncedly semiotic dimension of time is also evident whenever we use
time to signify other things such as status, commitment, intimacy, priority, and
power (Zerubavel, 1987). Consider, for instance, the symbolic aspect of duration, as
evidenced when we compare the different amounts of time someone spends with
different people, or the disappointment we feel when our guests leave “so early.” It
also explains why one might feel slighted that it took a close friend two weeks to
notify one of her engagement, as well as why one might refuse to wait for latecomers
beyond a certain amount of time.
Along similar lines, consider also the symbolic aspect of sequential ordering, as
manifested in the significance we attach to the order of speakers on a panel, or in the
priority signified by doing something “first.” By the same token, note also the sym-
bolism of timing, as manifested in the significance attached to a pledge to be avail
able “whenever you need me” as a token of commitment, or in the way a widow’s
decision to remarry is characterized as having been made “too soon.” Finally, con-
sider the symbolism of frequency, as exemplified by the significance attributed to
“progressing” from meeting once or twice a year to doing it regularly every week.
4.4 The Politics of Time

The sociology of time also highlights the political dimension of temporal arrange-
ments, and particularly the relation between power and time. The authority to allow
one’s children to play or watch television only after they finish their homework is
clearly a function of one’s power over them. So for that matter is the authority to
impose a curfew or decide when they should go to bed.
The political aspect of time is also manifested in the establishment of calendrical

contrasts. The early Christians’ decision to move the “peak” of the Jewish seven-day
week from Saturday to Sunday was an unmistakably political act, expressing as
well as promoting the break between the Church and the Synagogue (Zerubavel,
1985/1989: 20–2, 1987: 349–52). And given that Passover is always celebrated on a
full moon, so, indeed, was their decision to fix the date of Easter on the Sunday
following the full moon that coincides with or falls next after the vernal equinox
(Zerubavel, 1982a).
Consider also in this regard the decisions of the architects of the French
Revolution to introduce a ten-day week, replace the traditional Christian Era with a
new Republican Era, and begin the calendar year on September 22 instead of January
1 as parts of a larger attempt to de-Christianize France (Zerubavel, 1977, 1985/1989:
28–35, 1987: 352–3). Equally political was Stalin’s introduction of a five-day week in
order to dissociate Soviet social life from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish seven-
day rhythms of worship. Furthermore, he abolished the very institution of a com-
mon weekly day of rest, which meant that every day a different one-fifth of the Soviet
society had a day off, thereby exemplifying the role of calendrical arrangements in
promoting a “divide and rule” brand of politics (Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 35–43).
* * *
Given its strictly conventional basis, one might come to view the sociotemporal
order as somewhat less pervasive than the natural and therefore inevitable physic-
otemporal order. Yet as evidenced by the question “Do you know what day it is?” we
need to be sociotemporally “oriented” in order to be able to participate in the pro
nouncedly intersubjective social world (Zerubavel, 1985/1989: 2–3). To be part of
that world we also need to know what time it is (Zerubavel, 1982b), what month it is,
as well as what year it is.
In fact, despite its conventional basis, we tend to essentialize the sociotemporal
order and experience it as inevitable. Thus, for example, given the lack of any three-,
four-, five-, six-, eight-, nine-, or ten-day regular periodicity in our daily lives, we often
come to experience the seven-day week as a natural rhythm (Zerubavel, 2016: 71–2).
Trying to offer a class that would meet every nine days or establish a regular routine of
cleaning one’s home or calling one’s parents every six or eight days would therefore
most likely fail after just one or two rounds of such seemingly “absurd” cycles.
And yet, it is absolutely imperative that we avoid conflating merely conventional
sociotemporality with truly inevitable physicotemporality. As Peter Beagle put it in
his fantasy novel The Last Unicorn,
When I was alive, I believed—as you do—that time was at least as real and solid as
myself, and probably more so. I said “one o’clock” as though I could see it, and
“Monday” as though I could find it on the map . . . Like everyone else, I lived in a
house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and
I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know
that I could have walked through the walls. (Beagle, 1968: 199)
References
Beagle, Peter S. (1968). The Last Unicorn. New York: Ballantine.

Eliade, Mircea (1957/1959). The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World.
Hubert, Henri (1905/1999). A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and
Magic. In Essay on Time (pp. 43–91). Oxford: Durkheim Press.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1943). Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time: A Study of Referential
Principles of Sociology and Social Science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1976). Timetables and Scheduling: On the Social Organization of
Time. Sociological Inquiry, 46, 87–94.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1977). The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the
Sociology of Time. American Sociological Review, 42, 868–77.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1979). Patterns of Time in Hospital Life: A Sociological Perspective.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1981/1985). Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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5
Studying Organization from the
Perspective of the Ontology of
Temporality
Introducing the Events-Based Approach
Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty
5.1 Introduction
The matter of time and temporality has always been a core topic in the humanities,
as time serves as a basis for any definition of the social order (Sorokin and
Merton 1937; Zerubavel, 1981; Adam, 1990).1 Since the appearance of works by
Clark (1985), Bluedorn and Denhardt (1988), Gherardi and Strati (1988), and
Hassard (1991), the subject of time and temporality has been considered a core topic
for organization scholars as well. These researchers have attempted to incorporate
the subject of time into their studies in two ways (Bluedorn, 2002): either based on a
realist understanding of time including, among others, linear-views and clock time
(Ancona, Okhuysen, and Perlow, 2001), to which we will hereafter refer as the ontol-
ogy2 of time; or based on a subjective understanding of time, to which we will here-
after refer as the ontology of temporality, and which includes social construction
and process-views (Chia, 2002; Hernes, 2014a; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017).
Whereas in the ontology of time, time is a standardized and external dimension
from which the organizational phenomenon can be measured and managed, the
ontology of temporality has been favored by those working on ongoing change
(Schultz and Hernes, 2013) or emerging activities (Hussenot and Missonier, 2016)
because it signals the constant co-definition and re-configuration of the past, the pre-
sent, and the future. As pointed out by Bluedorn and Standifer (2006), the ontology
of temporality signals the unique temporal perspective of the actor as opposed to
generalized time as expressed by clock time. Another factor that distinguishes
time from temporality is that whereas the ontology of time is linear or sequential
Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes, and Isabelle Bouty, Studying Organization from the Perspective of the Ontology of Temporality:
Introducing the Events-Based Approach In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane
Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Anthony Hussenot, Tor Hernes,
and Isabelle Bouty.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0005
Studying Organization from the Perspective 51
(see Hernes in Chapter 3 of this volume), the ontology of temporality is expressed

through events (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006; Hernes, 2014a; Hernes, Chapter 3,
this volume).
In spite of this rather clear distinction in the literature, the ontology of time
(linear view of time) is so dominant in the field of organization studies that it often
appears as the only way to deal with organizational temporality (Bluedorn and
Waller, 2006: 357). To date, the ontology of time might have been relevant to under-
standing repetitive and standardized procedural activities, especially in large formal
organizations (Chia, 2003; March, 2007; Jensen, Thuesen, and Geraldi, 2016). As
most of the early research in organization studies has been conducted in large manu
facturing and services companies, the activities studied were often procedural and
standardized, and based on a rather stable structure of governance. This apparent
stability encouraged researchers to adopt an absolute view of how actors define the
continuity and change of their activity. In such a view, an organizational phenomenon
is considered as evolving from a given past, to a present and then a future, in this
order, as these time-slices seem to be defined once and for all.
However, the recent emergence of ever-changing organizational phenomena such
as freelancing, social movements, etc., and the development of projects in which
actors must develop responses to unforeseen situations and define unique and
dynamic collaborations, bring a new perspective to how actors have to define their
temporalities. Such organizational phenomena cannot readily be studied using the
ontology of time because the past, the present, and the future of these activities are
not given but rather have to be created and recreated on an ongoing basis by actors.
This type of fluid situation can be observed in any kind of organizational phenom
enon but it is especially prevalent among project-based organizations, which pursue
innovative and creative activities, when the ordering of the activities cannot be
defined beforehand at the beginning of a project but instead must be constantly
defined by actors as they face unpredicted events, forcing them to constantly re/
adjust their tasks, roles, goals, etc.
More generally, in a context of growing projectification of work and the society
(Jensen, Thuesen, and Geraldi, 2016), based on temporary, multiple, improvised,
and innovative activities characterized by their situated temporalities, the linear and
sequential ontology of time loses some of its usefulness for understanding organiza-
tional phenomena. Rather, we need an ontology of temporality enabling us to under-
stand how such activities are defined and ordered as events. In However, the current
The lack of a substantial development of the ontology of temporality becomes prob-
lematic, since it drives scholars to impose a linear view of time on the intimate experi-
ence of informal, emerging, innovating, and project-based activities. This prevents
us from netter understanding how actors actually define the continuity of their
activities through time and over time, which is what makes these activities possible
(Bergson, 1907/2009; Mead, 1932).
This chapter aims to contribute to the development of an ontology of temporality
in organization studies by introducing an events-based approach to study the
emergence and evolution of organizational phenomena (Hernes, 2014a; 2014b; 2017;

Hussenot and Missonier, 2016; Hussenot, 2019). An events-based approach repre-
sents a useful framework for understanding and empirically studying the becoming
of continuity (Whitehead, 1929/1978) within activities, especially within a context
of nonbureaucratic and ever-changing collaboration. More precisely, an events-
based approach makes it possible to understand how continuity is produced and
reproduced through events despite the on-going unfolding and uncertainty of
actors’ activities.
The next section discusses the ontology of time and the ontology of temporality and
aims to clarify the analytical distinction between the two. Each ontology is defined
and positioned within the literature. Section 5.3 introduces the events-based approach
as a way to understand organization from the perspective of the ontology of tem-
porality. Section 5.4 deals with some methodological challenges of the events-based
approach. Finally, section 5.5 discusses the contributions and implications of the
events-based approach. We notably emphasize the implications of an events-based
approach for our understanding of what an organization is and the relevance of an
events-based approach for studying contemporary organizational phenomena.
5.2 Distinguishing between the Ontology of

Time and the Ontology of Temporality
The ontology of time and the ontology of temporality are sometimes conflated in
studies as the objectified passing of time is mixed up with the subjective experience
of the flowing of activities. This conflation is not surprising, as it can be traced back
to the very classic distinction between the Greek notions of chronos and kairos. It is
generally accepted that chronos, which is the personification of time in pre-Socratic
philosophy, refers to a numerical and linear view of time, while kairos stands for a
more qualitative view of time, as this Greek word signifies the right and opportune
moment (Markosian, 2002). The chronos view is visible in realist ontologies of time
established by Plato (360 BC/2008) and Newton (1686/2009), among others
(Markosian, 2002), while the kairos view has led to a more subjective view of time
that appeared in the philosophies of Saint-Augustin (401/1993), Bergson (1889,
1896/1939, 1907/2009), and Ricoeur (1984), among others.
5.2.1 The Ontology of Time
The ontology of time is based on the assumption that time is a natural and objective
dimension that can be measured and used to run/schedule activities. This view is
deeply anchored in the Judeo-Christian civilization, as time here begins with creation
and ends with the apocalypse (TenHouten, 2005). Time is thus external and abso-
lute. It does not depend on individual experiences, as it is the same across all
situations and individuals (Shipp and Cole, 2015). This view has been referred to as
clock time (Zerubavel, 1981) or fungible time (Bluedorn, 2002). As institutionalized
measures of time are based on natural cycles (days, seasons, etc.), time is here con-
ceptualized as being chronological, unidirectional, linear, and progressing from the
past to the present and then to the future (Bluedorn and Denhardt 1988). In such a
view, the past, the present, and the future are detached; the past vanishes into the
present, and the future is expected. The events lived by actors can be differentiated
from one another by defining them as belonging to the past, to the present, or to the
future. Thus, in this view, events are positioned along the arrow of time but do not
constitute time per se, as time is a dimension that is given and independent from
these said events. Such a view leads to a representation of time as a spatial dimen-
sion, or rather, time is here conceptualized as “the ghost of space” (Bergson, 1896:
75). More precisely, time and space are alike, since we define time merely by separat-
ing and spatializing events, spreading them out along a time-line with a given
orientation.
In spite of the criticisms leveled against this approach, seeing time as a common
temporal scheme enables actors to regulate social life (Sorokin and Merton, 1937).
As an institutionalized measure, time plays a useful role, as it makes the coordin
ation between people possible (Zerubavel, 1981). Consequently, many studies have
focused on the role of time in organizations—notably, how it is experienced
(Butler, 1995) and managed as a controllable resource (Knights and Odih, 2002), or
used to identify, coordinate, and measure processes in organizations. Time can be
used to measure and define frames that articulate the different steps of an activity—
called temporal frames by Boden (1997). Some scholars have also focused on how
actors deal with different temporal frames and whether these different temporal
frames, such as lifecycle vs. cyclical frames (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988), are well
articulated or in tension with one another (e.g. Doz, 1996; Doz, Olk and Ring, 2000;
Huxham and Vangen, 2000; Lipparini, Lorenzoni, and Ferriani, 2014; Inkpen and
Pien, 2006).
In terms of organization and management, the ontology of time resonates with
coordination, synchronization, and timing. It is concerned with extension in the
present. It does not, however, concern itself with the dynamics between present,
past, and future. Time is used as an objective dimension to measure, interpret, and
position organizational phenomena.
5.2.2 The Ontology of Temporality
The ontology of temporality, i.e. a process-view of time (Hernes, 2014a; Reinecke

and Ansari, 2017), is anchored in the idea that time is not an external framework
imposed on actors, but rather, it is indexical to the events, activities, and experi-
ences lived by actors (Abbott, 2001). In this view, temporality is about the passage
from the flow of one’s experiences to a tangible continuity that defines these very
activities. Temporality becomes the creative definition of the reality enabling actors
to act in ways that create a sense of continuity through their activity. Importantly,
this sense of continuity can be created from mere repetitions and/or novelty
(Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) but is not confined to either repetition or novelty.
In such a view, the understanding and meaning of the past, the present, and the
future thus emerges from the temporal work performed by people (Kaplan and
Orlikowski, 2013)., Such understanding and meaning emerges from the way the
current moment is defined, connected, and related to the past, the present, and the
future (Weick, 1979; Dawson, 2014).
Rhythms, stabilities, novelties, ruptures, etc. are not defined along a given time-
line but rather are always in a state of becoming, as pointed out by Feldman and
Pentland (2003) in the case of routines that are constantly re-defined by actors. In
this sense, temporality is expressed in multiple ways, but narration seems to play a
key role in such expressions (Ricoeur, 1984; Boje, 1995; Rantakari and Vaara, 2017).
This type of temporality is what Cunliffe, Luhman, and Boje (2004), inspired by
Ricoeur’s (1984) work on narrative and time, have called “narrative temporality,” i.e.
the definition of the continuity of activities as a collective narrative practice. Such a
view suggests that “stories are not just chronologies (a sequence of events) but
situated, responsive performances” that “create a current experience and sense of
reality in the moment of telling” (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 273). In such a view, events
and their meanings and configurations depend on how actors narrate their experience,
how they create and recreate configurations of events (Ricoeur, 1984).
Similarly, the configuration, the acceleration, and the slowing down of the past,
the present, and the future, as well as what are considered to be a near or a distant
past and future, are not given; rather, they are situated and immanent in activities.
The temporality of an activity evolves and can have multiple expressions, since actors
can tell different stories as they experience the current moment differently one from
another and therefore give different definitions of their own personal continuities.
More precisely, the principle of immanence (Chia, 1999; Cobb, 2007; Hernes, 2014a;
Hussenot and Missonier, 2016; Hussenot, 2019) implies that the very defining and
configuring of the past, the present, and the future take place as one indivisible activity
in the current moment. Immanence here means that the current moment embodies
past, present, and future events, and this embodying of these events in the current
moment also gives shape to those past, present, and future events. Such a conception
of immanence implies that, as each moment absorbs preceding moments while
“projecting them towards a not-yet knowable future” (Chia, 1999: 220), by the same
token the future moment both gives shape to and is shaped by that very same
operation. Consequently, the past is immanent in the present and the future;
the present is immanent in the past and the future, and the future is immanent in the
past and the present.
Although authors in process studies have made efforts to develop methods to
study organization from the perspective of the ontology of time, especially in the
literature on change and innovation (Van de Ven and Poole, 1990; 1995; 2005), the
apparatus of an ontology of temporality remains to be developed. More precisely, the
ontology of temporality supposes to represent the immanence of the past, present,
and future from which the continuity of the activity is re/defined in the current
moment. However, as noted by Langley et al. (2013), attempts to study organization
from the perspective of the ontology of temporality have suffered from a lack of con-
sistency, leading to a “temporal bracketing” that consists in applying the ontology of
time. We think that this difficulty arises partly because the implications of our
understanding of organization as process through time have not been given suffi-
cient attention. Within the ontology of temporality, organization is not a social or
economic entity evolving along a time-line, but rather, organization is in the very
definition of temporality, as the reality of activities emerges from this temporality itself.
The events-based approach we introduce in the following section is an attempt to
provide an approach that allows one to follow and transcribe the way that temporal-
ity is defined and serves as a basis for making any activity, and hence organization,
possible. More precisely, we are interested in building a framework that allows one
to understand how actors define the continuity and the ordering of their activity, by
re/defining and configuring past, present, and future events.
5.3 The Events-Based Approach

The events-based approach suggests that organizations are temporal phenomena
that emerge and are maintained through the ongoing configuration and co-definition
of past, present, and future events that define both the current moment and its
agency. The relation between the events and the temporality has already been
underlined many times in organization studies (e.g. Chia, 1999; Cobb, 2007;
Cooper, 2014; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016; Danner-Schröder,
2018). Relying mainly on the process philosophy, such as the works of Henri Bergson
(Hussenot, forthcoming); Gilles Deleuze (Deroy and Clegg, 2011); George Herbert
Mead (Schultz and Hernes, 2013); Alfred North Whitehead (Chia, 1999; Cobb, 2007;
Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016), several scholars have tried to con-
ceptualize organizational temporality as arising from events.
5.3.1 The Notion of an Event
While the event is the unit of analysis of the events-based approach (Hernes, 2014a;
2014b; 2017), this notion remains open to interpretation as it means both what is
taking place (from the Latin word eventum) and what happened (from the Latin word
eventus) (Deroy, 2009). The event, therefore, refers both to the actual moment and to
the past, present, and future events that are considered external to the actual moment.
However, these two meanings should be seen not as opposites, but rather as a unique
dynamic in which the actual moment is defined by past, present, and future events
as much as past, present, and future events are re-defined in the actual moment. In
such a dynamic, all the past, present, and future events are directly or indirectly co-
defined in the actual moment, as there is nothing else in the actual event but other
events (Cobb, 2007). In other words, an event is anything that makes the actual
moment understandable. Consequently, understanding happens through the enact-
ment of past, present, and future events in the current moment. In this way, reality is
defined primarily by the past, present, and future events enacted by people, as these
enacted events define temporality, i.e. a sense of continuity arising through “sequen-
tial plots” (Boje, 1995: 100). In such a view, temporality is not given or stable, but
rather, it is always active (Hernes, 2014b), as past, present, and future events, as well
as their configurations (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), evolve permanently in a way
that maintains continuity and meaning of reality.
Let’s consider a paddler, crossing a bay from a point A to a point B on her/his
stand-up paddle.3 From an outside point of view, the crossing can be seen as a series
of separate event because the board is gliding on the water without stopping. But
from the point of view of the paddler, each stroke is a new and distinguishable one,
even if it depends on the previous and the next ones. Each stroke addresses the feel-
ing of being in movement on the water, but also the event of having left one shore
and the event of eventually arriving at the opposite shore. As each stroke fades into
the past, it leaves behind a trace that can be enacted with every other current or
expected stroke. Some may stand out more than others because they are associated
with a beautiful sighting. Each new stroke leads to the re-definition of the activity—
not entirely, but the nature, the difficulty, the meaning of the activity can be
re-assessed during each stroke. In this view, the meaning of the activity of paddling
(easy, difficult, fun, boring, etc.) is constantly redefined according to what the pad-
dler has experienced previously, what she/he is experiencing, and what she/he
expects to experience in the future.
A tangible temporality is thus re-produced in passing from the flow of indivisible
experiences to events, which are distinguishable from one another, yet immanently
related. This passage from the indivisible flow of experiences to events is what
enables actors to position their current moment in a past, a present, and a future
(Bergson, 1907/2009). Moreover, it is through this positioning of the actual event
into a continuity that actors are able to act in a certain way and anticipate continuity
and change.
5.3.2 Organization as a Structure of Events
Following this events-based view, the idea of organization gains a specific meaning.
Organization is not here viewed as a social or an economic entity, but instead as
the very process of co-definition and configuration of events by which people can
both define their actual moment and act in anticipation of novel events. The rise of
independent workers and their numerous collaborations provides a good illustra-
tion of organization as a structure of events (Hussenot and Sergi, 2018). As inde-
pendent workers’ activities are oriented toward multiple projects that are partly
interrelated and involve multiple actors, the organization of these workers cannot be
understood as a stable governance structure, but rather as an activity that consists in
creating a sense of continuity despite their involvement in numerous projects. The
organization emerges here from the temporalities of the projects in order to create a
structure of past, present, and future events from which the independent workers
can define the current moment, make decisions, and take action. For example, it is
based on the structure of events that independent workers can prioritize their tasks
and allocate resources to each task.
In this view, what we call organization is a structure of past, present, and future
events re-enacted by people (Hernes, 2014b; Hussenot, 2019). The notion of struc-
ture does not mean that the past, present, and future order is stable or given, but
rather that it is constantly negotiated, re-defined, and re-configured by actors. More
precisely, the events-based approach does not give primacy to any past, present, or
future events. It rejects preconceived primacy and instead aims to understand the
configuration of events from the point of view of actors in their actual moment.4 The
importance, the duration, and the pace of events is not imposed on actors, but are
considered as a way to define the actual moment. In this way, an events-based view
differs from more linear views of events (e.g. Langley et al., 2013; Morgeson et al.,
2015; Lord et al., 2015), according to which events are defined and viewed in relation
to one another in at least two ways—namely, their ordering, which is assumed to
remain the same as they move through time, and events are given particular qual
ities, such as centrality or strength (Morgeson et al., 2015).
The continuity of activities that emerges from the structure of events is thus always
in a state of becoming. This is in line with the Deleuzian view suggested by Deroy and
Clegg (2011: 639), whereby both difference and repetition are brought about by the
event: “any event can potentially deform the structural regularities in which it is
embedded. Thus, the concept of an event relates to both difference and repetition.” In
such a view, organization is defined as a temporal phenomenon expressed through
the very structure of events that are constantly re/enacted by actors. Continuity/dis-
continuity (Weibe, 2010), stability and/or novelty (Hussenot and Missonier, 2016),
and distant/near past and future (Hernes and Schultz, 2018) are only modes of defin-
ing and configuring the past, the present, and the future. Table 5.1 introduces some of
the main concepts of the events-based approach.
5.4 Applying the Events-Based Approach

The methodological challenge of an events-based approach is to show how the
structure of events evolves through actual moments, not merely from one stage to
Table 5.1 Some core concepts of the events-based approach
Concepts Definition
Actual Current experience lived by actors in which they enact a structure of events
moment in order to make sense of the world and act. This is the actual event/current
moment; the “now” lived by actors.
Continuity Sense of history, present and future re/defined through the re/definition and
configuration of various events. Continuity brings meaning and ordering to
actors. It is also called the continuum by Whitehead (1929).
Events Reification of the flow of experiences into moments that define the very
history, the present or the future of the activity and its context.
Enactment of Re/definition of past, present, and future events in the actual moment. Also
events called “prehension of events” by Whitehead (1929).
Structure of Configuration of past, present, and future events. This is the very definition
events of organization.
Organization Structure of events re/enacted by actors that defines their current activity,
i.e. the current activity’s continuity and ordering, as well as all “things”
involved in the current activity.
another, but as both an immanent and a situated process. More precisely, the aim
is to show how actors enact a temporality that is constantly re/defined in the “now.”
Of course, the events-based approach does not pretend to provide a full descrip-
tion of all the past, present, and future events enacted, but rather tries to offer an
understanding of the core events that are re/enacted by actors as they engage in
activities.
5.4.1 Depicting the Structure of Events as an Immanent

Definition of Temporality
The immanent principle described here means basically that events “connect intern
ally,” that previous or future events are brought into the “living present” by actors
(Hernes, 2014a). The structure of events of an actual moment is thus immanent in
the previous one. The way we define the current moment influences the definition of
the next current moment. Any representation of the structure of events during a
current moment includes - although differs from- the structure of events that was
manifest during the previous current moment. It is the progression of the structure
of events through actual moments that brings a sense of continuity to actors.
As the structure of events is translated in an actual moment from a previous one,
the structure of events is neither a mere repetition of the previous structure of events
nor entirely new. More precisely, the immanence principle can bring a sense of
continuity to actors, not only toward the past but toward the future as well, while
the principle of situatedness might reinforce this sense of continuity in certain situ
ations, while introducing a sense of novelty in others. The principle of situatedness
can give a sense of continuity if the current moment requires one to rely on what has
been previously enacted (i.e. past, present, and future events), but it can also provide
a sense of novelty if the current moment requires one to redefine and reconfigure
past, present, and future events. In whatever way the structure of events is enacted
by actors (as bringing a sense of stability and/or novelty), it always serves to define
continuity of reality for actors.
5.4.2 Defining Past, Present and Future Events and

Transcribing the Structure of Events
The literature on organization and temporality engages only partially with the pro-
cess by which actors select past, present, and future events. However, given the
important emergent literature on topics such as the uses of the past (Schultz and
Hernes, 2013; Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Suddaby, Foster, and Trank, 2010) and the
challenges of addressing distant futures (Bansal and DesJardine, 2014; George et al.,
2016; Wright and Nyberg, 2017), the situated dynamics offered by an events-based
approach should shed some light on how different elements of the past and future
are defined and processed in any current event, enabling the current event to reveal
itself to actors. According to the process view (Langley and Tsoukas, 2010; 2017),
in which the events-based approach is anchored, any depiction of the structure of
events is the result of the construction of a given organizational phenomenon.
The depiction of the structure of events is a way to describe the very making pro-
cess of the continuity, i.e. how actors create a story that enables them to make sense
of their actual moment and to act. This realization shows us that the researcher is
not external to the process of defining the structure of events, since she/he enacts
the events in the same way as any other actors. Consequently, the depiction of the
structure of events is never an objective one, but rather it is the uncertain outcome
of a fragile collective enactment of past, present, and future events marked by
on-going negotiations, interpretations, and compromises. In this sense, the main
task of the researcher is to experience and transcribe this enactment of the structure
of events, i.e. to experience the actual moment and transcribe the structure of
events enacted.
Figure 5.1 is an attempt to represent the progression of the structure of events of
an actual event (A) to other actual events (B and then C). As actual events are simply
different “nows” in which the past, the present, and the future are enacted, the figure
represents how past, present, and future are co-defined in actual events to provide a
sense of continuity that evolves from one actual event to another, providing a sense
of both stability and novelty for actors.
Past events Present Future

x events x events x

Actual event x’ events x’ events x’
(A)

Actual event x’’ events x’’ events x’’
(B)
Actual event
(C)
Figure 5.1 Progression of the structure of events through actual events
5.5 Some Implications and Contributions of the

Events-Based Approach
The events-based approach introduced in this chapter aims at studying organiza
tional phenomena from the perspective of the ontology of temporality. In such a
view, organization is a temporal phenomenon, i.e. it is the passage from the indivis
ible flow of experiences to configuration of past, present, and future events, serving
a sense of continuity for actors. Continuity is of great importance because it is pri-
marily from such a sense of continuity that actors can make sense of the world and
act. We can list at least three implications and contributions that an events-based
approach has to offer. First, this view implies that we see any organizational charac-
teristic as a temporal phenomenon and not as a substantive one. Second, the events-
based approach provides an alternative to the substantialist view in organization
studies that is based on predefined dualisms. Third, by surpassing the substantialist
view of organization, the events-based view offers an approach for studying con-
temporary organizational phenomena characterized by their fluidity and on-going
change.
5.5.1 Understanding Organizational Characteristics as

Temporal Phenomena
By stating that organization is the enactment of a structure of past, present, and

future events, the events-based approach offers an interesting way to comprehend
organizational characteristics as temporal phenomena. Continuity is not understood
here as something imposed on events by an external governance structure or by the
physical aspects of the organization (buildings, offices, etc.); instead, continuity is
produced and reproduced through the structure of events. In this sense, narration and
stories play a key role in enabling continuity. However, such an understanding does
not imply that non-humans do not play any role in the re/definition of continuity.
Buildings, technologies, etc. all play a role in re/defining continuity as well, as in such
a view, these non-human elements are seen as ingredients of events (Whitehead, 1929;
Hussenot, 2019), i.e. they participate in the re/definition of events insofar as their
meaning depends on the events they are related to. Following this idea, “things”
emerge from the structure of past, present, and future events to make reality tangible
and activity possible. In such a view, humans and non-humans are not given entities
positioned in a given space and time, but rather, they are abstractions (re)produced
through immanent and situated temporal activity. Nevertheless, the fact that non-
humans and humans are abstractions does not mean that non-humans and humans
do not exist; instead, as abstractions they gain specific meanings, roles, and statuses
because they are embedded into a structure of events, i.e. a history, a present, and a
future. By being embedded in this way, all “things” only exist as both outcomes and
ingredients of temporality.
Organizational phenomena such as collective memory (Hatch and Schultz,
2017), identity (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), culture (Hernes and Schultz, 2017), or
strategy (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013) thus emerge and are (re)produced as tem
poral phenomena. In this view, the relation between the collective history, the present,
and the expected future forms the basis for defining any organizational characteristic.
Organizational characteristics are thus not made from inherent and stable properties
but are always re/defined through temporality. For example, any attempt at develop-
ing a governance is a fragile outcome based on an activity’s history and expected
future, while this governance is also situated in a current context. Any form of gov-
ernance is an ingredient of events in the sense that it participates in the re/definition
of past, present, and future activities as much as it emerges from those same events.
In this way, governance participates in the maintenance of a sense of continuity. By
putting temporality first in the analysis, the events-based approach is thus an invitation
to reconsider how organizational characteristics emerge and are maintained.
5.5.2 Surpassing Predefined Dualisms and Embracing the

Complexity of Continuity
The events-based approach considers the continuity of organization not as

something made up from stable “things,” but rather, as always in a state of becoming,
performed through the enactment of the structure of events. This view invites
scholars to see organization as an ever-evolving phenomenon that is not just a
constant novelty, but more as progression in which continuity embraces novelty
(Hussenot and Missonier, 2016). Organization progresses by partially reproducing
previous organizational characteristics while bringing new ones into existence.
New and old organizational characteristics are not opposed, but rather, they
are co-defined, as these characteristics are re/produced in the re/definition of the
structure of events. This view offers an alternative to the one that has conceived of
organization as a process based on opposite stages or states, such as change versus
stability.
Dualisms such as novelty/stability, order/disorder, etc. are considered not as

opposites but rather as different ways to express the very complexity of the continuity
re/produced through the immanence and the situatedness of the structure of events.
As the progression of the structure of events does not lead to a clear and unique
meaning of the continuity of an activity, but instead to a complex one, and because
such a progression can be conflicted and open to multiple interpretations, dual-
isms are only seen as analytical distinctions made by people to make sense of the
world. This means that an organizational phenomenon should not be considered as
changing or stabilized, ordered or disordered, but rather, as always progressing, con-
tinuing as well as becoming novel. Following this idea, what seems important is to
study the emergence and reproduction of continuity, and how this continuity is
interpreted by actors, without imposing any predefined dualisms on such continuity.
As the meaning of the definition and configuration of various enacted events is not
always obvious for actors, continuity can seem messy, sometimes leading to very
different interpretations among different actors.
5.5.3 Relevance of the Events-Based Approach for Studying

Contemporary Organizational Phenomena
By considering organization as a structure of events providing continuity,

meaning, and ordering to actors, the events-based approach provides a relevant
framework for understanding some contemporary organizational phenomena.
Such a view is especially interesting in a context of ever-evolving ways of working
in which the way we define collaboration, job identity, and organization is mov-
ing forward (Barley, Becky, and Milliken, 2017). To date, most organizational
analyses have been based on the tenet that organization is the social and economic
entity that physically and socially circumscribes work activities (Chia, 2003). In
such a view, inherited from the industrial and bureaucratic era, work only occurs
in organizations. As this substantive view about organization was developed
in this specific context, we can understand the attraction of scholars to this
paradigm.
However, what about the current development of alternative ways of working
such as freelancing (Burke, 2015), coworking (Spinuzzi, 2012), the maker movement
(Anderson, 2012; Dougherty, 2012), and digital nomadism (Makimoto and
Manners, 1997), among others? These ways of working cannot be encapsulated into
an organization as a predefined entity, as workers engaging in these types of work
are often self-employed but still intensively collaborating with each other without
having a specific space and/or delimited work hours within which to do so.
Furthermore, these alternative ways of working are not separated from the rest of
society but are integrated into it, as they are not only about working but often
represent a lifestyle choice, including, for some of these workers, a political commit-
ment (Dougherty and Conrad, 2016). The same can be said about studies of social or
artistic movements (among others). All these phenomena have gained legitimacy in
the field of organization studies, but approaches relevant for understanding such
phenomena are hard to come by.
Our view is that approaches based on temporality, such as the events-based
approach, might help scholars to change their focus in studying such organiza-
tional phenomena. An events-based approach might contribute to such a change
in focus by providing insights without stating the pre-existence of a social and
physical structure, but rather, inviting scholars to focus on the re/production of
events, their temporality, and based on that, the organizational features emerging
from the structure of events. The events-based approach does not deny the exist-
ence of organizational characteristics, such as the structure of governance, an
organization’s strategy, its identity or even its space, but instead, urges scholars to
understand how these characteristics are produced and maintained as immanent
and situated abstractions re-produced through the structure of events. By privil
eging the ontology of temporality, the events-based approach provides an alterna-
tive view about organization and invites us to reconsider the way we understand
organization in order to deal with current developments in our work endeavors
and in society at large.
Notes
1. We are very grateful to the editors and especially Juliane Reinecke for her useful comments
and ideas that helped us to improve this chapter. A previous version was presented in 2018
during the annual Process Organization Studies Symposium. We also thank the organizing
team and participants of this symposium for their astute and insightful feedbacks.
2. The notion of ontology is used to draw attention to the processes whereby temporality and
time come to matter and to become something that have a special existence for actors.
3. Stand-up paddle boarding is a sport in which the paddler is standing on a board and using
a paddle to move across the water.
4. This point differs from previous developments of the events-based approach (for instance,
Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) in which the present and the actual moment
were not analytically distinguished but instead were conflated.
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6
The Timefulness of Creativity in an
Accelerating World
Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston
6.1 Introduction
New ideas take time; they do not simply appear out of nowhere. Many fast-moving,
innovative companies such as Apple, Google, and LinkedIn claim to know this. At
AT&T’s Bell Labs, for instance, protecting employees’ time has arguably enabled
researchers to produce Nobel prize-winning innovations such as the laser beam and
the transistor (Amabile, Hadley, and Kramer, 2002; Burkus and Oster, 2012). Sony
and HP have provided “safe havens” away from normal business activities, where
employees can use company resources for personal projects that are not officially
sanctioned (Zien and Buckler, 1997), while 3M, Google, and Intuit Canada have all
allowed staff a percentage of their time to pursue novel ideas (Conceição, Hamill,
and Pinheiro, 2002). For Google, this action is justified on the grounds that creativ-
ity requires a degree of freedom and flexibility. Accordingly, the company reputedly
sanctioned 20 percent of employees’ time for working on ideas that they find per-
sonally stimulating (Steiber and Alänge, 2013), although the extent to which this
practice is still, or indeed ever was, actually followed may be more urban myth than
fact (Hill, 2019). More generally, research into large-scale innovation projects has
revealed a variety of different perceptions and strategies for managing time when
working with new ideas (Saunders, Van Slyke, and Vogel, 2004), capturing the tem
poral intensities of key events (Dougherty, Bertels, Chung, Dunne, and Kraemer,
2013), gathering and sustaining momentum (Granqvist and Gustafsson, 2016), and
recognizing the “right,” or serendipitous, time for novel ideas to emerge (Garud,
Gehman, and Kumaraswamy, 2011).
The fact that many companies manage to sustain a continuous flow of novel prod-
ucts and solutions in today’s fast-moving world invites a closer look at time and tem
porality in relation to creative practice. In particular, how should we understand the
various temporalities of creative work in a world where companies are facing ever-
increasing pressures to innovate more quickly; how might temporality help us to
Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston, The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World In: Time, Temporality,
and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Barbara Simpson, Rory Tracey, and Alia Weston.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0006
think differently about generativity and the dynamics of emergence; and how can
companies be confident that, by simply setting aside flexible time, novel ideas will
result? Responding to these questions, our argument here is positioned in the con
temporary context of late modernity, which Rosa (2003, p. 3, citing Gleick, 1999)
claims is characterized by the “acceleration of just about everything.” Whether speed
and acceleration are beneficial in creative processes is, however, still very much a
matter of debate. For instance, in their study of technology firms that depend upon
innovation for survival, Brown and Eisenhardt (1997) found that speedy decisions
lead to superior performance. In contrast, Chen et al. (2012) found little support for
such a direct relationship between the pace of new product development and
product success, suggesting instead an inverted U-shaped relationship where initial
positive performance declines rapidly with increasing speed due to the limits of
human processing capacity. Similarly, pressures to meet strict deadlines have been
viewed both as a positive incentive for focused idea generation (Gersick, 1995), and
as detrimental to the incubation process (Amabile et al., 2002), as illustrated, for
instance, in Czarniawska’s (2013) study of the news industry, which shows that
technology-accelerated news delivery, and the competitive pressure to generate
“Breaking News,” undermines traditional journalistic values of credibility, accuracy,
and impartiality. As our world accelerates, then, there is an increasingly urgent need
for theories of time and temporality that can bring new insight to empirical dilem-
mas such as these.
Much of the existing literature on organizational creativity (e.g. Amabile, 1996;
Ford, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin, 1993) is focused on the antecedents to
creativity and its outcomes. To the extent that time is even considered in such stud-
ies, it is most often treated as an exogenous variable that tracks the orderly progres-
sion of creative action over long periods of time, such as in large organizational
restructurings or in project team work (Drazin, Glynn, and Kazanjian, 1999; Ford
and Sullivan, 2004), or at the opposite extreme it is reduced to that momentary flash
when inspiration occurs (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). More processual approaches
seek instead to engage with the actual unfolding of creative practice over, or in, time
(Sonenshein, 2016; Unsworth and Clegg, 2010), although not necessarily in ways
that conform to conventional temporal distinctions (Fortwengel, Schüßler, and
Sydow, 2017). For example, based on his interview studies of a large and diverse set
of people deemed to be creative, Csikszentmihalyi (1975; 1997) came to understand
creativity in terms of what he calls “flow,” an experiential state that:
denotes the wholistic sensation present when we act in total involvement . . . the

state in which action follows upon action according to an internal logic which
seems to need no conscious intervention on our part . . . we feel in control of our
actions and . . . there is little distinction between self and environment; between
stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1975: 43)
The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World 71
This notion of flow seems inherently temporal, implying as it does a dynamic c ontinuity
of movement in ongoing creative practice (Petranker, 2002), but in attending to flow
as a state of being, Csikszentmihalyi’s work tends to overlook the temporal implica-
tions of creative becoming. Mainemelis (2001) has gone some way towards address-
ing this gap in the theorization of flow by proposing the notion of timelessness as a
key characteristic of creative experience. However, whilst it is certainly true that
creatives often report losing all sense of time when they are engaged in creative
work, this apparent disconnection from time is by no means uniquely associated
with creativity. Csikszentmihalyi noted that timelessness might equally arise in con-
texts as diverse as experiences of religious transcendence or in simple play. For
instance, the gambler’s experience of timelessness in a casino devoid of clocks and
windows has little to offer any re-theorization of creative action. Further, the charac-
terization of creative practice as timeless denies the potential for different temporal
resources to contribute to the emergence of creative work. The issue for theory, then,
seems to be less a matter of time per se, and more about what we actually make of
time and the multiple temporalities of creative practice.
In this chapter, we propose timefulness as an alternative formulation of emergent
creativity, in which multiple temporalities may be understood as resources that are
themselves continuously emergent, and which in combination have the potential to
generate a multiplicity of options for creative action. In making this argument, we
elaborate two contrasting perspectives on time: a realist view of clock time, or being
time, with its commitment to the orderly passage of pasts, presents, and futures in
time, and an idealist view of becoming time as the temporal experience of emergence
with time, which is inherent to any creative action. But first, we set the context for
this debate in the next section by exploring the concept of acceleration and its com-
plement, deceleration, especially as articulated by Rosa (2003; 2013). Later, we
examine the role of acceleration and deceleration in relation to being and becoming
temporalities. The chapter concludes with our reflections on the value of timefulness
as a way of engaging with the temporal dimensions of creative practice, and the
potential costs of unchecked acceleration.
6.2 Our Accelerating World

The ever-growing demand in Western economies for more, and faster, creativity has
wide-reaching implications for contemporary organizations, especially those in the
creative industries (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; DeFillippi, Grabher, and
Jones, 2007; Gill and Pratt, 2008). However, the connections between this insistent
demand for creativity and the accelerating trends in both business and society
remain under-examined. The effects of acceleration are evident in both the demands
of modern working life (Ulferts, Korunka, and Kubicek, 2013) and the manner in
which temporalities are understood and organized (Sennett, 1998). Although often
valorized as a means towards greater efficiency and the freeing up of more spare
time, acceleration can also become a pathological syndrome where the early effect
iveness of speed traps organizations into ever-faster processes as requisite for their
survival (Perlow, Okhuysen, and Repenning, 2002). Acceleration may then be
experienced as a source of stress, hurry sickness (Adam, 1995), time famine
(Perlow, 1999), and “dead”lines. Too much to do, and insufficient time to do it,
creates a crisis mentality that results in burnout, exhaustion, and enforced
deceleration.
Social acceleration is arguably a defining feature of both formal organizations and
modern life more generally (Rosa, 2013; Wajcman, 2008). In the specific context of
business, Grey (2009) suggests that the pursuit of increasing speed, as exemplified by
practices ranging from Taylor’s time and motion studies to more contemporary
interests in business process re-engineering, just-in-time production, and lean
manufacturing, is emblematic of the late industrial era. Speed has become the hand-
maiden of progress and technological advancement, an end in its own right that has
been cast adrift from its early modernist objectives of efficiency and optimization. In
his meticulous drawing together of sources from sociology, social psychology, his-
tory, politics, and cultural theory, Rosa (2003) has developed a systematic theory of
social acceleration that offers a much needed temporal perspective on the develop-
mental logics of late modernity. He uses this analytical framework to ask what, if
anything, is common across the enormous range of accelerating processes that char-
acterize our world today, whether these be at work, in family life, in terms of life-
styles, fashions, and changing social practices, or on the global/political stage.
Rosa’s model is based upon three not entirely distinct categories of acceleration,
each of which he links to a specific driving mechanism. Perhaps the most obvious
domain for social acceleration is in the speeding up of communications, data pro-
cessing, and transport through technological advances that have drastically reshaped
production and consumption into globally connected activities where physical dis-
tance has ceased to be a barrier to the almost instantaneous flow of information and
change (Adam, 1995). The primary driver for this technological form of acceleration
is the capitalist economy, particularly to the extent that time is equated to money,
thereby providing both a means of commodifying and intensifying labor, and a
source of competitive advantage.
The second category in Rosa’s model is the acceleration of social change by means
of which society itself may be understood as speeding up. This is exemplified, for
instance, by changes in the relationship between family and work from “an inter-
generational pace of change in early-modern society . . . to an intra-generational pace
in late modernity” (Rosa, 2003: 8, emphasis in original), in which the life-span of
individuals is likely to exceed the time-span of a family or any given occupation.
Here, acceleration is driven by the increasingly fluid and contingent structures and
practices of society, where it is the complexity of emergent relations across the
social system that introduces new and potentially destabilizing disruptions capable
of rippling across the entire system.
Finally, Rosa argues that the pace of life itself is a third category of social
a cceleration, as reflected in people’s personal experiences of time, as well as their
awareness of time compression and the scarcity of time. This leads to growing stress
as people worry about not having enough time to keep up, with the consequence
that they increasingly multi-task while also spending less time sleeping, preparing
food and eating, being with family, or enjoying leisure activities. The driver of this
form of acceleration is the desire to “taste life in all its heights and depths and in its
full complexity” (Rosa, 2003: 13), which involves reimagining a fulfilled life as one
that continuously expands beyond one’s own immediate experiential sphere.
Whilst these mechanisms of acceleration may dictate our experience of late
modernity, they are not necessarily universally accepted and celebrated. Indeed,
many traditional societies, such as indigenous and local communities, resist the
Western obsession with progress, preferring narratives of knowing that simultan
eously draw out and weave together multiple threads of meaning (see, for example,
Holmberg and Ayalik, 2019; Rosile, Boje, and Claw, 2018). Milan Kundera’s novel
Slowness (1996) offers an evocative reflection on the implications of acceleration for
human experience. The story opens with an account of a man riding his motorcycle
faster and faster in a veritable ecstasy of speed. Kundera surmises that the faster
the man goes, the more he finds himself living only in the present moment, cut off
from the past which informs his memories, and also from the future which engages
his imagination. With neither memories nor prospects, he effectively stands
outside of time, outside of the chronology of life, literally outside his own standpoint
(ex-stasis). In this state he can identify only with the present moment and nothing
else; past and future are forgotten and inaccessible; he is in a state of timelessness. In
this state, he is as innocent as a child who has no past, and as fearless as a person
who has no future. Kundera tellingly describes this ecstatic timelessness, not as a
moment of inspiration, but rather as an ordinary, everyday, vulgar experience that
merely seeks relief from the remorseless effort of becoming ourselves. There is no
possibility for creative action when experience is reduced in this way to a succession
of timeless moments.
Responding to this ecstatic angst, Rosa suggests that, in fact, social acceleration
often functions as a superficial phenomenon that merely papers over a deep-seated
inertia, which slows down, or even paralyzes possibilities for social change. He
points to a number of natural limitations to perpetual acceleration, such as bio
logical constraints on reproduction and growth, anthropological orientations
towards certain types of perception, the social boundedness of cognitions, and the
speed with which our brains can process sensory inputs. Furthermore, human sys-
tems may generate dysfunctional responses to acceleration, such as the traffic jams
produced by more people trying to reach their destinations quickly, or the impend-
ing failure of the UK National Health Service as a result of pathological levels of
complexity caused by trying to do more and more. These apparently natural limits
function as an unintentional antidote to acceleration by introducing decelerating
dynamics into social systems.
There are also more intentional forms of deceleration that may be invoked to
resist the effects of acceleration. For instance, at a personal level, taking time out for
meditation, or yoga, or just to get off the treadmill for a while, is seen as a way of
preparing to re-engage more energetically and more creatively with the accelerating
world. Even scheduling in some mindless activity from time to time may allow for
some necessary separation from endless acceleration (Elsbach and Hargadon, 2006).
In addition, there are more radical social movements of deceleration that actively
challenge the speeding up of modern life. Examples include the Slow Food move-
ment (Petrini, 2007; van Bommel and Spicer, 2011), which recognizes the threats to
environmental sustainability and social well-being of lives lived in the fast lane, Slow
Cities (Knox, 2005), which seek to reclaim the human dimensions of city living, and
Slow Democracy (Saward, 2017), which responds to the challenge posed to demo-
cratic design by social acceleration. Even Slow Radio has made a recent appearance
on the BBC as a response to the relentless pace and pessimism of much news
broadcasting.
These various forms of deceleration all acknowledge that increasing speed inevit
ably leads to short-termism and mounting uncertainties, which in turn call forth
quick impulsive reactions that may “make do” in the interim but ultimately risk fall-
ing short of what is actually needed in any given situation. They do offer encourage-
ment to avoid unnecessary and possibly costly mistakes by advancing more slowly
and with more deliberation, but can simply “slowing down” ever be a practical
answer to the challenges of doing creative work in the context of social acceleration?
We suggest that in order to advance understanding of creativity we first need to
develop an appropriate theory of temporality, so we now turn to consider two alter-
native approaches to theorizing time.
6.3 Different Times, Different Temporalities

Time, its nature, how it can be represented, and how we abide within it, is a puzzle
that has preoccupied humans throughout history. Indeed, analysis of the parietal art
produced by our prehistoric ancestors in places such as the Lascaux cave complex in
France suggests that Paleolithic artists were every bit as concerned as we are today
with the depiction of movement and change (Lima, 2012). Not only did they repre-
sent seasonal cycles, but they also used multiple adjacent frames, just as contempor
ary movies do, to suggest movement. Thousands of years later in the fifth century
ce, the ineffability of time is still reflected in Augustine’s question “What, then, is
time? I know well enough what it is, provided no one asks me. But if I am asked what
it is and try to explain, I do not know” (cited by Bardon, 2013: 24). The problem that
Augustine was struggling with is that as soon as we reify our ordinary everyday tem
poral experience by translating it onto objective representations, we lose the capacity
to contemplate the becoming of meaning (Williams, 2016). It is this dilemma that
continues to underpin philosophical thinking about time and temporality today: on
one hand, we think about time as a way of ordering events across the discrete
temporalities of past, present, and future, and on the other it is connected to the
temporal experience of emergence in the creative unfolding of living.
Bardon (2013) maps these two perspectives respectively onto realist and idealist
orientations. The realist position is that time exists as some “thing” that is independ-
ent of human experience, a universal law of nature that acts as a temporal container
within which events are logically ordered in time. Past, present, and future are more
or less distinct temporal categories that are defined relative to each other in dualistic,
either-or terms. This perspective has come to be dominant in Western thinking,
especially since the Enlightenment and the advent of the clock, which literally carves
time up into equally spaced intervals. The idealist alternative asserts that temporality
is the means with which we experience the dynamic changefulness of living. There is
no external measure of time—temporality is becoming within us rather than us being
in it—and the extent to which experience appears to be ordered and progressive is
simply the product of our own mental constructions rather than a consequence of
any immutable law of nature. This idealist position has a long and venerable history
reaching back at least as far as the change-denying Eleatic philosophers of Ancient
Greece, then returning more recently with Kant and twentieth-century process
philosophers such as Bergson, Mead, and Heidegger. Although these idealist argu-
ments may seem extreme and counterintuitive to our modern minds, they are
remarkably resonant with post-Newtonian developments in physics, which have
challenged every conventional assumption about the independent existence of time,
its uniformity, and its directionality, pointing instead to temporal meanings that we
construct in our efforts to make sensible the vast complexities of the cosmos
(Rovelli, 2017).
The difference between realist and idealist perspectives is more than simply the
extent to which time is treated as either an objective measure or a subjective experi
ence. The key distinction we wish to emphasize is between the realist view of being
time as passage from past to present to future, and the non-successive idealist view
of the becoming present as an emergent experience resourced by pasts and futures
that have been purposively constructed. Whereas realism seeks patterns of predict
ability, idealism engages with the disruptive dynamics of creativity. These two philo-
sophical orientations should not, however, be taken as mutually excluding. Nor do
we intend to suggest that either is superior to the other, but rather that they offer
valuable complementarities in relation to creative practice. To elaborate these points,
we now develop each perspective in detail, paying particular attention to their impli-
cations for acceleration and creativity.
6.3.1 Creative Practice in Time
Although time has always fascinated philosophers, it has only relatively recently
entered seriously into the organization studies domain (Antonacopoulou and
Tsoukas, 2002; Goodman, Lawrence, Ancona, and Tushman, 2001; Hernes, Simpson,

and Soderlund, 2013; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017). The particular challenge here is to
expand current theoretical understandings of time to provide more comprehensive
insights into the temporal nature of organizational practice. To the extent that
organizations are social phenomena, they necessarily change and evolve over time,
both shaping and being shaped by human activities that are themselves formed in
time. The significance of this temporal disposition is reflected in a growing vocabu-
lary that distinguishes between different time-reckoning systems such as clock time,
event time, cyclical time, quiet time, banana time, just-in-time, and so on (Bluedorn
and Denhardt, 1988; Butler, 1995; Clark, 1985; Perlow, 1999; Petersen, 2002;
Roy, 1959). More nuanced typologies distinguish different aspects of time such as
polychronicity, speed, punctuality and temporal depth (Bluedorn and Jaussi, 2007),
time aggregations, durations, frequencies, rhythms, and cycles of time (George and
Jones, 2000), and temporal structuring (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). Time is also
manifest in organizational pathologies such as diminishing product life cycles that
feed into the voracious modern demand for consumables (Brose, 2004), time impov-
erishment (Perlow, 1999) where a perceived shortage of time produces stress and
anxiety, and of course the time-distorting effects of acceleration (Czarniawska, 2013;
Grey, 2009; Rosa, 2003).
The underpinning assumption in all of these developments is the steady progres-
sion of clock time, which overtly supports and justifies organizational control
through patterns of replication and predictability (Adam, 1995). Its significance is
demonstrated, for instance, in the globalized economy, where twenty-four world
time zones provide for activities to be coordinated across multiple locations. These
time zones facilitate the workings of society by scheduling a host of services that are
made measurable, and therefore manageable, through time budgeting and time effi-
ciencies (Hernes et al., 2013; Simpson, 2014). Clock time also provides for the com-
modification of labor by attaching an exchange value to time worked and the nature
of that work (Giddens, 1990), which in turn sets the scene for disputes over who has
control of time. Clock time, then, is both a commodity and a mechanism of control
in the production processes of contemporary industrialized societies. Adam (1995)
argues that clock time, because of its relentless and mechanistic uniformity, serves to
obscure the natural temporalities of lived experience. Nevertheless, clock time often
remains an invisible, taken-for-granted force in theory development so it is instruct
ive to briefly consider its origins and implications.
As we have previously suggested, clock time is an Enlightenment invention that
draws on Newtonian mechanics to understand time in relation to space, as a universal
law of nature, a mechanism that is entirely exogenous to lived experience. Here, time
is constituted as an infinite sequence of “instants” that stretches out in an endless
succession towards past and future instants. Each of these instants is independent of
those that precede or follow it, and each is also infinitely divisible or summable as
durations that can be reckoned using clocks or calendars. So, for example, an instant
may be a nano-second, an hour, a season, or an epoch—the defining quality of time
in this view is that instants proceed in a unitary succession as one second follows
another, and each season heralds the next. The relationship between past, present,
and future is simply that of succession, where the meaning of any instant does not
depend upon the carrying forward of experience from previous instants.
This view of time is consistent with a realist, being mode of thought that is charac-
terized by the externalization of time as some “thing” within which practice takes
place, and where time can be represented as an ordered sequence from past to pre-
sent to future. This approach aims to distil metrical theories or laws that formalize
relationships between variables already stabilized as entities within the field of
inquiry. Although this strongly rationalistic view has been widely rejected in organ
izational studies, for instance in the contrast between chronos and kairos (Orlikowski
and Yates, 2002), traces of well-ordered pasts, presents, and futures nevertheless per-
sist, suggesting continuing adherence to realist assumptions about time as an
“epochal succession” of events that have “temporal directionality” (see for example
Hernes, this volume, Chapter 3). In fact, the very notion of speed and acceleration is
a product of realist thinking with its commitment to the ordered and uniform pro-
gression of clock time. The speeding up of technologies, societal shifts, and the pace
of life in general are measured against a ticking clock, each event being afforded
fewer and fewer instants of time in the race for progress. Thus acceleration has a
logical limit when the duration of any given task or experience is reduced to a single
instant that is effectively timeless, devoid of duration, and stripped of any meaningful
association with past or future.
Importantly for our argument here, clock time cannot create time because it can-
not address the variability and unanticipated emergents of lived experience, and
neither can it engage with the dynamic continuities of flow. It cannot actually explain
the generation of anything new, although it is certainly useful for tracking the move-
ments of already-formed entities as they appear in successive instants. Clock time
produces futures that can be nothing more than projections of what has already
passed. Its very finitude excludes the generative possibilities of becoming. To grapple
with creative emergence then, it is necessary to seek an alternative to the realist
image of time as a discrete, metrical passage from past to future, one that evolves
with and through human action. Accordingly, we now turn to idealist perspectives
on time to explore what they might offer to creative practice.
6.3.2 Creatively Practicing Time
Practicing is, first and foremost, a lived experience, a becoming that unfolds with
time (Shotter, 2006). However, if we are ever to grasp this dynamic quality of prac-
tice, we need a theory of time that focuses on the movements of temporal experience
rather than on discrete, disembodied, and static “instants.” This need is reflected
in recent developments in process organization studies, where researchers are
attending more to questions of “how” than “what,” especially how organizational
phenomena emerge and develop over time (Garud, Simpson, Langley, and
Tsoukas, 2015). As Langley et al. (2013) observe, this growing interest in process
invites a comprehensive re-examination of ontological, epistemological, and meth-
odological issues in process research. A re-theorization of time as temporal experi
ence is a necessary complement to these developments, one that acknowledges there
is more to understand than can be represented by realism alone. Early contributors
to this new project include Kaplan and Orlikowski (2014), who draw on Emirbayer
and Mische (1998) to redefine the past and future as interpretations rather than fixed
realities, by means of which coherent and shared accounts of present actions may be
constructed. Similarly, Hernes et al. (2013) emphasize the dynamic and ongoing
interplay between pasts and futures as resources that inform actions in the present,
while Simpson, Buchan, and Sillince (2017) exploit this dynamic interplay in an
empirical study of emergent leadership.
These dynamic accounts of temporal experience ultimately trace their origins
back to Henri Bergson, for whom movement and time were recurring themes right
across his diverse oeuvre. “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a
register in which time is being inscribed” (Bergson, 1907/2011: 17). Living (and
practicing) then, is a temporal matter that, at best, can be only partially understood
through an external lens such as clock time. Bergson refers to this form of time as
“abstract time” (1907/2011: 19), which in his view is not really time at all as it attends
only to the succession of instants (Guerlac, 2015). As such, it is merely a mechanism
of spatialization by means of which we divide up our experience of living into
sequences of instantaneous moments. By contrast, Bergson’s “concrete time” reflects
a temporal perspective in which the past endures into the present in a perpetual
process of becoming. In other words, the present can only come into being if the past
is contemporaneous, thus confounding the conventional dualistic separation of past
and present.
It is by prolonging the past into the present that temporal experience acquires the
continuity of durée.1 Thus past and present are no longer conceived as discrete
instants in time, but rather as coexisting and embodied experiences. Durée “is not
merely one instant replacing another . . . [it is] the continuous progress of the past
which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances” (Bergson, 1907/2011: 11). It is
durée that differentiates between “an hour spent by a condemned prisoner waiting to
be executed, an hour spent by a child waiting for the start of their birthday party, an
hour spent undergoing interrogation, an hour spent in a traffic jam, an hour walking
in the forest, or an hour making love” (Linstead and Mullarkey, 2003: 6).
Furthermore, because there is a multiplicity of pasts that may be carried forward
into presents, temporal experience is both plural and irreversible. “We could not live
over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of
all that had followed” (Bergson, 1907/2011: 12).
The comparison that Bergson makes here between “abstract” and “concrete” time
parallels the philosophical distinction that we have drawn between realist and ideal-
ist orientations to time. However, it is qualitatively different from the contrasts
frequently invoked in the organizational literature between objective time and

subjective time, chronos and kairos, or clock time and event time. Whereas these
various dichotomies are unified by their common assumption that it is entities that
move, Bergson’s more radical position is that movement, or process, is ontologically
prior to entities, so “abstract” and “concrete” times are different, not just in degree,
but in kind. Rather than a dualistic, either-or distinction, Bergson is articulating the
both-and perspectives of a duality that offers ontologically different ways of seeing
and engaging with practice.
Heidegger (2010/1953) similarly argues that clock time is a de-temporalized and
spatialized representation of time, quantified in units that remain constant regard-
less of the specifics of any given situation. Instead, he favors a non-successive tem
porality of becoming in which past, present, and future are interpenetrating and
co-constituting rather than discrete points in an ordered sequence of time. Blattner
(this volume, Chapter 2) shows how Heidegger builds on Husserl’s concepts of reten-
tion and protention to construct an originary temporality in which the experience of
the present retains something of what has passed while also anticipating something
of what is yet to come. The future, then, is not some imaginary “thing” located in
metrical order beyond the present, but rather it is a becoming future that will prob
ably, but not certainly, come to pass. Equally, the past is not a memory that is
recalled; it is a consciousness of what has passed in the continuity of experience. For
Heidegger, this continuously emergent temporality is an ontological precondition
for lived experience.
Mead (1932) also extends Bergson’s idea of the coexistence of past and present in
temporal experience by invoking the Pragmatist Maxim, which asserts that our pre-
sent actions are conditioned not only by the past, but also by what we anticipate
their future consequences might be (Peirce, 1878). Like Heidegger, Mead under-
stands temporality as the co-evolutionary engagement of pasts and futures in the
actions of the present moment (Simpson, 2014). Here, a present is defined by some-
thing happening. It is a movement, a turning point, a becoming, that is inherently
creative in its changefulness. Each present is distinguished from others by the change
that it generates rather than the state that it accomplishes, and as such, it is not only
a direct expression of creative action, but also a profoundly processual concept. Pasts
and futures, then, are the epistemic resources that interpenetrate to create the
dynamic movements of presents, which in turn inform the further reconstruction of
pasts and futures. “The long and short of it is that the past (or the meaningful struc-
ture of the past) is as hypothetical as the future” (Mead, 1932: 44). Consequently, it is
only the present that is real in an ontological sense, and it is the simultaneity of
hypothesized pasts and futures in the present that generates creative action by allow-
ing us to take alternative attitudes and see alternative perspectives.
In what Adam (1995: 78) describes as “the most radical of all social science con-
ceptualizations of time,” Mead explicitly links temporality to sociality, which he
defines as “the capacity of being several things at once” (1932: 75), the liminal
experience of being “betwixt and between the old system and the new” (1932: 73).
For him, sociality is expressed as emergence—it is that process of readjustment

which produces continuity in experience. By simultaneously drawing on a past and a
future, novel possibilities for present action may be realized. In his Introduction to
Mead’s “Philosophy of the Present,” Arthur Murphy elaborates this notion of
simultaneity:
The novel event must not merely be in two systems; it must adjust this plurality of
systematic relations in such a fashion that “its presence in the later system
changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs” (page
92) while its older relations are reflected in the new system it has entered. It car-
ries over the old relations, yet in its emergent novelty it reflects back upon the
older world the uniqueness of its new situation. (Mead, 1932: 25)
Temporal experience is thus constituted in the ever-changing sphere of social

engagement where our interactions do not merely exist in time, but they are time. By
walking simultaneously in our own shoes and those of others, and taking the alter-
native perspectives offered, new and unanticipated meanings may be generated in
the present. It is in these dynamic presents that both selves and their situations can
be creatively transformed in the ongoing social processes of living.
These idealist accounts of temporality from Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead cap-
ture to varying degrees the fluidity, emergence, and heterogeneity of a worldview
that is lived rather than merely counted, that attends to the flow of experience rather
than the fixity of entities, and that raises issues rather than securing answers.
Following Chia (1995), the view of temporal experience that we are advancing might
be called “postmodern” but its meaning is more exact than can be conveyed by this
broad term; we intend it precisely as an ontologically processual account of the tem
poral resourcing of creative practice. Far from the timelessness implied by the
sequential “instants” of clock time, here temporality is filled with a multiplicity of
times which, in their dynamic interplay, generate the flow of experience. Following
Mead in particular, we propose that an idealist approach to time is characterized by
timefulness as temporal resources drawn from past recollections and future imagin-
ings interpenetrate to produce novel and unexpected outcomes. Furthermore, time-
fulness is necessarily social as it brings together different viewpoints that invite the
creative reconstitution of time by allowing us to reassess situations through the
experiences of others.
We have previously suggested acceleration is a concept that is rooted in a realist,
clock time perspective, but is there anything that a becoming temporality might offer
to extend this understanding? What is clear is that without timefulness there is no
prospect of creative novelty or innovation, and of course without these, the whole
industrial agenda would grind to a halt. The critical question then is not how to
speed up timefulness, but rather, how to accomplish more through it. The old adage
“make haste slowly” reminds us that allocating time for creativity may produce bet-
ter results, but the notion of timefulness extends this idea by emphasizing that it is
the temporal quality of this affordance of time that is all important. It seems that this
is precisely what the fast-moving, innovating companies we introduced at the
beginning of this chapter may have recognized.
6.4 Timefulness, Acceleration, Creative Practice

The puzzle that has motivated this chapter is to better understand the temporal
dimensions of creativity, especially in the late modern context of an accelerating
world. In building our argument, we have contrasted realist and idealist orienta-
tions to time, and have concluded that clock time (as well as other successive
forms of time) provides more readily for the control and prediction of recurring
processes than the flexibility and flow of creative practice. Although the limita-
tions of clock time, with its relentless and ordered progression, are well recognized
in the organizational literature (Reinecke and Ansari, 2017; Simpson, 2014), many
studies still quite appropriately engage the dualistic sequencing of past, present,
and future in order to trace timelines and explore temporal structures. The
problems with this approach are, however, exacerbated by the accelerating trends
in technology, social change, and the pace of life (Rosa, 2003), where like the
speeding man on a motorcycle in Kundera’s story, passing instants are stripped of
their temporal context and meaning as time becomes more and more compressed,
and ultimately timeless.
The notion of deceleration, whether it be a natural consequence of, or a volitional
response to, these accelerating trends, redirects attention towards the dynamics of
slowness by means of which the timelines of our lives might be decompressed
(Parkins, 2004). In an accelerating world “The density of time increases. The gaps are
being filled” (Eriksen, 2001: 21), whereas deceleration slows the pace of practice by
reopening and expanding the gaps in the progression of time. However, to the extent
that deceleration is defined in dualistic opposition to acceleration, it will suffer the
same limitations in its temporal theorization despite its commitment to a more
expansive and flexible temporality. Because deceleration is tied to realist assump-
tions about the linear and unitary succession of past, present, and future, it cannot
provide an antidote to the lack of creativity inherent in clock time.
The idealist temporalities of Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead offer insights into an
alternative form of time in which temporal experience is reconfigured as emergent
process. This understanding of time is inseparable from the processes of living, and
by extension, creative practice. Lived experience then, is an evolving process punc-
tuated by creative actions that make sensible, and give meaning to, the present. We
have argued it is this simultaneous juxtapositioning of pasts and futures in the pre-
sent that generates the movements of creative action, the turning points of change,
and the flows of becoming. This temporal simultaneity demonstrates what we have
called timefulness, by which we mean to indicate dynamic and creative presents that
are filled with interpenetrating pasts and futures.
The well-known story of Art Fry’s creation of Post-It Notes at 3M illustrates this
dynamic simultaneity of pasts and futures in developing a new product (Fry, 2008).
A striking feature of Fry’s story is how his extracurricular activities (golfing and
singing) provided epistemic resources for his idea generation. It was on the 3M golf
course, at the second hole of the red nine to be precise, that he first heard about
Spence Silver’s discovery of sticky micro-spheres that “don’t know what to stick to.
They’re real interesting because you can’t dissolve them and you can’t melt them. It’s
like sticking to a bunch of marbles.” He was sufficiently intrigued by these micro-
spheres that he went along to hear Spence Silver talk about them at a 3M technical
forum. Curiosity satisfied, Fry then filed this information away.
It was some time later, when he was singing in his church choir, that the slip of
paper marking his place in the musical score fell out just as he stood up to sing.
“Everyone else was singing and I was trying to find what page we were on. I thought,
I wish I could have a bookmark that would stick to the paper but couldn’t pull it
apart.” Recalling Silver’s sticky micro-spheres, Fry realized that they are more sticky
when they are tightly packed together, and less sticky when they are spread apart, so
there should be “some magic spacing” that would work just right for paper. This
question then became the focus of his experiments, and the rest is history.
What we see here is a classic illustration of Mead’s sociality, where recollections of
the past (Silver’s “glue”) and imaginings of the future (dependable page markers)
interpenetrated in a present to stimulate experimentation, and eventually a novel
product. Fry’s creativity thus involved more than just timeless immersion in the flow
of experimentation, or having a bit of time to spare for new thinking. It was also
timefully resourced by the simultaneity of pasts and futures that created the condi-
tions for sociality. Mead argues that it is through this readjustment of meanings that
conscious mind is continuously reconstituted in social interactions. Timefulness thus
implies mindfulness, which evolves through the relational and co-productive dynam-
ics of dialogue. Similarly, Heidegger (2010/1953) designates “care” as an existential
quality of being-with the world and others. By extension, we propose, therefore, that
carefulness is integral to our understanding of timefulness as a social phenomenon
that depends on deliberative and attentive practice. Although details provided in
Fry’s podcast (2008) are sketchy, he does certainly acknowledge the social and col-
laborative context for his work. In his view, having ideas is the easy part, but without
the collaborative exchange of ideas there can be no evolution of either mindfulness or
carefulness. The third quality of timefulness that we see in Fry’s account is that of
playfulness, as exemplified by his golfing activities, and also his playful experimenta-
tion to find the perfect spacing for sticky micro-spheres on Post-It Notes. It is this
playfulness that addresses the ever-present dynamics of learning in all creative
processes.
Timefulness thus offers a rich conceptualization of the ways in which creative
practice may be realized alongside, and threaded through, the unfolding continuities
of temporal experience. For researchers seeking to understand creative practice, this
conceptualization challenges conventional realist assumptions about the sequential
ordering of pasts, presents, and futures, offering instead a non-successive and

non-dualistic temporality in which it is the simultaneity of pasts and futures that
creates the possibilities for novelty and change to emerge in the present. This temporal
reconfiguration has significant implications for the doing of empirical research as it
requires us to turn our attention to the movements and flows of emergent practice in
the present rather than the retrospective reconstruction of time-ordered narratives.
The methodological challenges to working in this way are significant, but there is
now a growing body of literature that is concerned with, for instance, mobilities
(Urry, 2007), travelling concepts (Simpson, Tracey, and Weston, 2018), and the
shadowing of movement (Czarniawska, 2007), all of which inform a nomadic style
of engagement where the researcher is embedded and participating rather than
observing objectively from outside the action. However, there is still plenty of poten-
tial for both empirical and methodological developments in advancing this becom-
ing perspective on temporality.
Because timefulness is fundamentally grounded in ongoing practice, it also has
direct implications for organizations as they seek creative ways of enhancing their
activities. Whereas the accelerating pace of business is often a source of anxiety and
stress, timefulness reminds us that mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness are also
qualities of the temporal experience that constitutes the processes of creativity. Thus
there is more to the creative successes of companies like Apple, Google, and LinkedIn
than simply protecting time. We surmise that they also invest in creating the condi-
tions in which timefulness can flourish and haste can be accomplished more slowly.
6.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have focused attention on the temporal dimensions that underpin
a processual understanding of creative practice, especially in the late modern con-
text of an accelerating world. Drawing on the idealist thinking of Bergson, Heidegger,
and Mead, we have emphasized the importance of temporal experience, rather than
simply the passage of time, in understanding the continuity and creativity of prac-
tice. Our argument is directed towards unsettling those powerfully established
notions of successive being time that prevail in the West in order to open up oppor-
tunities for new questions and new insights into the creative processes of becoming.
We propose that it is in the timeful simultaneity of interpenetrating pasts and futures
that creative presents can arise. Instead of attending to the inputs, the agendas, the
decisions, the structures, and the outputs of creative practice, then, we endeavor to
trace the creative movements and flows of generative work.
In making this argument, it has not been our intention to reject clock time as a
legitimate temporal frame, but rather to demonstrate that, on its own, it can never
account for the emergent creativity that is inherent in all human practice. Further,
because acceleration and deceleration are essentially being time concepts, they have
little relevance to an idealist take on time; we have proposed mindfulness, carefulness,
and playfulness as potentially more relevant and more dynamic constructs to

motivate research into the becoming time of creativity. We see being time and
becoming time as complementary temporal perspectives, each offering different ways
of understanding and researching the processes of organizing. Whereas being time,
with its dualistic separation of past, present, and future, may be ideally suited to
tracking time sequences, becoming time attends to the generative possibilities that
arise when pasts and futures are juxtaposed to resource emergent presents. The invi-
tation to researchers, then, is to actively explore the interplay between these two
temporalities, thereby deepening and enriching scholarly inquiry into the temporal
organizing of creative practice.
Note
1. We use Bergson’s original language here to distinguish his notion of durée from the more
general usage of “duration,” which tends to refer to a measurable span of time.
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7
Flowline at Work
Transforming Temporalities in News Organizations
through Metaphor
Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad,
and Gudrun Rudningen
7.1 Introduction
The way of producing, distributing, and consuming news has changed dramatically
since the introduction of online publication platforms in the mid-1990s. While the
traditional cyclical news model is characterized by strict deadline production and
predictable distribution, online news production and distribution is continuous,
immediate, and in the literature characterized as “liquid journalism” (Deuze, 2008).
In most newspapers around the world, the morning meeting has marked the start of
any working day since the start of the modern press around the nineteenth century
and the institutionalization of the newsroom (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009). This tradition-
bound ritual’s main purpose has been, first, to determine what news will be covered
in tomorrow’s newspaper, and second, to evaluate today’s newspaper. After the
meeting, the newsroom staff all start working, mostly individually, towards the
shared goal of bringing the contents of the paper product together within the given
deadline for the print edition. Even though online news is growing and about to
outcompete print, the traditional way of producing news tends to reproduce estab-
lished structures (Larsson, 2012) and it can be a struggle for newsrooms to overcome
the conventional rhythms of news production (Schlesinger and Doyle, 2015). For
instance, at the Financial Times the number of stories published per hour was found
to peak as the deadline for the print edition was approaching (Schlesinger and
Doyle, 2015). Suggestions for why this occurs include the institutional nature of
journalism making profound and fundamental change difficult (Eide and Sjøvaag,
2016) and the fact that established practices minimize people’s fear, “providing a
sense of ontological security” (Wheatley and O’Sullivan, 2017: 977). However, as
reported by the Reuters Digital News Report 2014, the traditional news consump-
tion curve is undergoing a transformation because news is being accessed online
and steadily throughout the day, with peaks in the morning, lunchtime, and early
Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen, Flowline at Work: Transforming
Temporalities in News Organizations through Metaphor In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies.
Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Arne Lindseth Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad, and Gudrun Rudningen.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0007
evening. As news is consumed on a more or less continuous basis instead of being

dependent on the print product arriving “on the doorstep,” most newsrooms are
reorienting their production and publication efforts towards a “digital first” strategy.
In practice, the print product is still the organizer of time and effort, to the effect that
both products and the work environment of journalists suffer. Based on ethno-
graphic observation over several years in three newsrooms in Norway, we argue that
a key for efficient organizing is synchronized production and distribution—what we
call flowline, rather than the differentiated and punctuated time frames of deadline
production.
In our action research-inspired study of these newspapers in Norway, we found
this transformation easier said than done. In this chapter we will focus on one of
them, a local daily in a medium-sized city in the southeast part of Norway.
Managerial efforts at changing production from a closed day-to-day framework of
producing stories for the next day’s newspaper, to an ongoing, open-ended workflow
adapted to the digital, were initially unsuccessful. The journalists and editors seemed
unable to let go of the mindset and behavior of a deadline regime and thus ended up
attempting to do digital, in following their “digital first” strategy of publishing all
stories first on the digital platform, rather than being digital—that is, structuring
their work and mental models according to an open-ended, near-future-oriented
production flow. For instance, they kept the morning meetings and the editor-in-
chief would lead by asking for what could be the front-page story of the day, inad-
vertently making everyone visualize the print product instead of the online news site
with its ongoing stream of stories. It seemed like the managers’ rhetoric of going
“digital first” constituted an empty narrative because they were not able to translate
their “specific forms of social action” (Thatcher 1998: 554) into actually representing
digital production.
In this chapter we explore the process of enabling a temporal transformation in a
newsroom setting. We propose that a new and generative metaphor, flowline, should
be created to replace the ingrained deadline mentality enabled models of real and
imaginary worlds, allowing joint interrelations of perceptually guided action to
emerge, and giving rise to active experimentation and temporal transformation of
the workflow. We suggest that metaphors are devices for capturing and expressing
embodied, tacit, and relational aspects of the temporal (past, present, and future)
flow of experience, and as such are better to spur change than literal language, which
tends to be prescriptive in relation to the social phenomena with which it is con-
nected (Tsoukas, 1991).
7.1.1 Time and Temporality in News Organizations
News organizations operate in increasingly dynamic and “hyper-temporally driven

environments” (Wheatley and O’Sullivan, 2017) and are under tremendous pressure
to change due to rapidly decreasing revenues, forcing them towards “abbreviated”
Flowline at Work 91
thinking and “becoming accustomed to living in a constant present” (Hassan, 2003:

239). The “presentism” nurtured by daily deadlines helps them to survive and com-
pete every day, while simultaneously preventing them from thinking about alterna-
tive futures. This paradox is ingrained in deadline practices, a temporal configuration
in the news industry today that is out of sync with the reality it operates in.
Newsrooms are not alone in facing such dilemmas. Awareness that the imposed
temporal constraints are provisional and constructed is low in many organizations,
and hence initiatives to reconfigure organizational practices by thinking differently
about time are more or less absent (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Ballard, 2008).
For news organizations, the deadline is thus a process of temporal configuration,
an ingrained institutionalized norm that provides principles for producing news
papers, and a scaffold for the activities taking place, limiting the need for explicit
managerial efforts to follow up on journalists’ everyday work. Consequently, trad
itional production of journalistic content is dominated by an understanding of “time
as an assembly line” (Eide, 2016; Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988), maintaining a pre-
occupation with the passage of time as linear, measurable, and controllable. It is a
collective construct which shapes what one is paying attention to and how phenom-
ena are interpreted, and it is functional in guiding what actions should be per-
formed at various (clock) times, providing “a shared and recognized organizing
device to describe, understand and possibly control large configurations of events”
(Clark and Maielli, 2009: 257). These trajectories are construed out of already exist-
ing repertoires of temporal structures and only occasionally change orientation
(Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). In addition, the development of new conceptions of
time, pace, and rhythm in organizational life is constrained and attempts to achieve
them may generate conflict (Yakura, 2002). So how did this newsroom succeed in
replacing their repertoire of temporal structures, reportedly without conflict?
According to the journalists themselves, the changes not only increased the pro-
duction volume, but also reduced stress and improved the work environment
immediately.
Navigating temporal transitions is a familiar challenge for organizations, yet it is
not clear how they align conflicting temporal demands and resolve pressure to entrain
to their environments (Patriotta and Gruber, 2015; Reinecke and Ansari, 2015; Ancon
and Waller, 2007). In viewing time as a process, temporality can be “defined as the
ongoing relationships between, past, present, and future” (Schultz and Hernes 2013: 1),
while viewing time as enacted in practice makes objective, subjective, and inter-
subjective time inseparable (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). That is, time is in the activ-
ity and perceptions of time shape and are shaped by the actions and interactions
performed (Roe, 2008; Bluedorn, 2002). A process view suggests that conceptions of
time and temporal structures are constituted in practice (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015)
as a result of creative action. It follows that adaptation and change of temporal struc-
tures is also warranted in action. In order to understand how change in recurrent
temporal structuring comes about, it is therefore necessary to investigate conditions
and mechanisms for how dispositions for action emerge. Below we will suggest and
discuss how a particular type of metaphor, i.e. generative metaphors, can be used to
spur such collective temporal change.
7.1.2 Metaphors in Organization Theory
The use of metaphor implies understanding and experiencing something in terms of

something else. In more formal terms a metaphor is, according to Merriam-Webster,
“a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or
idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them”
(2018). Within organizational theory there has been a continuous interest in meta-
phors since Gareth Morgan’s comprehensive contributions on the role, scope and
application of metaphors to organizations and organizational processes in the 1980s
and 1990s (e.g. 1980; 1993; 1997/1986). Subsequent work on metaphors in organiza-
tion theory can roughly be divided into two strands: “organization of metaphors,”
which is general in nature and not specific to organization theory, and “metaphors of
organization,” which is concerned with the status of metaphors—that is, whether they
represent a “liberation” and advancement of knowledge and insight, or are “imprecise”
and ambiguous figurative devices that are of no or little scientific value (Grant and
Oswick, 1996). More recently, Cornelissen (2005: 752) comments that the existence of
metaphors in organization theory is now undisputed and that “our concern should be
with figuring out how [metaphor] operates to aid theorists and researchers,” advocat-
ing an interactionist model in which metaphoric understanding is genuinely creative
(or generative) rather than a matter of deciphering already present features in the
representation of the target (i.e. the “unknown” subject) when compared to the source
(i.e. the familiar subject). Despite metaphors’ importance for communicating, guid-
ing, and navigating collective action, little is known about how they can be used as an
initiator of changing organizational work practices (Biscaro and Comacchio, 2017;
Grant and Oswick, 1996). How does the use of metaphor, as a temporally enacted
performance, enable change of work practices, and what are the implications?
7.1.3 The Generative Qualities of Metaphors
Schön (1979/1993) introduced “generative metaphor” to denote metaphors that

enable frame restructuring when frame conflict exists. They can be transformative
because they allow deeply embedded mental models and behaviors to be transferred
from an area of “impossibility,” “to an area of difficulty, enabling problems to be
‘solved’ without direct engagement with the problem” (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990:
236). New metaphors that are imaginative and creative are capable of providing
novel understanding and meaning to our experiences and everyday activity, which is
not available through our conventional conceptual system (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980: 139–41). In Schön’s view metaphor is not just a way of looking at things, but
Flowline at Work 93
also a “process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence”
(1979/1993: 137).
Morgan extends this view when he comments that a metaphor is a “primal, gen-
erative process that is fundamental to the creation of human understanding and
meaning in all aspects of life” (1996: 228, italics added).
Generative metaphors are not means to transmit content or shared “meaning,”
they are enacted accomplishments linking the organizational realm to the realm of
action. For a metaphor to be efficient it needs a “plot” allowing participants to create
metaphorical events by making temporal links to past/present/future, and it becomes
“a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it [and] alter the conceptual sys-
tem and perceptions and actions that the system give rise to” (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980: 145). Possibilities for action are continually shaped and brought forth by the
types of action in which humans engage to fulfill something “missing” (Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch, 1993), and metaphors thus have the potential to actualize
situations by providing plausible, coherent, and acceptable actions with the features
of importance being emergent (Cornelissen, 2005). Collective metaphorical events
generate proscriptive actions that are shaped and constituted, not arbitrarily, but as a
result of ongoing creative acts that bring both past history and future anticipations
into the present. The self-referentiality and articulation of experiences from the past
(source, e.g. deadline) and anticipations of expected outcomes in the future (target, e.g.
“flowline”) enable the constitution of a temporal action domain composed of available
artefacts, resources, and capacities. Metaphorical events transcend the individual level
of knowing by enabling a transformational process of mutual tuning where experi-
ences, insights, and expectations shaping future conduct are imagined, shared, and
elicited through a process of co-construction (Walsh and Ungson, 1991). Metaphors’
potential for framing agential conduct is determined by the extent to which they
enable fusing of separate realms of experience (and imagination) and allow reframing
of perceptual processes and ingrained schemas (Barrett and Cooperrider, 1990;
Srivastva and Barrett, 1988)—and are made relevant through the temporal affordances
of the situations they create. But how does the new “living” metaphor evolve and new
temporal concepts and possibilities for action emerge? In what follows we will examine
how the workflow and practices in a local newspaper changed as a result of the research
team’s (authors’) introduction of a new metaphor, flowline, and the enactment of this
generative metaphor by the newsroom managers and staff, replacing deadline as the
main governing mechanism for news production and distribution.
7.2 Case Study: Syncing the Newsroom in Local News

7.2.1 Research Design and Method
Our work with the local newspaper started in early 2015. The paper, here denoted
Local News, employs about thirty persons and is part of a large corporate media
group in Norway, with a circulation of about 12,000 copies and 44,000 daily readers.
Like many other newspapers it had adopted a “digital first” strategy and wanted to
develop an integrated and synced newsroom for both online and print news, “one
newsroom, one product.” This strategy gave prominence to the digital distribution of
news on behalf of the printed edition, even though the latter still generated 70 per-
cent of the revenue. However, changing the organizational mindset and making this
shift in practice was not straightforward, and the editorial group wanted the research
team to help facilitate the change (see Table 7.1 for an overview of the action research
engagement and key organizational events in this organization). Local News is part
of a larger four-year action research project called OMEN: Organizing for Media
Innovation, which includes two other newspapers (regional and national), with the
overall aim of improving their innovation processes, by strengthening both the jour-
nalistic creative processes and their ability to change in response to whatever new
technologies or societal changes present themselves in the future. The aim for the
change of temporal regimes was to support Local News in achieving a more stable
and predictable everyday production in sync with its audience’s expectations of
when news should be available, through elaborating imaginatively the implications
of time regimes in the newspaper’s everyday working life as a way to improve its
present workflow.
Since our empirical approach builds upon longitudinal field studies engaging par-
ticipants in joint collaboration inspired by appreciative inquiry (Ludema et al., 2006),
which is a positive mode of action research (Reason and Bradbury, 2006), we focus
on liberating the creative and constructive potential of organizations and human
communities (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987; Ludema, 2001, Cooperrider and
Whitney, 1999; Ludema, Cooperrider, and Barrett, 2006). Appreciative inquiry rec-
ognizes that inquiry and change are not truly separate moments, but are simultan
eous, i.e. inquiry is intervention (Pålshaugen, 2001). The empirical material collected
covers a timespan of three years, 2015 to 2018, and consists of interviews, document
studies, participant observation, and facilitation of workshops. The latter have been
the primary vehicle for spurring active experimentation with new work forms and
testing of concepts as a result of analytical efforts and co-created understanding,
but are also used as feedback workshops (Pettigrew, 1990) to validate findings and
enhance construct validity (Yin, 2003). Action research is a research design that
engages and guides practitioners and researchers in co-creation of practical solutions
as well as obtaining knowledge for the research community (Reason and Bradbury,
2006). According to Heron and Reason, “Primacy [within action research] is given
to transformative inquiries that involve action, where people change their way of
being and doing and relating in their world—in the direction of greater flourishing”
(2006: 145). The accumulated insights we obtained through the interaction with the
field decided what would be the topic for the next workshop (see Table 7.1). A work-
shop was typically organized by starting with a presentation of often semi-finished
ideas, model or tools that the research team had prepared for news workers and
managers to reflect upon and develop further together with the researchers. By
Table 7.1 Overview of the action research engagement and key organizational events
Time Key interventions Aims and outcome Implications for Analysis and implications
organizational practice for research Participants
Managers Employees
2015 Sept.–Oct. Appreciative Mapping of organizationalIncreased consciousness Identification of 4 26

inquiry interviews strengths and challenges of enablers and potential organizational. strengths
(1 hour) for change in organization and challenges
Oct. Workshop with Testing methods and Structure collaborative Designing workshop series 3 23
newsroom prototype tool for ideation, creative processes of on urgent challenges
(full day) developed story ideas storytelling development
Nov. Workshop with Discussing and planning Agree on action points for Preparing tasks and 3
editors (2 hrs) how to move forward, immediate and long-term adjusting action research
appointed development change workshop methods
group
2016 Jan. Workshop I with Summary and discussion Implemented new planner Identifying broader topics 3 4
development of challenges, plan for (Trello), editors’ pre- of discussion and
group (3 hrs) progression of strategic morning meeting inventing method for
work colleague support
Feb. Workshop II with Discussing audience Failed method (“Sparr”), Integrating content 3 4
development engagement, ideation content analysis project on analysis and ethic analysis
group (3 hrs) method for colleague consortium level planned, of “digital first” technology
support suggested digital first training and strategy, identifying
(“Sparr”) completed “no sense” practices
Apr. Workshop III Looking at organizing Focus attention on Continuing “out of sync” 3 4
with development news production for practices that make audience analysis, using
group (3 hrs) rhythm and tempo, “no sense” in digital theory of liminality and
news 24/7 production temporality
Continued
Table 7.1 Continued
Time Key interventions Aims and outcome Implications for Analysis and implications
organizational practice for research Participants
Managers Employees
June Workshop IV Work on strengthening New internal deadline at Analytic standstill: why 3 4
with development engaged practices, noon, failed metaphor are they always failing at
group (3 hrs) alternative time regimes, (qualimeter) implementing lasting
and news quality change?
Sept. Fieldwork, Observation of everyday Identification of individual Empirical base for flowline 3 22
sit-along (2 days) practices practices of flow practice
Nov. Workshop with Presentation of Systematizing of Empirical base for 3 4
development storytelling ladder and storytelling criteria and improved tool for ideation,
group (2 hrs) airport analogy/flowline audience engagement confirmed relevance
strategies flowline
Workshop Presenting tool for None (no one present) Urgent need for a better 19
consortium level ideation ideation tool
(2 hrs)
Workshop Testing improved tool for News editor present, Confirmed need for 27
consortium level ideation: Idea Propeller. general agreement on metaphors to work by,
(4 hrs) Introducing flowline need for more creativity need for editor training in
and flow ideation
2017 Feb. Workshop Testing IdeaPropeller Story development, Adjusting questions in 3 18
newsroom (3 hrs) 3 topics ideation tool
June Workshop Discussing flowline, Story development, Effectivizing ideation tool: 3
newsroom (1 day) testing Idea Propeller 2 topics Mini-propeller
Workshop (1 day) Media-trail and ideation Story development, Adjusting ideation tool 2 1
with local youth 3 topics
Sept. Meetings (2 x 2 Working group with news Suggestions for flowline Model for employee
hrs) editor strategies involvement
Oct. Workshop, Action points for flowline General agreement on Identify “failed change” 3 20
internal (4 hrs) transition flowline strategies factors
Oct. Fieldwork, Observation of flowline Effects and results of Systematizing effects of 3 22
sit-along (2 days) practices introduction of flowline introduction of flowline
Dec. Meeting with Summary of internal Model for low threshold Fine-tune A-game 3
editors (3 hrs) workshop on flowline organizational changes analysis
2018 Jan. Meeting Introducing A-game Identifying need for Inventing metaphor 3 20
newsroom (3 hrs) analysis change: social media audience engagement
May Meeting with Introducing “glowline” Agree on need to reduce Systematizing audience 3
editors (2 hrs) audience “noise” engagement practices
Sept. Meeting with Discussion of glowline Identify need for glowline Preparing empirical 3
editors (2 hrs) continued workshop newsroom observation
2015–18 Informal talks 3 26
and observation
(> 30 hrs)
Internal documents (reports and content
analyses, consortium level) > 150 pages
bringing researchers’ observations and analyses back to the organizations as

something that was not final or finished, the aim was to raise awareness about what
they take for granted or seldom talk about. In this way we hoped to encourage
employees’ reflections, imagination, and creation of shared understanding about
how problems and challenges could be dealt with, but also to agree upon concrete
steps to lower the threshold for experimenting or testing new ways of working.
Our first intervention in 2015 was to conduct semi-structured interviews with
everyone located in the editorial room—that is, journalists, photographers, desk
journalists, editors, marketers, and receptionists. The questions revolved around
their everyday work; past experiences, reflections about present performance, and
possibilities for the future. More specifically, the topics covered included conditions
for performing idea work (see Carlsen, Clegg, and Gjersvik, 2012), digitalization
versus print, collaboration with colleagues, and organization and management of
newsrooms. Out of this round of interviews, five converging needs were identified;
1) stronger integration and coordination between print and digital platforms, 2)
more hands-on involvement of editors when it comes to prioritizing, making deci-
sions, and actively supporting journalists in their work, 3) obtaining a better balance
between news and feature stories, 4) revision of editorial profile regarding what sto-
ries should be produced and not, and 5) more meeting points for sharing informa-
tion and entering into joint accomplishments. During our initial observations in the
newsroom and of morning meetings we discovered that the journalists had no
established routines, methods or practices for developing ideas, echoing the findings
of Nylund (2013). Many journalists struggled to find the necessary time to engage in
collaborative ideation and it generally took place on an ad-hoc basis.
The extent of our engagements was balanced against most employees’ expressed
experience of not having time enough to devote to innovative experimentation and
interventions, but throughout the project period we were on average in contact with
or visiting the newsrooms on a monthly basis (see Table 7.1). Between interventions
we conducted follow-up interviews (formal and informal), participant observation
in the newsroom, and “sit-alongs” with individual journalists while they were work-
ing on their computer, conversing about what they were doing at that moment. We
organized meetings with editors and staff, and held presentations and initiated dis-
cussions for the whole newsroom or groups of employees, including representatives
of the corporate headquarters and editors of other local newspapers in the consor-
tium. The combinations of methods that we used to develop conceptualizations and
constructs aimed to obtain verisimilitude and applicability in addition to being rec-
ognized and acknowledged by informants (Stewart, 1998).
7.2.2 Setting: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”
Since its formation centuries ago, news work has been temporally structured around
the notion of “the deadline”.1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a deadline
Flowline at Work 99
historically indicates “a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were
liable to be shot,” but as a metaphor it has become an institutionalized norm in news
organizations indicating the rhythm of how news is produced. However, the growth
of news published on digital platforms at close to all hours has made this formative
figure of action less relevant for the organizing of news work. The industry’s response
has been to introduce a “digital first” publishing scheme, but changing the deeply
ingrained institutionalized pattern of work activities has been more troublesome
than anticipated (Wheatley and O’Sullivan, 2017).
This was also the case for Local News when we started working with them in 2015,
as falling circulation and downsizing in all parts of the organization had led to
increased work pressure and perceived stressfulness, and a dystopic outlook on the
future of their organization. The everyday working life of the journalists included
preparedness for reporting breaking news, planned stories and features, and calen-
dar temporalities like weekly, seasonal, and yearly activity cycles, and they were thus
working, and living, within a multitude of temporal structures. One of our initial
observations was how holidays and seasons seemed to take them by surprise every
year. “Oh no, Christmas is coming up,” they exclaimed and organized meetings to
plan for relevant stories a week or two before the holiday. According to Clark, all
time-reckoning “involves a plurality of contingent temporal markers, sequences,
durations and combinations of the past/present/future, all of which are socially con-
structed” (2009: 256). The cyclical year also represented a hindrance to engaging in
transformation processes. “We have to wait until after the holidays” (whether Easter,
summer or Christmas holidays) was a common response when we took the initiative
to involve the larger newsroom. However, we slowly understood that it was the tem-
porality of the deadline that dominated the journalists’ workday and that constituted
the major hindrance to change. In particular, the daily need to produce enough stories
for the next day’s newspaper within the set deadline seemed to trump every other
matter of working life, including long-term planning. The journalists felt a clear
expectation to deliver a new story each day, and thus had little time to think about
other things beyond the present day.
We came closer to an understanding of the implications of the deadline regime
when one journalist explained in an interview how they were expected to write one
story a day “in order to help fill the newspaper.” Likewise, the editors expressed that
a main part of their everyday struggle was the issue of “filling the paper,” having
enough stories ready within the deadline so that there would be no empty pages in
the paper edition distributed the following day. The main problem after continuous
downsizing was that the overall volume of stories produced by the staff was insuffi-
cient, not only to “fill the paper” but also to be successful as online publishers. This
had become particularly clear to them as the corporate unit for content development
and analysis provided them with online access to real-time performance and weekly
reports of statistics comparing their results with earlier performance and other
newspapers in the media group (consisting of seventy-two local media organizations
in Norway). The metrics showed that Local News, in comparison with similar
newspapers, underperformed in terms of the number of stories produced by its own

staff, and was in their own words “the worst in their class.”
The lack of a sufficient number of stories can in turn be related to the newsroom’s
established practices of work and production flow. Many of the journalists started
every morning at about 8.15 a.m. with a “clean slate,” focusing on preparing the one
story that they felt was expected of them that day. What stories they were going to
produce was often not settled before they came to work; it was instead decided dur-
ing the regular morning meeting—a common ritual in newsrooms (Gravengaard
and Rimestad, 2012). The solution suggested by the chief editor was to produce a
repository of stories so that instead of emptying their inventory each day, they had a
surplus storage of stories that would make the task of filling the paper a lot easier.
The chief editor illustrated his idea with the metaphor of fueling the petrol tank of a
car from half full to full instead of emptying the tank and half filling it every day.
While the metaphor provided a good illustration of what was at stake, translating it
into editorial and managerial practices producing practical implications was not
equally straightforward. This quickly became a “failed metaphor.” One reason might
be that everyone agreed on the goal (better long-term planning), but they had few
suggestions about how to get there, as this would also involve a change in mentality,
seeing the newsroom as a collective with a common agency rather than individual
journalists expressing their autonomy through the everyday production of news sto-
ries to fill the newspaper. There was also little debate around whether making
changes in the management’s practices could be part of the solution, although their
ways of talking and acting were strongly associated with print production, e.g. dis-
cussing what would be the cover story or talking about the culture section of the
newspaper. As expressed by members of the newsroom, it also posed a challenge
that the paper edition continued to be highlighted as what generated income, and
that journalistic pride and status was still associated with what was published on
paper. Established rhetorical tropes such as assessing journalistic quality in terms of
“how to make a story shine on paper” further contributed to a deadline, paper-
oriented regime of production in the newsroom.
One of the most prominent examples was the central position that the analogue
“page planner” had in the everyday production of Local News. A “page planner” is a
tool commonly used in many newspapers for keeping overview and control of the
flow of production. Most commonly, it is a sheet of paper displaying rectangles rep-
resenting all the pages of tomorrow’s newspaper in a grid (see Figure 7.1). When a
page is produced, it is crossed out with a marker, usually by the copy editor in charge
of tomorrow’s paper product. The editors may also have their own paper versions on
their desks, to follow progress. When the deadline for the front page (which is usu-
ally the last page sent to the print publisher) approaches, the number of crossed-out
rectangles signifies the level of progress and generates a possible feeling of crisis or
doom. This system for planning and measuring progress functions to “make time
concrete and negotiable . . . and envision the ending of an otherwise open-ended
story” (Yakura 2002: 956). The predictability of deadlines is in this respect a central
Flowline at Work 101
Figure 7.1 Example of a page planner from Local News
structuring mechanism for employees in a newsroom, but it also stresses that time is
always scarce and hence may explain why established work practices are rarely chal-
lenged (Widholm, 2016).
7.2.3 Initial Interventions

As part of the co-creative efforts of researchers and the newsroom to develop and
implement a strategy for synchronizing production and publishing, a “development
group” was established in 2016, consisting of three editors and four journalists, rep-
resenting both experienced journalists and union representatives. We worked with
this group for over a year, meeting and discussing what could be done to resolve the
problems that the newsroom was facing.
Media organizations could be seen as producers, performers, and consumers of
time, but due to its pervasive and ubiquitous influence, time is often taken for
granted and not questioned in their everyday practices. The initial phase of our co-
creative work was thus characterized by activities focused on raising awareness and
producing reflexivity among the members of the development group, and eventually
the newsroom as a whole. This implied making the group map out the challenges
with which the newsroom was currently struggling, before coming up with concrete
ideas and suggestions for changes and action points that the newsroom could test out.
As early as the first workshop, suggestions were made to introduce an editors’

meeting prior to the morning meeting, and to start using a digital production planner
in everyday production. In the second workshop, they could report that these
changes had been implemented. The new editors’ meeting was characterized as a
“great success” that they were “very happy” with, and that was “working well for all
parties.” The research group introduced Local News to the free online planning tool
Trello because it was used by one of the other newspapers participating in the project,
and the development group could report that Local News had “gone straight from
the meeting and tested it.” While they had also tried a couple of other options, and
found that there were some technical challenges with the interface and establishing a
routine of inserting information into the system, they found the online planner to
have “eased a lot, mak[ing] it more visual,” exclaiming that “Trello is wonderful.”
A next step was to initiate a discussion about time and timing. In order to meet
readers’ expectations for updates and new stories, the rhythm for publishing news
online should preferably match the traffic peaks throughout the day from early
morning to late evening, and the mix of content should change during the day based
on what kinds of stories readers want at different times. However, Local News’ “digi-
tal first” strategy of publishing all stories on their online news site before they were
published in the print edition seemed more like a rhetorical device than a practice in
everyday life, due to their strong concern for the fate of the print product, and
whether they would be able to “fill” the newspaper if they focused on digital only.
To increase awareness of paradoxical practices in the newsroom, we presented the
visualization of their traffic peaks on various online platforms (web, mobile, tablets)
together with an overview of their own current organization of the news cycle (time
of deadline, working hours, timing of meetings, when they published stories online).
The discrepancy between when their readers were paying them attention, and when
the newsroom was making their stories available, was striking, and seemed to be
quite the eye opener for the development group. This insight was strengthened when
we asked them to do a simple mapping of when sources for stories were available,
and compare this chart with the charts of online traffic peaks and their own work-
flow during the day. As it turned out, most journalists were in-house in meetings
or preparing for stories both when sources’ availability and the online audience
presence peaked.
This exercise in visual awareness seemed to produce a greater sense of urgency
about, and motivation for, the need to change their workflow. It spurred a discussion
as to how one might go about rethinking the established work and production pat-
terns. One of the obvious mismatches between stories published and reader atten-
tion was the fact that they generally had very good online “traffic” on Mondays, but
had very few new stories to publish due to reduced staff levels during the weekend,
and this limited the front-desk employees whose job it was to “push stories.” This
inspired the idea of thinking differently about when the news week starts and ends,
and we joked about how it would make more sense to import the Muslim week. One
of the participants stated, “I kind of like the idea of starting the week on a different
day. Let’s say we start the week on Thursday.” Projecting to the development group a
visual representation of the lack of correlation between their production flow and
reader attention thus seemed to articulate what was taken for granted, and to open
up other ways of imagining practices and organizations of workflow.
7.2.4 The Making of Generative Metaphor
Although there were plans to test out several of the suggestions that came up in the
development group’s sessions, such as introducing a new main deadline at noon,
none of these were actually implemented. While the development group were able to
imagine ways of changing their temporal organizing, they seemed less able to actu-
ally make these changes happen. A more genuine process of challenging the mindset
and practices of the established deadline regime was thus not initiated until several
months later, when the researchers suggested a new meeting to continue the work
that had been put in motion. In the process that followed, the researchers’ introduc-
tion of new metaphors came to play a central part.
The way in which these metaphors were generated is quite characteristic of the
project’s methodological approach, where the use of creative collaborative work and
sketching as an analytical visualization process tool is central. The research team
gathered around a high table in our office space with blank paper sheets and colored
felt pens, to think and draw forth an approach to the upcoming workshop on pro-
duction flow. In a series of idea sessions, we worked our way through various meta-
phors and chains of associations. Since a main concern was to find a production flow
that could synchronize the discrepant temporal logics of print and digital production,
inspiration from musical terms such as pace and rhythm led to the idea of “grooving
the news rhythm.” The development group’s expressed need for the journalists to
stop writing what they called “the shit in the middle” stories, i.e. stories that were
neither a proper full-length story nor a short informative notice, but something in
between, generated associations with a “narrative ladder” (originally “abstraction
ladder”) where one would aspire to either stay down or climb the whole ladder,
inspired by the familiar storyline structure in journalism (Hayakawa and Hayakawa,
1990). We also drew an idea for a multistage rocket tool, with four sequential groups
of questions to ask in order to get the story to “take off.” Most of these metaphoric
sketches never left the drawing board, while some, like the ladder, were tested on the
development group. The ladder itself was too confusing a metaphor to become use-
ful, but it spurred a set of important questions and ways to engage audiences that
later became integral in the development of the Idea Propeller tool for collaborative
creativity in newsrooms (Hagen and Tolstad, 2019).
At one point in the process, we revisited a statement made by an editor in one of
the other participating news organizations. He had raised the issue of figuring out
“how to make stories fly online,” which we recognized as a digital equivalent of
“making stories shine on paper.” Stories that fly online can be defined as stores that
are read and shared, reaching a wider audience, and hopefully also triggering new
subscriptions. The expressed need to avoid using resources on mediocre stories was
related to the implicit notion that stories of high quality had the best potential to fly
online (or to shine on paper). At the time, the deadline production regime was
preventing Local News from producing such online stories to any great extent. The
need for a new production flow was thus related both to improving the synchroniz-
ing of online publishing with reader attention, and to providing the journalists with
an organizational infrastructure that would enable them to write stories of quality
and relevance.
Our troubles in actually enabling changed practices in the newsroom inspired a
two-day sit-along by one of the researchers. The goal was to identify enablers and
hindrances of each individual newsroom employee’s workflow, and to make sense of
the gap between what they expressed that they wanted to do (change practices) and
what they were actually doing (not changing). Since the goal was to facilitate a tran-
sition to a production flow where submission and publication of stories were distrib-
uted more evenly throughout the day, we found inspiration in the work routine
discovered among one of the journalists. Because he had the sole responsibility for
the finance and economy section, he could not rely on the “one story a day” produc-
tion cycle, and had thus established a rhythm that was independent of the deadline
regime. He never started the day with a “clean slate,” but instead worked in a more
overlapping flowing mode, continuously switching between preparing stories, idea-
tion, writing and getting the stories ready for publishing.
In the intersection of the notion of “making stories fly online” and this individual
journalist’s work routine, two interrelated ideas emerged from our collaborative
thinking and drawing sessions. A key element in our work was the realization of
how the notion of the deadline was so engrained in Local News’ newsroom practices
that it strongly limited the abilities of editors and journalists to imagine and imple-
ment alternative ways of working and organizing their newsroom. In exploring
alternatives to the deadline metaphor, the idea emerged to think about the produc-
tion of stories in an even flow throughout the day as a “flowline” production mode.
As a literal word construction, “flowline” might not make much sense, but “flow” as
something continuously in flux and “line” with its connotations to deadline aroused
a curiosity and feeling in the group that this was something worth exploring (see
Table 7.2 for comparison of deadline and flowline). The idea of flying stories also
sparked the idea that understanding how a flowline production would function in
practice could be exemplified through looking at airport logistics. An airport is
characterized by a continuous stream of people and flights throughout the day, and
is thus distinctly different from a deadline approach where everyone starts and fin-
ishes at the same time. The rhetorical question, “would it make sense if every traveler
came in at 9 a.m. and left by plane at 4 p.m.” seemed to underscore and show the
paradoxical nature of the deadline regime.
The flowline metaphor and the airport analogy were presented to the develop-
ment group in the form of a drawing (see Figure 7.2). We asked them to imagine
Table 7.2 Deadline production vs. flowline production
Deadline production Flowline production
Aim “Filling the pages”: All pages must beContinual production (primary).
filled within pre-given time limit. Firstism: Being the first to break
Freshism: Bringing the news as fresh news (secondary). “Make the stories
as possible. “Make the stories shine”:fly”: Time, platform, and frame the
Copy edit the pages until perfect. stories for online peaks of audience
presence.
Nature of Cyclical: The timer is reset every Continuous and never-ending:
production day; repeating work cycle governed Ongoing production governed by
by clock-time. reader peaks and breaking news.
Motivation “Dead if not finished”: The thrill of “Deliver when finished”: the rush of
deadline and the adrenaline rush, publishing most read stories,
one set goal for the newsroom as a individual accomplishments
team. throughout the day.
View of time Clock time (primary), exogenous and Experience time: The human
independent. Event time (secondary), experience of living in/with time,
qualitative, habitual time. clock time and event time are
inseparable.
Temporal Presentism: Focused on here and Open-ended near future: Loosely
orientation now, structured relations between structured and directed at what is
past, present, and future (re) next. Ongoing present: continuous
produced for each cycle. structuring of relations between past,
present, and future
Publication Asynchronism between production, Continuous coordination between
and distribution, and consumption. “Gut publishing and reader consumption.
consumption feeling” of what engages audiences. Metrics measure audience
engagement.
Management Governed by strict time limitation Autonomy and individual effort to
and military precision to reach reach reader peaks.
deadline.
Technology “Page view,” paper page planner. “Digital first,” online story planner
(e.g. Trello).
Metaphoric Static: Industry norm, “dead Generative: Foster creative thinking
quality metaphor,” internalized and and alternative ways of organizing,
routinized, experimental and future-oriented.
tradition-bound and
history-dependent.
check-in as the moment the journalist pitches the idea for a story, while security
control is where you get a “go” for your idea, and the gate is the place where you
decide what route the story will take when it comes to form (e.g., feature, reporting,
notice) and strategies for publication. The actual take-off of the flight is when the
story is published and landing could represent evaluation, feedback, and discussions
about the potential for making a follow-up story. As in an airport, the flights, i.e.
stories, would be distributed throughout the day, from morning to evening, and
perhaps even include a “red eye.”
HOW TO MAKE THE STORY FLY ON THE WEB MORNING FLIGHT

RED EYE
5 FLY EVENING FLIGHT
Contact readers
(front desk)
4 BOARDING
Deliver in flowline
3 GATE
Platforms,
Publishing stategies 6 LANDING
2 SEQURITY CONTROL Evaluation
The (narrative) ladder Action points
1 CHECK IN
Touch down MA-AIR
Figure 7.2 Illustration of the flowline metaphor used in an airport analogy—original

drawing on the left (in Norwegian) and translated version on the right
The flowline metaphor was embraced by the development group as the workshop
progressed, exemplified for instance by how they seamlessly started making use of
the term as an integrated part of the conversations and discussions unfolding. In the
words of the editor-in-chief: “I do think we are in the core of a way of thinking . . . if
we were to achieve something on this together with you, I am sure these are models
that will make an impact.” Overall, throughout the discussions a common idea about
what a flowline approach would imply emerged: a work rhythm of continuous delivery
of stories throughout the day, a surplus of stories, increased self-management, better
ideation and creative discussions of ideas from the start—resulting in making stories
“fly online.” It would be a continuous production cycle, adapted to the needs of
“others”—the audience and sources rather than the newsroom staff.
7.2.5 Performing Metaphorical Events
The flowline metaphor and the corresponding airport analogy seemed to open the
way for the transformative “what if . . .?” question, offering the possibility of imagin-
ing without incurring the risks and constraints of the real world (Ragsdell, 2000).
This enabled imagination and anticipation of the future, resonating with existing
practice, and seemed to be well received by both editors and journalists. While dead-
line characterized the existing reality (dead if not finished), flowline characterized a
new reality (deliver when finished). To paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson: “[flowline]
provides an organization of important [work] experiences that our conventional
conceptual system does not make available . . . the way you would understand your
everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the
[flowline] metaphor” (1980: 141). Flowline as an open-ended workflow thus offers
new prospects for how to deal with the paradox of performing online and print pro-
duction in parallel, by providing possibilities for new temporary structuring that
enables flexible accomplishments rather than rigidity leading to failures.
Plans were made for testing the flowline mode of working in the newsroom a few
weeks later, as the development group embraced the idea of turning the newsroom
into an “airport”: “It’s childish, but couldn’t we have a check-in counter? Standing
tables where you check in. . . . You’ll need to meet with [one of the editors] to look
over your travel documents before you move through security for another flight.”
However, the scheduled test week was cancelled a few days prior due to sickness
among both researchers and journalists. The implementation of the flowline was
thus left hanging for another ten months, when the news editor initiated another
attempt after preparing the newsroom staff for a transition to a new content manage-
ment system (CMS) for online production, which would replace the old one focus-
ing on page views and print production.
In order to concretize the metaphor in terms of what they should do differently
when converging the newsroom to a “digital first” production, the news editor met
with the research group to outline a plan. Based on the input from this meeting,
where the researchers stressed the importance of employee involvement as we had a
hypothesis that “ownership” of the process was integral to success, he appointed a
team of four journalists to come up with suggestions for how they could change
their workflow. A larger workshop with the whole newsroom present addressed
these suggestions and asked for common strategies on how they could adapt to this
line of thinking. Among the changes proposed and later implemented was a new set
of story templates, denoted “quickies,” defined by how little time was estimated for
their production. In doing so, ideation became separated from the making of a story,
and the news staff could work with several stories in parallel. By introducing a
backup plan for when a story was dropped shortly before the deadline, the produc-
tion cycle now resembled a “hurtline”—that is, no one was “shot” anymore.
To reduce ambiguity and maintain control over production, the newsroom
revived their use of the online planning tool Trello, as an editorial planner. While the
tool had already been implemented in the newsroom, it was with the introduction of
the new flowline regime that Trello really had its moment of release. “It [Trello] is
our universe. The genius thing we have come up with is the color-coding,” said the
digital editor. She was referring to how they were now using color codes to display a
story’s status through the production process. “Trello’s foremost function now . . . is
the production progress of the individual story. That is what the color codes indicate,”
said the news editor. These color codes imply that everyone now has continuous
access to the status quo of the newsroom’s production process, both online and paper,
and its success was linked to the involvement of the journalists in inventing and
agreeing on what the different colors “meant.” One of the journalists stated that by
doing this they got “a very good tool to follow our stories from start to finish; we have
done a good job concerning which labels and points in production we mark down.”
Temporal structures are manifested in logs, schedules, and other time-displaying
devices (Gersick, 1994), and the difference between the aforementioned analogue
page planner and Trello as tools for newsroom production is in this respect striking.
The page planner, as physical sheets of paper with rectangles representing newspaper
pages, clearly mirrors the logic, the temporal understanding, and even the materiality
associated with a deadline production mode. Trello, on the other hand, with its
color-coding indicating the movement of stories in the production process, clearly
provides a visual representation of how the flowline moves along. While the page
planner is a physical tool that is primarily carried around by the copy editor (or other
members of management in charge), thus being primarily under the supervision
and control of one person, Trello is accessible to all of the newsroom staff all the time.
Journalists can follow their stories through the production system based on the color-
coding, and since all of the stories in production are on display, the entire newsroom
has continuous insight into how production is coming along. This tool is more demo-
cratic and thus clearly adds a sense of shared ownership to the flowline process.
Both journalists and management have rearranged their rhythm of production.
The journalists prepare their story for the following day in the afternoon, make
interview appointments, and put a description of the story into Trello before they
leave work at 3.30 p.m. The news editor and the digital editor make a quick “clean
up” in Trello each evening, organizing the journalists’ entries for planned stories and
marking what has been published. “You can be sure that you don’t miss anything
[that] has been a problem,” the digital editor said. They describe their everyday work
situation as improved, as they are now both better prepared and have a continuous
surplus of stories to publish, both online and in the print edition.
In the newsroom seminar leading up to the introduction of the flowline regime,
the journalists and editors also discussed issues of how to structure and organize
their work within the new flowline regime. Their suggestions included the need to
be able to work on several stories at the same time, and that everybody needs to get
on board with the new regime and to start the working day outside the newsroom to
get new ideas. The way in which the employees were here thinking and producing
ideas based on the frames and conditions set by the flowline regime implies that the
introduction of this new metaphor had generated new ways of thinking and acting
about how news production is executed and organized, which in turn lowers the
threshold for implementing these new thought patterns into practice. Now that the
flowline regime has been introduced and implemented, the newsroom staff seem to
be on board with and motivated for making additional changes in the ways they
organize and execute their work. We just recently introduced the metaphor “glow-
line” as a way to increase audience engagement at all levels in the organization (see
Tolstad, Hagen, and Skjælaaen, 2019), and the newsroom staff ’s openness to this
might in part be related to the very notion of flowline as a dynamic workflow that is
continuously adjusted towards the audience’s attention and consumption patterns.
So how did the “flowline” metaphor perform? Within the first month after the
changes were introduced the production volume of stories produced in-house
increased by 40 percent and the number of readers visiting the news site increased
by 30 percent—one of the senior journalists increased her readership by 135 percent
in these four weeks. Surprisingly, the paper production flow also got a revival, as the
copy editor now had a steady volume of stories to work on throughout the day. “It’s
Christmas Eve here every day now,” he exclaimed. Half a year later, without any
interventions other than a sit-along to document and discuss the changes with the
staff, and the news editor paying continuous attention to the results in individual
and plenary meetings, the numbers were stabilized at a level slightly below the initial
results. Now other newsrooms have started visiting, intending to learn from these
experiences and hoping to copy the impressive results. One of the other newsrooms
in the OMEN project implemented flowline as their new production regime in 2017,
with similar success, and the third newspaper is now in the process of transforming
to a flowline mode.
7.3 Discussion
As a primary and deep-rooted governing temporal structure, deadline has for cen
turies been the embodied rhythm, logic, and pace that news workers have entrained
in their everyday work. All work practices have been synchronized in order to meet
the daily deadline, implying following a highly linear temporal structure that, when
zooming out, is also cyclical, as it repeats itself every day. When online publishing
entered the newsroom scene some twenty years ago, the accompanying temporal
regime was of a fundamentally different character. Because it does not rely on the
time it takes to print and distribute the newspaper, but rather arranges for immediate
publishing, online temporality is about timing towards audience reception, continuous
and speedy updating, and longevity in terms of the everlasting online accessibility of
news stories.
As a consequence of the promising prospects for online news (compared to print),
many newspapers have adopted a “digital first” strategy of publishing all stories
online, not “saving” any stories for print. Yet, from dialogue with other media organ-
izations both in Norway and internationally, we see that the changes are mostly
technological (implementing a new CMS) and not transformative of the newsroom
culture and temporal mentality.
Our initial investigation showed that a deadline-dominated temporality in turbu-
lent times provided the journalists with a strong emphasis on the present day with
little time for developing ideas for future stories, in both the short and long term,
and for participating in strategic innovation projects. Starting with a clean slate, as
some journalists did every day, also resulted in a lack of stories for publication dur-
ing weekends and on Monday mornings—when their reader numbers would nor-
mally peak. Based on a preliminary analysis of their work practices we introduced
several metaphors and among them flowline as a way of adapting towards a more
open-ended and near-future-oriented news cycle. To paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson
(1980), it was introduced as a metaphor for the news staff to “work by,” not as a new
organizing principle, but as something to be practiced. Flowline thus became an
enabler for a number of minor technological, cultural, and organizational changes
over some time. Traditional work on metaphor in organization theory describes
metaphors in terms of what Cornelissen (2005) denotes as the comparison

model—that is, as fixed-meaning entities provoking “active thought experiments”
that “assert similarity” and transmit meaning between a target and a source (Barrett
and Cooperrider, 1990). Metaphors are in this view proposed to be significant first and
foremost at the conceptual level, as they convey organizing principles for thought and
experience, and thus play a crucial role within processes of sensemaking (Lakoff, 1993;
Cornelissen et al., 2008). Our study resembles an interactionist model (Cornelissen,
2005) of metaphor, advocating the generation and creation of new meaning that is not
present either in the source or in the target. Building on a process perspective, we sug-
gest that metaphors unfold as events of creative actions, i.e. as iterative processes of
trial and error, imagination and anticipation, reason and learning.
Performative metaphors like “flowline” and “quickies” are temporal and provi-
sional constructs functioning as mechanisms for lowering thresholds and enabling
transformative change in organizations. It is through metaphorical events that a new
temporal structuring of ongoing action is imagined, and that a new way of under-
standing how activities can be linked, interconnected, and sequenced emerges
through action. The deeply embedded deadline-governed workflow corresponds to
a collective established background and entire system that shape a domain for effect
ive action. This action domain is a point of departure for the rhythm, pacing, and
composition of work activities which appear as recurrent, stable, and recognizable
over cultural, technical, and social barriers. By introducing the new metaphor flow-
line this background is brought to the fore and questioned through articulation of
assumptions, beliefs, and concerns about how one negotiates and navigates through
a world that is not fixed and pre-given, but rather is temporally shaped by the types
of actions in which we engage (Varela et al., 1993: 144). This is a creative process
which involves “the conjunction of whole semantic domains in which a correspond-
ence between terms or concepts is constructed, rather than deciphered” (Cornelissen
2005: 751, italics in original). What makes a metaphor generative is that the con-
joined terms are not self-contained; they are “empty” in the sense that imagined
new situations for existing rules and procedures do not apply, and participants must
construct and enact narratives to resolve the ambiguities about what they can do
(Barge and Little, 2002; Thatcher, 1998). This construction is spurred by “break-
downs” (Winograd and Flores, 1986) in the background or “anomalies” (Barrett and
Cooperrider, 1990) in the foreground, and is resolved through a combination of
reflective imitations, shifting between perspective, experiments, and dialogical
actions in order to acquire and render new co-constructed dispositions for action.
For a metaphor to be generative and enable narration it should be neither too
distant from nor too close to the source domain in order not to produce arbitrary or
trivial connections. As an enabler for change, metaphor does not address the prob-
lem directly, but transforms it in oblique ways by making the world less fixed and
creating new and multiple ways of seeing and understanding the target (Barrett and
Cooperrider, 1990; Cornelissen, 2005). Beyond a reframing there are in our study
few new activities added to the workflow which involve learning and training; it is
the temporal configuration, the pacing, and rhythm that have changed. Clark and
Maielli state that: “By selecting various events in the form of sequences or trajectories,
from arrays of events which can be apprehended relative to one another, concepts of
time are constructed by attending to sets of events which are seen to unfold relative
to other trajectories of events” (2009: 257). A transformation of concepts of time can
thus be understood and spurred by viewing metaphor as a creative performance
and enactment of time—that is, it is the timing of events, and not time as such, that
enables the generation of a new temporal structuring and patterning of action to
make change happen.
7.4 Conclusion
Metaphors are devices for capturing and expressing embodied, tacit, and relational
aspects of the temporal (past, present, and future) flow of experience, giving impetus
to novel interpretations, explanations, and inventions not previously imagined, and
“because of its inherent ambivalence of meaning, metaphor can fulfill the dual function
of enabling change and preserving continuity” (Pondy, 1983: 164). Our study builds
upon an action research design involving the co-generation of new ideas, concepts,
and metaphors, aimed at enabling transformative change in the temporal structur-
ing of a news organization as it changed its workflow from day-to-day, deadline-
governed production to continuous and near-future-oriented production, flowline.
As a device for organizational change, metaphor represents a critical yet appreciative
inquiry into how multiple interpretations of intersubjective meaning and collabora-
tive construction of new concepts unfold in practice and create new possibilities for
action. However, the use of metaphors and action research goes beyond making
change happen; they are also promising means of informing practice and process-
oriented research in general, with its interest in temporary evolving phenomenon,
interactions, changing interpretations, and lived and living experience.
Note
1. The title of this section is a lyric from the song “Not Dark Yet,” from the album Time Out of
Mind by Bob Dylan (1997).
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8
Temporal Shaping of
Routine Patterning
Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar
8.1 Introduction
On time. In time. Time flies. Time is running. Time out. Time has come. Past. Present.
Future.
Temporality is a salient feature of all human life and activities (Bluedorn, 2002).
Temporality is not about time reckoning. It is about living (Jaques, 1982). Temporality
concerns the ways in which the passing of time forms the being of things
(Heidegger, 1927/1996) through a dynamic process. The notion of temporality refers
to a flow-like approach, i.e. the ungraspable flow marked by its ongoing novelty
(Hernes, 2014)—in other words, the continuous becoming of things. This process
consists of an endless flow of new presents, and the agency of actors always lies in
the present where they ascribe the present with meaning, as well evoking past and
future events (Schultz and Hernes, 2013).
Recently, there has been an increasing interest in how history and time affect
organizing processes (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006; Hernes, 2014; Langley and
Tsoukas, 2016). This interest has also reached the routine literature, but there is still
limited understanding of temporality (Simpson and Lorino, 2016) and how it shapes
routine dynamics (Howard-Grenville, 2005). In line with Turner (2014), we take as
a starting point in this chapter that temporality is paramount for understanding
routines as it is likely to influence how routines develop and change (Simpson and
Lorino, 2016).
It is widely acknowledged that routines are crucial for organizational performance
(Nelson and Winter, 1982; Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011), and they are
frequently defined as “generative systems that produce recognizable, repetitive
patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman and
Pentland, 2003: 95). Routines are comprised by actions (Feldman, 2016) and develop
as continuous processes of creation and recreation (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013),
as actors enact and perform the routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Jarzabkowski,
Lê, and Feldman, 2012). As such, routines are seen as action patterns that emerge
Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar, Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning In: Time, Temporality,
and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Lena E. Bygballe, Anna R. Swärd, and Anne Live Vaagaasar.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0008
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 117
and are accomplished through actors’ performances (Feldman, Pentland, D’Adderio,

and Lazaric, 2016). Implicit in such a processual view on routines is that temporality
is a shaping force in this routine patterning process.
Granting agency to temporality is arguably different from the more common
approach to time within the routine literature, where time is primarily seen as an
independent variable in the unfolding of routines, from their antecedents to their
outcomes (Turner, 2014). Time tends to be used as an abstract measure, looking at
dating and sequencing. This means that, as argued by Simpson and Lorino (2016),
the past is seen as an already determined history and the future is perceived to be
deduced from past experience. This leads to accounts of routine development over
time. Agreeing with Mutch (2016) that the understanding of historical shaping of
routines is still limited, we suggest that time has agency (Hernes, 2014) and propose
that the understanding of routines can be furthered by following the actions of
actors as they act in time. Such a process approach to the impact of temporality on
routine development can help to overcome the time-reckoning perspective and
enhance our understanding of routine dynamics (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013).
In this chapter, we draw on an empirical example from a construction company
where temporal conflict is salient in the creation and recreation of a quality routine.
The findings give insight into how temporal dimensions such as time orientation,
time horizon, and pace shape the routine patterning within the firm. The chapter
also contributes to the literature on temporality as empirical research on how tem
porality affects organizing is still rare.
8.2 Routine Patterning and Temporality

8.2.1 Routine Patterning
A processual perspective on routines presumes routines to exist as traces of action

patterns through time and space, which can alter from one enactment to the next
(Feldman et al., 2016). Routines have inner dynamics that create both stability and
change (Feldman and Pentland, 2003; Jarzabkowski et al., 2012). It has become
widely accepted to refer to the constituents of routine dynamics as ostensive and per-
formative. Ostensive refers to the more generative ideas about the routine (Pentland,
Feldman, Becker, and Liu, 2012), while performative refers to the actual perform
ances of the routine as actors act (Feldman, 2000). The performative underscores the
agency of the actors involved, and stresses that routines are performed by specific
people in specific times and places (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Also, they are
“not only effortful, but also emergent accomplishments” (Feldman, 2016: 613), i.e.
they are often works in progress (Feldman, 2000).
Focusing on agency opens up the possibility that actors might approach a routine
from different—and sometimes conflicting—perspectives (Salvato and Rerup, 2018).
Previous research has demonstrated that the development of routines can lead to
divergence and struggle between different points of view and conflicts between
actors (Howard-Grenville and Rerup, 2017). These enactments can be more or less
incompatible and lead to misalignment between different performances of a routine
(Edmondson and Zuzul, 2016). Actors have different goals and intentions (Howard-
Grenville, 2005), and they try to adjust to situational conditions (Essen, 2008) or tap
into sequences of the routine (Turner, 2014). Variability in performance can not only
lead to change, but also be vital in stabilizing a routine across actors who are dispar
ate in time and space (Danner-Schröder and Geiger, 2016; Essen, 2008). Essen
(2008), in her study of the internal dynamics of a home-help delivery routine, dem-
onstrated that routine survival happens when workers oscillate between departing
from, and returning to, the routine. Individuals respond to situational contingencies
differently and in particular when the setting has inherent competing needs, and
there is a need for nuanced descriptions of how variability is managed in relation to
routine dynamics (Essen, 2008).
Recently, some scholars have argued that the notions of “performative” and
“ostensive” are starting to resemble separate entities (e.g., Feldman, 2016; Simpson
and Lorino, 2016). To overcome these issues, they suggest a stronger process focus
on actions and how actions get interlinked with actions and thus form patterns of
actions over time. As Feldman (2016: 30) remarks, actions are “simply the doings
and sayings,” and are important for several reasons. First, they are constitutive in
nature and help overcome dualisms between the ostensive and the performative.
Also, they are relational in that every action derives its meaning, significance, and
identity from the role it plays in a transaction. To capture the becoming of routines,
Feldman (2016) suggests that the performative should be changed to performing,
and the ostensive should be changed to patterning. This means that there is an
emerging patterning of the routine created by the flow of performances (Feldman,
2016). Through these performances “collective regular patterns of action” emerge,
and lead to the development of a shared understanding of what actions are relevant
in relation to a routine and how they relate to the organizational context (Dionysiou
and Tsoukas, 2013: 183). The patterning is a recurrent process that guides the evolv-
ing recreation of patterns of action. Over time these become an interlocking reposi-
tory of stored actions that appears as a coherent and collective pattern. This means
that the performing and the patterning mutually constitute each other (Dionysiou
and Tsoukas, 2013).
The concept of patterning is a more recent development within routine dynamics
research, and highlights the role of time and temporality, claiming that routines are
inseparable from time (Feldman, 2016). Time and temporality have been approached
in different ways in the routines literature. In his extensive review of the nature and
role of time in routines research, Turner (2014) showed that time and temporality
have been seen to play a role as temporal antecedents of routines (i.e. time as signal,
resource, and state of mind), and are also key to explaining the performance outcomes
of routines. For example, in a study of a garbage collection routine, Turner and Rindova
(2012) demonstrated how changing conditions slowed down the participants’
routine performances as, over time, they had to figure out new ways of completing
their task. The study also demonstrated the importance of a fit between performances
of the routine and the environment’s expectations of “timely performance” (Turner
and Rindova, 2012). A slightly different way of incorporating temporality in routines
research has been from the approach of the participants’ state of mind. For example,
Feldman and Pentland (2003: 95) stated that participants’ “ability to remember the
past, imagine the future, and respond to present circumstances” shapes the ability
for routines to change from within. Participants’ focus and temporal orientation also
influence the routines (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). The role of temporal orienta-
tion was also key in Howard-Grenville’s (2005) study of a road-mapping routine,
where she—based on Emirbayer and Miche (1998)—showed how the combination
of actors’ intentions and temporal orientations affected the routine performances.
She demonstrated how routine participants might choose to iterate on earlier
performances, pragmatically include elements of earlier performances when trying
to pursue several ends the same time, or project parts of earlier performances to
imagine and/or plan for future performances (Howard-Grenville, 2005: 629). In
other words, the development of a routine is shaped by the temporal orientation of
actors, as the present- and future-oriented actor tends to perform the routine more
flexibly than those oriented toward the past. It has also been suggested that routine
development is shaped by the fact they are highly embedded in a broader network
of routines—i.e. an ecology of routines—and, within this ecology, different
routines can unfold at different speeds (Howard-Grenville, Rerup, Langley, and
Tsoukas, 2016).
Although the interest in temporality in routine development is increasing, and
Turner (2014: 23) concluded that “time is well recognized as an independent variable
in routine research,” take away this research is still in its infancy and the routine lit-
erature is often mute to time and temporality (Simpson and Lorino, 2016). There is a
need to understand “how performing routines is affected by variability among rou-
tine participants with respect to time as a signal, resource, and state of mind”
(Turner, 2014: 20). Simpson and Lorino (2016) add that there is need for looking at
routines in time, rather than the often used variance-based approach that focuses on
the routine development over time. They go on to say that the “inherently processual
nature of the performative idiom demands a temporal understanding of the present
moment as continuously emergent in the interplay between remembered pasts and
imagined futures” (Simpson and Lorino, 2016: 65).
8.2.2 A Temporal Lens to Understand Routine Patterning

The increasing attention given to time and temporality in routines research aligns
with the increasing interest in these phenomena in general organization theory
(Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, and Tushman 2001; Hernes, 2014; Langley, Smallman,
Tsoukas, and Van de Ven, 2013). As the process approach has grown stronger, it is
argued that temporality is not merely a lens of the researcher, but a feature of
managing and organizing experienced by all the parties involved (Langley et al., 2013).
It has become common to take an agentic temporal view (Reinecke and Ansari,
2015), viewing time as a subjective and intersubjective phenomenon that is highly
contextually embedded (Emirbayer and Miche, 1998; Adams, 1998). This means that
people in organizations experience time through shared temporal structures they
enact recurrently in their everyday practices, which in turn produces and reproduces
temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities
(Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). Through this process different groups and organiza
tional entities can develop a “temporal commons,” i.e. a shared conceptualization
of time and temporal values that is developed by a culture carrying collectivity
(Bluedorn and Waller, 2006: 355). This can lead to the existence of multiple and
varying temporalities in organizations that generate tensions between entities
(Reinecke and Ansari, 2015).
Several temporal dimensions can coexist in an organization, and there is—across
multi-disciplinary literatures—some variety in terms of which temporal dimensions
are singled out. For example, Halbesleben, Novicevic, Harvey, and Buckley (2003)
argue that time frame/time horizon, tempo, temporality, synchronization, sequence,
pause/gaps, simultaneity with zeitgebers, time personality, and timelessness, are par-
ticularly relevant for organizational research. Ancona et al. (2001: 646) argue for
including “timing, pace cycles, rhythms, flow, temporal orientation, and the cultural
meanings of time.” While recognizing that all of these dimensions might be relevant
for our purposes, we will in the following focus on time orientation, time horizon,
and pace. We believe that these three dimensions cover the key aspects we need to
explore in terms of how temporality shapes routine patterning, and the choice is
based on a combination of insights from our case study and the literature. Temporal
orientation (Howard-Grenville, 2005), or temporal focus (Bluedorn and Standifer,
2006), is about the orientation toward past, present or future and how actors tend to
either iterate on earlier performances or project parts of earlier performances to plan
for future performances (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Howard-Grenville, 2005).
With time horizon, we are referring to the temporal distances into the past and future
that actors consider when anticipating when events happen(ed) or may happen
(Bluedorn, 2002: 114). This resonates with the notion of time frame that stipulates
the beginning and end of processes (Halbesleben et al., 2003), and different pro-
cesses in an organization—for example, exploration and exploitation activities—that
have different time frames (Ancona et al., 2001). Pace refers to the speed or tempo
with which a phenomenon occurs (Bluedorn, 2002), and indicates how much activ-
ity can be accomplished within a given time frame. It relates to Gersick’s (1989)
notion of time-based pacing of activities. Pace is linked to entrainment, or temporal
coordination (Bluedorn and Waller, 2006; Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006) and “the
adjustment of the pace or cycle of activity to match or synchronize with that of
another activity” (Ancona and Chong, 1996: 253). It is about the synchronization of
tempo and/or the pace of two or more activities within a system (Pérez-Nordtvedt,
Payne, Short, and Kedia, 2008; Ballard, 2009). Such synchronization can occur both
within and between various groups or work units (Halbesleben et al., 2003).
We assume that a multiplicity of temporalities affects the enactment of routines,
and that these enactments in turn shape temporalities. Using multiple conceptual-
izations of time enables the understanding of how different facets of temporality
affect interaction (Gersick, 1989), and therefore routine patterning. The temporal
approach we take includes a more radical understanding of temporality where tem
porality is granted causality (Schultz and Hernes, 2013), and responds to calls for
developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between routine development
and temporality (Turner, 2014; Feldman, 2016; Simpson and Lorino, 2016). The key
issue is that organizations are caught in endless temporal flows of ongoing presents,
where they weave past, present, and future together (Schultz and Hernes, 2013).
8.3 Methods
8.3.1 Research Context
We have studied the quality routine in a construction company, hereafter referred to

as Alpha for the sake of anonymity. In 2018, Alpha had a total turnover of 4 billion
USD and 8,000 employees. The company undertakes approximately 500 construc-
tion and civil engineering projects each year across the Scandinavian countries, and
is a decentralized organization with a high degree of autonomy granted to the local
units and projects. Ensuring quality is a key performance indicator in all projects,
and the company was awarded ISO 9001 certification in 2014. However, since then a
growing awareness has developed at Headquarters (HQ) that the current quality
routine does not fulfill its purpose of creating consistency in quality performance in
the project-based organization at large, and of enabling learning from previous
defects. This is attributed to the reactive nature of the system, which focuses on
registering defects when they have already happened—using paper-based checklists—
instead of encouraging proactive actions and utilizing the existing system. Calculations
show that costs related to quality defects comprise a substantial amount of the com-
pany’s total revenue. A new initiative was therefore introduced by the corporate
improvement team in 2016 to develop a new quality system, run as an R&D project.
The new system was inspired by the company’s lean construction process, focusing
on involving project participants and creating commitment. The idea was to connect
the new routine to the lean construction process by utilizing the involvement and
collaboration of the construction workers and the use of digital tools to ensure quality.
The key motivation underpinning the new concept was to complement the existing
reactive and push-driven quality control routine with a routine that allowed project
participants to be more proactive and pull-driven (i.e. seeking information required)
than before. In parallel with this center-led initiative, some of the projects had
already started to use a digital tool for quality assurance, which they found useful.
8.3.2 Data Collection and Analysis
Process research allows for understanding how things evolve over time and why
they develop in certain ways (Pettigrew, 1997). Therefore, a qualitative process
research strategy seems particularly useful for studying how recognizable, repetitive
action patterns form and change over time, and therefore for our purposes. Such
an approach is also in accordance with previous studies of routines (e.g. Howard-
Grenville, 2005; Jarzabkowski et al., 2012, Turner and Rindova, 2012). Furthermore,
qualitative studies are useful to explore perceptions of time in organizations
(Lumineau and Oliveira, 2018).
The findings we present are based on data collected at Alpha from June 2016 until
June 2018. It is important to notice, however, that the change process is a never-
ending story. Data were collected in real time as the process progressed (Pettigrew,
1997). Data sources included participation in workshops and meetings concerning
the change initiative, observations at the project level (ten project meetings), and
interviews with people at both the project and central levels of the organization
(thirty interviews). We followed standard procedures for collecting and processing
qualitative data, such as the use of a dynamic interview protocol, the development of
memos, and a chronological history (Miles and Huberman, 1994) concerning how
temporality shaped routine patterning. The analysis aimed at identifying themes and
concepts that emerged in the data collection process (Corbin and Strauss, 1990).
This process involved qualitative and inductive coding to identify concepts mean-
ingful to the respondents, i.e. first-order concepts that could illustrate how their
actions were influenced by temporal dimensions. We scanned the interviews for
data that seemed to be important for understanding this process and looked for
them in subsequent interviews and documents, as well as in the observations and
archival data. The unit of analysis was the actions of individuals and groups of people
at different organizational levels and the temporal dimensions related to these actions.
Following this first-order analysis, the topics identified were scrutinized and labeled
into second-order concepts (Nag and Gioia, 2012), before we worked to identify
linkages among the concepts that led to aggregated themes that represented theoretical
concepts at a more abstract level (Nag and Gioia, 2012). The constant comparative
method was used, iterating between literature on routine creation and recreation
(e.g. Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013) as well as literature on temporality (e.g. Reinecke
and Ansari, 2015) and the empirical material (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), to let the
empirical findings direct attention to the theoretical analysis and vice versa.
We used the software NVivo in this process, and sought to ensure the reliability of
the coding by conducting separate coding, the results of which were compared,
discussed, and adapted into the final themes. Table 8.1 shows the coding structure
of how we identified the temporal dimensions in the data material.
Table 8.1 Data structure
First-order concepts Second-order concepts Aggregated themes
Lack of time—“we use what we Iterating past Past patterning shaping

have”; Lack of attention due to more performance of the present understandings of
pressing issues; “Trapped” in routine routine—creating stability
existing artifacts
Industry-level norms for quality Orienting toward
work; Legal requirements—cover the past
one’s back; Contractual regulations
HQ driven by long-term learning Long time horizon Differing temporal
and development needs; Need for logics—creating temporal
creating consistency in quality conflict in present
performance performance
Projects driven by production and Short time horizon
delivering within time; Temporary
relations between organizations;
Quality issues often require ad hoc
actions
HQ aiding projects with templates Slow pace
and development of checklists
and plans that are developed over
the years
Projects characterized by stress Fast pace
and urgency; Existing routine, with
paper-based checklists seen to
disturb production logic
Consistent quality is important for Joint situated Shaping temporal
business; Acknowledgement that understandings— commons—aligned actions
existing routine is not working orienting toward the orienting toward the future
properly future
The use of new digital tools provides
immediate information and
learning—HQ recognizing the fit
with project work pace
New routine linking quality assurance Shaping temporal
to production planning routine structures
In the following, we use data from the study of Alpha to describe how temporality
shapes routine patterning, honing in on the temporal dimensions of time orientation,
time horizon, and pace.
In line with Eisenhardt and Graebner’s (2007) recommendation—and similar to
other studies of a single routine and its dynamics (e.g. Turner and Rindova, 2012)—
the following section presents together our first- and second-order analysis. We start
by describing the different steps in the “generic” quality routine. We then focus on
why this apparently inefficient routine continued for so long, before we delve deeper
into the triggers of change, the temporality dimensions, and how these have
influenced the routine patterning.
8.4 Findings
Overall, our findings show how the routine patterning is a continuous flow between
past, present, and future enactments of the routine. The presentation of these find-
ings is organized as follows: After explaining quality assurance at Alpha, we describe
how orientation toward the past created stability in routine patterning, even if
Alpha’s quality routine was perceived as “not working.” Next, we document temporal
conflict in the present performance of the routine, and how the questioning of tem
poral assumptions triggered change in routine patterning. Finally, we describe how
the introduction of a new quality initiative led to a range of adjustments, which rec-
reated routine patterning with an orientation toward the future.
8.4.1 Ensuring Quality at Alpha
Quality is an implicit part of any project delivery at Alpha, and relates to both pro-
cesses and the products being built. Quality is largely influenced by clients’ require-
ments, government regulations, and the company’s own experiences and procedures.
To handle quality issues with regard to what is being built and what the client gets,
Alpha has a quality assurance process that is based on some overall steps which run
through the life span of a construction project and its design and production phases.
This is illustrated in Figure 8.1.
The first step in ensuring quality in the product is in the design phase. In this
phase, Alpha needs to ensure the quality of the final product, e.g. a building, based
on the requirements, standard regulations, and previous experiences, which are
stored in the company’s corporate system. The next step of the quality routine is
in the production phase, where quality is ensured through quality assurance.
Checklists are used by supervisors throughout the project, to ensure that everything
is done according to agreements and that deviations are reported. These are collected
Clients
requirements
Design/planning Construction production Quality in final

Specifying quality levels and creating Quality control, filling in product
Law/standards
checklists according to project plan checklists, and dealing with
Deviations stored
deviations on site
in database
Previous experiences
Figure 8.1 Quality assurance at Alpha

by the responsible foreman, and registered in a database, in order to store the

information and to enable opportunities for learning from earlier experiences.
Traditionally, the checklists were paper based and the data had to be registered
manually. However, more recently digital tools have been used in the process. The
way deviations are solved depends on the type and significance of the deviation.
Smaller issues are usually dealt with immediately and might not even get registered,
while bigger issues are discussed in formal meetings between the parties, such as the
weekly site meeting which all the craft managers and foremen attend, and registered
in the database.
8.5 Temporality Shaping the Quality

Routine Patterning
8.5.1 Orienting toward the Past and Iterating Past
Performance—Creating Stability in Routine Patterning
Routine participants’ orientation affects routine patterning (Howard-Grenville, 2005).

The interviews reflect the fact that many people at both HQ and the project level had
for some years regarded the existing quality routine as inappropriate—as one of the
HQ managers said: “It is widely held that the routine doesn’t work.” The reason for
this was that the system was too complicated and difficult to use, and there were
few opportunities for learning from mistakes across projects. However, looking at
the overall routine pattern over time, as embedded in various artifacts such as pro-
cedures and systems, it seemed relatively stable (Feldman et al., 2016). Other issues,
such as improving the construction planning processes and implementing lean prin-
ciples, were more pressing, Thus, one explanation for this stability can be lack of
attention, but other explanations are related to the fact that quality is highly regu-
lated and depends on contractual agreements. Deviations are very costly for the
respective responsible party and can delay the progress of production. The following
quotes illustrate how actors are oriented towards the past as quality is regulated by
law and contracts. As one foreman explained, “The only reason for registering some-
thing is because you don’t want to get the blame.” Another foreman concurred: “Of
course, I do it because I’m afraid of being caught, legally.” This interviewee further
pointed out that people usually do what is expected of them, even if reluctantly, and
“those are the ones that make the system persist.” Similarly, some of the subcontractors
that we interviewed just referred to the contract with Alpha, and affirmed that “In
this project, we do as Alpha wants. Next time there is another contractor, and then
we have to comply with their requirements.” The routine patterning of the present
was also shaped by the former work with ISO certification and the database. These
observations indicate that despite the potential conflicts between the needs of the
projects and the company in relation to the quality routine, these formalities are
likely to sustain the existing routine pattern. We also learned from the interviews
that, besides the formal aspects, there was strong pressure to keep the projects going,
not having time to think, just following what has always been done, and not creating
too much fuss.
The findings indicate that there was a shared schema of how the routine should
work in principle (Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). However, even though well-
established individual and shared schemata tend to persist (Fiske and Taylor, 1991),
the actions taken in relation to the routine may lead to a change in routine patterning.
Our findings show a similar process, and as will be shown in the next section, the
actions taken were largely shaped by temporality.
8.5.2 Differing Temporal Logics in Pace and Time Horizon—

Creating Temporal Conflict in Present Performance
Informants working at the construction sites generally reported dissatisfaction with

the existing quality routine, and the main argument was that it was of little use.
Typically, the paper-based checklists would be collected and registered into the
system on late Friday afternoon. Once they were in the system, no one would ever
take any further notice. However, given the large variance in each project in terms
of clients’ requirements and product and project specificities, the checklists needed
to be adapted to the individual project.
In one of my first projects, I got this all-round role called project engineer, which is
usually given to inexperienced staff. As is often the case, they also get the respon-
sibility for quality. I made a comprehensive plan and checklists based on the
routines. However, this old guy from the HQ, when he saw it, just said “take away
half of it.” It has to be adapted to the specific project and its needs—we don’t want
to do more than the client requires and we don’t want to overwhelm the crafts-
men with redundant work. I learned to keep things simple.
(Middle manager, HQ, previous site manager)
One project manager expressed his opinion about the existing routine as follows:
“Assurance work is something everyone hates—one of the worse tasks you do. The
checklists have nothing to do with quality; something does not become more correct
by filling out a list.” This view was confirmed by other informants. Confirmations
and controls would usually be done on an ad-hoc basis, and were considered a hassle
in the daily work. When talking to the informants, it appeared that there was a
difference in the time horizon of the projects and HQ, and that this difference was
troublesome but also to some extent necessary:
There are different time horizons. We are so eager to adapt to the projects’ rhythm,
but perhaps they need us to think the longer thoughts. They ask for forms, because
they don’t have time to create them themselves. (Quality Manager, HQ)
The projects will ask us to make a system that works for them while we are thinking:
why are you not using the system we have designed? (IT Manager, HQ)
It used to be business as usual until two relatively uncoupled initiatives, at the project
and corporate levels of the company respectively, accentuated the focus on quality
and resulted in changes in the quality routine. These change initiatives, and the
emerging routine patterning, were largely shaped by the differences in time horizon
and pace between the projects and the corporate level, represented by HQ.
In one of the projects, the project participants had started using an app for quality
checks. It replaced the paper checklists, and implied that confirmations and controls
would be registered immediately the work was done, and supported by photos. It was
much more in line with the ongoing workflow and tempo of the construction work. It
also represented a real-time way of collecting information. While the existing system,
being reactive, was oriented toward the past, the app represented the present time.
8.5.3 Shaping Temporal Structures and Allowing for

Mutual Adjustment and Temporal Commons—Orienting
toward the Future
Embeddedness refers to the degree to which a routine is connected with other

organizational structures (Howard-Grenville, 2005), and embeddedness shapes rou-
tine dynamics (Howard-Grenville and Rerup, 2016). The database where all quality
deviations were supposed to be registered was a key part of the quality routine but it
was difficult for the project to register and also to retrieve information from this
database. The findings show how this system was largely discarded and then evoked
in new forms because it was perceived as misaligned with the daily production pro-
cesses in the projects and thus as hindering enactments of quality performance. This
means that the actors were iterating past performances at the same time as they were
orienting toward the future. Actors at the HQ started to rethink how to use the data-
base along with an initiative to change the quality system, particularly in respect of
how to use all the information stored in the system. The idea was to proactively plan
production in a manner that would avoid the most common and costliest quality
deviations (historically), and the new system was flaunted as a useful artifact for
learning. At first, the new initiative grew relatively independent of the project initiative,
but over time these two processes became increasingly connected. Becoming more
connected, there were struggles about how quality assurance should be performed,
by whom it should be performed, and which artifacts should be included in the
performances. In particular, there were disagreements about which digital artifacts
should be used and how; the new system, with an associated new digital tool, the
app introduced at and used by the projects, or both these. For e xample, interviewees
(HQ representatives) talked about the non-compliance of the projects in using the
existing system and routine, and the subsequent adoption of the app, which HQ at
first, hoped was just a fleeting trend.
The system we had was too rigid—information in the system was not well
organized—and it took forever to find something that might be useful. So most
people put information into it but it did not provide learning to the organization.
When [name of the app] came along people at the project level wanted to use it
straightaway but at HQ we found it difficult because it was not integrated with the
system and we wanted everything to be gathered in a system that we had
control over.
We identified several transformational events that contributed to reconciling the

opposing forces that the struggles above represented. One transformational point
was that, when the actors connected the quality routine to the production planning
routine, it seemed to provide them with a more powerful language across the organiza-
tion that opened up a variety of possible future patterning(s). One of the interviewees
explained: “Earlier it was easy for the quality controller to describe the quality pro-
cess, because everyone else had to adapt to it. However, now the quality process must
integrate into the other processes.” In other words, it was recognized that for the
quality routine to work, it had to be aligned and integrated with the overall produc-
tion routine and the planning of the actual construction work. This entrainment
proved important in the overall process.
Another transformational point in the routine patterning was when the routine
was connected to the idea of quality assurance providing a more cost-effective busi-
ness. Using the app for some time, the project team members experienced how this
led to quicker and better exchange of information about mistakes and quality deficien-
cies—insights that could be used to prevent the same mistake being made repeat-
edly. For a long time, there were multiple voices at Alpha questioning the value of
quality assurance as such and how it could best be performed. As the idea spread
that a systematic use of digital tools across all projects in the organization would lead
to a more cost-effective business, the belief in quality assurance and the willingness
to engage in it increased. These findings are in line with Zbaracki and Bergen (2010)
who, in their study of how organizational entities struggled over pricing routines,
showed how the organizational actors who managed to connect their performance
with more powerful macro-logics won the battle. Struggling over the performance
of the current quality routine and trying to carve out potential patterns for the
future, the actors at Alpha seemed to actively embed the routine in more powerful
logics to increase the potentiality of their envisioned future.
The empirical model shown in Figure 8.2 summarizes how people experienced
the quality routine and the actions that were taken in response to differing tem-
poralities. For a long time, people at Alpha had used a quality routine that they all
found to be useless, but which somehow persisted until new digital tools were intro-
duced. The project teams expressed a need for tools that were easy and efficient to
use and that aligned with the inherent temporal logic of project work and construc-
tion processes. It seems that the high pace of project work made the actors do quality
work on an ad-hoc basis—for example, using parts of the paper-based checklists to
HQ’s long-term focus. Working on
finding a quality routine where
Existing quality routine. HQ starts to tap into project
experience from all projects can be HQ adjusting to needs of the projects.
Large quality system that is experience with new app,
used for learning and efficency Developing shared schemata.
cumbersome to access and connecting it to their work on a
purposes.
retrieve data from. new digital quality system.
Attention to Shaping temporal

Iterating past problems shaped by commons
performance Orienting toward the future
differing
temporalities
Picking a set of sub-

Connecting quality routine to
routines needed for the Projects’ high pace-focus Projects starting to production planning.
specific project. Checklists are filled in on delivering the project recognize that there is a
Existing systems not manually and registered within a tight time frame. need for an overall quality
relevent for daily when there is time. Starting to use digital tools system where learning
activities; projects Leads to a time lag that give immediate and between projects can take
seldom use the database between reporting and timely documentation and place.
to learn from other following up on communication.
projects, but still report deviations.
on major issues.
Figure 8.2 The development of the quality routine at Alpha

confirm expected quality and register the most critical incidents. When starting to
use the app, the registration of deviations could be done immediately. In the same
time period, HQ was also working with quality. Their work had a longer time frame,
and included efforts to develop a digital quality routine. The differences in time hori-
zon and pace at the two organizational levels seemed to shape the actions they
engaged in related to quality work (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002; Nadkarnin, Chen
and Chen, 2016; Aeon and Aguinis, 2017). For a long time, the enactment of the app
was mainly a bottom-up process where actors disparate in time and place started using
it. Gradually it spread to new actors in the organization and became acknowledged
as a system that provided transparency to quality assurance (D’Adderio, 2008;
Turner and Rindova, 2012). Furthermore, HQ started to realize that using digital
tools, such as the app, was more in line with the pace of project work and that it was
not in conflict with the developments going on at HQ. This realization paved the way
for connecting the quality routine to production planning, and consequently a
shared understanding developed that allowed for mutual adjustments and the estab-
lishment of a temporal commons in the organization.
8.6 Discussion
Repetitive joint action is at the core of routine patterning (Dionysiou and Tsoukas,
2013) and we address how this patterning is shaped by temporality (Simpson and
Lorino, 2016). Temporality consists of multiple temporal dimensions that can be
constructed differently across actors, tasks, and structures (Orlikowski and
Yates, 2002). In other words, the actors involved in the performing of a routine can
have different temporal logics. We suggest that the temporal lens allows for a broader
understanding of routine patterning and to demonstrate this we focus on three of
the salient temporal dimensions that we found in the case of Alpha: temporal orien-
tation, time horizon, and pace. These dimensions create temporal tensions but they
were also, to some extent, necessary and even vital in terms of performing the qual-
ity routine in a manner that creates both efficiency and learning in the long term. In
the following, we will discuss the inherent struggles of finding meaning and com-
mon ground that allow for routine patterning at the same time as permitting desired
variability in performances of the quality routine. The model shown in Figure 8.3
illustrates how routine patterning is shaped by—and shapes—temporality and is
based on the findings presented earlier.
Patterns are being shaped as actors take action based on temporal orientation. For
instance, the project participants at Alpha tended to use parts of the available quality
routine that were useful to them in their high-pace environment. Their performing
of the routine included different approaches. They iterated past performances of the
routine as the time horizon was short and there was little time to figure out new
performances. Also, they chose to dip into the aspects of the routine they found use-
ful due to the high pace of activity. In addition, they adopted an artifact that could
Past patterning Differing temporal

creating stability in logics in present
present performance performance triggering
Routine creation Routine change Routine recreation
patterning
Shaping temporal
commons and
orientation toward
the future
Figure 8.3 Temporality shaping routine patterning
match the pace they aimed for in performing the routine. Over time the patterning of
the routine was shaped by the acknowledgement across HQ and the projects about
their different pace, and different time horizons, but also that there were shared goals
and interdependencies because both levels were interested in short-term and long-
term quality performance. This common understanding makes the actors orient
toward future quality work and explore how it could align with various production
logics. As this understanding emerged, it was decided to link the quality routine to the
planning routine as this would align better with the temporal logic of project work.
This enabled the development of a temporal commons and balanced the tensions cre-
ated by differences in time orientation, time horizon, and pace.
The proposed model aims to give insight into how temporality may add to our
understanding of routine patterning. The key insights that we would like to discuss
further are: (1) how orientation toward the past can create stability in routine pattern-
ing (iterating past performance), (2) how temporal conflict in the present perform
ance of the routine and the questioning of temporal assumptions trigger change in
routine patterning, and (3) how the shaping of temporal structures can create a
temporal commons that balances the tensions inherent in temporality, thus allowing
for routine patterning and an orientation toward the future.
First, the findings show how the quality routine at Alpha was used for a long time
even though it was cumbersome and not working. The informants explained how
time pressure and the high pace of project work meant that they seldom questioned
the quality routine. It was easier to just use parts of the routine and—also because of
the short time horizon of the projects—do what you had always done. This finding is
in line with Bluedorn and Richtermeyer (2005), who demonstrated that the shorter
the future time horizon, the more stress and a sense of urgency will be the reality.
Furthermore, quality is largely regulated and there are industry standards for quality
work, and this also contributed to the iteration of past performances of the routine.
Howard-Grenville (2005) argues that present- and future-oriented actors are likely
to perform the routine in a more flexible manner than those oriented toward the
past. However, we also found that the actors flexibly navigated in this landscape by
using parts of the routine or using the routine as they saw fit—for instance, by only
registering the most severe quality deviations in the system. The reason for this
pragmatic approach might be that the participants, in their context of high pace and
short time horizon, were more inclined to remember the past than imagine the
future (Feldman and Pentland, 2003).
Second, we found that in the process of iterating past performance, inherent tem
poral conflict was present between the projects and HQ. These conflicting temporal
ities were known and understood in the organization as something that was difficult
but also somehow necessary. Projects are, by definition, temporary (Lundin and
Söderholm, 1995), with ex ante defined final deadlines and relatively short time
horizons, compared to permanent organizations (Bakker, DeFillippi, Schwab, and
Sydow, 2016).
As the empirical material illustrates, projects also have fast pace, often material-
ized as sequences of deadlines for deliveries (Jones and Lichtenstein, 2008). HQ, on
the other hand, had a longer time frame and a slower pace in their work and this
difference made HQ and the projects approach the routine differently (Feldman,
2004). The short time frame of project work made the projects mainly orient toward
the present and iterate the past, while HQ—with its longer time frame and perspective
into the future—worked with multiple development processes simultaneously. HQ
worked on developing a technological quality system, researching the value of the
recent quality initiatives, and developing checklists, procedures, and other artifacts.
For some time, the enactment of the routine at the HQ and the projects was
incompatible (Edmondson and Zuzul, 2016). The difference in temporalities and
time scales created tensions in the organization. This is not so surprising and it
aligns with, for instance, Howard-Grenville (2005), who showed how differences in
orientation can lead to disputes about how to use the routine, as well as tallying with
research on conflicting temporalities hampering inter-departmental interaction in
organizations (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015). The actors at Alpha adjusted their per-
forming of the routine to their perceptions of the situational conditions (Essen, 2008).
For example, they expressed a need for tools that were easy and efficient to use—to
match their high-paced action and production. The temporal logic of the project led
to a preference for a “quicker” quality routine. Adopting the app accentuated the
pace of their quality work. This again seemed to reinforce the temporal conception
of the project (Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). When they adopted the app, it made it
possible to document deviations (a salient part of the overall quality routine) imme-
diately. The project team members took this opportunity to change their routine
performance. This reinforcement of the project’s temporal structures seemed to
increase the temporal conflict (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006; Reinecke and Ansari,
2015) between the projects and HQ, which triggered a change in the enactment of
the quality routine at HQ as they also started to question their temporal assump-
tions. HQ realized that the present performance of the routine and the temporary
logic of project work were important for how Alpha should work with quality, and
they decided to implement digital tools in the new quality routine. In the following,
we will turn to how they also worked on shaping temporal structures to create tem-
poral commons.
Above we discussed how temporal conflict can trigger change in routine patterning
as it may make actors question their own temporal assumptions. In the case of
Alpha, we see that the recreation of the routine into a shared understanding of what
actions were relevant to the routine first flourished when there was acknowledge-
ment of the interdependencies and the reasons for the differing temporal logics.
Furthermore, the shaping of a temporal commons came about as actors throughout
the organization acknowledged the need for change and started questioning the
assumptions about the functioning of the quality routine. As a result of this process
it was decided to link the quality routine to the procedures for production planning.
This was also a result of future-oriented actors working actively to establish the new
routine across the firm, applying elements of earlier performances pragmatically and
also projecting the future quality routine at Alpha (Howard-Grenville, 2005).
At Alpha this understanding had been there previously as well, but not so much in
terms of how it made actors attend to problems differently. In their discussion of how
organizations negotiate conflicting temporalities, Reinecke and Ansari (2015) intro-
duce the term “ambitemporality” as a way of explaining how organizations accom-
modate contradictory temporal orientations. Ambitemporality is not about reaching
a unified way of using the routine but about acknowledging the need for different
coexisting temporal logics for the organization to work. This mutual understanding
and adjustment is motivated by a need to establish some form of common under-
standing and shared reality with others (Echterhoff, Higgins, and Levine, 2009).
We know from before that routine development is shaped by how the routines are
embedded in a broader network (Howard-Grenville, et al., 2016). However, Howard-
Grenville (2005) argued that future-oriented actors tend to perform the routine
more flexibly. Our findings are not quite in line with this reasoning as we find that
HQ, as well as the projects, were oriented toward the past and the future at the same
time. Iterating past performances takes place at the same time as they are orienting
toward the future. It is the temporal conflict and the acknowledgment of temporal
differences that triggers change.
Variability in performance can be vital to stabilizing a routine across actors dispar
ate in time and space (Danner-Schröder and Geiger, 2016; Essen, 2008). Our study
supports this notion and that situational contingencies exist in routine development
(Essen, 2008), in the form of interactive situational issues (Tsoukas, 1996). In the
development of the “new” routine, differing temporal logics created variations in
how the routine was performed, and even though this involved incompatibility in
performances for some time, it seemed to strengthen the “new” routine.
8.7 Conclusion
In this chapter, we have focused on connecting temporality and routine research and
developed insights into how temporality shapes routine patterning (Feldman, 2016;
Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013). The chapter has demonstrated how multiple coexisting
temporalities in organizations lead to variability in performances—seen as increasing
deviations in the routine across time and space—but also strengthening the progress
of the routine. We have shown how present performances of a routine include iterat-
ing past performances as well as opening up new possibilities for future patterning.
Furthermore, we have shown how actors, having different time horizons and pace of
work, perform the routine in different and sometimes incompatible ways and how
these conflicting temporalities can trigger a temporal commons and changes in rou-
tine patterning (Reinecke and Ansari, 2015).
We have only focused on some temporal dimensions that were especially relevant
for our context. We encourage further studies to look into other dimensions and
other contexts to enrich and build on our proposed model. Furthermore, this study
focused on the differing temporalities between projects and HQ. There are certainly
also differing temporalities within these levels and between trades, and these differ-
ences may hold significance for routine patterning. Future research should delve
deeper into these connections.
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9
Capturing the Experience of Living
Forward from Within the Flow
Fusing a “Withness” Approach and Pragmatist Inquiry
Frithjof E. Wegener and Philippe Lorino
9.1 Introduction
Brilliant empiricists have poked much fun at those who tell us some vague
should-be instead of what is. We want something more than either of
these; we want to find out what may be, the possibilities now open to us.
(Follett, 1924: 2)
In this chapter, we are inspired by the Talking About Organizations Podcast (2017)
to go from research about a process, to process becoming the research practice.
Exploring the “possibilities now open to us” (Follett, 1924) requires inquiring from
“within” doubtful situations with practitioners (Talking About Organizations
Podcast, 2017). Such inquiries from “within” are needed to further our processual
understanding of “organizational becoming” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002; Lorino,
Tricard, and Clot, 2011), as capturing the experience of living forward together with
research participants offers a deeper understanding of “becoming” (Langley and
Tsoukas, 2010).
Traditional ways of scholarship tend to rewrite the story with the hindsight gath
ered during the research process. Such accounts become “artifacts of retrospect”
(Weick, 1999: 135), as they suffer from two problems. On the one hand is the problem
of “retrospective illusion” (Follett, 1924) where in hindsight we make logical connec
tions between events, but knowing the outcomes influences these logical connections
and is not in line with the lived experience of the actors who were facing the actual
situation (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). On the other hand is the problem of creating
theoretical accounts from a detached observer point of view, separated from the
point of view of the actors (Weick, 1999; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). Instead of
Frithjof E. Wegener and Philippe Lorino, Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow: Fusing a “Withness”
Approach and Pragmatist Inquiry In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane
Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Frithjof E. Wegener and
Philippe Lorino.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0009
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 139
“artifacts of retrospect” that look backward in time, Weick calls for “narratives of
prospect” that capture the point of view of actors, and for developing methodologies
that integrate the retrospective nature of understanding backwards with the pro
spective nature of living forward (Weick, 1999).
Living forward describes the “experience of being thrown into an unknowable,
unpredictable world” (Weick, 1999: 137). From this perspective, Fachin and Langley
(2018) introduced “process as withness” by building on the concept of “withness”
(Shotter, 2006). A withness approach incorporates “living forward,” as underlying a
withness approach is “a true process perspective [which] places the researcher him or
herself in flux along with and in direct relation to the researched” (Fachin and
Langley, 2018: 23). Thus, rather than detached observing, a withness approach requires
engagement with the inquiry process at hand to highlight the “living forward” of actors
(Weick, 1999).
While Shotter (2006) introduced withness as a philosophical concept, we lack a
methodology for a withness approach, as there are only some exemplary vignettes of
a withness approach to research. This chapter aims to build on the proposal of Fachin
and Langley (2018) for a “process as withness” research approach by fusing a with
ness approach with pragmatist inquiry (Martela, 2015; Simpson, 2017), forming a
methodology intended for advancing our processual understanding of organizing.
For this, we draw on the shared tenets of process ontology and collaborative inquiry
shared by pragmatism and a withness approach, as others have done before (Lorino
and Mourey, 2013; Lorino, Tricard, and Clot 2011; Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014). We
call the methodology “pragmatist withness inquiry,” referring to the fusing of a with
ness approach with pragmatist inquiry.
The question we address is: how might process researchers move beyond produ
cing what Weick (1999: 135) labels “artifacts of retrospect” that look backward in
time towards “narratives of prospect” that capture the experience of living forward
(see also Fachin and Langley, 2018; Shotter, 2006)? To address this question, we
focus on the role of situated dialogic inquiry of actors and the practices employed as
they face a problematic situation, their deliberating how to deal with the situation,
and how they eventually resolve the situation.
The theoretical relevance of such a withness approach lies in the potential of gaining
a deeper understanding of the emergence of practices and habits, by joining in the flow
with research participants and sharing the lived experience as they are living forward
when dealing with doubtful situations. Researchers can thus create theory that is more
moving, as their experience and their theorizing are part of the same experience as
practitioners’. The proposed withness approach stresses the prospective dimension of
process research and fuses a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. A withness
approach shares similarities in intentions and overall set-up with action research, pro
cess consulting (Schein, 1993), and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva,
1987). A withness approach differentiates itself by starting from a relational-processual
ontology, focusing on surprising situations, a return to lived experience, and an
inherently dialogical research approach. Where other research approaches share

similar goals of changing existing habits and beliefs, a withness approach specifies how
to bring the background to the foreground and how to find new possibilities for action
in challenging situations. Combining a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry
allows us to go beyond the situation-specific focus of a withness approach, to include
the overall inquiry process, adding actual experimentation with the possibilities that
were discovered through a withness approach. Such research can generate new con
cepts, new practices, and narratives of prospect (Weick, 1999).
In practical terms, through developing a withness approach, we strive to create
socially useful knowledge for specific situations through inquiry with practitioners
(Fachin and Langley, 2018). The goal here would be to create research accounts that
can “move” practitioners (Weick, 1999) and researchers. Such accounts could allow us
researchers ways to help practitioners become more sensitive to processual aspects of
practice. Such an approach would also have the potential for exploring ways of teach
ing processual thinking and acting (Talking About Organizations Podcast, 2017).
The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. First, we introduce the con
cepts of living forward, withness, dialogue, pragmatist inquiry, and community of
inquiry. Then, we propose a methodology based on fusing a withness approach with
pragmatist inquiry. Thereafter we discuss the methodological and theoretical impli
cations and compare the proposed methodology with similar methodologies. The
chapter concludes with an invitation to explore and build on our proposed pragma
tist withness inquiry methodology.
9.2 Theoretical Framework

9.2.1 The Struggle of Living Forward
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood

backwards. But they forget that other proposition, that it must be lived
forwards.
(Kierkegaard, cited in Gardiner, 1988: 127)
In an article aptly titled “That’s Moving: Theories that Matter,” Weick (1999) con
sidered why so few theories “move” us on a deeper level and lack emotional resonance.
Weick argued that to “move” us, theories must synthesize backward understanding
and forward living. Highlighting this struggle of living forward in a concrete situation
requires integrating retrospective, but also prospective elements to grasp the ongoing
process of living forward. Weick (1999) argued that theorists need to be sensitive to the
situational particulars that shape the struggle of living forward. Examples of such
research are accounts that describe the struggles of actors dealing with doubtful
situations. Orlikowski (1996) captured the struggles of actors dealing with the

introduction of new software systems and how the software was appropriated. Schön
(1983) described the role of reflection-in-action in the work of professionals who deal
with doubtful situations. Weick (1983) showed how managerial thought is connected
to context and how thinking and acting intertwine.
We are faced continuously with living forward and with the “throwness” and
uncertainty of having to act despite limited knowledge. Whenever one acts, there is a
chance that actions now might not lead to the expected outcomes. Consequently,
while research can often sound “obvious” in hindsight, when living forward things
are not as “obvious.” Weick put this as the “gap between living forward with flawed
foresight and understanding backward with equally flawed but mischievously seduc
tive hindsight” (Weick, 1999: 134). When people act, they are looking back at a
remembered past, anticipating imagined futures as living forward, but needing to
act in the now. That is, people make sense of the present situation by finding narra
tives that make sense of the past, prospectively looking forward to understand the
events happening at the moment and to hypothesize courses of action (Weick, 1995).
As a result the “Present is perpetually ‘in-the-making’ through the interplay of
remembered past and abductive anticipations of imagined futures” (Emirbayer and
Mische, 1998; Howard-Grenville, 2005; Simpson, 2009; Simpson, 2014, cited in
Garud, Simpson, Langley, and Tsoukas, 2015: 14). Thus, living forward captures the
idea that the future is uncertain and that, even though we can learn from the past,
new insights might emerge that make us rethink the past and ultimately we need to
act in the now (Howard-Grenville, 2005).
Living forward occurs most clearly in situations where the action is interrupted, as
“interruptions uncover the pattern of taken-for-granted relevancies that had been invis
ible in routine, ongoing action” (Weick, 1999: 140). In these dialogues, or in Weick’s
terms “discourses of absorbed coping” (1999: 140), existing beliefs and habits can come
to light, showing how current concepts as conceived words are limiting one’s percep
tion. The idea is that this is not detached reflection but a form of “involved deliberation”
that remains engaged with the situation at hand (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). The
dialogue here helps in discovering new action possibilities—as Rorty (1989) put it,
“vocabularies are constructed for coping, not for representation” (cited in Weick, 1999:
140). Therefore, the re-description of the situation through dialogue in the midst of
practice (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) is essential to uncover new action possibilities.
Capturing the experience of living forward requires an engagement with the situ
ation to understand how the situation is unique and that there are multiple possible
futures. For this, moments of surprise are crucial, in which actors are at first unable
to go on, but then find ways of moving on and taking new paths. In these situations,
the interests of both practitioners and theorists align. The breakdown of action
motivates the practitioner to find a solution to resume action. The breakdown and
how to resume action highlights living forward to theorists. The ultimate goals of
theorist and practitioner might still differ (Weick, 1999), as the theorist is interested
in a theoretical understanding of why the situation leads to a breakdown, while the
practitioner is interested in the practical understanding of how to deal with the
breakdown. However, by inquiring from within, “process as withness” offers theor
ists and practitioners a joint approach of engaging in situations of breakdown.
9.2.2 Process as Withness
A promising approach to highlight living forward is the idea of “process as with

ness” (Fachin and Langley, 2018), building on the work of Shotter (2006; 2008; 2009).
Shotter (2006) introduced the concept of a withness approach, as opposed to
“aboutness” research. Shotter argued that existing research approaches tended to be
distanced from the phenomenon at hand, leading to research “about” others at a
distance. Instead, Shotter (2006) called for research that starts inquiries from
“within” unsettled situations, rather than from without. The challenge is how to
bring about innovative change in organizations, thus doing something new or
doing something for the very first time (Shotter, 2009). As such, a withness
approach can be seen as acting as a form of “change agent” that helps co-inquirers
to retell the stories of their organization (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). For this,
Shotter mainly built upon the work on language and its relationship with the world,
situations, and actions, specifically of Wittgenstein (1953), the dialogism of Bakhtin
(1984; 1986; 1993) and Mead (1938), the processual nature of inquiry of James
(1890; 1897), and the social nature of inquiry of Dewey (1896). All of these authors
share an understanding of language as being deeply related to action, where speech
in itself is an act (Lorino, 2014b).
A withness approach steps away from the analytical-representational perspective
on organizational change, where the idea is that new thinking comes from old think
ing. Such a perspective means that organizational change happens through persua
sion, cognitive or discursive reprogramming, or strategic interventions (Shotter and
Tsoukas, 2011). In contrast, a withness approach employs a relational-responsive
perspective in which “new thinking emerges from certain events that unsettle old
ways of thinking and move individuals to start noticing new possibilities” (Shotter
and Tsoukas, 2011: 345). Such a perspective on organizational change highlights the
role of narratives in both organizing and organizations (Pentland, 1999) as “change
comes about by telling different stories, while the work of the change agent is to
facilitate the process of story re-telling” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 335). In the pro
cess of retelling, a withness approach joins in.
The fundamental tenet of a withness approach is starting the inquiry from within,
focusing on what people go ‘inside of ’ (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011; Shotter, 2006).
Instead of using preconceived ideas to intervene in a situation from the outside, a
withness approach urges an understanding of the particulars of that specific situ
ation. Shotter (2009) terms these moments “arresting moments.” Such moments give
“prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us
overlook” (Wittgenstein, 1953: 132). The point of a withness approach here is that
the inherent uniqueness and newness of the situation require perceiving and articu
lating these new perceptions, rather than being blinded for the unfamiliar by think
ing and acting with familiar mental categories.
For this, a withness approach aims to challenge the meanings behind existing
habitual responses. This interest in finding different ways of relating to situations
and the relational-responsive nature of dialogue in such processes of organizational

change links Shotter (2006) with Bakhtin (1984; 1986; 1993).
Relating Bakhtin to Shotter (2006; 2008; 2009) requires an understanding of the
relation of experience with language. Bakhtin argued that when using words and
language to communicate, we depend on a common background, a common cul
ture, and a common “genre” of language, against which our own specific language
can make sense. As children, we have to slowly “grow into” this background, to make
sense of what others are communicating (Bakhtin, 1984; 1986). In most circum
stances, we grasp what others mean, we understand what they are trying to get at,
and we are unaware of the background. This background only sometimes becomes
explicit, in moments where action breaks down and the taken-for-granted assump
tions of the background come to the fore. Think, therefore, of background as the
underlying assumptions, beliefs, habits, and other dispositions to act, as well as
anticipation of how others might react. The aim is to foreground the background
(Shotter and Tsoukas, 2013).
To foreground the background, a withness approach focuses on experiencing the
struggle of “living forward” together with research participants, with the researcher
placing herself in the flux of becoming. The idea here is that neither the past nor the
anticipated future can determine what will happen in the present. It is in the “spe
cious present” (James, 1890) that alternative possibilities emerge, and it is in the pre
sent that actors need to act on these possibilities to create innovative change in
organizations (Shotter, 2009; Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). In this process, a withness
approach helps by making practitioners aware of what might be surprising in a situ
ation as an “arresting moment” (Shotter, 2009) and introducing new theoretical
insights in a practically relevant way to find novel possibilities for action
(Shotter, 2006; 2009). The argument is that, rather than seeing research as describing
and analyzing what others do, capturing the experience of living forward together
with research participants gives a richer understanding. A withness approach looks
towards the future-in-the-present, and what the expected outcome of the actions is.
Such prospective and embodied sensemaking is still a relatively understudied phe
nomenon, especially regarding how participants go through the whole process of
sensemaking (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2014). This is similar to Shotter’s idea of situ
ated dialogic action research as “exploring, and verbally articulating, the real possi
bilities for making an innovative next step in a specific situation in a particular
organization” (Shotter, 2009: 268). It is relevant here to understand the importance of
starting by uncovering new meaning in situations, and to use metaphors and analo
gies to see in new ways, since “the most we can do is redescribe the world and, in
doing so, handle it differently” (Weick, 1999: 140). A withness approach helps by
redescribing the world to uncover new possibilities for action.
For this, researchers and research participants explore possible actions and antici
pate future consequences as “action-guiding anticipations” (Shotter, 2008; 2009) by
building on the pre-reflective abilities of humans (Shotter 2008). Here, the new dis
tinctions in a situation can aid in abductive thinking for exploring innovative change
in the situation that one is facing. By exploring currents habits and beliefs and using
the situation to question these habits and beliefs, Shotter’s withness approach follows
a process ontology on organizational change as the “reweaving of actors’ webs of
beliefs and habits of action as a result of new experiences obtained through inter
actions” (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 570). For this reweaving of beliefs and habits, a
withness approach uses situated dialogic inquiry to get new experiences.
The researcher has a different role in a withness approach than in other forms of
research, such as action research, process consulting, and appreciative inquiry. We
discern four specific areas in which the researcher plays a different role within a
withness approach.
1. The researcher helps practitioners to be “prepared to catch a glimpse of such

new possibilities in those moments when events ‘strike’ us. To do this, we must
desist from seeking explanations, conducting analyses, offering in ter
pret
ations, or formulating hypotheses. We must . . . allow ourselves to be struck,
moved, arrested, and so on” (Shotter, 2009: 279). Thus rather than analytically
detaching ourselves from situations from a rational-positivist perspective, a
withness approach employs the relational-responsive attitude to discover from
within the situation the kind of differences that might give us a “glimpse of
such new possibilities” for actions by allowing ourselves to be “struck” by the
situation (Shotter, 2009). For this, it is essential to remain “radically empirical”
(James, 1912).
2. To do this, the researcher engages in specific forms of productive dialogue to
explore new distinctions and possibilities for action. In the dialogue, the
researcher can draw on theoretical insights, but only to highlight aspects of
the situation that have not become part of a dialogue. In the dialogue, it is vital
to remain relationally responsive to the other, a point to which we will return
in the next section.
3. Here, the researcher can also add new possible actions derived from theory,
but these again need to be situated and concrete, not abstract and decontext
ualized. The idea here is to point out to the participant the levers that can be used
to change the situation through “action-guiding anticipations” (Shotter, 2009).
4. Moreover, a withness approach adds looking forward, by trying to specify
one’s anticipation of the consequences of actions as “action-guiding anticipa
tions,” what it would feel like if “it starts moving” (Shotter, 2008; 2009). The
idea here is that any broader change ambition in an organization necessarily
starts somewhere small and that these smaller changes can be experienced and
guide the overall change process. A withness approach calls here for being
aware of action-guiding anticipations that can guide us to the next steps to
take (Shotter, 2008; 2009) on our path towards an uncertain future. Think here
of having in mind a taste about what one is cooking, or a specific idea of how a
meeting should go.
To summarize, a withness approach revolves around novel perceiving and sense

making in situations through dialogue (Fachin and Langley, 2018) and deliberating
how to go on. It is important to understand that a withness approach does not start
with problems; rather, a withness approach calls for us to pay attention to the situ
ation and what might “strike us” as surprises that indicate something novel, some
thing that might point us towards new possibilities for action. A researcher
employing a withness approach thus joins in the enactment (Weick, 1969) of the
situ
ation and of how actors experience the unfolding situation (Dittrich and
Seidl, 2018) as they probe it to get a better understanding (Farjoun et al., 2015).
Applying process as withness still requires some methodology design and devel
opment (Fachin and Langley, 2018). There are only snippets of interactions available
from Shotter himself (see examples in Shotter, 2009), and these snippets seem only
to concern one-on-one interactions. Moreover, there are only a few published art
icles that come close to a withness approach (for an overview, see Fachin and
Langley, 2018). A withness approach challenges many of the more traditional
understandings of the nature and purpose of academic research (Fachin and
Langley, 2018). While the stronger process ontology of a withness approach is
interesting in light of process philosophy and helps in creating practically relevant
research, this seems to come at the cost of generalizability (Fachin and
Langley, 2018). One way out of this seems to us to embed a withness approach
within a pragmatic paradigm, which focuses research on pragmatic validity and
relevance (Farjoun et al., 2015; Martela, 2015), and brings in insights about organ
izing as a form of continuous design (Garud et al., 2008).
9.2.3 Productive Dialogue in Surprising Situations
Key to such an inquiry process is collective dialogue. The inquiry becomes dialogic
ally reflexive, meaning that the trans-actions of two or more people influence not
only the situation but also the people involved (Dewey and Bentley, 1949; Lorino,
forthcoming). This trans-action allows for novelty to emerge. In line with this,
Shotter (2009) and Tsoukas (2009) argue that organizational change begins with
dialogue (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014). Yet, the “actual process of how the unfolding
of particular, situated, real-time conversations may lead to change remains elusive”
(Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 81). We are interested in such situated dialogue, includ
ing aspects of conversations that are not necessarily verbal.
The primary function of dialogue is two or more people engaging with each other
to deal with an unsettled situation (Tsoukas, 2009). Instead of engaging with each
other confrontationally, the dialogue partners engage with each other to question
underlying assumptions, habits, and beliefs (Schein, 1993). The goal is to “get in
touch with what is going on in the here and now and become conscious of how
much our thought and perception is both a function of our past learning and the
immediate events that trigger it” (Schein, 1993: 47). Engaging through dialogue with
the ongoing situation “shorten[s] the internal feedback loop as much as possible”
(Schein, 1993: 47) between taking an action and the consequences of that action. For
this, in a withness approach researchers and other research participants together
explore a doubtful situation through dialogue (Shotter, 2006), seeking distinctions
that make a difference (Tsoukas, 2009) and can lead to possible (future) actions
(Shotter, 2009).
Situations are essential here, as processes such as organizational change, strategiz
ing, and routine dynamics are shaped by the situations in which they occur
(Dionysiou and Tsoukas, 2013; Simpson and Lorino, 2016). Where humans tend to
look for similarities between different situations, new insights are more likely to
emerge when looking at how a specific unsettling situation is different from previous
situations (Raelin, 2001)—akin to what Schön (1983) described as reflection-in-
action. The problem often is that our habits, beliefs, and assumptions, based on the
past, frame our perception of the present situation. Dealing with the situation at
hand thus often requires us to perceive the situation not in habitual ways, but in new
ways, in order to become aware of and perhaps adapt our habits, beliefs, and assump
tions (Schein, 1993), and to change the way we relate to and therefore frame a situ
ation (Shotter, 2006; 2009). Therefore, understanding how the situation influences
the ongoing process is vital for having productive dialogue for organizational
change. A withness approach includes this relationship between language, action,
and situation by focusing on moments of surprise that are in some ways perplexing
and in which action breaks down.
To understand the critical role of language in dialogical situations, the ideas of
Bakhtin are helpful. Bakhtin described the double role of language and words as
conducive to creativity. On the one hand, speech is situated, and the situation in
which a word is used influences its meaning. This allows one to use a metaphor or
analogy in a specific situation to convey a specific meaning, without taking the word
literally. In this way, language allows for situated creativity. On the other hand,
speech and individual words are related to categories, as they refer to more general
ideas (Bakhtin, 1986). This refers to the idea that “Forming itself in an atmosphere of
the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not
yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word”
(Bakhtin 1981: 280). Thus, using a specific word might bring up historical connota
tions. At the same time, speech and more general acts are related to what happened
previously in a specific situation and also anticipate a future. Think of asking a ques
tion and anticipating an answer. This dialogical and relational interplay between two
or more people in a dialogical situation can create new insights. Combining different
types of speech (such as differences between different functions or disciplines) can
create conflicts and contradictions, which can be resolved through a creative inquiry
which projects into the future, relates to the past, and finds in this mutual question
ing of the future through the past and the past through the future a path towards
new meanings and stylistic creativity (Bakhtin, 1981; 1984; 1986).
Shotter argues that taking a process perspective to its extreme requires realizing that
such processual inquiry means changing those involved in the inquiry as well
(Shotter, 2008). For such situated dialogue, Shotter (2006) suggests a “form of engaged,
responsive thinking, acting, and talking, that allows us to affect the flow of processes
from within our living involvement with them” (Shotter, 2006: 585). This requires a
perspective on language and speech that sees language not as dead and already spoken
with predefined meanings, but as a resource engaged in relational-responsive prac
tices, where the spoken word relates to the world around us. We should consider how
this extraverbal situation influences words in the speaking (Bakhtin 1981; 1984; 1986;
Garud et al., 2015) and their “unfolding temporal contours” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011:
339). This perspective highlights the situatedness of the dialogue, in the temporal sense
as well as in the material and social sense of the situation, where a withness approach
includes “extraverbal” communication. This means looking at the specific use of lan
guage in the situation and how the situation shapes those words. In this, new distinc
tions and new perspectives can emerge, leading to novelty (Garud et al., 2015). Shotter
(1996; 2006; 2009) argued for the vital role of metaphors, analogies, images, gestures,
more guiding forms of talk (e.g. “look at that”), and generative questions (e.g.
“imagine,” “what if ”) (Cunliffe, 2001; Shotter, 2009). The idea is not to introduce
abstract theoretical concepts to the practitioner, but to use these discursive practices as
“reminders” (Wittgenstein, 1953) for the practitioner to become aware of new aspects
of the situation through the dialogical interaction. This is in line with the idea of Schein
(1993) of dialogue necessitating concrete experience, not abstract concepts.
To summarize, situated dialogue affords people the ability to question and adjust
their existing habits and beliefs by relating the dialogue to the situation at hand.
Awareness of the situation is required in order to come to new distinctions in the
situation, and potentially reframe the situation. To make the dialogue productive,
Shotter suggests using metaphors, analogies, and other gestures to help practitioners
become more aware of the situation. Next, Shotter argues for using theoretical
insights in a concrete and situated fashion to point practitioners towards potential
levers to change the ongoing situation (Shotter, 2006; 2009).
9.2.4 Pragmatist Inquiry
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual

way.
(James, 1890: 80)
We now turn to pragmatist inquiry to fuse it with a withness approach. Pragmatist

inquiry concerns the process through which actors learn to adapt their habits and
beliefs to new classes of situation. It is based on social groups’ interactions with their
environment in a recursive relationship (Ansell, 2012) combining thought and
action. It is a relational, “transactional” process in pragmatist terms (Simpson, 2009),
i.e. a process in which new knowledge emerges from actors’ relationships with each
other and with the situation. Pragmatist inquiry starts when actors face a surprising,
“indeterminate” situation (Dewey, 1929) where action breaks down, and actors are
“doubtful” as what to do next (Dewey, 1938).
People inquire into this doubtful situation and change it through their inquiry,
until they consider they understand it sufficiently to act. Situations and practices are
central concepts in pragmatism. Situations trigger, influence, and are influenced by
inquiry. They combine time, space, and social settings into a coherent whole, focus
ing on temporal, social, and material interactions, and they shape possible actions
(Farjoun et al., 2015). Situation and action are in a “quasi-dialogical” relationship
(Joas, 1996; Joas and Beckert, 2002), in which actors are “in ongoing dialogue with
unfolding situations” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 966). Therefore, situations are
not just context to actions but are constitutive of action (Joas, 1996). As described by
Dewey: “The purpose is to clarify the disturbed and confused situation that reason
able ways of dealing with it may be suggested” (Dewey, 1920: 161). To achieve this,
pragmatist inquiry is made up of different steps, which are not necessarily linear and
might be repeated or overlapping (Lorino and Mourey, 2013).
Pragmatist inquiry starts with a practical disruption (habits do not generate the
anticipated result), leading to an impulse (or affect, emotion, feelings). Such an
impulse can take the form of doubt, curiosity or more generally surprise, and starts
the thought process of deliberation, as “thought is born as the twin of impulse in
every moment of impeded habit” (Dewey, 1922: 171). This release of impulse starts
the inquiry process (Dewey, 1922; James, 1956; Farjoun et al., 2015).
In the next step this impulse is intellectualized into a problem (Dewey, 1938),
which is needed to give the inquiry an impetus, since “without a problem, there is
blind groping in the dark” (Dewey, 1980/1938: 108). Pragmatism highlights the situ
ational nature of problems (Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Boin, 2017; Follett, 1919). To
resolve the problem, the process continues until it ends in a ‘working hypothesis’
through abduction (Peirce, 1932). Problematizing and abduction (hypothesis
creation) require both looking back at previous experience and how it might relate
to the present, and also looking forward to possible future consequences and events,
integrating past experience and the current situation. The present is here the
“specious present” of James (1890), “short duration of which we are immediately and
incessantly sensible.” As Dewey (1922) puts it, people engage in the “dramatic
rehearsal” of different possible actions, as both a looking back and a looking forward
attitude. Dewey extended hypothesis from the limited use in science to something
that can guide action (Ansell and Boin, 2017).
The “abductive turning point” (Simpson, 2017) mixes invention and narrative
creativity (inventing a plausible narrative) and reasoning (Lorino et al., 2011) and
provides a possible explanation of the situation. Here again, impulse plays an
important role: “The moment arrives when imagination pictures an objective conse
quence of action which supplies an adequate stimulus and releases definitive action”
(Dewey, 1922: 193).
We often need to “enact” (Weick, 1969) a hypothesis in a situation to learn more

about the situation (Farjoun et al., 2015). Thus, even with limited knowledge of the
situation, we often need to start acting to better understand the situation. This enact
ment helps us to understand what ends might be achieved (Joas, 1996). Such enact
ment is already a form of experimentation (Lorino, 2018). The pragmatist inquiry
involves a form of situated creativity (Joas 1996), where actors make use of what is
available in creative ways. Only in the present moment can agentic action manifest
(Mead, 1932): for any new possibilities to emerge, one has to (en)act in the now.
Reasoning deducts how to test the working hypothesis empirically. Next is experi
menting, a “leitmotif ” of pragmatism. Experimentation highlights the fallibilistic
nature of pragmatism and the need to learn through experience (Ansell, 2012).
Pragmatic experiments explore the possibilities in a “probe and learn” process
(Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Bartenberger, 2016), akin to “probing into the future” as
described by Brown and Eisenhardt (1997). Experimental action connects the
hypothesis and reasoning with the transformation of the situation (Follett, 1924;
Lorino, 2018). Induction is needed to interpret the results of the experimental
action. Especially when dealing with an organizational inquiry, experimentation is
essential, as only through experimentation can deeper aspects of the organizations
come to the fore (Argyris and Schön, 1978). The trying nature of experimenting is
needed to learn about the world (Ansell, 2012; Raelin, 2007).
Thus, after the experimental action one has to “learn from experience.” The learn
ing lies in a backward and forward connection between the action and the outcome
of the action, which is essential for learning (Dewey, 1916; Elkjær, 2003). The out
come can be a new practice, habit or concept (Lorino et al., 2011). If the outcome is
to the inquirers’ liking and action can resume, the inquiry process ends. If the out
come is not as intended, or action still cannot resume, another iteration of inquiry
starts, with the changed situation as the starting point (Elkjær, 2003), leading to a
changed hypothesis. This can also happen when the original intention as “overall
end” has been achieved, but the outcome still does not satisfy inquirers. Then the
overall end changes again, highlighting the processual nature of ends and purposes
(Lorino and Mourey, 2013). Pragmatist inquiry, as a withness approach, requires
methodological development (Martela, 2015) that genuinely invites a “theory/prac
tice synthesis” (Simpson, 2017: 66).
9.2.5 Community of Inquiry
Pragmatist inquiry, though it involves mental states and processes, is inherently

social rather than subjective and mentalist. It is most productive when it happens in
a pluralistic community constituting a “community of inquiry” (Dewey, 1916), par
ticularly when it faces organizational issues.
In the pragmatist perspective, deliberations of a community of inquiry play a cen
tral role, as Rorty argued: “the best we can do in science is to have useful conversations
about topics of interest” (cited in Johnson et al., 2015: 17). In particular, Mead’s dia
logical perspective on “conversation of gestures” is helpful (Simpson, 2009; 2017).
Through deliberations exploring the differences within the community of inquiry, new
insights and learning can emerge (Simpson, 2009; Tsoukas, 2009), highlighting the
importance of dialogue in creativity (Simpson, 2017; Tsoukas, 2009) and the creative
use of what is available (Ansell and Boin, 2017). Interesting here is to explore the
potential role of collective reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983; Wegener, Guerreiro
Gonçalves, and Dankfort 2019; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) of a community of inquiry.
The collective nature of dialogical relationships in a community of inquiry is a vital
part of pragmatism that invites forms of co-inquiry between academics and other
research participants.
9.2.6 Fusing Pragmatist Inquiry with Withness
In this section we propose a fusion of pragmatism and a withness approach. A

withness approach and pragmatist inquiry share a processual view of the world, a
focus on problem building and problem solving, and emphasize experiencing situ
ations from within (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Lorino and Mourey, 2013; Lorino,
Tricard, and Clot, 2011). The process ontology of pragmatism matches our interest
in the process thinking of Shotter (2006; 2009) and Tsoukas (e.g. Tsoukas and
Chia, 2002). The work of Shotter (2016), Lorino (2011; 2014a; 2014b; Lorino and
Mourey, 2013), and Shotter and Tsoukas (2011; 2014) together lay the theoretical
and methodological foundations for fusing pragmatist inquiry with a withness
approach.
Shotter (2016) had already described links between a withness approach and
pragmatist inquiry, inter alia the emergence of background (Wittgenstein, 1967)
habits (Dewey, 1938), and “before-the-fact thinking” (Shotter, 2015), i.e. interest in
pre-conceptual, pre-intellectual, and pre-cognitive experiences. Dewey, James and
Mead, just like Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Shotter, saw that deliberate and conscious
capacities of people emerge over time out of spontaneously responsive activities
within our environment, highlighting the importance of background and the
anticipation that such background or habits raise in us (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011).
Such expectations that grow over time can give us “action-guiding anticipations”
(Shotter, 2008; 2009). For this to occur, new experiences are required that stretch
people beyond their current background or habits.
To gain such new experiences, which allow for new distinctions and even new
practices to emerge, both pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach start with an
indeterminate or doubtful situation, or an “arresting moment” in the terminology of
Shotter (2009). A withness approach and pragmatist inquiry are closely aligned in
the concept of the community of inquiry and the important role of dialogue. A with
ness approach and pragmatist inquiry emphasize the situatedness of dialogue and
action, and how such situatedness can lead to “action-guiding anticipations.” New
experiences can lead to uncovering new action possibilities as “action-guiding

anticipations,” but require embracing the not-knowing (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009).
Embracing the not-knowing requires doubt, as “living doubt is necessary to ener
gize inquiry” (Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman, 2008: 908). Otherwise our mind
is more likely to bulk up experience through conceptualizing experience into exist
ing categories, eradicating any differences that might have created new insights
(James, 1909; Wittgenstein, 1967) rather than perceiving experience, the concrete,
and the particular (“radical empiricism” in the terminology of James, 1912) as the
path to new distinctions (James, 1909; Wittgenstein, 1953).
When relating these ideas to organizational studies, specifically organizational
change, both a withness inquiry and pragmatist inquiry see organizational change
not as devising grand plans or theories based on existing concepts, but as continu
ously ongoing, triggered by breakdown and doubt (Dewey, 1922; Shotter, 2009).
Organizational change becomes more about the changing stories that people tell
about themselves and the organizations. The role of the researcher then becomes to
“facilitate the process of story re-telling” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 335). Thus, for
a group of people to get organized, they need to find a way to inquire into the situ
ations they face from within, grasping how this situation is different from previous
situations, and uncover the possibilities and potentialities for novel change from
within this engagement with the situation (Dewey, 1922; Farjoun et al., 2015;
Shotter, 2009).
Therefore, by fusing pragmatist inquiry with a withness approach we highlight the
social and pluralist nature of the community of inquiry; the major contribution of
habits to the inquiry, as its trigger, object, and tool; the transformational nature of
inquiry as leading to changing practices and habits; a more holistic conceptualiza
tion of the inquiry process; and the need for experimenting with new action
possibilities.
9.3 Methodological Requirements for Pragmatist

Withness Inquiry
After the theoretical discussion of a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry, we
derive the methodological requirements and design a methodology that fuses a
withness approach with pragmatist inquiry into pragmatist withness inquiry.
9.3.1 Entering the Field, Roles of Researcher and

Participants, and the Requirement for Genuine Doubt
Our pragmatist withness inquiry methodology requires situations and processes

where many surprises lead to existential doubt and inquiry processes, and where
both researchers and practitioners are challenged to adapt their habits and
beliefs—not starting from hindsight, but in situations where there are multiple
contradictory outcomes or no clear outcome yet (Weick 1999). Weick (1999)

suggests staying close to the project-size of absorbed coping to come closer to living
forward. The focus of the methodology is to study situations where action breaks
down, where practitioners enter discourses of absorbed coping rather than dis
courses of detached representation, and where things are provisional rather than
settled (Weick, 1999). Capturing living forward here points to what people notice
when action is interrupted and how people cope with the interruptions. This inte
grates both retrospective backward understanding and prospective living forward
simultaneously.
In line with this, pragmatist inquiry requires starting from a relational-responsive
process ontology that is resolutely anti-dualistic, but rather highlights the recursive
nature of phenomena (Farjoun et al., 2015). For this, pragmatist inquiry requires
engagement with practitioners in doubtful situations. Such “problem solving” in the
sense of Dewey (1938) allows pragmatist inquiry to bind together the distinctive
perspectives of pragmatism on experience, habit, action, and reflexivity. This also
makes pragmatist inquiry an inherently situated activity, highlighting the epistemic
uncertainty of living forward (Farjoun et al., 2015). This also requires a longitudinal
approach, starting with situations that are doubtful and ending the inquiry when
“normal” activity resumes again. During this process a “healthy attitude of doubt”
(Martela, 2015) is vital as “The scientific attitude may almost be defined as that
which is capable of enjoying the doubtful; scientific method is, in one aspect, a tech
nique for making productive use of doubt by converting it into operations of infinite
inquiry” (Dewey, 1929: 228). Another precondition for inquiry is a willingness to
reframe the situation (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), as the initial perspective on the
situation might be the very reason why activity came to a halt (Dewey, 1938).
Generating new perspectives on a situation, and getting a fuller understanding of
it, is helped by the formation of a community of inquiry, therefore making this a
collective endeavor (Tsoukas, 2009). Here it is essential to create diversity in the
group, not just as stakeholder involvement, but to enlarge the resources of past
experiences, interpretations of the present, and anticipations of the future (Lorino
et al., 2011). In line with the idea of the withness approach (Shotter, 2006), the
researcher and the practitioners become full participants in the community of
inquiry and equal knowledge creators who bring in their habits, beliefs, and prac
tices. Researchers are looking to understand the process of organizational inquiry
from within, through participating in it (Lorino, 2020); and vice versa, practitioners
become accepted as co-creators of knowledge.
9.3.2 Dialogical Transactions
Generating the kind of productive situated dialogue necessary for a withness

approach requires relational engagement in the form of a shared commitment to
improve the situation together. This requires “dialogical and mediated inquiries”
(Lorino et al., 2011; 2014a). Participants in the dialogue need to be open with each
other and allow their habits and beliefs to be questioned (Tsoukas, 2009).
Methodologically, it is crucial to include the extraverbal aspects of the situation here
(Garud et al., 2015) and to notice “the unfolding temporal contours of words in their
speaking” (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011: 339).
In the dialogue occurring during deliberations, we engage with a withness
approach to aid in finding possible actions in the specific situation that the commu
nity of inquiry faces. A dialogical approach requires that a community of inquiry
engages in explorations of the situation. Moreover, the inquirers’ experiments are
based on these explorations. Here, experimentation can take the form of thought
experiments, discursive simulations, and more extensive deliberations of possible
actions that transform the situation. Limitations of current habits create the existen
tial need for new habits and practices. In this process, participants must be free
to voice their authentic perspectives, and the power is somewhat equal (Lorino
et al., 2011; Lorino, 2018).
During the inquiry process (Martela, 2015), the researchers’ role will be to focus our
co-inquirers on the uniqueness of the situation (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014) and the
corresponding data (Cunliffe 2001). Our role as researchers is not to come with highly
abstract theoretical knowledge, but to try to understand how the characteristics of the
situation might tell a community of inquirers how to proceed (Cunliffe, 2001; Shotter
and Tsoukas, 2014) through “action-guiding anticipations.” Other participants can
also offer relevant ways of “how to go on.”
9.3.3 Understanding Living Forward: Abduction

and Experimental Action
While reasoning is an integral part of pragmatism, our methodology most clearly

differentiates itself from others by including abduction and experimentation.
Abduction and Narration

We are interested in inquiring into a situation of how people abduct what to do
next—making the expected or intended outcome as a form of hypothesis as explicit
as possible, testing this hypothesis through a field-experiment, and analyzing the
results of the experiment as a new situation.
We want to understand how the unique characteristics of the situation are consti
tutive of action—the “law of the situation” (Follett, 1942)—and how the inquiry
process unfolds over time. It seems most appropriate to talk about an abductive logic
when analyzing these kinds of data. Abduction in the words of Peirce is presented as
follows: “Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that some
thing actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be”
(Peirce, 1932: 171). Such an analysis of “what may be” seems appropriate when
fusing a withness approach with pragmatist inquiry. For this, the community of
inquiry together creates a coherent narrative story of what is going on through dia
logue and abduction, deductively designs, and inductively evaluates experiments
(Ansell, 2012; Ansell and Boin, 2017). Especially interesting here seems to be the
co-creation of prototypes as boundary objects (Lorino, Tricard, and Clot, 2011).
These prototypes are then manifested as hypotheses to test.
(Field) Experiments
In pragmatism, experiments play a vital role in testing ideas generated through
abduction (Farjoun et al., 2015; Lorino, 2018). Experiments are particularly useful in
organizational research and an essential element of pragmatism (Ansell, 2012). They
allow us to test the ideas derived abductively, to design experiments deductively, and
to make sense of the results inductively (Lorino, 2018). Additionally, combining
field experiments with mixed methods process research allows us to understand the
changes occurring in more detail, by obtaining data on the pre-and post-experiment
stage, as well as obtaining quantitative and qualitative data about the process to
understand both causes and effects (Paluck, 2010).
9.3.4 The Role of Data, Analysis, and Theorizing
Research from a process perspective necessarily also requires problematizing

assumptions about data being “out there” to be “collected” by researchers (Langley
and Tsoukas, 2016). Taking a processual perspective also calls for a processual per
spective on data. Here it seems helpful to differentiate between data as something
given and capta as something taken, and to include the situatedness of data and the
enactment of data. Choosing what to include and what not to include, and how to
make use of data, has implications for the research inquiry (Jones et al., 2019).
Inquirers are embedded in complex systems and need to enact meaningful data
(Lorino, 2018). Important here is to embrace the exploratory nature of the inquiry
and to explore within the community of inquiry what data are meaningful to the
ongoing inquiry and how they can be used (Lorino et al., 2011; 2018). This discus
sion of the processual nature of data has implications for the use of methods.
“Slow Motion” of Moments through Video-Ethnography

To get a better understanding of the “arresting moments” (Shotter 2006) and the
abductive turning points (Simpson 2017), we suggest using video-ethnography to
zoom in on what is occurring in specific situations and to capture the situation as
much as possible (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Vesa and Vaara, 2014). Video-
ethnography allows us to capture the situatedness of actions by combining temporal,
social, and material relationships in one medium. Field notes can miss crucial
aspects due to limited time and the fact that what is important in a specific situation
is often only known afterwards (Vesa and Vaara, 2014). Rather than making limited
and indirect interpretations of field notes, video-ethnography allows one to go back

again and again to data, enabling novel and richer interpretations of the present and
reinterpretations of the past (Vesa and Vaara, 2014).
Here, it is interesting to use the video to explore the dialogue with the other
research participants in order to grasp what happened in these situations and try to
get the “account” right (Weick, 1999). The point is that this is less about having video
than about how to use video in a meaningful way in the inquiry process (e.g. Lorino
et al., 2011), where the video is not about representing reality, but is used as a tool for
iconic mediation (Lorino et al., 2011; Lorino, 2018).
Co-produced Reflexive Auto-ethnography

A reflexive auto-ethnographic journal seems most appropriate to capture the
thoughts of actors and researchers (Fachin and Langley, 2018) and is uniquely cap
able of capturing lived experience (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Vesa and Vaara, 2014).
Going from detached observers of ethnography to engaged participants in
auto-ethnography allows us to grasp and engage more fully with the experience of
actors, and not just act as observers. In this way, auto-ethnography allows us to
capture our own experience of living forward. Auto-ethnography also allows us
to capture how understanding changes over time—not just understanding of the
present and the future, but also of events that have passed, by looking back at data
from earlier moments and capturing how one’s understanding of the future and the
past has changed over time (e.g. Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015).
It is interesting to explore forms of engaging in auto-ethnography collaboratively,
to allow for more dialogical relational and responsive engagement with the other
participants in the community of inquiry, thereby building on the relational and dia
logical nature of a withness approach. The community of inquiry can more fully
capture their individual and collective sensemaking and analyze this collectively
over time. This is similar to the work of Kempster and Stewart (2010), who followed
Stewart’s becoming of a COO through journals and reflecting dialogically on these
journals to capture the ongoing change process. Throughout the research, the “flux”
experienced is increased as the processes of discovery in the field, self-discovery
(Locke, 2011), and the transactional nature of the inquiry process are highlighted.
Analysis
Analysis is concerned with how the hypothesis, or even competing hypotheses, were
generated; analyzing the results of the experiments to decide if any hypotheses have
been refuted; and finally, how we could explain the surprising results again.
Using video allows us to engage in multimodal analysis of how the social, tem
poral, and material aspects relate to each other in the situation and how they together
influenced the actions that actors chose (Jarzabkowski, LeBaron, Phillips, and
Pratt, 2014). Here, especially when trying to analyze surprise and the emotional
element that is so important to pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach, video
offers a possibility to analyze in detail (Vesa and Vaara, 2014). In addition, to achieve
a true withness approach requires us to reiterate analysis of past events in the light of
current events to understand how one’s understanding has changed over time
(Fachin and Langley, 2018; Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015).
Theorizing
Theorizing in such a methodology would be approached from a different angle than
mainstream approaches. On the one hand, it would start from the perspective that
theories probably cannot be general, accurate, and simple (Weick, 1999). Instead of
aiming at generalizability, to which other approaches are better suited, our pragmatic
“process as withness” methodology would favor “accuracy” (Weick, 1999), which
allows for theorizing closer to readily available patterns of absorbed coping. In line
with this, rather than propositional form, theorizing would take the form of narra
tives that are closer to living forward. The question thus becomes “ ‘What’s the story
here’—not what’s the principle here, what list applies, or which boxes or arrows sum
marize this” (Weick, 1999: 140). On the other hand, while the theory would probably
need to be constructed retrospectively, the idea would be to build theory that can be
used prospectively as well, leading to more “moving” theory (Weick, 1999). Helpful
here is the co-creation of an account of the inquiry to “encourage continuing dia
logue dedicated to getting the account ‘right’ ” (Weick, 1999: 140), where the focus is
not on abstraction and generalization, but on the context and the particular
(Weick, 1999). What transcends the specific situation are the practices and eventual
habits that are the objective of pragmatism. These practices and habits can be trans
ferred into other situations, albeit that a new situation might call for some adapta
tion. Thus, in line with pragmatist inquiry and a withness approach, the outcome of
such research would probably take the form of new concepts/beliefs that have proven
helpful, and new habits/practices that can help in future situations (Lorino, 2018).
9.3.5 Summarizing a Methodology for Pragmatist

Withness Inquiry
In summary, pragmatist withness starts its inquiry from within situations of doubt,
focused on the shared experience of the community of inquiry, be that academics or
practitioners. Such inquiry requires some guidelines on format, content, situations
and surprises, and community of inquiry.
Regarding the format, our proposed methodology is deeply relational, focusing
on situated dialogue and action of a community of inquiry. A challenge here is con
ceiving the situation in existing categories. Instead, our proposed methodology calls
for perceiving the situation and using metaphors, analogies, visuals, and other ges
tures to go beyond existing concepts. Lastly, the methodology requires a set-up that
allows the community of inquiry to be situated, using audio and video recordings to
be able to reanalyze specific situations later. Field notes become a place to capture
the emotions, surprises, and hunches that occur throughout the inquiry process.
Regarding content, our experience so far reinforces the need to allow for emer
gence in the process and to embrace the process ontology inherent to a withness
approach. Rather than providing preconceived ideas, our proposed methodology
thrives in moments where no clear end goal has yet emerged. Nonetheless, both the
past and the future can be used as resources in the methodology, being fused in
uncovering new possibilities for action in the present. A withness approach adds
action-guiding anticipations as a way of using future anticipations to guide one’s
action in the present. Instead of only reflecting on the past, our methodology also
calls on the community of inquiry to “pro-flect.” Pro-flection refers to thinking pro
spectively ahead of our anticipation of the future. This is also needed to become
aware if the anticipations have changed throughout the inquiry process.
Regarding surprises and situations, our proposed methodology highlights the
role of both in the inquiry process. One must have expectations in order to be sur
prised, but such surprise needs to be attended to, as surprises can be of different
intensity. Important here is that the community of inquiry is aware of using the
situation—including time—as a resource, seizing moments of surprise to gain new
insights by asking a question that highlights “information” in Bateson’s sense, i.e.
“differences which make a difference” (Bateson, 1972: 315), and foregrounding the
background that is often hidden in day-to-day activity (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011).
9.4 Discussion
9.4.1 Comparison with Other Research Approaches
In the following, we first describe similarities between action research approaches

(e.g. Raelin and Coghlan, 2006), process consulting (Schein, 1993) and appreciative
inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987), and later differentiate a withness approach
from these approaches.
Regarding action research, there are a plethora of approaches. Originally, Lewin
(1946) realized that interventions are more likely to be successful if the target popu
lation is involved in the change process, “making the client more of a researcher”
(Schein 1995: 1). Different from a withness approach, the drive of such action
research came from the researcher interested in a specific topic (Schein, 1995).
Arguably, though, a critique of action research is that the trigger comes too often
from practice, leading to action research that is close to consulting. In our reading,
the pragmatic action research approaches of Raelin come closest to a withness
approach. In the words of Raelin and Coghlan, “as a form of anticipatory reflection,
managers under these circumstances may probe to a deeper level than the prior time
orientations by considering alternative goals and approaches, by positing a series of
‘if-then’ propositions based on new contexts, or by challenging underlying assump
tions that govern the present situation” (Raelin and Coghlan, 2006: 681). We use
Raelin’s approach to highlight general commonalities and differences between action
research and a withness approach. Like a withness approach, pragmatic action

research highlights the “here and beyond” (Raelin and Coghlan, 2006: 681). The idea
is that pragmatic action research “reframes unanticipated problem situations to see
experience different” (Raelin and Coghlan 2006: 681), leading to “premise reflec
tion” (Raelin, 2001).
Process consulting (Schein, 1993; 1995) shares several commonalities with a
withness approach. They share a focus on the situation that research participants
face with the researchers. Both see the role of the researchers not as providing solu
tions, but as helping the research participants to gain insights themselves, by enab
ling them to learn from their own experience (Schein, 1993). Both see it as essential
to join the flow with the research participants and to follow what the research par
ticipants are trying to do (Schein, 1993; 1995). Both see the timing as important;
some moments are more opportune than others for a question, a remark, or another
type of action.
Appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987) also shares several com
monalities with a withness approach. As with a withness approach, appreciative
inquiry aims at discovering or even creating “new social possibilities.” Both see the
background of habits and beliefs as an essential factor in influencing how people act.
Both align in the idea that transforming habits can happen fruitfully through dia
logue, as a collective interaction in which new “social” knowledge can be created
(Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987). The “action-guiding anticipations” of Shotter
(2008; 2009) are similar to the idea of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider and
Srivastva, 1987) in not only focusing attention on problematic aspects but also speci
fying what one is “striving” for more positively. The action-guiding anticipations
relate to the positive consequences.
However, most of these approaches seem to start (implicitly) from a positivist or
constructivist perspective. Our methodology departs here, by fusing a withness
approach with pragmatist inquiry. Pragmatism gives better tools to assess the value
of a new practice or habit in dealing with a situation than would positivist methods
that rely on truth as correspondence or interpretive/hermeneutic approaches that
favor pluralism over relation with reality (Martela, 2015).
On the most fundamental level, none of the previous approaches are explicitly
based on a relational-processual ontology. The process ontology inherent to our meth
odology allows us to capture the inquiry on the fly as an unsettled and emergent
endeavor, including action possibilities considered but not taken, and highlighting
practices used to resolve the situation. Importantly, a withness approach adds the
researcher herself joining the flux of living forward, including how the inquiry process
changes the researcher. Additionally, the simultaneous combination of retrospective
backward learning and prospective living forward highlights the role of the past and
the anticipated future in how a situation in the present is dealt with creatively.
More concretely, while other research approaches also aim at changing existing
habits, beliefs, and practices, these approaches are implicit on how to change
these beliefs. Their focus seems to be more on developing an overall methodology

than on specifying the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings for using
the situation and the dialogue to change habits. A critical difference between a
withness approach and these approaches is the focus of a withness approach on
questions and other methods for changing the habits and beliefs of an actor in
order to elicit new distinctions through situated dialogue and integration of pro
spective elements into the research endeavor. Through this, a withness approach
has the potential of more fully following the situated emergence of new practices
and habits.
The perspective of inquiring from “within” also differentiates a withness approach
from other approaches. Other approaches intervene from preconceived concepts,
plans, and more specific methods, which necessarily requires employing concepts
that are already familiar. Therefore, “new” approaches and concepts are less likely to
occur with such preconceived interventions (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2011). In con
trast, a withness approach focuses on the emergent dialogue and how the inquiry
starting with the uniqueness of the situation creates novel possibilities for action.
After all, the point of a withness approach is that “The problems are solved, not by
giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known”
(Wittgenstein 1953: 109). A challenge here remains—namely, that the inquiry is
existential for both practitioners and researchers.
9.4.2 Theoretical Aspects
Several authors (Langley, 1999; Van de Ven, 2007; Weick, 1995; Locke et al., 2008)

have argued that the discovery process of theorizing and especially its creative
underpinnings need better understanding. As argued by Nayak (2008), processual
theorizing is less about giving definite answers than about the “becoming” nature of
theorizing itself. This allows for creativity and intuition to occupy a more p
rominent
role in the ongoing process of theorizing (Locke et al., 2008). This becomes even
more important as “studying a phenomenon from within involves an effort to cap
ture the evolving meaningful experience—the qualia—of those involved in it,
through . . . partaking oneself in that experience” (Langley and Tsoukas, 2016: 8).
Such “prehensive” and “performative” research (Langley and Tsoukas, 2016)
requires unraveling the becoming process of process theorizing in such a way that
we allow others to follow our “flashes.” Abductive moves would allow us to better
understand the temporal nature of theorizing (Locke et al., 2008) and offer a per
spective from within the flux of the ongoing experience. This includes the role that
the pre-reflective and the emotional side plays in theorizing and the inquiry pro
cess itself. As Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman (2008) argued, we need to “ ‘re-
enter the present’ and find puzzles in the familiar” (Locke et al. 2008: 917); we think
that the proposed methodology might do just that.
9.4.3 Methodological Aspects
A constant challenge of a withness approach seems to be creating situations that

give rise to dialogical interactions that lead to novelty. Allowing for this open-
ended dialogue “along with a willingness to be visibly and publicly ‘not-knowing’ ”
(Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) requires a level of trust that seems to require longer-
term engagement with the field and co-inquirers. This applies not only to the
research participants but also to oneself. As the first author was trying to learn to
“do” a withness approach and become more dialogical, it was a challenge to engage
in “true” dialogue. In an inquiry, the habits and beliefs of all participants can be
called into question. A challenge here was to enter the inquiry from “within,”
rather than bringing in preconceived ideas. Still, we feel that having a detailed
record of the whole process, including the emotion, surprises, and “arresting
moments” (Shotter, 2006; 2008) throughout the interaction, offers a more detailed
understanding of living forward at that moment.
In line with Martela (2015) and Shotter (2009), it seems that both a withness
approach and pragmatist inquiry move the focus of research more towards building
inquiring habits and practices that work pragmatically, rather than being “mastered
by ‘method’ or ‘theory’ ” (Martela, 2015: 547). We started with a quote by Mary
Parker Follett, but believe the extended quote below to be more appropriate to grasp
ing how our proposed methodology differentiates itself from others.
We wish to do far more than observe our experience, we wish to make it yield up
for us its riches . . . We must face the fact that it is seldom possible to observe a
social situation as one watches a chemical experiment . . . We need those who are
frankly participant-observers, those who will try experiment after experiment and
note results, experiments in making human interplay productive . . . Brilliant
empiricists have poked much pleasant fun at those who tell us of some vague
should-be instead of what is. We want something more than either of these; we
want to find out what may be, the possibilities now open to us. This we can dis-
cover only by experiment. Observation is not the only method of science.
(Follett, 1924: 2)
We believe that our pragmatist withness inquiry methodology aligns with Mary
Parker Follett. The proposed methodology differentiates itself by drawing on a with
ness approach to “yield the riches” of experience through the methods of
Wittgenstein (1953) and the potential of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Shotter, 2006;
Tsoukas, 2009). Pragmatist withness inquiry is a situated inquiry that aims at chan
ging existing practices, habits, and beliefs, building on the pre-reflective capabilities
of humans (Shotter, 2008). Adding pragmatist inquiry as a community of inquiry
builds on the dialogism of Shotter and adds the full process of pragmatist inquiry,
the broader community of inquiry, and experiments to discover and test “the possi
bilities now open to us” (Follett, 1924).
9.4.4 Future Research
Based on these first attempts at different variants of pragmatist withness inquiry, we

want to highlight some exciting avenues for further research. Our primary interest
here lies in encouraging other scholars to pick up pragmatist withness inquiry to
build on and extend our early attempt, focusing on the situated dialogical dimension
of a community of inquiry by adding a withness approach.
An exciting avenue for methodological development seems to be to combine a
researcher who engages in pragmatist withness inquiry with a researcher who
remains in a more detached participant-observer role. This would offer a way of ana
lyzing the same process both from within and in-the-flow, on the one hand, and
from without and afterward, on the other. It might be interesting to watch the videos
back together and return later to the same video or audio to compare how one’s
understanding has emerged and changed over time (Revsbæk and Tanggaard, 2015),
and to engage in dialogue about this (Lorino et al., 2011; Lorino, forthcoming).
One of the biggest struggles that we see going forward is the issue of keeping the
prospective and withness nature of this research approach alive when communicat
ing it to fellow researchers, practitioners, or even students. The writing of Helin
(Helin, Hernes, Hjorth, and Holt, 2014; Helin, 2014; 2017) has explored this in more
detail. An idea for keeping the prospective nature alive is creating blogposts of
understanding the present and the future in which to communicate the prospective
nature of the research. This could be done alongside more traditional forms of com
municating research through journal articles or books.
Here, it is interesting to explore multimedia experiences, rather than using text
exclusively to address these issues (Fachin and Langley, 2018). Such multimedia experi
ences seem more attuned to the kind of “moving” research and theory of Weick (1999)
and Shotter (2006; 2009). An interesting possibility is to co-produce accounts with the
participants as an extended form of dialogue. Co-produced accounts would be in line
with Weick’s suggestion of co-creating such accounts to continue the dialogue in a
meaningful way with the goal of “getting the account ‘right’ ” (Weick 1999: 140).
9.5 Conclusion
This chapter set out to explore how process research might produce narratives of
prospect that capture the experience of living forward. We argue that the fusion of a
withness approach and pragmatist inquiry has the potential to come closer to living
forward through exploring ways of co-inquiring with practitioners as equal part
ners. Researchers join the flux of living forward, consequently applying process phil
osophy as “put[ting] yourself in the making” (James, 1909). For this, we build on the
one hand on the relationally responsive dialogic interactions of a withness approach
with the research participants to aid in exploring situations to find new possibilities
for action. On the other hand, we build on the epistemology inherent to pragmatist
inquiry and the collective nature of the community of inquiry to extend the dia
logical inquiry of a withness approach by adding the critical role of pluralist deliber
ating, hypothesizing, and experimenting.
This chapter reflects only the early stages of designing a methodology for pragma
tist withness inquiry. By no means do we want to insinuate that we have addressed all
the issues. For example, dissemination of pragmatist withness would probably require
new ways of writing and using multimedia experience, which we have been unable to
address fully due to space limitations. We do hope, however, to have built the founda
tions needed for other “adventurous inquirers to dive in and explore more of what
pragmatism [fused with a withness approach] may have to offer” (Simpson, 2017: 66).
We hope to have engaged readers in a discussion to design this approach further and
to embark on the exciting journey towards achieving forms of process research that
include the prospective and the performative.1
Note
1. We would to thank several colleagues for their generous feedback. The feedback from the
editor and the three reviewers helped tremendously in getting the chapter to higher levels.
Earlier drafts of the chapter were presented during a Workshop on Design Science at TU
Eindhoven, the PDW of PROS 2018, and the Warwick Summer School on Practice-Based
Studies 2018, and we are grateful for the feedback we received there. We also have to thank
colleagues at the Warwick Winter School for Advanced Video Methods, who gave insight
ful comments during a data session. Next, we received generous feedback from Katinka
Bergema, Katharina Dittrich, Hans Berends, Barbara Simpson, Ann Langley, and Hari
Tsoukas, which helped at crucial stages. Throughout the process, we had several chances to
explore and practice the methodology. We must thank the UX-team for their generous
support in allowing us to explore this methodology: Michael Verheijden, Desie van den
Belt, Odeke Lenior, Christianne Francovich, Martijn Roza, Yannick Gloudemans, and
Linda van der Meijden. We had the chance to practice with Katharina Dittrich and Barend
Klitsie, who provided much-needed feedback. Last but not least, Yan Feng has helped
incredibly throughout the process as a trusted sparring partner, encouraging in doubtful
situations and a deeply processual thinker.
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10
Organizational Time in Historical
Perspective
Foundational Thinking and the Case for
Social Cycle Research
John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson
10.1 Introduction
In this chapter we argue that sociologists have historically emphasized what might
be termed realist, structural or determinist explanations of time at the expense of
ethnographic, interpretive or process-oriented ones (Hassard, 1990). Indeed, ana
lyses of organizational time have tended to reflect one of two realist traditions: func-
tionalist studies of time structuring and critical examinations of temporal
commodification. Both traditions have invoked primarily linear metaphors when
illuminating core issues of industrial or organizational time, and notably so when
examining work experience under various forms of production and service systems.
In contrast, sociological research seeking to account for the more heterogeneous
and recursive nature of time—inquiry often taking recourse to cyclical or other
process-oriented metaphors—has historically been thinner on the ground. In stud-
ies of industrial and organizational behavior, for example, relatively few researchers
have focused on how actors experience working time symbolically in “social cycle”
terms (Sorokin, 1957)—in other words, how they obtain meaning through the
recurrence of temporally ordered events and construct their own cultural time-
reckoning systems based on such experience. In this regard, we are concerned ana-
lytically with how time and temporality at work can be appreciated from social
anthropological, ethnographic, and thus qualitative viewpoints.
In this analysis, therefore, we discuss sociological work on time not only in the
“linear-quantitative” tradition but also in relation to studies which have developed
“cyclical-qualitative” interpretations. Initially, on developing a conceptual frame-
work, we offer explanations of working and organizational time from the historically
John Hassard, Stephanie Decker, and Michael Rowlinson, Organizational Time in Historical Perspective: Foundational Thinking
and the Case for Social Cycle Research In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane
Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © John Hassard, Stephanie
Decker, and Michael Rowlinson.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0010
dominant linear-quantitative tradition, and notably in relation to one of the most

influential theoretical traditions in industrial and organizational sociology of the last
fifty years, labor process theory (sensu Braverman, 1974). Here we draw upon theor
ies of working time in social history to explain how the economic structures of
industrialism gave rise to a range of linear metaphors—metaphors which have sig-
nificantly influenced the time perceptions of modern societies. This analysis pro-
vides a basis for illustrating just how the linear-quantitative paradigm became
dominant in the sociology of time.
Whilst recognizing the importance of the linear tradition, we argue subsequently
that for industrial and organizational sociology it does not provide a sufficient basis
for explaining the nature of time symbolically in relation to work experience. In par-
ticular, it can be argued that the linear tradition has neglected interpretive and phe-
nomenological aspects of working time and thus the importance, diagnostically, of
cyclical and processual metaphors. To redress the balance, and by turning primarily
to French and American traditions of social time research, we illustrate analytical
affinities between cyclical and qualitative time notions. We develop this analysis to
explain the subjective and inter-subjective perception of working time and specific
ally by reference to findings from four ethnographic investigations that addressed
such issues prior to postmodernism. As a result, the chapter considers retrospect
ively the case for promoting social cycle research in ethnographic studies of organ
izational time.
10.2 Foundational Thinking on Time and Temporality

To produce this historical overview, it is important that we first construct a concep-
tual framework. To achieve this, we draw upon some of the main images of time in
social philosophy, and then upon two of the main time metaphors in social theory.
These concerns are then brought together in the main body of the chapter.
10.2.1 Philosophical Issues
Speaking broadly, of the two dimensions which define existence, time and space, the
former has always presented greater difficulties regarding definition. Traditionally,
the main thrust of analysis has come from philosophers, although more recently
time has been a significant concern for physicists, biologists, and historians. Social
scientists, however, have arguably been slower to engage the concept theoretically,
and particularly sluggish in deploying it as a central dimension in empirical work.
By way of contrast, in philosophy there is a long and scholarly history of temporal
analysis, with the concept of time being a central issue of philosophical inquiry for
over 2,000 years (Koselleck, 1985). Here, debate is found at several analytical levels,
ranging from ontological concerns with time and existence, to epistemological
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 171
concerns with time and understanding. It is a tradition which has yielded a wealth of
abstract and complex questions, such as: does time flow, is there an arrow of time, is
time dynamic or static, is time merely the perception of motion, and even is there
such a thing as time at all (Baron and Miller, 2019)?
Although a detailed analysis of such questions is beyond our scope, we can at least
identify some of the main traditional—notably dualistic—issues to confront scholars
of time. First, at the level of ontology, is whether we should regard time as an object
ive fact “out there” in the external world, or as a subjective essence constructed via a
“network of meanings”: in other words, should we conceptualize time as real and
palpable or essential and abstract? Second, is whether we should theorize time as
homogeneous (time units are experienced comparably) or as heterogeneous (time
units are experienced differentially); or put another way, is time continuous and
infinite or atomistic and epochal? And third, is whether social time can be meas-
ured, and if so, whether we can have more than one valid time; should we regard
time as a unitary quantifiable commodity or as a pluralistic qualitative experience
(Callender, 2011)?
Through a sociological lens, the ways in which we answer such questions essen-
tially determines how we conceptualize time. These are issues which have pragmatic
implications for social affairs—for as a culture develops a dominant concept of time,
it answers these questions at every point of its evolution. Indeed, with the reconcili
atory arguments of postmodernism notwithstanding—work often promoting “the
ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” (Barad, 1998: 87; also Hassard
and Parker; 1993; Linstead, 2004; Cunliffe, 2011)—traditional sociological antino-
mies continue to provide valuable means for interpreting the nature of social and
organizational time.
10.2.2 Thinking Metaphorically

When seeking to conceptualize time and temporality another powerful tool for
social and organizational analysis is metaphor (Manning, 1979; Tinker, 1986;
Cornelissen, 2005). Indeed, over the decades metaphors and related tropes have
been useful for explaining a range of sociological concepts (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980). For organizational analysis, perhaps the best-known work in this
area is Gareth Morgan’s (1986) book, Images of Organization, in which he interpreted
organizations variously as “systems,” “machines,” “dramas,” “organisms,” and even
“psychic prisons.” Since its first publication this book—like Morgan’s earlier influen-
tial work Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (1979, with Gibson
Burrell)—has become a classic in the canon of management literature, providing a
rich theoretical resource for exploring the complexity of modern organizations.
For the concept of time, however, arguably fewer primary metaphors (Grady, 1997;
Cornelissen and Kafouros, 2008) have been developed to conceptualize what is, like
organization, a somewhat elusive notion. Of the few that have, the most regularly
rehearsed have been variants of the “cycle” and the “line” (Hassard, 2001), although
writers have discussed other primary metaphors, such as “helical” time, plus a large
number of secondary or “complex” metaphors (Cornelissen et al., 2008). For the
metaphor of the cycle, one of the most influential historical analyses is Mircea
Eliade’s (1959) book Cosmos and History, in which he describes inter alia how the
cycle is the basic time metaphor of (pre-Christian) “archaic man.” He suggests that
for archaic societies events unfolded in an ever recurring rhythm—where sense of
time was developed out of the struggle with the seasons, and with the “horizon of
time” being defined by the notion of the “eternal return.” Eliade argues that when
“Christian man” abandoned this bounded world in favor of linear progression to
redemption and salvation, then for the first time he was exposed to the dangers
inherent in the historical process. For Eliade “modern man,” in response, has sought
refuge in various forms of faith in order to rationalize a historical process that seems
to have neither beginning nor end. In a complex metaphorical treatise, Eliade
describes how in the face of such uncertainty modern scholars have often sought to
“master history” and bring it to a conclusion, as in the writings of Marx and Hegel.
A similar symbolic argument was developed by Sebastian de Grazia (1974) in
Time, Work and Leisure. Grazia argues that while primitive concepts of time were
dominated by the metaphor of the cycle, for modern societies Christian beliefs pro-
vided the image of time as a straight line—as a testing pathway from sin on earth,
through redemption, to eternal salvation in heaven. He contends that in the evolu-
tion of modern culture the idea of irreversibility replaced that of the eternal return.
The distinguishing feature of ultimate progression thus led the way to a linear con-
cept of time. Grazia relates how in Book Two of Confessions, Augustine “broke the
circle” of Roman time. In contrast to Herodotus and his notion of the cycle of human
events, Augustine “dispelled false circles” and instead purported the straight line of
human history. In so doing, Grazia describes how history began to be dated from the
birth of Jesus Christ, even though culturally Anno Domini chronology only became
widespread during the eighteenth century.
Sociologically, it can be argued that the linear metaphor has been influential due
to its link to a further notion—time as a commodity. During the rise of industrial
capitalism this sense of linearity was to find time equated with value, as
E. P. Thompson (1963) described in The Making of the English Working Class. In
Thompson’s work technological and manufacturing innovations see time closely
aligned with industrial progress. Time, like the individual, becomes a commodity
of the production process, for in the equation linking acceleration and accumula-
tion, a human value can be placed upon time. As Karl Marx argued in the first vol-
ume of Das Kapital (1867), surplus value can be accrued through extracting more
time from laborers than is required to produce goods having the value of their
wages. Other influential metaphors similarly emphasized temporal formality and
scarcity, with notions from Newton and Descartes suggesting, for example, that
time was real, uniform, and all-embracing; it was a mathematical phenomenon; it
could be plotted as an abscissa.
In such metaphorical thinking, therefore, modern cultures are often theorized as

adopting primarily linear time perspectives (Dawson and Sykes, 2016). Here, the
past is unrepeatable, the present is transient, and the future is infinite and exploit
able. Time is homogeneous: it is objective, measurable, and infinitely divisible; it is
related to change in the sense of motion and development; it is quantitative. Whereas
in theology the linear metaphor of time anticipates the promise of eternity, in the
material world of modern capitalism it suggests time being measured in finite units
of productive performance. Time is a resource that has the potential to be consumed
by a plethora of activities and its scarcity is intensified when the number of potential
claimants is increased. In advanced societies time scarcity makes events become
more concentrated and segregated, with special “times” being given over to various
forms of activities. Here time is experienced as a way of locating human behavior
and fixing action that is particularly appropriate to circumstances.
By uniting the ideas of linearity and value we begin to conceive of time as a limited
good, for its scarcity enhances its worth. In Metaphors We Live By (1980) Lakoff and
Johnson crystallized this idea by discussing three secondary metaphors linked to
linear time: time as money; time as a limited resource; time as a valuable commod-
ity. The suggestion is that, under capitalism, time and money are increasingly
exchangeable commodities: time is one means by which money can be appropriated,
in the same way as money can be used to buy time; money increases in value over
time, while time can be invested now to yield money later.
This quantitative, commodified image of time has often been considered a by-
product of industrialism. In Technics and Civilisation (1934: 14) historian and phil
osopher Lewis Mumford stressed “the clock, not the steam engine [was] the key
machine of the industrial age.” He argued that rapid developments in synchroniza-
tion were responsible for organizations of the industrial revolution being able to
display such high levels of functional specialization. In turn the emergence of large
firms required considerable segmentation of both parts (roles and positions) and
activities in time and space. Such specialization set requirements for extensive time/
space coordination, both at intra- and inter-organizational levels. As high levels of
coordination needed high levels of planning, sophisticated temporal schedules were
necessary to provide a satisfactory degree of predictability. The basis of prediction
became that of sophisticated measurement, with efficient organization becoming
synonymous with detailed temporal assessments of productivity. As historically the
machine became the focal point of work, so time schedules became the central fea-
ture of planning (Gantt, 1919). During the course of industrialism, the clock
emerged as the instrument of coordination and control, with the time period
replacing the task as the focal unit of production.
In his famous article “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (1967),
historian E. P. Thompson argued that industrialism witnessed a crucial change in the
employment relation, for it was now time rather than skill or effort that was para-
mount. In large-scale manufacturing, the worker became subject to extremely elab
orate and detailed time-discipline. Whereas prior to industrialism most craft
workers were self-employed—working in their own homes, with their own tools,
and to their own hours—the coming of the factory system saw progressive temporal
rigidification. Before the industrial revolution, Thompson argues, a key characteris-
tic of work was its irregularity, for periods of intense working could be followed by
ones of relative inactivity. There was for example the (pre-industrial) tradition of
“St Monday,” where Monday might be taken as a casual day, like Saturday and Sunday,
with most work being completed in the middle of the week. Moreover, the length of
the pre-industrial or agricultural working day was irregular and determined largely
by the time of the year. Thompson’s (1967: 56) quote from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of
the d’Urbervilles complements his analysis well: “Tess . . . started her way up the dark
and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches
of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.”
Thus, in contrast to the task-oriented temporal experience of pre-industrial soci
eties, the linear-quantitative tradition emphasizes how, under industrial capitalism,
not only did the great majority of workers become subject to rigidly determined
time agendas, but they also became remunerated in temporal units: paid by the hour,
day, week, month, or year. The omnipresence of the factory clock brought with it the
notion that the worker is exchanging time rather than skill: selling labor-time rather
than labor. Workers were forced to sell their labor by the hour as time became a
commodity to be earned, saved, or spent.
10.2.3 The Hegemony of Clock Time
Out of this form of analysis, social and organizational theory came to view “modern”
or “industrial” conceptions of time as hegemonic structures whose essences are pre-
cision, control, and discipline. In industrial societies, the clock becomes the domin
ant machine of productive organization; it provides the signal for labor to commence
or halt activity. Workers must consult the clock before they begin working. Although
life in industrial societies became structured around times allocated for many activ
ities, it is always production that takes preference. While under industrial capitalism
Grazia (1972: 439) suggests “man is synchronised to work, rather than technology
being synchronised to man,” similarly for auto magnate Henry Ford the key to suc-
cessful mass manufacture was to take the “work to the man,” not the “man to the
work” (Brinkley, 2004).
It is indeed no accident that the opening credits of Charlie Chaplin’s (1936) cele-
brated film about the onset of mass production in American industry, Modern
Times, are listed against the backdrop of a large clock. Chaplin is saying that in
modern societies, time is given to production first; other “times” (familial, communal,
etc.) must be fitted around the margins of the production process. Ideal organizations
are those having temporal assets which are highly precise in their structuring
and distribution. The impression is of technological determinism dominating our
perceptions of time; of arithmetical equations providing solutions to time problems
in the context of there being finite limits and optimal solutions to temporal structur-
ing. The implicit rule is that a modern society is effective only if its members follow a
highly patterned series of temporal conventions; each society’s productive day must
be launched precisely on time, even if this results in “alienation” rather than “free-
dom” (Blauner, 1964). In this process, clock time holds distinct advantages for cap
ital as it is both visible and standardized. It has two strengths in particular: it provides
a common organizing framework to synchronize activities, and it commodifies labor
as a factor of production (Blyton et al., 1989; Tuckman, 2005).
It is indeed from this scenario that, for industrial sociology, Frederick Winslow
Taylor was to emerge as the heir to Adam Smith’s metaphoric pin factory and
become the high priest of rational time use (Kanigel, 1997; Cummings et al., 2017).
It is in the manuals of industrial engineers following Taylor that are found the logical
conclusions to the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, and Babbage. Scientific Management,
and the time and motion techniques that were its legacy, established by direct
administrative authority what the machine accomplished indirectly—fine control of
human actions. In Taylorism we arguably reach the highpoint in separating labor
from the varied rhythms experienced in craft or agricultural work: clock rhythms
replace fluctuating rhythms; machine-pacing replaces self-pacing; labor serves
technology.
For industrial sociology, therefore, the linear conception of time became “com-
modified” due to a major change in economic development: when time was dis
covered as a factor in production (Hassard, 2001). Time was a value that could be
translated into economic terms: “it became the medium in which human activities,
especially economic activities, could be stepped up to a previously unimagined rate
of growth” (Nowotny, 1976: 330). Time was now a major symbol in the production
of economic wealth. Under industrial capitalism, timekeepers were the new regu
lators and controllers of work; they quantified and transformed activity into monet
ary value. When time became deemed a valuable commodity then its users were
obliged to display good stewardship—time was scarce and must be used rationally.
10.3 Rethinking the Linear Tradition

Historically, therefore, linear and quantitative metaphors have been employed to
describe how, under capitalism, time became an object for consumption. In this
view, time is essentially reified and given commodity status so that surplus value can
be extracted from labor. The emphasis is upon time as a condition and criterion of
the employment relation—an objective parameter rather than an experiential state.
However, in terms of foundational sociological thinking the standard
linear-quantitative thesis on time and temporality—often associated with studies of
“Taylorism and Fordism” requires qualification. When embraced historically by
industrial and organizational sociologists, it perhaps results in overstating the deter-
ministic rationality, for example, of production technologies and understating the
social construction of temporal meaning in the workplace. In other words, there has
been a tendency to downplay the experience of temporal flexibility in a range of func-
tions emerging within the rise of the modern corporation (in corporate planning,
marketing, research and development, sales, etc.) Moreover, while the work of many
professional occupations (accountants, consultants, engineers, lawyers, etc.) has
customarily reflected event-based task trajectories, the work of many non-professional
occupations (such as “blue light” workers, trades people, maintenance workers, etc.)
has also traditionally reflected irregular, if not necessarily s elf-determined, operational
patterns. In addition, it can be argued that the historical dom in
ance of the
linear-quantitative tradition appears somewhat anachronistic in an era where, for
many nations, the service sector now dominates the economic landscape.
We can begin to question, therefore, why in the history of industrial and organ
izational sociology the linear-quantitative thesis has been applied so readily as the
basis for explaining the nature of time at work. Whereas many applied sociologists
have suggested that progressive temporal commodification accompanied increased
de-skilling at work—notably in the wake of Harry Braverman’s (1974) influential
monograph Labor and Monopoly Capital—others suggest that time-structuring
practices at work are far more complex than, and by no means so deterministic as,
much labor process theory has habitually implied. A notable proponent of this alter-
native position has been the British sociotechnical theorist Peter Clark, who in an
against-the-grain book, Organizational Transitions and Innovation-Design (1988,
with Kenneth Starkey), contended it was naive for organizational sociologists to
assume that working time must be routinely commodified into a highly fractionated
division of labor through “Taylorian recipes.” Drawing on alternatives to labor pro-
cess theory, the book offered examples of task designs that were not anticipated by
Marxist or Marxian theory, such as under sociotechnical systems design, where a
key to improving productivity, and also the quality of working life, was permitting
greater temporal autonomy for employees. Under sociotechnical approaches—
which gained much profile through experiments in the Scandinavian auto industry,
and later influenced team-working and empowerment philosophies—time structur-
ing was somewhat taken away from managers and handed over to members of the
autonomous work group. Therefore, although F. W. Taylor’s prescriptions reflected a
“tight bundle” of productive elements—combining, for example, time study with
method study, payment systems, and organization structure—it is a bundle, Clark
and Starkey argue, that was seldom applied in its entirety in Britain or America, a
theme developed by Clark in other books, such as Innovation and the Auto Industry
(1985, with Richard Whipp), Anglo-American Innovation (1987), and Organizational
Innovation (2003).
The suggestion here is that many of the metaphors and scenarios emerging from
“strong” versions of the linear-quantitative thesis—and from labor process analysis in
particular—require scrutiny. The standard impression of Taylorist and Fordist work
practices is of homogeneous activities being measured in micro-seconds to realize
optimal aggregate production output. However, as organizational ethnographers have
documented, this image ignores the power of work groups, on even the most exter-
nally determined task processes, to construct their own time-reckoning systems
(Hassard et al., 2018). Whilst in comparison to other forms of organization the tem-
poral inventories of manufacturers are relatively exact, they nevertheless remain of
somewhat bounded rationality when we consider the role of contingent factors such
as effort level, technical failure, and market demand. In fact, for contemporary
market-based organizations, time inventories are arguably seldom as determined and
finite as many so-called “rational” models of workplace behavior would portray.
Furthermore, the luxury of long-term commercial time horizons has rarely been
available to firms within the economically and technologically “turbulent fields” of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
It can be argued, therefore, that organizational time has always been an analytic
ally far richer phenomenon than portrayed habitually in industrial and organiza
tional sociology. Sociological perspectives prevailing for much of the twentieth
century, for example, such as functionalism and structuralism, often failed to cap-
ture the complexity of organizational temporality. Arguably such perspectives
tended to concentrate mostly on delineating ideal types of temporal structuring or
suggesting that the nature of working time essentially reflects the social relations of
(capitalist) production. To conduct meaningful research into working time, it can be
argued that we have always needed in-depth nominalist as well as realist approaches
for understanding organizational behavior; methods which access subjective/inter-
pretive well as objective/structural facets of time in the workplace. The concern has
tended to be, however, that in contrast to the critical-structuralist juggernaut of
“Bravermania” highly influential from the 1970s and 1980s onwards—
“anti-structural” (Hassard and Wolfram Cox, 2013) studies of temporal experience
have been much thinner on the ground, with the qualitative dimension of working
time being generally understated and research evidence found only in occasional
pieces of organizational ethnography.
10.4 Social Cycle Perspectives

The question remains, therefore, of how best to advance a case for the development
of ethnographic and process-oriented perspectives on time and temporality in
organizational research. In championing such an approach the claim we make is that
historically we are not as bereft of theoretical models or empirical contributions as
we might think. We note at the outset that the identification of subjective and ethno-
graphic themes has long been a major concern of both the French and American
traditions in the social anthropology of time.
In the French tradition, for example, the writings of Hubert (1905), Hubert and
Mauss (1909); Durkheim (1912), and Mauss (1947, 1950) all emphasize the rhyth-
mical nature of social life through developing ethnographic conceptions of time,
rather than representing time as simply measurable duration. For example, Hubert
(1905) defined time as a symbolic structure representing the organization of society

through its temporal rhythms, this being a theme also developed by Durkheim
(1912), who analyzed time as a product of collective consciousness. For Durkheim,
“collective time” is the sum of procedures which interlock to form the cultural
rhythm of a given society. He argues, for example: “The rhythm of collective life
dominates and encompasses the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from
which it results; consequently, the time that is expressed dominates and encompasses
all particular durations” (1912: 69). For Durkheim, therefore, time is derived from
social life and becomes the subject of collective representations: it is fragmented into
a plethora of temporal activities which are reconstituted into an overall cultural
rhythm that gives it meaning (see also Koselleck, 1985).
Later, one of the most ambitious attempts to outline the qualitative and heteroge-
neous nature of social-time was made by the French sociologist-cum-jurist Georges
Gurvitch (1964) in his book The Spectrum of Social Time. In a refined, if at times
somewhat opaque, thesis, Gurvitch offers a typology of eight “times” to illustrate the
temporal complexity of modern society (i.e. enduring, deceptive, erratic, cyclical,
retarded, alternating, pushing, explosive). He illustrates how cultures are character-
ized by a mélange of conflicting times, and social groups are constantly competing
over a choice of “appropriate” times. Like earlier writers, Gurvitch distinguishes
between the micro-social times characteristic of groups and communities and the
macro-social times characteristic, for example, of systems and institutions. He
makes regular reference to a plurality of social times and notes how in different
social classes we find different timescales and levels operating. Gurvitch suggests
that through analyzing time at the societal level we can reveal a double timescale
functioning—with on the one hand the “hierarchically ordered and unified” time of
social structure and on the other the “more flexible time” of society itself (1964: 391).
More recently, in Presentism and Experiences of Time, François Hartog (2003)
argues in a similarly heterogeneous vein that our “presentist present” is by no means
as uniform or definite as we might think. In an analysis highlighting the contradict
ory qualities of our contemporary temporal understanding, he suggests time is
experienced very differently depending on the position one occupies in society.
Hartog describes how on the one hand we can be temporally absorbed (as well-paid
professionals) in “global movements” and “accelerated flows” or else (like casual
workers, living from hand to mouth) destined to existence in a “stagnant present.”
He argues that the latter possesses no “recognized past” or “real future”—it is instead
a world in which the encouraging temporality of “plans and projects” is largely
inaccessible. Hartog’s analysis suggests therefore that the present can be experienced
not only as “emancipation” but also as “enclosure,” with similarly the future being
perceived as “promise” but also as “threat.”
In America, Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton (1937) also highlighted the
qualitative nature of social time, notably in work that laid the ground for social cycle
theory (Sorokin, 1957). In the process Sorokin and Merton drew on the French trad
ition, citing the sociological influence of Durkheim (1912) and also early cultural
anthropologists such as Codrington (1891), Hodson (1908), Nilsonn (1920), Best

(1922), and Kroeber (1923). This synthesis allows Sorokin and Merton to identify
qualitative themes at both micro and macro levels of analysis. Whilst, at the micro
level, they emphasize the discontinuity, relativity, and specificity of time (“social
time is qualitatively differentiated,” 1937: 615), they also suggest, like Durkheim,
that: “units of time are often fixed by the rhythm of collective life” (1937: 615).
Indeed, Sorokin and Merton take this position a step further. Whereas, for example,
Evans-Pritchard (1940) in his studies of the Nuer illustrates how certain activities
give significance to social time, Sorokin and Merton adopt a position more charac-
teristic of the sociology of knowledge. They argue that meaning comes to associate
an event with its temporal setting, and that recognition of specific periods is
dependent on the degree of significance attributed to them. Drawing again on
anthropological notions, Sorokin and Merton argue that “systems of time reckoning
reflect the social activities of the group” (1937: 620). They suggest interpretive
notions of time are important not only for analyzing primitive but also modern soci-
eties, suggesting ultimately that: “Social time is qualitative and not purely quantita-
tive. . . . These qualities derive from the beliefs and customs common to the
group. . . . They serve to reveal the rhythms, pulsations, and beats of the societies in
which they are found” (1937: 623).
What might be termed this “cyclical-qualitative” literature suggests, therefore,
that modern societies, as well as primitive ones, hold pluralities of time-reckoning
systems, and that these are based on combinations of duration, sequence, recur-
rence, and meaning. Unlike with linear and homogeneous time reckoning, there is
no uniformity of pace and no quantitative divisibility or accumulation of time units.
Instead the emphasis is on cultural experience and “sensemaking” (Weick, 1995): on
creating temporal meanings rather than responding to temporal demands. The goal
is to explain the largely ethnographic and interpretive nature of social time.
10.5 Ethnographic Exemplars for Organizational

Research
Finally, having examined theoretical notions underpinning a social cycle
paradigm—notably from foundational contributions in anthropology and sociology—
we discuss how prototypes for organizational research can be found in previous
ethnographic studies of workplace temporal experience. In so doing, we present as
exemplars four social cycle studies of organizational time developed prior to the
advent of postmodernism: that is, inquiries developed before sociologically
“synthetic” thinking gained intellectual purchase, from around the mid-1980s. The
prototypical studies in question are: Donald Roy’s (1959) account of t ime-structuring
rituals amongst factory workers; Peter Clark’s (1978, 1985) proposals for linking
temporal experience with organization structure; Jason Ditton’s (1979) analysis
of time strategies among bakery workers; and Ruth Cavendish’s (1982) study of
temporal experience and organizational politics in assembly work. These studies all
emphasize the voluntarist nature of time structuring, develop their explanations
from ideographic data, and in so doing reflect nominalist ontology. As such they
arguably provide a vanguard of exemplars for those wishing to construct an ethno-
graphic process-based paradigm for organizational time—one founded on key elem
ents of social cycle theory.
Of these accounts, Donald Roy’s is probably the best known. In what has become
a classic paper in industrial and organizational sociology, he outlined how workers
who were subject to extremely monotonous tasks can make their experiences bear
able by putting meaning into their (essentially meaningless) working days. In Roy’s
machine shop, the work was both long (twelve-hour day, six-day week) and tedious
(simple machine operation). In reflective, auto-ethnographical, and above all par-
ticipant observation-based research, he described how he nearly quit the work
immediately when first confronted with the combination of the “extra-long workday,
the infinitesimal cerebral excitement, and the extreme limitation of physical move-
ment” (1959: 207). It was only on discovering the “game of work” which existed
within the shop that the job became bearable. The group in which he worked had
established its own event-based, time-reckoning system for structuring the day—
although it was one which took some time to understand. As the working day
stretched out infinitely, the group punctuated it with several informal social “times,”
each of which was the signal for a particular form of interaction. The regularity of
“peach time,” “banana time,” “window time,” “pick-up time,” “fish time,” and “coke
time,” together with the specific themes (variations on “kidding” and “serious”
themes) which accompanied each time, meant that instead of the day being endless
durée it was transformed into a series of regular and recurrent social activities. In
place of one long time horizon, the day contained several short horizons. Roy
explains that after his initial discouragement with the meagerness of the situation, he
gradually began to appreciate how “interaction was there, in constant flow. It cap-
tured attention and held interest to make the long day pass. The twelve hours of
‘click,—move die,—click,—move die’ became as easy to endure as eight hours of
varied activity in the oil fields or eight hours of playing the piece work game in a
machine shop. The ‘beast of boredom’ was gentled to the harmlessness of a kitten”
(1959: 164).
Jason Ditton’s (1979) analysis of the time perceptions of bakery workers is very
much in the same tradition. Like Roy, he describes the social construction of times,
and how workers develop “consumatory acts to manage the monotony of
time . . . breaking endless time down into digestible fragments to make it psycho
logically manageable” (1979: 160). He illustrates how time is both handled differ-
ently and experienced differently according to the type of work being done. For
example, in the bakery studied there were two main production lines—the “big
(bread) plant” and the “small (roll) plant,” each with a range of tasks. Whereas in the
“big” plant the work was physically more difficult (“hot, hard and heavy”), it was
preferred because the number and speed of events made the day pass quickly.
In contrast, life on the “small” plant was made bearable only because slower
production meant there were more opportunities to “manipulate” time.
In Ditton’s study, not only do we see (as in Roy’s account) the use of event-based
time reckoning to give meaning to the day, but further how such time reckoning is
strategic. Ditton shows not only how managers and workers possess differing time
strategies but also how these are linked to differing temporal orientations. Ditton dis-
tinguishes between the more linear time orientations of management and the more
cyclical time orientations of workers. Management is consumed with the linearity of
clock time—with the calculation and division of duration, and with the relentless
demands and pace of the machinery. Workers, on the other hand, use their k nowledge
of event-based cycles in order to control time. Additionally, the bakery workers pos-
sessed a whole repertoire of “unofficial instrumental acts” for exercising control over
the pace of the line, and Ditton’s work is aimed, specifically, at showing how these acts
were appropriated, for example, as strategies for “making time,” “taking time twice,”
“arresting time,” “negotiating time,” and “avoiding time.” Through this analysis Ditton
was able to show how, in the bakery, individual work roles were often evaluated
according to their potential for manipulating time to a worker’s advantage.
Ruth Cavendish (1982) was another around this time to illustrate the strategic
importance of time in the workplace. In her account of women assembly workers
“doing time,” she portrays time as fundamental to the political struggle between
capital and labor, in an analysis that suggests potential fusion with labor process
analysis. Cavendish argues that as time was what the assemblers were paid for they
made sharp distinctions between “our time” and “their time.” Time-obedience was
the crucial discipline that management had to enforce, and skirmishes over clocking
off were more than just symbolic: “they were real attempts by them [managers] to
encroach on our time and, by us [workers] to resist such encroachments” (1982:
117). In a detailed ethnographic account Cavendish describes, for example, how
“UMEC counted the minutes between 4.10 and 4.15 in lost UMO’s [unit of output],
and every day the last few minutes before lunch and before the end of the afternoon
were tense—each side tried to see what it could get away with” (1982: 117).
Like Roy and Ditton, Cavendish outlines how working time is not only an object
ive boundary condition, but also a subjective state, as she explains how time was
experienced differently according to the situation a work group faced. Cavendish
describes how working on the production line “changed the way you experienced
time altogether,” and how “the minutes and hours went very slowly but the days
passed by very quickly once they were over, and the weeks rushed by” (1982: 117).
She notes how there was habitually consensus amongst the women as to the speed at
which time was passing, for “Everyone agreed whether the morning was fast or slow,
and whether the afternoon was faster or slower than the morning” (1982: 112). Like
Roy (1959), Cavendish notes how the women developed a number of recurrent time
“rituals” and that these served both to “make the day go faster and divide up the
week.” As Cavendish argued suggestively: “All the days were the same, but we made
them significant by their small dramas” (1982: 115).
However, while Cavendish, like Roy, shows how such rituals and events gave the
workday an informal time structure, she notes also how the phenomenological per-
ception of time was not always homogeneous. In the interstices between rituals or
events, or simply during periods when time seemed unusually burdensome, the
women would devise their own, personal strategies for “getting through” the day.
Cavendish explains how: “Sometimes 7.30 to 9.10 seemed like several days itself, and
I would redivide it up by starting on my sandwiches at 8 a.m. I would look at the
clock when we’d already been working for ages, and find it was still only 8.05, or, on
very bad days 7.50. Then I redivided the time into half hours, and ten-minute
periods to get through, and worked out how many UMO’s I’d have done in ten min-
utes, twenty minutes and half an hour” (1982: 113). In addition, she notes how
members of the group would adopt personal strategies for getting through these
periods: “Arlene was deep in memories, and Alice sang hymns to herself. Grace
always found something to laugh about, and Daphne watched everything that went
on” (1982: 115). Among the group’s members, Cavendish suggests older women
were more adept at handling time, and that it bothered younger women far more. In
particular, older women were skilled at “going inside,” or deciding when to cut off
from chatting in order to pass the time by day-dreaming.
Additionally, in contrast to Roy and Ditton, Cavendish describes how time in
such workplaces can be reckoned differently according to the day of the week. For
example, she notes how Monday was a “good day” timewise because “everyone was
fresh” (“it seemed a long time since Friday”) and the group could catch up on the
weekend’s news. Tuesday, however, was a “very bad day” because it was not special
in any sense. On Wednesday, the supervisor issued the workers with their bonus
points, which would form part of the basis for their pay on Thursday. This made
Wednesday bearable not only because the bonus points gave the group a vehicle for
ritual discussion, but also because—as the points were related to the amount of
pay—it gave the impression that it was “almost Thursday,” and near the end of the
working week (“By Wednesday lunchtime, people would say half the week was over
and we could see our way to Friday afternoon,” 1982: 116). Although Thursday was
pay day, it could be experienced as a “long day” partly because the pay slips arrived
in the first half of the morning. However, the pay slips often served as a vehicle to
give the group “a few minutes interest,” especially if one of the packets had been cal-
culated incorrectly. Friday, although the last day of the week, was also a “slow day” as
there we few rituals to supplement the group’s work. Apart from the horizon of “sub-
sidised fish and chips” at lunchtime, it was a “long haul” to finishing at 4.10. At the
end of the afternoon the women always tried to spin out the last break by an extra
five minutes, so that there was then only half an hour or so to finishing time.
Finally, although operating at a more macro level of analysis, arguably some of the
most innovative social cycle work on organizational time has been accomplished by
Peter Clark (1978; 1985), who in studies of food processing and textile manufacture
illustrated how temporal differentiation represents a crucial link between a firm’s
culture and its structure. Clark was one of the few researchers to go beyond the
small-group level and make this link to organizational forms. He argues that in
depicting organizations in a “static mode”—as under various empirical forms of
functionalism and structuralism—sociologists have failed to consider how struc-
tures themselves can “vary rhythmically” (1978: 406). Following the earlier cycle
theories of Kuznets (1933), Sorokin (1957), and Etzioni (1961), he suggests large
firms can experience periodic differences, for example, in the intensity of produc-
tion or service, and that these, in turn, can reflect significant changes in an organiza
tion’s character and culture.
In a study of sugar beet processing Clark notes how the time frame of the case
company contained “two sharply contrasting sets of recurring activities” (1978: 12).
He describes vividly the marked differences in attitudes between the intensive period
of sugar beet processing, during the autumn, and the more mundane activities that
characterized the factory’s operations during the rest of the year. In so doing, Clark
highlights the cultural rhythms that ebb and flow within the organization, illustrat-
ing for example the excitement and anticipation that characterizes the onset, in
September, of the processing “campaign,” a three-month period during which inter-
personal relationships within the factory appeared to change, as did those between
workers and their families. However, Clark also describes how as the campaign
“matures” the workforce appears to become increasingly alienated from the work of
processing, this bringing overt expressions of control by management. Indeed, by
the end of the campaign Clark describes how the workforce comes to welcome the
second major transitional period—when the workers are dispersed to relatively self-
regulating groups, each working on distinctive tasks. In this study, therefore, we see
two forms of what Clark calls “temporal repertoires” at work, with each reflecting its
own implicit cultural values and structural rules.
In a later study, primarily analyzing organizational innovation, Clark (1985; see
also 1988, 2003) sought a singular concept with which to frame such changing struc-
tural and cultural forces. He found it in Gearing’s (1958) anthropological notion of
the “structural pose”—a concept denoting the set of rules required for categorizing a
recurring situation, the type of social actors required for a situation, and the forms
of action that should be taken. When translated for use in organizational analysis,
Clark suggests structural poses are tacit rules of conduct shared by those familiar
with relationships between structure and culture. They are founded on depth of
cyclical experience and reflect skills of tactical anticipation and expectation. In other
words, they represent implicit strategic blueprints that signal actions to be taken in
response to particular sets of organizational circumstances.
Empirically Clark (1985) used the notion of the structural pose to analyze the
actions of two marketing groups within a large textile firm, and how each reacted to
a major shift in fashion and demand. The groups were from separate divisions and
located in different parts of the country. Further, the personnel of the groups were
dissimilar, with one, “Acorn,” being comprised mainly of experienced staff, and the
other, “Harp,” of employees relatively new to the industry. In this study, Clark shows
how only the Acorn team was able to anticipate and handle the change process
satisfactorily. He explains principally how it did so by “activat[ing] a structural

arrangement by which employees in various parts of the firm were redesignated as
members of an innovation group” (1985: 77). In contrast, the Harp team, which in
the short history of the site had only experienced periods of buoyant demand, inter-
preted poor sales figures as merely the result of a “bad season.” As a result: “It was
some time before they realized that a major shift in style was unfolding. When they
did realize, they had neither the credibility nor the capability to achieve the appro-
priate collateral structure for innovation. It was not in the structural repertoire of
Harp Mill” (1985: 77).
Clark argues, therefore, that organizations possess whole repertoires of structural
poses based on the premise of temporal recursiveness. In developing such reper-
toires, employees can account for the recurrent, but varying, rhythms of the organ
ization, and thus for its heterogeneous time-reckoning system. Clark’s work
illustrates links between temporal experience, structural differentiation, and stra
tegic time reckoning. In work emphasizing cyclical event-based temporal trajector
ies, Clark stresses how firms, over time, draw on recurrent experiences to deal
strategically with complex issues and events, many of which are generated by forces
in the organizational environment.
10.6 Conclusions
In industrial and organizational sociology, the historically dominant image of time is
of a phenomenon that is objective, measurable, highly valued, and scarce. The
emphasis is upon rationality and homogeneity, and the view that time is quantifiable
and evenly distributed. We accept that employment defines the pivotal time around
which other social times are structured. As economic performance is often assessed
by the number of hours it takes to produce goods or offer services, time is given a
commodity image. A corollary is the portrayal of work organizations as marvels of
temporal synchronicity and quantitative time reckoning.
However, in concentrating upon quantitative time, industrial and organizational
sociologists have traditionally overlooked the importance of qualitative time. Stress
has been placed on time structuring rather than temporal experience. The focus has
been upon how time is formally patterned in task systems rather than how it is
“made sense of ” in task execution. In concentrating upon structure and form, and
treating time as a hard, objective, and homogeneous phenomenon, we have neglected
how it can also be experienced in more processual terms: as soft, subjective, and
heterogeneous; as reflective of a “world on the move” (Hernes, 2014) where flow
prevails over stability.
Indeed, from the complex relationships linking employees, the organization, and
the environment there emerge whole ranges of time patterns and rhythms. New
employees learn these rhythms gradually, through knowledge of how the character
of work can change according to the particular time-period being experienced.
While work roles are often structured according to a formal inventory of activities,
employees also learn the “meaning” of work by reference to an informal catalogue of
connected activities and events. Tasks are categorized not only in relation to explicit
work schedules, but also according to cultural and symbolic constructs created and
shared by employees. As we have noted, time is one of the main criteria at play here,
for the experience of employment is inextricably linked to the way time is personally
and socially constructed.
In sum, this chapter has examined those primarily “dualistic” foundational theor
ies of time developed prior to the advent of reconciliatory sociological thinking
under postmodernism from the mid-1980s. We have argued that in industrial and
organizational sociology we have traditionally sought research which accesses not
only the concrete facts of time structuring, but also the subjective flow and essence
of temporal meaning. We have argued that while sociology’s traditional conceptions
of time are based largely on metaphors of linearity, rationality, and quantification,
we have illustrated how such thinking can serve to restrict our awareness of inter-
pretive and processual features of time at work. Instead, by turning historically to the
French and American traditions in the sociology and anthropology of time, we have
argued there can be found a research position more attuned to understanding the
symbolic nature of temporal heterogeneity—one capable, in particular, of illuminat-
ing the more culturally recurrent features of organizational time.
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11
Historical Consciousness
as a Management Tool
Diane Ella Németh Bongers
11.1 Introduction
The increasing call for historical perspectives in organization studies, highlighted by
the concept of “the historic turn” (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004), illustrates that his-
tory has become a central concern in management studies.1 Indeed, history is much
more than just a list of facts (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). History is defined by Seixas
and Peck (2004) as the past, everything that has ever happened to anyone, anywhere.
They insist that the past is located, and therefore it is necessary to understand it and
to give meaning to it, in order to be provided with a wider perspective from which to
evaluate our present preoccupations today for the future. Thus, what Seixas and Peck
(2004) present as essential is the awareness of the past or historical consciousness, a
structure to think historically, to practice history, that shapes how we understand the
past. The historic turn in organizational studies also comes along with a shift towards
history as historical consciousness. Scholars examine history as rhetoric through the
study of historical narratives, to show the ways in which the processes underlying
historical consciousness unfold. As we demonstrate in our literature review, while
most studies of organizational history focus on the use of history by top managers
that we propose to call “tight history,” they seem to ignore the informal articulations
of history that evolve from the lower levels of the organization, which we offer to
label “loose history.” Indeed, tight history is managed top-down whereas loose his-
tory is bottom-up, as it comes from ordinary lower-ranking people. Following the
literature review, we detail our empirical study which investigates the activities and
processes by which actors use history at both the individual and the institutional
levels. Thus, our work aims to provide a contribution to understanding the processes
by which organizations develop different forms of historical consciousness, by pro-
moting both tight and loose history.
Diane Ella Németh Bongers, Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process
Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press
(2020). © Diane Ella Németh Bongers.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0011
11.2 Literature Review

The concepts of “tight” and “loose” have been widely used in the social sciences to
establish typologies (see, for example, Mintzberg’s organizational configurations,
1993) according to tight–loose properties (Peters, Waterman, and Jones, 1982).
Cultural studies scholars compare nations to classify human societies as “tight” or
“loose” (Pelto, 1968). According to Pelto, tight societies are formal and orderly
whereas loose ones are individualistic and expressive. In the same way, Gelfand et al.
(2011) classify nations according to the degree of tolerance people have of deviant
behavior. Triandis’s (2004) view of “tight” and “loose” cultures is also related to
power, authoritarian ones forcing people to comply, while conversely in conciliatory
ones people tend to say “it does not matter.”
Another approach initiated by the concept of coupling (Weick, 1976) also focuses
on organizational culture. Scholars examine the structural relationships among
actors and explore the features of multidimensional fit and interdependence in
organizations (see Meyer, 2002; Orton and Weick, 1990; Beekun and Glick, 2001,
among others), concentrating on the diverse patterns of coupling. This view con
siders organizations as tightly or loosely coupled systems, and focuses on the
decoupling of policy–practice and means–ends, which is purposefully implemented
to serve the interests of powerful leaders (Bromley and Powell, 2012).
The variety of theoretical perspectives appear to be complementary as scholars
have converged on a common view, agreeing that the concepts of “tight” and “loose”
are useful for qualifying cultures or systems, thanks to a focus on their characteriza-
tion and calibration properties. “Tight” relates to being managed and controlled by
top management whereas “loose” refers to individuals in the lower ranks of the
organization. We also subscribe to this vision and believe that these concepts are
relevant to presenting existing theories in an organized way according to whether
they consider history as being managed top-down or bottom-up, as this opens up
opportunities for research. The first of these views will therefore be labelled the
“tight history” perspective, and the second one, the “loose history” perspective.
11.2.1 The Tight History Perspective
The majority of studies in the existing literature examine history as tight history by
stressing history as one of the managing tools. Indeed, Wadhwani, Suddaby,
Mordhorst, and Popp (2018) emphasize the performative role of history in the mak-
ing and unmaking of organizational orders. A study conducted by Smith and Simeone
(2017) examines the Hudson Bay Company’s use of the past to show how organiza-
tional history was successfully converted into an asset to face political threats. With
an emphasis on rhetorical practices, the studies focus on the rhetorical power of his-
tory (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2016), especially in the formation of
legitimate judgments that address the content of messages used for persuasion. Tight
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 191
history is mobilized by organizations and their managers to legitimize their decisions

or actions (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank, 2010), for strategizing (Suddaby and
Foster, 2017; Foster, Corraiola, Suddaby, Kroezen, and Chandler, 2017), or by assimi-
lating history as a resource that forges organizational identity and culture by
managing the collective memory as resources (Funkenstein, 1989; Zundel, Holt, and
Popp, 2016; Corraiola, Suddaby, and Foster, 2017), like, for instance, a recent study
demonstrating how the founder figure is mobilized in a dynamic perspective in
organizational identity construction (Basque and Langley, 2018). As such, history is
used consciously, deliberately, and with a manipulative intent. Researchers study how
individuals are led to adopt a common judgment and are at the same time pushed or
forced to refrain from criticism. Studies therefore address both legitimacy and power.
It is about making believe, persuading, even punishing, to force people to adhere to a
certain way of seeing. To do this, historical consciousness is used as a rhetorical
strategy.
The emphasis on rhetorical history in organizational studies relies on the study of
historical narratives, especially the grand narratives or organizational stories that
express organizational identity claims “to articulate, enact, stretch, preserve or
refresh expressions of organizational identity” (Basque and Langley, 2018: 1685),
even putting forward the cathartic power of myth (Suddaby, Ganzin, and Minkus,
2017). Suddaby et al. propose to replace legitimacy by authenticity because “authen-
ticity requires an organization to remain true to an internalized ideal, identity or
historically defined template of what is real, honest, true or essential about an organ
ization, a product or a practice” (2017: 291). According to them, organizations
should be considered like clans headed by a shaman, having a kind of magical lan-
guage or incantations that allow the organization to be characterized by unique val-
ues produced by a unique history.
The data primarily considered and analyzed by researchers are discourses,
archives, and institutional documents, together with interviews conducted with
managers; historical narratives, both internal and external, that are managed and
controlled by the leadership of an organization. Issues central to this view address
the power and legitimacy dimensions of tight history, but there is a call even among
those who endorse the tight history perspective to widen research by considering
other concerns, other actors and, of course, other data. The tight history perspective
provides a useful but incomplete view of theoretical approaches to history in
management sciences. A greater understanding may therefore be gained by the
exploration of the loose history perspective, as we now propose to demonstrate.
11.2.2 The Loose History Perspective
An emergent stream of research introduces loose history as an alternative perspec-

tive which can offer insights to contrast with earlier studies. These refer to historical
narratives that challenge the dominant history of an organization. Here again,
history is seen as performative, but it is not considered as the prerogative of managers

as it is also used by all organizational actors.
Through an approach focused on legitimacy judgment formation, Smith and
Russell (2016) unveil the micro (individual) and macro (institutional) levels of the
legitimacy process. They show that the process that ensures persistence of legitimacy
judgments and stability of the institutional order is polyphonic. According to them,
constitutive historicism results from an individual evaluator’s own judgment of
social acceptability and a collective consensus about legitimacy that is present at
some higher level. They insist on studying how individuals in organizations contest
interpretations of the past by listening to the voices of a wide range of actors at all
levels of the organizational hierarchy. Bitektine and Haack (2015) also explore the
macro and the micro aspects of legitimacy and show how “silenced” legitimacy judg-
ments and judgment suppressor factors induce evaluators to abstain from making
their deviant judgments public.
The idea of replacing or counterbalancing legitimacy by authenticity is investi-
gated further by Hatch and Schultz (2017), who show that using history authen
tically is much more powerful than manipulating history to legitimate a strategy
already formulated. According to these authors, combining authenticity with
power and legitimacy is a matter of aligning strategic choices with wisdom and
knowledge extracted from the past. They analyze the historicizing activities of the
Carlsberg Group, particularly around the use of the Semper Ardens motto, both to
create a multi-award-winning beer and to spread the motto around the world.
They show that authenticity reinforced the craft dimension of Semper Ardens
beer and enhanced the moral strengthening of the community around the
founders’ philosophies and ideals. Their study demonstrates the benefits for an
organization of including all actors in the historicizing process, a view that
counterbalances the traditional perspective focused on the power usually

conferred to tight history. Hatch and Schultz found that “actors believed that
authenticity would produce acceptance by senior decision makers and/or stake-
holders” (2017: 688). Therefore, they stress that manipulating history is risky
because history has agency and therefore possess power which can be grasped by
any of those who use it.
The prominent role of all organizational actors in the historicism process prompted
some theorists to propose an alternative and emancipatory approach to doing history.
They developed the view of actor-network theory as historiography which they call
ANTi-History, assuming a relational lens to understand the construction of history as
a product of the politics of actor-networks who perform their past (Durepos, 2009;
Durepos and Mills, 2012). By theorizing history, they insist that doing history
depends on an engagement with “history,” “historiography,” and “the past” as well as
with critical approaches to organization studies, arguing that researchers should trace
the performances of actors as they negotiate the past into written histories to see how
the socio-past oscillates as history (2012: 705). Performing history relates in this view
to the spatiotemporal process of doing history, the historical consciousness defined
by Seixas and Peck (2004), a structure of thinking historically which is not just the
prerogative of some specific individuals.
Hence, the loose history perspective incites one to consider various aspects of
context that shape how history contributes to the social construction of reality by
actors. Lubinski (2018) points out that historical claims which revise previously
existing narratives are validated in a continuous dialogue with multiple audiences
and often result in “rhetorical frictions” that require continuous and efficient histor
ical revisions to settle emerging conflicts. By examining the context through the
study of historical narratives, she proposes to address history as lived and experi-
enced, arguing that “the negotiated reception by audiences and the daily practices in
which they are embedded is essential to understanding their socially constructed
veracity” (Lubinski, 2018: 1999). Researching the emergence of rhetorical histories
and their maintenance over time through the study of conflicts, new practices, and
counternarratives should enable scholars to apprehend better how organizations dif-
fer in their ability to construct and use rhetorical capabilities, especially according to
the co-creative dimension of the processes at work in a practice of history that
shapes how organizational actors understand and therefore use the past.
The loose history perspective fosters a social co-construction process of history
by multiple audiences or by interactions between micro and macro levels, insisting
on widening research to include all organizational actors, both managers and
employees. Studies mainly center on the analysis of narratives and stories, individual
and/or institutional, as they situate historical claims by accounting for the places and
practices surrounding their production. However, as Boje, Haley, and Saylors (2016)
illustrate with their title “The Antenarrative Turn in Narrative Studies,” some pro-
pose to look at “the not yet fully-formed narratives, but rather pieces of organiza
tional discourse that help to construct identities and interests” (Boje et al., 2016:
391) to see how actors’ fragmented speculations regarding possible futures may
influence organizational change. For instance, they study the micro stories of man-
agers and other stakeholders in Burger King Corporation’s international strategiz-
ing. Through the stories of collective life inspired by lived experience, they observe
that lower-ranking individuals produce their own historical narratives that are
sometime congruent with those created by managers and reveal the central role of
antenarratives in organizational effectiveness.
By offering an examination of the variety of theoretical perspectives on history,
which we have labelled “tight history” when emanating and managed top-down,
and “loose history” when produced by individuals in a bottom-up direction, we
observe that scholars tend either to concentrate on one perspective only by address-
ing performative issues, or to focus their study on the interplay between levels by
considering the confrontations between them that occur over time. However, we
know little about the processes by which organizations develop different forms of
historical consciousness by promoting both tight and loose history. Therefore, we
attempt here to contribute to the understanding of these processes by elaborating
further on the articulations of tight and loose histories, showing how they are used
in organizational settings. The empirical material is presented here mainly to illus-

trate a theoretical point; we do not pretend to present the data in a very rigorous or
extensive fashion.
11.3 Methods
Earlier studies of historical consciousness focus on the performative dimension of
history through the examination of narrations, especially narrative structures that
show and explain the use of history in organizational settings by analyzing rhetoric
(Lubinski, 2018; Basque and Langley, 2018, among others). Alternative perspectives
have been proposed in recent years to address the doing of history, by highlighting
either its temporality or its spatiality, although the variety of perspectives represent
more complementary than competing approaches. The former view consists of the
orizing about how organizational actors construct reality. Methods here involve
tracing the variations in history by studying the emergence of issues in organiza
tions, their conflict and resolution (Hernes, 2014; Smith and Russell, 2016), or
stressing the performative implications of reinvesting the past (Hatch and Schulz,
2017), tracing the socio-past (Durepos, 2009) by focusing on continuum and change
(see, for example, Basque and Langley’s (2018) “conservative” and “progressive”
invocations). Therefore, scholars study narratives through discourses, archives, and
interviews with managers and/or employees. The latter perspective, in contrast,
insists more on how actors build their various spatial representations of the past by
tracking how history transpires in various settings and artifacts, and widens data
collection by including extensive observations, macro data, such as myths and grand
narratives, and micro data, such as antenarratives (Boje et al., 2016), to better con-
textualize and conduct abductive research.
Our proposal is to consider tight and loose history both in the making and in the
doing of history. Therefore, we need to address simultaneously two different levels:
on the one hand, the individual level, by considering all the various kinds of narra-
tives and practices that are in use within the organization, and which emerge from a
bottom-up process that begins with lower-ranking members of the organization;
and on the other hand, the institutional level, by studying historical narratives and
practices that are managed and controlled by the leadership of the organization. This
implies setting up a relevant data collection design to better grasp the dynamics of
tight history and loose history in the organizational reality as performed and experi-
enced by the actors. Hence, we conducted a longitudinal ethnographic study of a
single case to approach the processes by which organizations develop different forms
of historical consciousness by promoting both tight and loose history.
As we did not seek to address representativeness issues, but rather to explore the
complexity and entanglement of tight and loose history in multiple and intertwined
contexts, a paradigmatic case study seemed quite adapted (Yin, 2009; Stake, 2005;
Mills, Durepos, and Wiebe, 2010, among others). Hence, our research took place in
a company where tight history played a prominent role as the “glue” for organiza
tional identity, and where the fundamental importance of loose history also seemed
to be advanced. Another prerequisite for our five-year longitudinal research project
was to be able to dive into organizational life and enjoy a complete latitude for col-
lecting data, being free to attend to all kinds of external, internal, open, and restricted
events, and with privileged access to everyone and to the company’s archives and
information system.
Our research setting was therefore a very unconventional company, originating
from an unpretentious experiment within a small geographic area, which has con-
stantly evolved and is today an emblematic leader in France. The model is linked to
the emergence of the idea of collective entrepreneurship based on the idea of work
freely chosen and granted, where entrepreneurs identify and implement new forms
of autonomy. Coopaname (which stands for the Cooperative of Paris—Paname in
slang) is a business and employment cooperative (BEC) that promotes a political
vision of businesses as collectives of people that are craftsmen of both their lives and
works. Its raison d’être is to conduct an experiment in cooperativism as an alterna-
tive to capitalism and communism, by placing the economy once more at the service
of human beings. This organization is thus an ideal place in which to study tight
history that supports the organizational model’s development, and the loose history
of individual actors in their simultaneous becoming as autonomous entrepreneurs
and as members of a collective democratic organization.
Of course, we collected a huge amount of data of various types in our study, but
we had to ensure that the collection was extensive in relation to both tight and loose
history, as we easily had access to a plethora of data related to tight history. On the
one hand, we had written data such as corporate external and internal brochures,
corporate digital archives of meetings and assemblies, books and papers published
or presented at conferences, reports of various collective meetings, and surveys and
studies made by external companies. On the other hand, we collected observation
notes, updated a daily logbook, made transcriptions of recorded meetings and inter-
views, explored and captured many pages of the company information system as
well as individual websites of entrepreneurs and of collectives of entrepreneurs, and
of course we kept all the email exchanges we had. These data were essential for
studying loose history and useful for triangulation. They were collected in three dif-
ferent moments. First, we followed the steps of the entry path proposed to new
cooperators and attended all meetings and training sessions. Second, we watched
collective work sessions of several groups held monthly. And third, we attended vari-
ous external and internal corporate assemblies. All along we developed relationships
with actors, surveyed the media and forums, and conducted interviews, although
these were not primary data. Primary data were written documents and exchanges,
and our extensive field notes collected during and after observations.
We proceeded in two stages to make our analysis. At first, we took all data, includ-
ing our observation notes, transcripts of meetings, emails, photographs, interviews
as well as data coming from external and internal archives to triangulate our data,
and considered narratives and antenarratives as well as contexts, audiences, and net-
works. Then, we went deeply into the study by writing dense descriptions (Geertz,
1973) of tight and loose organizational and individual histories, both in time with
chronologies and in space in and across settings to address actors’ lived experience.
We then studied how historical narratives are created and received, and examined
how people historize the past at the individual and institutional levels. To achieve
this, we explored frictions at individual and organizational level and examined the
articulations of tight and loose history. By studying actors’ historicizing methods,
we researched how the structuring and interplay of loose and tight history may help
the organization to achieve its objectives by enhancing the agency of historical
consciousness.
11.4 Findings
First, we concentrate on tight history performed at the macro level by managers to
address external and internal audiences, and show how history has been used to
institute the company as an alternative organizational model fundamentally com-
mitted to cooperative values, as well as to guide its successive transformations, keep-
ing innovating to stay aligned with them. Second, we focus on loose history at the
micro level as individually performed by actors, and how they use history for devel-
oping their businesses as well for contributing to and intervening in various collect
ive projects of the organization.
11.4.1 Tight History
Tight history addresses various audiences both external and internal to the organ
ization. Primarily available as organizational stories experienced and lived collect
ively, they are the “grand narratives” anchored in early pioneers’ experience and
originate from the first associates, some of whom had already endorsed or some-
times would later endorse a social mandate of president or CEO. In addition to the
stories massively transmitted orally, some documents are written. A book was writ-
ten by the initiator of the initial experiment, and papers were presented at confer-
ences and sometimes published in research journals centered on the social economy.
All articles are available on the company’s website. We have reconstructed
Coopaname’s history to highlight the considerable importance that has continuously
been attributed to it, not only to explain, communicate, and legitimize the company,
but also to theorize the project and explore how to go even further. Organizational
history was handled by the first cooperators, who became more and more frequently
associated with external researchers in the social economy and then in law, manage-
ment, sociology or political science. We will first present the institutionalizing pro-
cess and then continue by tracing tight history throughout a project undertaken to
fulfil the legal obligation of setting up staff representation, which illustrates the
interrelation of tight and loose history. To do this, we have drawn on our data to
include antenarratives and fragmented pieces of discourse from workers, managers,
and the media. This was possible because the company is recent, and we had free
access to organizational actors and pioneers who still work there and were direct
convenient providers of data. Some interviews were even conducted with people
who had left the cooperative.
Genesis of Coopaname: The Institutionalizing Process

The main concern of the embryonic experiment was to prevent entrepreneurs from
failing after a few months because they could not earn a sufficient income to live
on. Microcredit, nurseries, and other devices already existed in the 1990s, but
none of them seemed to be able to fully respond to entrepreneurs’ specific needs.
“Entrepreneurship is a practice that requires one to acquire in a short time all the
skills needed to set up and then run a business: know how to produce, know how
to sell and know how to manage.”2 The existing training and coaching services
could not solve some specific difficulties. First, the main actors coaching entrepre-
neurs had no lived experience in running a business. Moreover, entrepreneurs had
more than occasional requests to satisfy, and their sometimes “small” problems
could also become “crucial” problems. Furthermore, everything was usually man-
aged daily without real concern for the long term.
The ideal mode of operation would therefore be to have a global approach articu
lated to a local approach, and to focus on time as a crucial dimension of success. The
motivation and the determination of the entrepreneur appeared to be the key suc-
cess factors, rather than his or her ability to run a business, according to the founder
(Bost, 2011). In view of these observations, a person working for years with entre-
preneurs decided to run an experiment to bridge the gap between the discourse that
tends to present entrepreneurship as achievable by everybody, and the actual prac-
tice of entrepreneurship, which is a path full of pitfalls. Shortly after the beginning of
the experiment, it appeared that “the desire to create a business was more important
for the entrepreneurs than becoming a business manager.”3 Thus, a very large num-
ber of the project initiators who had been welcomed to launch their activity decided
to remain in the company, even though their project was successful. After a few
months, the initial experiment had to be adapted: the company now both had to
continue to welcome and support new project leaders, and had to have an infra-
structure that allowed those with a successful project to stay. Cohabiting entrepre-
neurs are at different stages of their projects. This diversity adds to the great diversity
of projects and people. The experiment had to transform itself to continue to ensure
the mission it had set.
It progressively but quickly became what it defined itself as “a shared enterprise”
project.4 This embryonic enterprise therefore became a new business model, a
shared company, labelled a “cooperative of activity and employment.”5 It was
gradually cloned in several places, particularly in the provinces, and finally was also
set up in Paris in 2004, when Coopaname was registered. The company project is
designed both to coach entrepreneurs who launch a business, and to relieve them of
all the administrative constraints brought about by the management of their busi-
ness once it has become successful. The aim is to facilitate learning by doing, while at
the same time securing the professional career. It was decided to open it to all people
wanting to earn their living thanks to their savoir-faire. “The model is linked to the
emergence of the idea of collective entrepreneurship. It is based on the idea of a
work freely chosen and granted, independent in its aims and methods.”6 Most entre-
preneurs want to do what they do in their own way, at their own pace, with the tools
and techniques they have chosen. This drives entrepreneurs to identify and imple-
ment new forms of autonomy.7
The pooling of resources requires the hiring of people to take care of the support
functions (accounting, secretarial work, etc.). The company is also the initiator and
leader of a BEC network, “Coopérer pour entreprendre,”8 created to be a spokes
person and a recognized and privileged interlocutor. Negotiations and dialogue are
indeed necessary with the public authorities, to give a legal form to what exists in the
company. For example, the model involves creating a specific legal status for employ-
ees, allowing project holders to retain their rights to unemployment, etc. Different
types of co-operators therefore coexisted from that moment in the company, just as
in all BECs: there are “project initiators”, “permanent employees,” and “salaried
entrepreneurs.” What they do allows them to be assigned a status. Everyone may or
may not endorse these statuses, and so can switch from one to the other to fill spe-
cific needs or meet specific objectives, as we will see later in the chapter.
Less than a year after its creation, Coopaname already had more than sixty
cooperators. Especially because of the economic crisis, the growth in project initi
ators was really edifying. Thus, the model soon needed to be adapted again.
According to commercial law, it became a SCOP, a cooperative enterprise in which
the employees hold the majority of the company’s shared capital. Employees elect
the management team, actively participate in decision making, manage the com-
pany, and share its profits, in accordance with the democratic economic principles of
cooperatives. At the same time, it was incorporated as a public limited company.
This choice was based on an intended purpose that is now totally assumed and
clearly claimed. “Coopaname advocates for a political project, which is to seek the
reconstruction of securities, rights, protections and solidarity. In other words, it
militates for strengthening the collective dimension to face exacerbated and encour-
aged individualization.”9 Between 2004 and 2014, the company met with tremen-
dous success, growing from 5 to 800 employees. Coopaname became the largest
BEC in France. As some entrepreneurs wanted to develop a business in the
construction sector, a “sister cooperative” called “Alter Batir!” was registered in 2007.
It allowed entrepreneurs to have the ten-year coverage guarantee required for
construction work. At the same time, another legal entity was created, called

“Coopératifs!”, which allowed entrepreneurs to benefit from a license for carrying
out services to the person and also to benefit from tax and social benefits such as a
reduced rate of VAT and social security exemptions. Later, “HOP HOP HOP!” was
set up to provide a tailor-made legal framework for trainers and entertainers of the
sporting community who work in the associative sector and usually offer their skills
without benefiting from any social security. They usually have different statuses and
are isolated; very often they have no other choice but to be considered as volunteers,
sometimes paid under the table, and they encounter difficulties in dealing with com-
munities or associations. Therefore, all legal and administrative aspects are managed
by the administrative team and cooperators who have already faced similar prob-
lems. Each member of the community can then become a member of one or more
cooperatives of the group, successively or at the same time, depending on the activ-
ity proposed or on the target clientele (private companies, individuals, associations,
public bodies, etc.) This legal framework was chosen also because it allows for adap-
tations. The business model of the BEC was enshrined in law in 2014.10
The Staff Representation Project

In 2006 the company initiated a project to comply with the legal obligation of setting
up staff representation. The result was an employee committee which was composed of
elected staff representatives and chaired by the employer. Two cooperators wrote a
paper together to explain this challenge. “Instead of just complying with the law,
Coopanamians decide[d] to initiate a process of reflection and engage in action
research to answer three fundamental questions about staff representation in the con-
text of a BEC” (quoted in Delvolvé and Veyer, 2011). First, they questioned the mean-
ing of staff representation. Second, they reflected upon the concept of staff
representation in a company where employees are at the same time employers and
managers. And third, they wondered how to create and formulate a jurisprudence that
could be appropriate and relevant to their own business model. This process finally
took place in two stages. The first stage lasted two years. It consisted of “intense cogita-
tion to find relevant answers.”11 The second stage lasted three years and aimed at find-
ing the best way to apply it. It was achieved through the election of staff representatives.
By the end of this process, the whole project of Coopaname had itself evolved. The
company tended to emancipate itself from the business model it had created to con-
tinue sticking to the political project it had set for itself—that is, to meet the growing
need for a mutual protection of careers. Coopaname left the leadership of the Coopérer
pour entreprendre network for several reasons. The first was not to mobilize power
and therefore leave it to other BECs; the second was that they wanted to go further in
their emancipatory project than others who were satisfied with what already existed;
and another reason was that as the network grew, disagreements crystallized and the
atmosphere deteriorated.12 The trademark “mutual of labor” was registered. It con-
sisted of the collective creation (by five cooperatives) of a single economic entity called
“Bigre!”13 which constituted an innovative form of economic and social organization:
. . . an associated labor mutual, bringing together, in one and same community,
several thousand members, who guarantee each other, on an equal footing, an
economic and social capacity to do their respective jobs and to live on them. The
common entity brings together 7000 people and has 25 branches in France. Today,
Bigre! continues to be built by a dozen partners and does not yet have any real
economic activity as such.14
“Bigre!” will include artists as well as gardeners, computer scientists, interpreters,
journalists, service providers, freelancers, shepherds, consultants, carpenters,
craftsmen, show technicians, e-traders, authors, seasonal workers, etc. It will also
be open to any new company or organization wishing to conceive within itself
emancipatory forms of relationship to work and who would like to contribute its
stone to the common project.15
Their intention was to create an organizational model that would be exactly the
opposite of the one embodied by Uber.16 The aim was to implement a new specific
business model which relies, not on financial means, but on an ethics supported by a
political vision of organizations. This project did not differ from the original one
because had already been announced in 2006 as the basis of any BEC (Veyer and
Sangiorgio, 2006). But in 2014 it became a priority for Coopaname which initially
took care of itself alone, then partnered with a few other cooperatives “with which
there are affinities.”17
Since the implementation of the experiment, the actors have understood the irre-
placeable importance of history. Not only did they succeed, thanks to history, in
achieving over a period of a few decades the construction of a now recognized
organizational model that has spread throughout France, but also history remains
their essential driving force in ensuring the resilience of the cooperative and guaran-
teeing its potential for innovation. Coopaname is still a leading company that par-
ticipates frequently in the media and at conferences, and which is now increasingly
approached by researchers. The “tight history” of Coopaname was assumed initially
by the founder, soon afterwards by early workers and associates, and then by all
those who wished to, even if they did not always endorse a social mandate. Their
participation implies interplays of loose history with tight history. Outside actors
working in other BECs and scholars associated more and more massively with the
study and theorization of the company. The tight story was thus also taken over by
actors outside the organization.
The cooperative is evolving through an action research approach which has been
continuing since then. It has set up a governance body called “the research commis-
sion,” and the year is punctuated by “seasoned universities of autumn” and “of
spring” in which all employees participate, and during which researchers and other
external personalities are invited. Thus, Coopanamians are making continuous pro-
gress in developing their resilience collectively and consolidating their strengths as
reflective practitioners. This strategy allows the cooperators to develop and practice
as a community, as everyone participates and contributes to the organization. The
singularity of Coopaname is always advanced through its history and the explan
ation of its raison d’être. Similarly, this emphasis on history is used to demonstrate
how and why this cooperative is different from other BECs that may have lost sight
of the values and/or the fundamental political and social objectives of this type of
business model because “they do not have any culture.”18 This is done on the website
of the company, and in the books or papers written by Coopanamiens, in which the
story is explicit and somewhat fixed. But it is also and mainly demonstrated orally
when the BEC model is put into perspective in a very educational way on multiple
occasions and in different settings, such as monthly meetings and various training
programs.
Tight history in this company is a management tool implemented to educate and
nurture all new members with the values of the organization. When people wish to
join the cooperative, they first attend information meetings where the project sup-
ported by the company is revealed, among other things. These meetings are set up by
company officials who can be considered managers, although they strongly refuse
this title, arguing that theirs is a democratic a-hierarchical business. They prefer to
present themselves as facilitators, animators, coaches, or even companions,19 but
they are generally in charge of a branch office. The core values of Coopaname are
thus immediately placed in the context of the cooperative movement. Once admit-
ted into the company, people find their own way and may attend workshops.
Moreover, they are all the time encouraged to join in all debates going on about
organization, administration, cooperation, etc., which have become somewhat insti-
tutionalized as a participatory action research project.
One of the workshops, called “cooperative training”, aims at “putting into per-
spective the daily life of the cooperative by bringing the historical, economic, socio-
logical, legal, philosophical elements that question the political project of
Coopaname, its action and its practice.”20 It consists of twelve sessions of three hours
each (a total of around thirty-six hours scheduled over a quarter). The training
covers many topics. First, it aims to put the company in perspective: thus, after
retracing the origins, history, and projects of the company, its business model is
made explicit. Second, it is compared to the solidarity economy, the social economy
and social entrepreneurship. This then allows a focus on Coopaname’s networks and
on its own ambitions. Third, there is a presentation and discussion on the motiv
ations, advantages and criteria which can help people to choose their roles in the
company. They can become a partner by buying shares in the company, then pos
sibly get elected to the board of directors. They can lead collectives, or settle for just
being a salaried entrepreneur. This discussion makes it possible to focus more par-
ticularly on the analysis of the methods and mechanisms involved in the business.
A final session addresses in detail the vocabularies and arguments that allow
Coopanamians to know how to talk about themselves as members of the company.
When we took part in this training, we were able to see the wealth of information
given to participants, who were surprisingly not all newcomers. The story of the
company was traced back to well before its birth and registration. The context pre-
sented went from the thirteenth century to today, and it dealt with what happened
not only in France but also in many other countries. Indeed, this workshop provided
participants with a version of French cooperative history that had been created
by the leaders of the organization. We find here a practice of history which is shaped
by distinct but closely interrelated concepts that provide a structure to think
historically. But contrary to Seixas and his team (2004), who identify six steps in the
process (establish historic significance, use primary source evidence, identify
continuity and change, analyze causes and consequences, take historical perspectives,
and understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations), this process
almost appeared to have been already completed by the animator of the training,
who sometimes introduced himself as an “early days co-worker.” Many and various
issues were discussed, each participant bringing to the discussion his or her
knowledge and experience. They gave rise to debates about ideas because everybody
could intervene at all times. The historical narrative was not contested by other
seminar participants, who seemed to accept it and link their own lived experience
with this version. A former union delegate gave examples of practices and tensions
he had experienced there and in other companies. Another person spoke of political
or social episodes that he had studied more particularly; yet another proposed to
present books or authors he had read and found particularly relevant. If the
participants sometimes asked for more explanation, they did not dispute anything
and were eminently interested. Contestations and disputes did exist in the
organization, but in other settings. Indeed, our interviews revealed that the person
in charge of this training was considered as the privileged guarantor of the values
and practices of the company, as shown by sentences often heard such as “As long as
S. stays here, I stay” or else “I entered without hesitation as soon as I met S.”21
Training sessions and workshops are places where cooperators meet, get to
know each other, and exchange informally. These are not just training workshops
because they are also and above all moments of exchange and debate in which
disagreement can be expressed. All subjects can be addressed. Some participants
do not hesitate to point out certain dysfunctions or dissonances they have experi-
enced within the cooperative. Once on the table, the problems are discussed col-
lectively and possibly redirected to certain governance bodies and/or to ad-hoc
groups that are formed to collectively reflect upon the issues and try to propose
solutions.
For example, at the training session observed, several participants proposed
quickly to put their personal notes together to develop a formalized document that
could, for example, take the form of a database accessible to all. This project, in
which we also participated for a while, failed rather surprisingly because it did not
seem very difficult to carry out. Two main reasons, formal and substantive, explain
this failure. First, no one seemed to be able to fulfill the task, which appeared time
consuming, although a sharing of tasks was organized from the beginning and a test
was completed. And second, the project stumbled on substantive issues illustrated
by questions such as: “Why should we do this work when everyone can attend the
workshop?” “Will the document be accessible and read?” “Will it be updated, how
and by whom?”22 No decision had finally been made. Although the discussion was
extended to all participants, the project seemed to have “evaporated” and no collect
ive production ever did emerge.
However, deeper reasons seem to have played a particularly important role in the
failure of this project. The aim was to write a kind of book which would include all
the information provided here in order to facilitate its dissemination throughout the
company. Thus, once written it could not be modified. But at each session, many
questions were asked as well as requests made for clarification. Even the slightest
disagreement was dealt with immediately in a contradictory way. If the facilitator
often answered, all the participants expressed a view. The current issues were dis-
cussed and always put in the perspective of the story told. Thus, the data of the past,
the “raw facts,” were constantly discussed and rearranged. Once this knowledge was
written down and therefore formalized, and most probably taken out of context,
participants feared that it could lead to misinterpretation.23
We observed that the participants who met on this occasion thereafter often
referred to what they had learned during the training. This occurred in many ways
and in different places. In those moments, we noted that they had appropriated the
story because they used “we” instead of “you” or “they,”24 even though they did not
participate in the reported events. This illustrates the interplay between tight history
and loose history, which are complementary and indispensable means of enlighten-
ing the present, putting it in a context that is always specific. They allow the actors to
feed a debate, to establish positions, to justify statements and, above all, to make
choices and decide on future actions.
Surprisingly, two years later, a document entitled “Little vademecum with real
pieces of history of Coopaname in it and its project but not only . . .”25 is released,
written by the CEO who conducted the training seminars, who before being CEO
was an entrepreneur within the structure. The history is covered rather succinctly,
because the book particularly develops the future projects being supported by the
company. The story here includes both tight history and pieces of loose history. It is
especially a tool to both advocate and legitimate the future and is also important
because it allows the actors to build a reality, to share a common set of references
and of values. Even once written, history may eventually be interpreted and reinter-
preted, orally or by other writing, people tending to favor only certain facts and
ignore others whenever it suits them. By browsing the documents and attending all
types of events, we saw how the fundamental idea of the “mutuality of work” went
through the company for more than ten years, changing its shape and name, and
evolving from an internal concern supported by the actors themselves to an external
preoccupation assumed jointly with outsiders.
We have seen that tight and loose history interplay to provide a historical per-
spective useful to gain more insight into the deeply rooted values of the company
and to explain the present. Here history is positive as it is managed strategically, as a
dynamic capability, both to foster the social and legal construction of the organiza
tion and to enhance innovation. The past appears to be the most fundamental
resource of the cooperative. It is constructive for two reasons. The first is that it is a
persuasive source of shared social and temporal continuity. History is used as a tool
to establish, strengthen, and maintain a collective sense of belonging for its mem-
bers. Indeed, this business model can only hold if the entrepreneurs who have a
viable project remain in the company, because they thus support the financing of the
accompaniment of the newcomers as well as the development of the company as a
whole. At this stage, they could leave the company completely and start their own
business. It is the affectiosocietatis26 that cements the community and allows the
company to exist and grow. Successful and profitable entrepreneurs must be motiv
ated to stay rather than become independent. Their choice may be based on practical
reasons, such as outsourcing the administration of their business. But we have
observed that the decision tends to impose itself naturally on entrepreneurs because
they absolutely want to participate in the project. This idea kept coming up in many
interviews we conducted and exchanges we heard. History is also constructive as a
powerful legitimating agent. Coopanamians have a sense of belonging to a commu-
nity that actively participates in the development of another way of looking at work,
based on cooperation. Moreover, they are continuously motivated to take part in the
process, both upstream through reflecting, researching, and debating, and down-
stream by designing, testing, implementing, and managing. They especially feel that
they are participating in making history, accepting tight history and articulating it
with loose history. They are promoting a paradigm shift which appears necessary to
build better societies and better organizations. They are convinced they are going the
right way and make every effort to achieve it and feel totally legitimate.
11.4.2 Loose History
Loose history addresses individual actors—ordinary workers but also those who can
be seen as managers of the organization. Indeed, at Coopaname a cooperator can
take on several roles successively or at the same time, endorsing a social mandate
then leaving his place to someone else, being an entrepreneur and then coaching
people, then ultimately but not always definitively returning to his or her own busi-
ness. All the cooperators can also get involved in more or less formal collectives,
manage them, animate them, eventually become responsible for them, or settle for
being only at a distance, temporarily or not. This is the reason why our data were
sometimes difficult to label and classify. There are entrepreneurs who are salaried
and others not yet, and to complicate matters further, some salaried entrepreneurs
and permanent employees have already “crossed the border” several times. That is
why we decided to take into account “the hat”27 under which individuals spoke or
did something at a precise moment. Primarily, our sources are observation notes
and meeting transcriptions, completed with face-to-face semi-structured interviews.
We also watched personal websites of cooperators, some of whom expressed their
opinion on the company and/or told their story. We created portraits for our own
use of some individuals with biographical notes, observation and interview quotes,
emails and messages posted on the forums, both to have a better knowledge and
understanding of them, and also to observe their evolution in time and space. We
followed some individuals as soon as they entered the company and accompanied
them for a long time on their journey, both when attending training sessions and at
all types of events. Thus, we observed how tight history was handled by individuals
and also managed collectively.
We concentrated first on entrepreneurship at Coopaname to see the genesis of the
process, and more particularly on the “raisonned autobiography” (Desroche, 1984)
workshop to study the continuous process by which individuals get used to handling
their personal history and how as loose history it interacts with tight history. In what
follows we have also drawn on our own data, including narratives as well as frag-
mented pieces of discourse from cooperators and exhaustive observations of organ
izational life.
Entrepreneurship at Coopaname
Entrepreneurial qualities are not presumed for entering this company. Degrees
awarded and qualifications obtained are not considered here, whereas various lived
experiences are very much emphasized. The Coopanamians are more interested in
personality traits and in the person’s whole life history. It appears that the criteria of
judgment traditionally used for recruiting staff are not employed at Coopaname,
where primacy is given to sincerity, integrity, respect, and trust, which of course are
not absent in other firms. Expertise, diplomas, and professional background are not
important as such, but criteria do exist and constitute another vision. Coopanamians’
worldview goes with a specific normative system which is also mobilized for recruit-
ing employees, joining as an entrepreneur, and setting rules for living and working
together.
The entry process takes time, often several months. It goes through discussions
and meetings. What is checked is the raison d’être and the sense of a project, the
professional and personal histories of the candidate, his or her aspirations. Time is
stretched both into the past and into the future, to find the roots and mission set
forth by the candidate. It also allows the individual to get to know the company bet-
ter and thus to check if he or she is likely to find their place in the organization, and
has an interest in entering it. At Coopaname, there are manifold training programs,
readily accessible to everybody, in which history is used for multiple purposes. Some
workshops aim at facilitating integration into the company, but most are designed to
help cooperators in overcoming various blockages or in decision making. New and
experienced entrepreneurs and employees get the same attention and help. The most
numerous people to join the cooperative are women with family responsibilities, this
criterion being less discriminatory than it may be in other companies. There are also
many people who had a difficult working experience, who are unemployed and can-
not get work.
A particularity of this enterprise is that people are free to enter and leave, without
justification and without taking any professional and personal risks. They can leave
with their project, their brand, and their customers, at any time. The newcomers are
not directly employed. They become so only when they earn money through the
sales they make. They can take all the time they need to start their businesses till
they succeed in paying themselves a wage. Meanwhile, they have no costs to incur
and they can continue to receive social welfare benefits. Various workshops offer to
provide concrete assistance to the development of each person’s activity. All
Coopanamians meet here. There are newcomers, as well as historic employees. There
is a wide spectrum of age and projects (magic, philosophy, gardening, jeweler, jour-
nalism, fashion design, dog walking, etc.). Training sessions are set up and run by
other Coopanamians and are efficient ways of socialization. Newcomers take habits
on board even without being totally aware of it and incorporate the implicit current
rules. We observed that Coopanamians tend always to answer a question with
another question, which gives the impression that they discuss points of detail and
always look for complexity. In this organization, there seems to be no answer that
would be considered unique, good, and definitive. Everything is constantly ques-
tioned; the doubt is permanent, and is somewhat considered normal. Cooperators
who cannot bear this way of doing things spontaneously leave the company.
Many techniques are mobilized in the workshops. Coaching methods include
psychology as well as specific internally designed methods and processes, and even
music and dance. Even if a dedicated path has been set up for newcomers, anybody
can propose new training. He or her must just ask for a free room and then post an
announcement on the extranet. All training is free and can be attended as often as
needed. Some animators are paid by the firm, others are not. It depends on their
status: permanent employees free up their own time, so that training is part of their
job, whereas entrepreneurs are paid for training only if it has a regular basis. The
integration path for all new employees is not mandatory. It includes six workshops
in which various methods and techniques unfold and combine to alternate what are
labeled “cold moments” of confrontation between the dream and reality of the pro-
jects, with “warm moments” of comfort, hope, and encouragement (Németh
Bongers, 2017). This alternation makes participants both renew their vision of the
ideal project and innovate it in practice.
Workshops are moments of encounter at Coopaname as no common place of
production exists. These occasions favor the setting up of new projects, either by
redesigning existing ones or by creating partnerships. Some shared-brands are now
and then created according to the opportunities which arise. People progressively
work on all aspects of their project, such as pricing, their product/service offering or
their commercial brochure. They are encouraged always to pay attention to the
implications of the slightest change made to the project, both for their personal life
and for the project itself. At the same time, they examine and re-examine iteratively
their whole project and adapt it so that it may be a long-term, viable, and sustainable
one. Everything aims at departing from the DNA of the individual to characterize
the business which is developed. The same process is proposed to the permanent
employees in charge of pooling services to shape their job. As two cooperators wrote
in the early stages of the organization, “entrepreneurship is then both a collective

product and process” (Veyer and Sangiorgio, 2006).
Raisonned Autobiography
The cooperative identity formulated in the 1895 statement promulgated by the
International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) and revised in 1995 defines and guides
cooperatives worldwide. The fifth principles states that “co-operative societies must
provide education and training to their members, elected representatives, managers
and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of their co-
operatives.”28 Rather than considering that training exists in all companies for new-
comers to be socialized or indoctrinated, cooperators believe that educating people
empowers them to become the creative subject of their history instead of being an
object at the mercy of events.29
One of the most emblematic workshops at Coopaname is undoubtedly a practice
called “reasoned autobiography.” It is designed to allow people to turn backward to
their past to highlight a logic which finally brings them to discover or rediscover a
sense and a legitimacy necessary to move forward. We observed that actors appro-
priated this way of using history for themselves and used it daily. As they became
more and more conscious of the power of history, many also created their own
methods, either alone or in teams, and proposed alternative workshops and new
projects. They often cited J. F. Draperi, a researcher and professional trainer who
published books about cooperatives and who now and then joined the
Coopanamians. Inspired by Desroches, who proposed in his 1990 book “to learn
how to learn,” Draperi (2010) presents reasoned autobiography as consisting in
reflecting on one’s own life story, because to know where one is going, one must
remember where one comes from. It is both oral and written. “Speaking history is
essential to remembering, and writing history is needed to fix the memory in a
reasoned and sustainable way.”30 The aim is not to analyze how each person repre-
sents his or her itinerary, but to allow everyone to develop a project rooted in his or
her previous experience.
The three main issues of reasoned autobiography are, first, to enhance self-worth
and value the career path; second, to significantly strengthen fundamentals by iden-
tifying the various key elements that provide an overall cohesion; and third, to pro-
vide assertiveness. According to a survey done within the company, participants
who were either entrepreneurs or people in charge of support functions at
Coopaname felt very enthusiastic about this workshop and highly recommended
others to participate in this training program. “It allows one to objectify oneself by
becoming the subject of one’s own history.”31
We observed that the people who attended this training had a very particular and
recognizable behavior. They generally became more involved in the company, and
they innovated even more in their practices and in their projects. In addition, they
set up new workshops, and created and experimented with new methods that they
then offered to other cooperators. For example, some cooperators implemented
what they labelled first “connivance committees.” “These are moments of collective
tutoring for an individual. Anytime a project leader has a question or a specific issue
he/her cannot answer to, he/she can expose it to other Coopanamians. This is a new
form of accompaniment designed on demand, composed of very punctual micro-
groups of people. It is based on volunteering.”32 The people who had the idea for
implementing such committees formed a first support committee, and at the same
time they objectified their work. The methodology, form, content, and presentation
were worked on and refined to a definitive, fully marketable project. The delivery
process lasted six months. It was then experienced and adapted internally.
Afterwards, it was not only proposed within the cooperative. It was mainly sold
to outside companies as an original offering, although this had not been considered
initially.
Loose history originates from individuals but may afterwards be encapsulated in
processes and techniques. Actors use historical consciousness as a tool for trans
formation and action. As such it is a way to constantly use and reuse the past in the
present, to broaden and multiply future paths, and hence to innovate in practice.
Individual histories that are collectively objectified allow the discovery and exploit
ation of synergies. People discover themselves and each other at once. So, they
become actively involved, are more motivated, and get committed to each other.
Their various collective projects take shape and do not necessarily correspond to the
overall project led by the company or to their personal projects. They implement an
organization within the overall organization and start a process of institutionalizing
their business. The historical consciousness at the individual level is then linked to a
new and specific tight organizational historical consciousness.
We have seen that there is a historical consciousness in Coopaname that has a
significant impact at both the institutional and individual levels. History is both
tight and loose. Not only does history strengthen the company and the individuals,
but it also allows it to innovate and be more resilient. Similarly, it allows actors to
pause and take reflexive breaks, to objectify what they do and then go in motion
again. The articulation of the two levels allows the members of this organizational
community to align with each other and with the organization, which itself aligns
with each of its members in a process of historical co-construction. The continuous
recourse to history as historical consciousness makes it possible to familiarize both
with the cooperative specificities and processes and with others. By alternating tight
history and loose history as soon as they join, cooperators end up by hardly distin-
guishing between top-down and bottom-up history. The collective dimension of the
practice of history fosters innovation and enhances the resilience of both the organ
ization and each of its members.
Thus, history as historical consciousness is simultaneously both an organizational
tool and a process at Coopaname. Its agency allows the organization and the actors
to manage and practice both the ordinary and the extraordinary of organizational
life. Tight history tends to provide mainly guidelines, whereas loose history tends to
favor innovation. The movement is due to the articulation between both, and it
facilitates the organizing gearing process. However, using history as a tool may
sometimes appear less exciting, as we discovered by examining the frictions that
sometimes emerged in the organization in various contexts. It was then possible to
identify and address frictions at both the individual and collective levels.
11.4.3 Organizational Frictions between Loose

and Tight History
As we were able to develop relationships with many cooperators, our study includes
data collected both publicly and privately, internally and externally, amongst organ
izational actors in various contexts. This includes the individual experience of p
eople
who had left the cooperative, our intention being to obtain information about why
someone had chosen to leave, and thereby to better study the frictions as they were
experienced by actors. We interviewed people, chatted with them, watched their
exchanges, and through archival studies and observation notes, examined how fric-
tions were managed over time and across multiple contexts.
Frictions were mainly of two types, either personally or professionally oriented,
but we saw that they intermingled with each other. Most of those who contributed
substantially to this study of frictions have left the company or partially withdrawn,
but our data have been triangulated with various sources. We managed to bring
respondents to more reflexivity and dug deeper into the reasons for their departure
or partial withdrawal. Many cooperators live far from the company, in another
department or even another country. While this obviously prevents much physical
involvement in the company and hinders face-to-face communication, there are
other dematerialized ways to participate. In addition, other cooperators who are
already employed elsewhere remain in the company to develop their project in par-
allel, even if they do not spend most of their time there. If everybody is always free to
intervene by giving his or her opinion on all matters discussed within the company,
and all have great freedom of proposal and action, some people felt some dissonance.
It is true that debate is always favored, and marginal contestation is most of the time
seen as desirable. But tussles may emerge as soon as it takes the form of a formal
dispute. Then, the blockages that occur exhaust participants, who complain that
nothing gets done and that some subjects are left in the lurch. As for the protesters,
they tend to become demotivated, feeling that they or others are not taken into con-
sideration. This damages the image they had of the company. They are discouraged,
feel ignored, and withdraw. Sometimes, they even leave the cooperative. They
acknowledge that they had the opportunity to speak up and were encouraged to do
so, but they feel they have not been listened to, or been able to make themselves
heard. However, they continue to favor the model and say that they have no resent-
ment, as the intentions of all those taking part in controversies were laudable. In
hindsight, they acknowledge that they failed by stumbling more on problems of
form than of substance. Spending several years in the company allowed us to see
that some of the most enthusiastic and involved people sometimes took a step back
or even came out, as if they had burned their wings.
Frictions at the organizational level also appeared to be caused by problems of
organization and articulation between personal and professional life amongst those
who managed the cooperative, but these were exacerbated by the business model of
the organization. A lot of work is voluntary, especially from the cooperators who run
the firm or cumulate the functions and roles. Another problem is that many cooper
ators show little or no interest in the overall project, even if most of them are
enthusiastic about it. There are also many diverse status and jobs. The salaried
entrepreneurs have very different salaries, sometimes very low or non-existent.
Permanent employees must welcome, coach, train, and serve cooperators, and
often manage their branch and do public relations. Both may cumulate their duties,
with or without an employment contract.
We saw emerge and then followed a major dispute caused by divergent views on
the notion of obligation, some wanting to make it mandatory to become a member
quickly, others pretending that the model would be damaged or led astray by this
injunction. To overcome these differences, the cooperators initiated several collect
ives. One was made up of associates who reflected about the economic model;
another, open to all, examined how to consider other forms of remuneration than
money; another looked at how social mandates could be shared by many people.
Each time the process was the same: participants first agreed to take into account all
opinions and problems. Then they looked into the past and researched why some-
thing was done or why that decision was made. By going back to the past and recon-
textualizing the issue, they not only identified the fundamental values to cling to, but
also used them to build solutions that were mostly innovative. Whether at the indi-
vidual or collective level, the cooperators continually carried out a collective action
research approach by associating on a voluntary basis with all those who wished to
participate in it. Despite all their efforts, they deplored that some seemed not to
understand the social-historical significance of their organization and therefore
“behave as consumers,”33 and also that only few people did everything, and were
paradoxically accused of “grabbing power.”34 Nevertheless, many cooperators
repeated that “Democracy requires daily work, exhausting but so exciting.”35 Our
findings finally converge to consider history as a management tool that can have
tremendous performative aspects, even more when tight and loose history are
articulated to help the organization to deal with problems and achieve its objectives.
11.5 Discussion
Many companies seem to have increasing recourse to history, as described by
Suddaby (2016), who writes that “a new sensitivity to history” exists because
organizations take advantage of it for legitimating actions, for giving more authen-
ticity, for increasing status or social capital. But history is not only an object. Even if
it relates to a view through the lens of the past, history as historical consciousness
appears to be in some organizations, as we have demonstrated here, one of the most
important management tools, thanks to its agency. This study was designed, not to
generate a new theory, but to contribute to research by proposing to consider both
tight history and loose history.
To contribute to the literature, we first discuss organizational strategy through the
four models of change proposed by Suddaby and Foster (2017) and confront our
findings with history-as-fact, history-as-power, history-as-sensemaking and history-
as-rhetoric. Then, we present how our findings seem to echo institutionalist theory,
according to the demand of Suddaby et al. (2017) to re-enchant the world and insti-
tutions through magical thinking and a return to craft. Finally, we demonstrate how
our proposed concepts of tight and loose history may be useful for management
historians addressing organizational theory.
Suddaby and Foster (2017) review theories of organizational change according to
the implicit assumptions about history that they contain. They make them explicit in
order to propose four different implicit models of change. Each is characterized by a
diversely assumed objectivity of the past that goes along with a specific malleability
of the future.
History-as-fact assumes history as objective fact. It considers that change is a dif-
ficult process that can only be successful through extreme levels of episodic inter-
vention, as it is associated with an assumption of deterministic fatalism. As a
consequence, change becomes compulsory. It is due to an exogenous shock that
affects the organizational structure which has no other choice than to mutate from
one state to another one. This view is not consistent with our case, where organiza
tional change is impelled by a continuous process of multifaceted action research
scattered throughout the company.
The history-as-power model depends on a view of history as objective fact but
differs from the latter because it focuses on the power structure of the various coali-
tions within the organization. This view considers change as resulting from pres-
sures and confrontations between internal entities. Thus, change is seen as being
constrained because of intricately counterbalanced pressures for change and stabil-
ity. In this view, human agency enacted through reflexivity and praxis is central for
an inevitable change dependent on largely ideo-historical key mechanisms of
change. This model seems to fit better with what we observed in Coopaname, where
human agency occupies a preponderant place and has a driving role in the change
process. It also differs, however, in that those who confront are not entities but indi-
viduals who for the most part do not know each other. Even if there is no doubt that
coalitions do exist, the actors are careful to preserve democratic values and prin
ciples. Indeed, everybody can intervene, take part in debates, and get involved in
management and organizational processes. Constant efforts are made at every
moment to promote actors’ involvement, through pedagogy, many meetings being
open to all, and countless exchanges, including those posted on the internet forum.
By better addressing the particular needs of participants and therefore changing, the
company serves the general interest better, and it thus becomes more solid, more
innovating, and also more resilient.
History-as-sensemaking assumes a phenomenological view of history (Weick,
1995), based on human cognition and interpretation rather than an objective set of
immutable facts. As such, history is a process of understanding achieved in an itera-
tive form of back and forth between the past and present, which sustains either
change or continuity. Selective memory has a critical role in reconstructing the past,
so that the history becomes credible again. The history-as-sensemaking approach
places the emphasis on human agency and involves retrospectively creating shared
interpretations of what happened. However, if this vision is not totally divergent
from what we observed at Coopaname, it differs in one important respect: there was
no “cosmology episode,” no shock coming from outside, that suddenly and pro-
foundly affected actors, forcing them afterwards to reconstruct a new interpretative
framework for meaning. Instead, the actors themselves routinely planned interrup-
tions, such as reflexive breaks, to re-examine their practices, missions, and project,
as well as how each one interacted with others. This internal procedure applied to
individuals and to administrative bodies, as well as to all kinds of work collectives.
The history-as-rhetoric model is a highly subjective view of history which regards
the past as resulting mainly from interpretation, arguing that “the process of inter-
preting the past is highly agentic and can be deliberately manipulated for strategic
purposes” (Suddaby and Foster, 2017: 31). As such, it takes the form of narratives
and is for that reason malleable and open to revision. Thus, it is more biased by the
present and future. History-as-rhetoric is revealed in the massive use of purposive
storytelling through which managers seek to get organizational actors to enact a new
future for an organization. This approach seems to be the most relevant to character-
izing what we observed at Coopaname, at the institutional, operational, and indi-
vidual levels. History-as-rhetoric works both as formal remembering, a set of
techniques deliberately designed to shape organizational memories towards strategic
ends, and as emergent remembering, a rhetorical reconstruction of a firm’s history
through casual conversations and informal interactions. It serves both to promote
continuity and to support change. According to Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank
(2016), the agentic interpretive conceptualization of the past can be deliberately
manipulated for strategic purposes. Historicity is in this cooperative crucial for
organizational memory and identity, and it emphasizes the constitution of a firm as
mnemonic community in which “the construction of membership through narra-
tives of memory is the essence of re-membering” (Suddaby et al., 2016: 308).
History-as-rhetoric assumes that the strategic intent must be based on a kernel of
objective facts to ensure credibility and coherence, but also that it must be disguised
in order to manipulate organizational members. “Credibility in rhetorical history,
thus, is based on the same criterion as most storytelling but necessitates storytelling
structures that capture convincing and believable accounts of the past” (Suddaby
and Foster, 2017: 33). The collective, thus social, dimension of the process is then
crucial for legitimization, as memory and membership create a sense of
commonality and belonging in a given community. By participating actively in

events, individuals develop their episodic memory, an emergent remembering that
allows them to remember past autobiographical elements that they can rely on to
predict the future and act. But as the details are lost with time, knowledge is no
longer linked to a particular event and becomes general knowledge. Then, the mem-
ory becomes formal and semantic. This process is well described by neuropsycholo-
gists working on long-term semantic memory and contextual episodic memory.36
As such, the memory of consciousness and of knowledge can be shared thanks to a
set of personal data that is accessible to our conscience and that we can express. At
Coopaname we witnessed that once individuals considered themselves a member
and were thus accepted by others, they made the stories of the past their own, even
though the events had taken place well before their arrival.
When presented through the lens of the history-as-rhetoric model, historical con-
sciousness may prove to be a strategic management tool and a powerful legitimating
agent. According to the model, it is deliberate and made by managers. The concept
of rhetorical history describes the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to
manage key stakeholders of the firm” (Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn-Trank, 2010:
157), which gradually confers a collective identity on a community, and which thus
can take full advantage of a collective memory, seen as a mnemonic capability by
Coraiola, Suddaby, and Foster (2017). However, our work tends to demonstrate that
it does not necessarily imply manipulation of individuals, although it still encom-
passes some persuasion. As shown by Smith and Simeone (2017), a rhetorical his-
tory implies appearing credible and therefore congruent with the wider historical
social culture.
Historical narratives must be based on facts and on storytelling structures that
capture convincing and believable accounts of the past to ensure credibility (Suddaby
and Foster, 2017). However, we highlighted that at Coopaname historical conscious-
ness is used as a strategic, operational, and individual resource. The cooperative
claims and advocates for a political vision of the firm (politics in the sense of “life of
the city”). It places at the heart of its concerns a utopia and works to achieve a mis-
sion: collectively changing the firm and through it changing society as a whole. The
politicized nature of the corporate use of the past is therefore clearly stressed here.
The firm also uses history as a reflexive process to improve all operational and
organizational aspects, such as creating new facilities and services that will benefit
the whole community. At the individual level, work on historical consciousness
reveals it as a very fruitful way of proceeding to instill and cultivate an entrepre-
neurial mindset. Historical consciousness is therefore far from being confined to a
unique theoretical view of the past, as it always combines with practical concerns
which are to satisfy the specific and realistic needs of entrepreneurs. The political
view of the firm is coupled with material down-to-earth considerations. As a con-
sequence, this resource not only boosts organizations’ and individuals’ capacity for
innovation and resilience, but also enhances their responsiveness to grasp
opportunities.
Our study may also contribute to institutional historical research in terms of re-
enchanted organizations. Indeed, the research was conducted in a firm where people
pursue an assumed utopia that aims to rethink business and work, and therefore
collectively build and continuously adapt their business model. They move forward
by returning to the future. And their return to craft is supported by centuries-old
cooperative principles. The agency of historical consciousness supports the per-
formativeness of the inquiry process, both as a full social experience, thanks to com-
munities of inquiry, and as a conceptual tool. The company we studied is certainly
an extreme case, chosen on purpose to explore historical consciousness. It supports
the view of Wadhwani et al. (2018) and Suddaby et al. (2017), who propose to con-
sider authenticity as a counterbalance to legitimacy, reflexivity in place of embed-
dedness, mimesis as an enchanted substitute for isomorphism, and incantation as a
counterpoint to diffusion.
The relevance of legitimacy has been recently questioned by many scholars who
generally propose to replace it by authenticity, on the basis that legitimacy is often
used top-down to persuade or punish. As shown for instance by Hatch and Schulz
(2017), authenticity may be used bottom-up and it imparts power to people.
Authenticity is a way not only to innovate but also to escape traditional relationships
of power. We saw at Coopaname that people make mistakes but are not sanctioned
as long as others consider that they have authentically sought to do well. In most
cases, no one sees how to do better. However, if someone deliberately infringes the
principles and the values of the company, the sanction is immediate, he or she is
rejected straightaway by everybody, and what has been done is widely discussed and
communicated.
Reflexivity is, of course, a basic characteristic of entrepreneurs and practitioners.
Our study emphasizes the pragmatist approach which advocates a more democratic
view of organizations and a focus on educational concerns. The articulation of tight
and loose history is an abductive social process of people which fabulates (Lorino,
2018) existential concern of the future collectively and contradictorily by inventing
new practices according to fundamental human values and in the face of important
economical and societal challenges. Here cooperators extensively use research action
methods, keep asking questions, and constitute various communities of inquiry who
focus on “the ghost of the future” (Lorino, 2018) through abduction. Therefore, we
are in accord with Suddaby et al.’s “re-enchanted view of organizations in which cog-
nizant, self-aware individuals form collective intentions to engage in institutional
actions” (2017: 292). Proposing to replace embeddedness by reflexivity advocates
more research focused on conversations about the life interest and life project of
collectives, groups, and organizations: the “we”.
The mimesis implies, according to these authors, a form of “sympathetic magic”
that allows the copy to become more powerful than the original instead of being
downgraded. Our findings demonstrate that by articulating both tight and loose his-
tory, actors managed to go from an unpretentious experimentation to a leading
organization, always attempting to surpass itself to address more fundamental and
larger issues. The role of language and rhetoric is highlighted in these processes, and
may be presented as incantations, magical words that help people to transgress the
laws of a dominant rationalist worldview, and which empower them to imagine
other realities, pasts, and futures. As Suddaby et al. (2017: 294) write: “Their enchant-
ment arises from the degree to which they reflect and reinforce the phenomeno
logical foundations of institutions.”
Our work underpins Smith and Russell’s (2016) view of rhetorical strategies as a
multilevel model of legitimacy process based on interactions between macro-level
validity and micro-level evaluators’ judgments. They call on scholars of rhetorical
history both to study the historical narratives produced by people at the base of the
organization and to study how competing historical narratives interact within
organizations. Through the concepts of loose history and tight history, we subscribe
to their polyphonic approach to capturing historical narratives produced by differ-
ent people within and around organizations, rather than just the narratives produced
by managers, an approach which is also implemented by Lubinski (2018). Our
research, based on the conceptualization of tight history and loose history as well as
their interplay, advocates conducting long-lasting ethnographic studies by address-
ing both managers and lower-ranking organizational members and studying how
they produce, receive, and articulate their own historical narratives. Furthermore,
this allows the inclusion of many other data besides just narratives (Boje et al., 2016)
and a better search for the potential instrumentality of all historical accounts
(Durepos and Mills, 2012).
11.6 Conclusion
Historical consciousness is undoubtedly a management tool, and our work demon-
strates that even for a small and quite recent company, it can perhaps be the most
relevant one. One of our main findings is that historical consciousness used as a
management tool requires us to pay attention to both the intended purpose and the
process set up to achieve it. Effectively involving all members in the process can
increase the efficiency of the tool, but the tipping point between manipulation and
autonomy is sometimes tenuous. To avoid falling into manipulation, the firm must
constantly pay attention to ensuring pluralism. It will not become subversive as long
as the process remains widely open to all. But once controversy is not possible, can-
not be expressed, and/or is no longer considered, it may become so. A virtuous
enterprise must, then, constantly ensure that there is room not only for debate, but
also and most importantly for the expression of opposition; otherwise it will appear
as a corrupt and dogmatic organization that manipulates and bullies its members.
As pointed out by Mintzberg, “Effective organizations are communities of engaged
human beings, not collections of passive human resources. These organizations have
no tops or bottoms, no ‘leader’ who has to think for everyone else. Everyone is
engaged; communityship is fundamentally indigenous.”37
The limits of our research may lie in the fact that we examined a paradigmatic
organization, a cooperative where all members are encouraged to articulate their
own historical narratives in both tight and loose history. As the cooperative is almost
a-hierarchical, further investigations should be conducted in more hierarchical
capitalist-oriented organizations. We have no idea about how various traits of an
organization relate to its tolerance for a diversity of historical narratives within the
firm. Another limitation, of course, is the size of the company. Indeed, in a larger
company, we do not know if it would be possible to observe identical processes.
Notes
1. I would especially like to sincerely thank Roy Suddaby and my three anonymous reviewers
for their very helpful suggestions. Without them, this chapter would not have existed.
2. Quote from an interview with the founder.
3. Quote from an interview with the founder.
4. Motto of the cooperative.
5. Translated by the Coopanamians BEC (Business and Employment Cooperative) into
English.
6. Observation notes.
7. Quoted from company website.
8. Cooperate to undertake, own translation.
9. Source: internal archives.
10. Act 47 Law no. 2014–856 July 31, 2014, on Social Economy.
12. Transcription of cooperative workshop.
13. We suggest translating “Bigre!” as “Oh gosh!”
14. Web archives.
15. Quoted from the annual activities report of 2016.
16. Example provided during a training session dedicated to newcomers.
17. Quoted from the discourses.
18. Quoted from an interview with the CEO and appearing many times in observation notes.
19. Observation notes and in various archives.
20. Quoted from the message posted to present the training.
21. Quoted from interviews.
22. Oral and written exchanges.
23. We noted this in the messages exchanged between participants including us.
25. Our translation.
26. Concept appearing on the front page of many documents.
27. Metaphor very commonly used by cooperators.
28. https://www.ica.coop/en
29. Declaration of the VIth International Conference of UNESCO on Adult Education, Paris,
March 19–29, 1985, often cited at Coopaname.
30. Our own translation of the preface of Desroches (1990).
31. Quoted from the IT system forum.

32. Quoted from interviews.
33. Quoted from interviews and observation notes.
34. Quoted from interviews and observation notes.
36. It seems that two distinct neuronal networks coexist. Cf. Groussard et al. (2009) or
Guillery-Girard et al. (2006), for example.
37. http://www.mintzberg.org/blog/transformation-from-the-top-how-about-engagement-
on-the-ground
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12
Appropriating the Past in
Organizational Change Management
Abandoning and Embracing History
Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen
12.1 Introduction
This chapter investigates organizational change management in the wake of privat
ization in a Scandinavian telecom from a historical perspective. Based on an ethno
graphic study a quarter century after the company was privatized, we investigate
how the past was appropriated by managers for the purpose of implementing per
formance management in the company’s operations department. By addressing this
topic, we join the emergent research stream on the “uses of the past” in organiza
tions, which focuses on the way in which actors construct and use history for pur
poses in the present (Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, and Popp, 2018). Additionally,
we offer a distinct theoretical contribution by outlining an analytical framework
where we combine Bourdieusian theory (1977) with a narrative approach (Boje,
2001) to analysis. This framework provides an alternative view of the impact of his
tory on organizational change management studies by bridging objective and sub
jective elements of history, which, we argue, enables a different understanding of the
constitution of history, and its impact on change management practices, while
responding to calls for increased “historical consciousness” within the research field
(Brunninge, 2009; Suddaby, 2016).
The Scandinavian telecom was sold by the state in the early 1990s as a conse
quence of the liberalization of the European telecommunications market (Greve and
Andersen, 2001). The liberalization was a source of increased competition and inter
nationalization, which led to the privatization of all state-owned telecommunication
monopolies in the Nordic countries, carrying with it a significant rationalization and
restructuring of the sector across the region (Jordfald and Murhem, 2003).
Consequently, our case company was transformed from state-owned monopoly to
shareholder-owned business in a competitive international market. The exposure to
Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen, Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management: Abandoning and Embracing
History In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann
Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Henrik Koll and Astrid Jensen.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0012
Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management 221
competition made profitability the paramount concern of the company and set in
motion a wave of streamlining measures, where managers viewed performance man
agement as an integral part of this transformation. However, at the time of our inves
tigation, twenty-five years post privatization, the implementation was considered as
still ongoing. In other words, the department had not managed to move on from the
practices of the time of public monopoly to the practices envisioned in the competi
tive environment post privatization, and therefore, one could argue that the past was
alive in the present through organizational actors’ appropriation and enactment of
the past in practice. This led us to address the following research question:
In what ways did managers’ appropriation of history impact organizational change

management practices in a Scandinavian telecom a quarter century after
privatization?
By addressing this question, we draw attention to the subjective and performative

elements of history—that is, the ways in which actors sometimes consciously and
strategically, though often unconsciously and pre-reflexively, mobilize the past for
present purposes (Wadhwani et al., 2018). The underlying assumption of this focus
is the notion of history as a socially constructed symbolic resource (Suddaby, Foster,
and Quinn Trank, 2010). This conception notably breaks with predominant repre
sentations of history within organizational change management research which treat
history as objective facts (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). History in this predominant
view is seen as synonymous with a past which is fixed forever once it has occurred
(Brunninge, 2009). Thus, the research field spans two radically different conceptions
of history: one that emphasizes its manifest objective functions, and another that
stresses its latent interpretive elements (Suddaby, 2016). This chapter offers an alter
native conception of history, one which holds the potential to advance our under
standings of the impact of history on organizational change management by bridging
objective and subjective elements of history.
We integrate Bourdieu’s notion of practice with the emerging literature on organ
izational uses of the past. We argue that Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and
capital are particularly well suited for the purpose of this chapter in two ways: first,
the framework is based on a historical epistemology in which our being with history,
or time, is perceived as a key component to understanding social life (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992); and second, the framework is based on an integrating view of
social life that takes its intrinsic dual character into account by integrating its sub
jective and objective features (Gorski, 2013). Consequently, from this perspective,
“the social world is essentially accumulated history” (Bourdieu, 1986: 46), and his
tory is neither fully objective nor fully subjective as social life transpires through
ongoing dialectical adjustments between subjective and objective temporal struc
tures (Bourdieu, 2000).
Bourdieu demonstrates this interrelation by stating that each human action brings
together two states of history: objectified history, i.e. history which has accumulated
over time in artefacts, materials, customs, etc.; and embodied history, in the form of
habitus. Through practical experience, habitus and field as two modes of existence of
history attune to each other, thereby endowing actors with a practical sense which
allows them to appropriate the legacy of history in practice (Bourdieu, 1981). In this
sense, practical activity that is generated by a habitus that is adjusted to the field
becomes an act of temporalization through which actors “transcend the immediate
present via practical mobilization of the past and practical anticipation of the future
inscribed in the present” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 138).
We complement Bourdieu’s theory of practice with a dynamic and embodied
notion of narratives, understood as a way of linking objective and subjective per
spectives of time (Cunliffe, Luhman, and Boje, 2004). It is by analyzing the narra
tives of organizational actors that we are able to see how actors establish a link
between past and present, i.e. how stories of the past are appropriated by manage
ment and strategically incorporated into the stories of the present, as a strategic nar
ration of history (Barry and Elmes, 1997; Cunliffe et al., 2004). In our analysis, we
include utterances that convey ongoing events, or the “lived experience” of story
tellers (Boje, 2001), in the form of more fragmented antenarratives, as well as more
canonical narratives of past sequences, with temporal sequences (a canonical char
acteristic of narrative) either explicit or inferable.
The strength of our theoretical framework is that it enables us to understand the
impact of history or the appropriation of history on practices of organizational
change management as a way of bridging the objective elements of historical facts
with the subjective elements of historical narratives. In other words, we understand
history as both a structuring and a structured structure, (Bourdieu, 1990), which
through enactment and narrative construction plays a constitutive and performative
role in the continuous production and reproduction of organizational orders
(Wadhwani et al., 2018).
The chapter is structured as follows. First, we review key aspects of the change
management literature in relations to its treatment of history. Then, we move on to
present our analytical framework, after which we illustrate our argument through
the analysis of the narratives of organizational actors. We conclude the chapter with
reflections on the significance of the findings of the chapter including the underlying
value of our analytical framework.
12.2 Literature Review

In 2001, Pettigrew, Woodman, and Cameron identified the inclusion of history and
time as an underdeveloped dimension of organizational change studies and called
out extant research for being too universal and underestimating the impact of his
tory, context, and temporality. At the time, the literature was dominated by episodic
views of change as movement from one state to another (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002).
Consequently, the literature was concerned with developing stage-models (e.g.
Kotter, 1995; Lewin, 1947; Schein, 1992) for managers to plan and implement change
(MacKay and Chia, 2013; Weick and Quinn, 1999). History rarely featured as a focal
point of analysis in this research; however, the implicit underpinnings of an episodic
linear conception of change is that of the past as unchangeable facts. Hence, time
and history in this view are seen as metaphysical realities which can only be object
ively accounted for (Suddaby and Foster, 2017).
The “historic turn” has brought increased interest to historical analyses in organ
ization and management studies (Brunninge, 2009). Subsequently, the research field
has witnessed the rise of the “uses of the past” approach, which is concerned with
the various ways that organizations use history for business purposes (Wadhwani
et al., 2018). In this view, history is conceived as a socially constructed rhetorical
device, which can be shaped and manipulated by organizational actors for strategic
purposes (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Studies of change management have embraced
this approach and recognized the use of history as an important underutilized asset
in managing organizational change (Carroll, 2002; Gioia, Corley, and Fabbri, 2002;
Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005).
Yet, despite the turn to history and the booming interest in historical analyses,
there is still room for further development of “historical consciousness” in organiza
tional change management research (Brunninge, 2009). Suddaby (2016) explains
“historical consciousness” as an openness to discuss the ontological and epistemo
logical constitution of history and engage in development of approaches that can
bridge the structural–objective–positivist elements of historical truth and the
constructivist–interpretive–subjective elements of historical narrative. The reason
why this is important is that the ability of actors to appropriate history strategically,
as well as habitually, hinges on history’s objective functions. Thus, to fully understand
the impact of history or the appropriation of history on practices of organizational
change management, bridging is essential.
In this chapter, we offer such a bridge by means of an analytical framework based
on Bourdieu’s concepts in combination with a narrative approach to experience. The
dialectical interrelation between habitus and field enables us to show how history is
simultaneously being carried, and enacted, and carries actors. Thus, in other words,
actors’ ability or inclination to appropriate and narrate history in certain ways is
itself a product of historical acquisition (Bourdieu, 1981).
12.3 Analytical Framework

The essence of our analytical framework is the relationship between the historiciza
tion of social structures, i.e. fields, the historicization of individual actors, i.e. hab
itus, and practice (Steinmetz, 2011). We understand practice as the doing by social
actors which takes meaning and value in a particular field; reflected in the sociohis
torical trajectory of actors through their position in the field, the capital possessed,
and their habitus (Gomez, 2015).
To Bourdieu, the social world is made up of relational fields, which can be under
stood as microcosms carved out of larger social structures, governed by distinct
logics, which define the rules and resources that are legitimate in that particular field
(Bourdieu, 1990). In this sense, fields are historically embedded as they form separ
ate spaces, with their own stakes and their own agreed-upon logics, which did not
exist before (Steinmetz, 2011). Therefore, any social inquiry should start by defining
the field in which the investigated phenomenon is situated by reconstructing the
historical genesis of the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). As fields are relation
ally configured, the organizing principles of a field are always rooted both in the
history of the field itself and in the history of its relations to the larger fields in which
it is embedded (Steinmetz, 2011). Hence, while the tempo of the field is connected to
that of other fields, each field too has its own synchrony, rhythm, and pace. Thus,
actors’ temporal consciousness, experience, and meaning of time are conditioned by
their specific position in the field (Atkinson, 2019).
Fields are always occupied by a dominant and a dominated group of actors seek
ing to achieve personal advantage, and control of the mechanisms of the field,
through ongoing position-takings, guided by the field-specific capital (Steinmetz,
2011). In that sense, capital represents the stakes and resources over which actors
continuously struggle. Consequently, to define the boundaries of a field requires
empirical determination of what species of capital are active and within what limits
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Thus, the distribution of capital across the field
represents the structure within it, at a given point in time, and governs the field
dynamics by determining the chances of success for practices (Bourdieu, 1986). The
amount of capital in one’s possession defines actors’ relative distance from necessity,
which contributes to the structuring of their temporal consciousness, including their
sense of their own trajectory, i.e. of being “up and coming” or “on the decline.” In
this sense, the temporal consciousness of actors makes certain experiences likely or
unlikely, and certain actions and strategies objectively possible or impossible. Thus,
awareness of time can be viewed as the form in terms of which one’s life experience
is organized (Atkinson, 2019).
The habitus of actors can be understood as the active presence of past socialization
in a body. It is the product of the milieu in which socialization takes place and where
humans become culturally knowledgeable through their engagement in a particular
environment (Bourdieu, 1990). It generates the practical sense of what to do in spe
cific situations, within the conditions that apply to a field (Bourdieu and Wacquant,
1992). The inherently historical nature of habitus is captured in the following
definition: It is a “system of dispositions—a past which survives in the present and
tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practices”
(Bourdieu, 1977: 82). In other words, the habitus is a system of layers of enduring
and transposable dispositions integrating all past experiences. Consequently, the
dispositions acquired in the past are at every moment part of present actions and
perceptions, because the habitus is constantly subjected to experience, and, by the
same token, transformed by these experiences (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015).
Therefore, habitus always produces history on the basis of history (Wacquant, 2016).
Habitus is both individual and collective; individual in the sense that all actors have
their own unique historical trajectories, and collective in the sense that it is acquired
in a social environment (Bourdieu and Chartier, 2015). Consequently, actors who
occupy similar positions develop a similar habitus which is attuned to the field of
which it is the product and unattuned to others (Wacquant, 2016).
12.3.1 Narratives
Narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and
change (Herman, 2009), as it connects past, present, and anticipated future. Through
these connections, narratives “can be seen as stories of our experience in time,
grounded in events linked together in a temporal way” (Cunliffe et al., 2004: 272).
However, stories and narratives are not just retrospective reflections of past events,
but situated, responsive performance, where the past is interpreted through the pre
sent, and where the past and the future exist in our embodied experience (Menary,
2008) of the present. In other words, narratives are “lived embodied experiences”
(Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012: 64) that are “structured by the sequence of embodied
and embedded experience, perceptions, and actions” (Menary, 2008: 75). By com
bining this perspective on narratives with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, we under
stand narratives as embodied, learned, and generative, and as products of a “narrative
habitus” (Fleetwood, 2016), where narratives can be understood as social action
rooted in social structure. In other words, narrative is the “hinge” between individ
ual and society, which allows us to focus on the relationship between the individual
and social structures, and to see narratives as products of the logics of construction
applying to a field (Fleetwood, 2016).
This perspective provides us with a unique theoretical and analytical framework
that enables us to capture the subjective experiences of organizational actors in their
social and historical contexts. Drawing on inspiration from Fleetwood (2016), who
argues that habits include the inculcation of narrative dispositions, we pay attention
to how social structures shape narratives and human actions, through actors’ per
ceptions and representations of themselves and their world. Narratives can therefore
be seen as forms of social action generated by habitus, where social structures are
reproduced through repetition and through use. Thus, as well as reproducing the
field, narratives also have “the power to change it” (Fleetwood, 2016: 183). We thus
argue that the narratives are a means of taking the history of the field into possession
and using it in practice.
In our analysis, we adopt a broad definition of narratives to refer to sequenced
accounts, which include temporality, plot, and linear coherence, i.e. narratives with
a beginning, middle, and end, but also narratives as fragmented, nonlinear “ante
narratives” lacking overall meaning (Boje, 2001). Boje (2001) defines antenarratives
as fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative
speculations that offer an alternative to the classical understanding of narrative as

“coherent, linear and ordered tale.”
12.4 Study Context

We investigate how managers appropriated history for the purpose of implementing
performance management in the operations department of a Scandinavian telecom,
and how this appropriation impacted change management practices. The study took
place during the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2018. The operations department was organ
ized in twenty teams of approximately twenty-five technicians. One technician in
each team acted as union representative for his team. Each team was led by a manager
and the management team was led by a regional director. The work of the department
was divided into the two categories of installation and service. The former concerned
installation of new digital solutions and systems, and the latter concerned repair and
maintenance of the systems that transport cable signals. The department serviced
both private and corporate customers in a large regional area and had multiple com
pany locations scattered over the region with headquarters in the center.
At the time of our ethnographic study, the department had been presented with a
threat of being outsourced. Subsequent negotiations between the company and the union
had averted the threat temporarily by agreeing on a so-called “inhouse business case.”
The case included enforcement of key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance
management in the sense that specific targets were to be reached for the department to
avoid outsourcing. In light of this increased pressure, the technicians also had to waive
their “on-the-clock” lunch break and thus, work half an hour longer each day.
An important aspect in the context of these negotiations was the so-called Nordic
model of work and welfare, which is an organizing principle that is unique to the
Nordic countries (Ervasti, Fridberg, Hjerm, and Ringdal, 2008). The central features
of the model are: a high rate of unionization among employees, a national hierarch
ical system of collective bargaining, and the strong presence of trade unions at the
workplace level (Kettunen, 2012). The employment schemes of the model included
tenured civil servant positions with seniority-based pay and pension. However, after
privatization and the increased focus on profitability, new employment schemes were
implemented based on a minimum-wage system and performance-based pay
(Jordfald and Murhem, 2003). In this sense, privatization significantly altered the
logic of practice and put the legitimacy of the principles of the Nordic model under
pressure. Hence, the organizing principles of work, including terms of employment,
became an object of struggle and opposed positions formed between technicians and
managers—the former as proponents of the traditional organizing principle based on
the Nordic model, and the latter as proponents of a new organizing principle based
on performance management (Bourdieu, 2005). We sum up the struggle between the
two battling logics of practice in table 12.1 below. The table demonstrates the radical
changes in objective field structures before and after company privatization.
Table 12.1 Objective structures of the field before and after privatization
Before privatization After privatization
Company objectives Serve the public Maximize profit

Governing values Community Productivity
Solidarity Efficiency
Loyalty
Employment schemes Seniority-based pay Minimum-wage system
Tenure Performance-based pay
Low security of employment
Dominant organizing principle The Nordic model Performance management
We argue that the telecoms of the Nordic countries constituted a field as the organ
izing principles of the Nordic model provided these telecoms with similar condi
tions of existence and similar stakes that were unique compared to the rest of
Europe. Furthermore, we argue that the threat of being outsourced made the case
company of this chapter, and the operations department in particular, subject to a
particular struggle that allows us to analyze this department as a field (e.g. Bourdieu,
2005) embedded in the larger field of telecoms in the Nordic countries.
12.5 Methods
12.5.1 Data Collection
The majority of data were collected during a six-month ethnographic study in the
fall of 2016, where twenty-two interviews and more than thirty days of observation
studies were conducted. An additional three interviews were conducted in the fall of
2018. The data were collected by the chapter’s first author, who was granted access to
assume the role of participant observer in the department (Hasse, 2015). The author
observed managers and technicians in all aspects of their work including manage
ment meetings, team meetings, town hall meetings, and breaks. Observations were
documented in field notes and written out at the end of each workday. The author
was also granted access to internal documents such as email correspondence, KPI
reports, and meeting minutes. Furthermore, to understand the structuring forces
that set the framework for privatization and, thus, to achieve a micro and macro
dialectical theorization of our study, we included secondary data in the form of a
considerable body of textual material. This included union newsletters, reports on
the developments within the telecommunications sector in Scandinavia, and
research articles from peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Greve and Andersen, 2001;
Jordfald and Murhem, 2003).
The total amount of data constitutes the base of our understanding of the objecti
fied history—that is, company privatization and the subsequent field-level changes,
including the implementation of performance management—while the exhibited

interviews and field notes are elected because they in a special way provide illustra
tions of the subjective and embodied experiences of these changes.
The total of twenty-five interviews were split between: three with the regional
director, six with technicians (of which three were union representatives), and six
teen with managers. The duration of the interviews ranged from forty-five to ninety
minutes and all except two interviews were recorded and transcribed. Inspired by
Kvale and Brinkmann (2009), the interviews were set up according to a thematically
arranged semi-structured interview guide. The focal point of the interviews was a
variety of questions concerning the organizational changes in the department,
including the implementation of performance management. Additionally, inform
ants were asked to provide information about their personal historical trajectories or
the career path that had led them to their current position with the company.
12.5.2 Data Analysis
Data were coded in cycles in an inductive deductive combinational approach follow

ing the recommendations developed by Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña (1994). In
the first cycle, the entire dataset was coded by the first author, with the codes deriv
ing inductively from the data. This resulted in several themes or analytical categories,
of which the theme organizational transformation emerged, under which the
category of history arose. The coding was then linked to Bourdieu’s theoretical
concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and the history of organizational practices.
Working iteratively between data and our analytical understandings, this part of the
analysis connected the historicization of the organization (field) and the historiciza
tion of the managers (habitus).
A final detailed sub-coding by both authors identified the narrative constructions
of technicians and managers within the category of history. In that process, we iden
tified three storylines: 1) the department as a field of struggle, 2) abandoning history,
and 3) embracing history.
The department as a field of struggle. The department was narratively constructed
as a site of conflict between technicians and managers, and between the “good old
days,” when the union was strong (e.g. “In the old days, . . . back then there was a dif
ferent unity because people could talk to each other”) and the present organizing
principles of performance management (e.g. “we will be outsourced if we do not
perform”).
Abandoning history. This storyline emerged from the narratives of the managers
when they told about the past as something they needed to move away from to
strengthen management positions (e.g. “it has been the guiding star all the time to
do away with these old civil servants . . .”).
Embracing history. We identified this storyline from the narratives of the man
agers about the past as something the managers could “utilize” to their advantage
(e.g. “. . . So, the cooperation between me and the union representative, I would say, is
a big part of making things work”).
Following our approach to narratives, we acknowledge all types of statements that
had narrative qualities in the sense that we see them as part of the ongoing story
work (Gabriel, 2004).
12.6 Results
The analysis is divided into three parts, based on the above storylines. The first part
will serve to illustrate the structure and dynamics of the field as a structuring struc
ture by exhibiting the stakes and the struggle between management and technicians.
The second and third parts of the analysis are concerned with the two plots of aban
doning and embracing history. Thus, where the first section is intended to carve out
the field of struggle to which the habitus of managers were adapted, the focus of the
later sections is on the strategies and practices via which the managers temporalized
themselves by producing and reproducing history: in other words, their strategic
appropriation and narration of history in practice.
12.6.1 The Department as a Field of Struggle
The transformation from state-owned to shareholder-owned organization in the early

1990s had altered the company’s logic of practice as pursuit of new kinds of goals was
now essential to secure company survival. Competitiveness and profitability became
the paramount concerns and performance management, consequently, became the
primary organizing principle. These organizational changes had initiated a slow but
steady redistribution of symbolic capital and an increase of management power at the
expense of the technicians and the union over the years. At the time of our study, the
added pressure of the outsourcing threat enhanced the urgency of performance and
delivery on KPIs. This put the management team under pressure to manage the
implementation and enforce performance management. However, this renewed
change management focus also made clear the chasm between the traditional logic of
practice versus the new logic of practice, as the restructuring of field positions and
power resulted in opposed position-takings by managers and technicians—the for
mer as proponents of performance management as an organizing principle, and
the latter as proponents of traditional organizing principles based on the values of the
Nordic model. In this sense, the presence of two battling logics of practice made the
department a field of struggle between a narrative of the necessity of performance for
the sake of the future and a narrative of nostalgia and reminiscence of “good old days.”
The struggle is illustrated in an extract from a story told by a technician with more
than thirty-two years of seniority with the company, a technician who also assumed
the role of union representative. He explains what it was like when he first came into
the company when it was a public monopoly, and how the distribution of power had
changed, since then.
1) . . . I must say, it was a culture with a lot of time for a lot of things, and the
employees and the union actually had a really significant amount of power, they
really did. And if I am to look at it today, it is no way near comparable. Then, the
tables have turned. A great union man once told me that we had no more worlds
left to conquer, as in, we could not think of anything more to negotiate for . . . the
great battles are not as easy to find as they used to be. So, I think it is easier for
management to push through with their ways than it is for us to resist . . . people
are not willing to sit down and strike like they were in the old days. (Interview,
Technician A, union representative)
The extract points to how the union had enjoyed a great deal of power prior to pri
vatization, where favorable working conditions for the technicians had been negoti
ated. However, it also indicates how this power had declined over the years in favor
of management as performance management had altered the mechanisms of capital
distribution. The decline of union power had also affected the community of the
technicians, as their primary trump card, strikes, no longer seemed to have the same
impact. In the following, the technician explains how the new ways of organizing
had also affected the comradeship and community amongst technicians.
2) In the old days, we met at one of our meeting points for instance in the city
where we also had a meeting point. People met in there and there were really a lot
of technicians who met up every morning, together. And then, you could sit there
and talk about, well we are also bloody dissatisfied with this and that . . . You do
not do that today because today, we take the vehicles home. We go to work from
our home address . . . back then there was a different unity because people could
talk to each other. (Interview, Technician A, union representative)
From the extract, we see how the new organizing principles are set in opposition to
the “good old days” of power, community, and unity amongst technicians. The nos
talgic undercurrent suggests that the technicians were remembering former ways of
being a (good) technician and they mourned the loss of the organizing principles of
the public monopoly, where such dispositions had been acquired. The next extract
from another technician and union representative, also with thirty-two years of
seniority, explains how the organizational changes post privatization had impacted
the loyalty and spirit of the technicians: for instance, as a consequence of the out
sourcing threat and the subsequent negotiations, which resulted in the technicians
having to waive their “on-the-clock” lunch.
3) It turns up, you know, it is sort of regularly every three-four-five years, so it has
been there for many years; then, this outsourcing ghost turns up, you know . . . and
I think, gradually, people have lost some morale in this corporation, you know. I
think, gradually, people do not really care . . . that is how I feel these days. It is
like, it does not even matter anymore. (Interview, Technician B, union
representative)
The extract speaks of a kind of emotional disengagement from their jobs and a loss
of loyalty and dedication to the company on behalf of the technicians and an increase
in the divide between them and the management team. This is also reflected in the
story from one of the managers, who was a technician at the time of the “in-house
business case” negotiations.
4) . . . We said yes to sell our paid lunch to get allowed to stay “in-house,” and just
to make a little bit of a story to it, then one can say that at the next meeting we
had, I think, we were twenty technicians, I almost believe that eight of them had
taken black tape around their arms as mourning bands, now that the company
had ripped them off and sold their lunch break. (Interview, Manager A)
In the extract, we see how two opposed positions formed as the technicians blamed
the company for their loss of the structures and organizing principles of “the good
old days,” which had provided them with favorable working conditions. On the
managerial side, however, the “in-house business case” enhanced the necessity of
performance as the department was fighting not just for market shares but also to
avoid being outsourced to an outside competitor.
5) We will be outsourced if we do not perform. The workplace of the future

depends on present performance. They think it is just a threat and we hear loads
of excuses. It is just funny how some can [be on target] and that is what we need
to keep on building on. (Field notes, Regional Director)
The added competitive pressure post privatization and the subsequent outsourcing
threat rendered the future present in consciousness as something which was no
longer given, as survival depended on the department’s ability to perform, be profit
able, and generate economic capital. As a result, department objectives and the logic
of practice were significantly altered. Consequently, the once dominant but grad
ually decimated organizing principles of the Nordic model were continuously
brought into question or delegitimized by management in light of competition. This
is reflected in the next extract when a manager points to the powerful presence of
the union, and the habitus of technicians acquired during the times of public
monopoly, as hampering change management effort.
6) But we also have a culture where the union has been a part of things for many
many years and this means that the technicians are thinking: What can the com-
pany do for me and not the other way around. And then they are incredibly naive
at times . . . the fact alone that it was very close with the business case that we
were outsourced. It was very close. They do not have a clue about it. They believe
they won this and that means on a somewhat naive level they say we just keep
going the way we always would have gone, and things will be fine. (Interview,
Manager B)
We have sought to illustrate the structure and dynamic of the field by drawing atten
tion to the distribution of capital and power between technicians and managers. We
have identified the department as a field of struggle between two different logics of
practice: one based on the principles of the Nordic model of work and another based
on performance management. Also, we have demonstrated how the objective struc
tures of institutionalized organizing principles and the dispositions shaped by them
can be very enduring. This is illustrated by the way the favorable working conditions
of technicians, and their habitus, were seen as an obstruction to achieve the per
formance necessary to secure survival. In other words, we see how the past was nar
ratively inscribed in the present, placing limits on the chances of success for change
management practices.
12.6.2 Abandoning History
In the following part of the analysis, we demonstrate how the limits of the con
straints inscribed in the department as objectified history inclined and enabled the
managers to appropriate history via strategic narrations of the past as an obstruction
to the desired company future. On the basis of the managers’ experience and socio
historical trajectories in the field of struggle, we identify how the managers put to
work these historical structures as they were simultaneously carried by and carrying
history in practice.
The continuous struggle over capital is shown in the following extract of an inter
view with a manager who had been with the company for twenty-nine years.
7) . . . we continuously streamline and slim our organization and regardless of

which organizing measures we have conducted; it has been the guiding star all
the time to do away with these old civil servants . . . Now the union is deci-
mated . . . but it is still strong compared to when you look outside the company.
(Interview, Manager C)
The extract suggests that strategic organizing for capital accumulation and the seiz
ure of power included finding ways to undermine the strong position of the union
and the old civil servants, whose habitus was not adjusted to the objective structures
under which one was expected to function after privatization. Part of this strategic
organizing included termination of the old principles for hiring and firing
employees.
8) They are still living in the times of last-in, first-out . . . back in the day there was a
ranking and if you wanted to fire a civil servant ranked number twenty-two on the
list, you had to fire number twenty-one, twenty, and so on all the way down to
first. So, there was a security of employment you did not see anywhere else. The
last-in, first-out principle is officially terminated. It does not exist anymore . . . So,
it is productivity and if you are not productive, then you are out. But they are not
there yet. They still believe in last-in, first-out. (Interview, Manager B)
As reflected in the phrases “they are not there yet” and “they still believe in,” capital
accumulation from the viewpoint of the managers was associated with the notion of
moving on from the past by breaking with the old values, beliefs, and organizing
principles. As a result of the ongoing struggle, and the pressure and urgency of per
formance caused by the “in-house business case,” the notion of abandoning the past
became a way of cementing management’s position of power by promoting perform
ance management as the dominant principle of capital accumulation. In the narra
tives of managers, this delegitimization of the past was expressed by the term “special
culture,” which was positioned as an obstruction to the desired company future.
9) We are dealing with a culture which previously offered opportunities for . . .

ample opportunities for coordinating and plan my day, to go to the hairdresser,
and make breaks, and take a nap, or take an hour or two breaks, and so on . . . this
we have done away with among other things by putting GPS tracking on the utility
vehicles. (Interview, Regional Director)
The GPS tracking system provided management with an additional tool for control
and surveillance of the technicians to support the ongoing streamlining of the day-
to-day operation. Also, it reduced the relative autonomy of technicians and strength
ened management’s position of power. As the extract also indicates, the GPS was
considered a necessary measure to do away with the old culture. Hence, in the
extract, the narrative of the past as an obstruction to the envisioned future of the
department is enforced.
The narratives of a “special culture” were dominated by frequent uses of “the old”
and “the young,” delegitimizing past values by referring to it as for instance “ancient
culture.” This is reflected in a selection of extracts from interviews with two different
managers.
10) There are some who have been here for 30, 33 and 34 years, and some who
begin to approach a 10-year anniversary. Thus, I would like to say that young, new
forces have come in, who have a different worldview than those born in the ancient
culture. (Interview, Manager D)
11) It is incredible how some of the employees just cannot get past that—it’s like
tunnel vision completely . . . they think they are the center of the world and that
the whole world should revolve around them—it’s not going to be like that again—
so MOVE ON now . . . (Interview, Manager E)
Following the narratives of the managers, we especially note that the “special cul
ture” reconfigures and reinterprets the past in light of the ongoing present, where
young and new employees are seen as making things move a bit faster, and where
historically bound practices are devalued by a more profit-oriented narrative, i.e.
where “old people” and “ancient cultures” are positioned in opposition to efficiency
and performance.
To sum up, in this part of the analysis, we have shown how the habitus of the
managers, as a product of historical acquisition in the departmental field of strug
gle, enabled them to appropriate history by strategically constructing a narrative of
the past as an obstruction to the envisioned future of the department. By construct
ing this narrative, the managers strategically put the historical structures of the field
to work in their change management practice. Because their habitus is the product
of the embodiment of these historical structures, i.e. rules and regularities of the
field, it allowed the managers to transcend the immediate present by mobilizing the
past that was inscribed in the present. In other words, the lines of action engen
dered by a habitus adjusted to the field included the construction of this narrative
as a means of strategic position-taking and capital accumulation in the field, while
at the same time reproducing the structures of the field to which the habitus of
managers was adjusted.
12.6.3 Embracing History
As shown in the above, the practical experience in the departmental field of struggle
had endowed the managers with a practical sense that enabled them to re-enact and
narrate history the way their habitus inclined them to perceive it. Thus, the delegit
imization of the “old culture” was part of a strategy or practice which made sense to
them under the constraints of the struggle which they took part in. Next, we demon
strate how this practical sense also allowed the managers to appropriate history in
another way, which expressed itself in their change management practice as involve
ment of—and collaboration with—their teams’ union representatives.
In other words, although management on the one hand constructed the narrative
of “the old culture” as an obstruction to the envisioned organizational change, their
practical sense simultaneously enabled them to utilize “the old culture” to their
advantage via strategic appropriation of the legacy of history. Manager B provides an
example of how this played out in practice.
12) There are conflicting interests, but I have chosen to say: Why should I punish a
man for being sick when I can call [my union representative] and say to him: Now,
this guy has been sick three times. It is unacceptable. Try having a talk with him
because otherwise, I will need to have a talk with him. And then, he has a talk with
him, and it works itself out . . . I could have chosen the hard way and had disgrun-
tled employees, but I have chosen to involve him. (Interview, Manager B)
Our takeaway from this story is that the conflict between the two opposed logics
of practice, or the narrative of the necessity of moving on from the past versus the
narrative of “the good old days,” was still constitutive of the dynamic and struc
ture of the field. However, instead of abandoning the values and organizing prin
ciples of the past completely, the managers had learned to utilize the union
representatives as facilitators of organizational change. This was reflected in the
story of Manager A when he reflects on his collaboration with his union
representative.
13) They [the union] take up much space in general, but if you can manage to turn
it around, to make him feel better, not that he is to take on management, but at
least to clear up the support that you might have . . . things are much easier . . . So,
the cooperation between me and the union representative, I would say, is a big
part of making things work. (Interview, Manager A)
The way this collaboration or appropriation of history hinged on experience, under

stood as the gradual adjustment of the habitus of managers to a field constituted by
two competing logics of practice, is illustrated by the story told by Manager C, who
had been with the company for twenty-nine years.
It was almost like a boxing match . . . and it has been that way, I mean, like there
had to be war instead of cooperation. I think sometimes, management could have
done things differently, because sometimes when a decision had been made for
us to do something, they would be like: Now we are just going to go at them
hard . . . we have the right to be in charge, but that is not what you get the most out
of. There are always some union representatives who like to feel important and
stuff, and I do not understand; just give them something so they can sit in the cor-
ner and work with it and feel they are a part of running things. I mean, we get
them on our team in that way . . . Now, he [the regional director] is doing some-
thing. He is involving them a lot.
The extract offers an outline of the historical development of the battle between
managers and technicians; it illustrates the power struggle in which management
had claimed their right to manage the department and attempted to outpunch the
powerful union by taking a hard line against it. However, over the years, the man
ager explains, the approach had changed to a more involving and collaborative strat
egy. We interpret this strategy as a product of the managerial habitus or in other
words the gradual embodiment of the historical structures of the field. Thus, as a
product of historical acquisition through their experience in the department, the
habitus of managers made it possible for them to appropriate history via the utiliza
tion of the power of the union representatives, which, as a kind of legacy of history,
still shaped the objective potentialities of present practices. In this sense, the way
managers managed change was shaped by the dialectical interplay between the
objectified historical structures of the department and the subjective construction

and enactment of these structures in practice.
12.7 Discussion and Conclusion

In this chapter, we have examined organizational change management in the oper
ations department of a Scandinavian telecom a quarter century after the privatiza
tion of the company. We have examined how management’s appropriation of history
impacted their change management practices during implementation of perform
ance management in the department. By combining Bourdieusian theory with a
narrative approach to analysis, we have outlined an alternative historical perspective,
promoting an understanding of history as both a structuring and a structured struc
ture (Bourdieu, 1990). In light of this perspective, we have aspired toward a “histor
ical consciousness” (Suddaby, 2016) by engaging with questions concerning the
ontological and epistemological constitution of history and its impact on organiza
tional change management. Moreover, our analytical framework has enabled us to
draw together the objective elements of historical facts with the subjective elements
of historical narratives; thus, we have been able to explain how the objectified his
tory of the department as a field, and the subjective history of the habitus, were
brought together in practice. In this way, we have shed light on the impact of the
largely unexplored interaction between these two modes of existence of history
(Suddaby, 2016) on the ongoing production and reproduction of organizational
orders in the context of organizational change. In other words, through this histor
ical perspective, we have shown how the ability or inclination of managers to appro
priate history for the purpose of implementing performance management was
shaped by the dialectical interplay between the objectified historical structures of the
field and the subjective construction and enactment of these structures in practice.
We have zoomed in on narratives as a vital component of the situated responsive
performance through which the managers temporalized themselves via practical
mobilization of the past in the present. In this sense, we have shown how the narra
tives as a form of social action were produced by the managers’ historically transmit
ted dispositions, acquired through experience in the field of struggle, while
simultaneously reproducing and gradually changing the field through strategic nar
ration of history, as their habitus inclined them to perceive it. We identified two dis
tinct narrative appropriations of history which impacted the practice of change
management, both of which were engendered by the habitus of managers adjusted to
the constraints of the relations of force that constituted the departmental field. The
first, which we categorized as “abandoning history,” emerged as a delegitimizing nar
rative of the past as an obstruction to organizational change and, thus, to the envi
sioned future of the department. The second, which we categorized as “embracing
history,” emerged as a utilization of union representatives as important facilitators
for organizational change. Through these findings, we illustrated how the practice of
change management was impacted by management’s appropriation of history, which

was itself a product of the dialectical interplay between history as a structuring and a
structured structure.
Based on our results, and by drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts as well as an epis
temological emphasis on being with history and time, we argue that the framework
we have outlined is easily integrated within the current literature on organizational
uses of the past. By reconceptualizing history into a complex habitus and field
dialectic, we are reminded that organizational actors have a history, and that they are
the product of the history of the whole social field and of the accumulated experience
within a specific subfield. Practice therefore becomes a product of a habitus that is
itself a product of historical acquisition (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Hence, we
see potential in this framework to move research on uses of the past forward in at
least two significant areas. First, by embedding organizational actors’ uses of the past
in a field within fields, the framework provides an inherently contextualized concep
tion of uses of the past. We therefore argue that the framework provides an
opportunity to extend current work (e.g. Lubinski, 2018; Mordhorst, 2008) concerned
with the way in which the use of historical narratives intertwines with organizational
fields and society at large. Second, by emphasizing the way practices arise from
habituated tendencies and embodied history rather than from purposeful, goal-oriented
initiatives, the framework provides a solid starting point for further exploration of the
non-rational and pre-reflexive ways in which history performs organizational work; an
area that so far has received limited attention (Wadhwani et al., 2018).
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13
Memory Work
Corporate Archivists and Long-Term Remembering in
Organizations
William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola,
François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby
13.1 Introduction
Memory is important to organizations (e.g. Booth and Rowlinson, 2006; Kieser, 1994;
Munir and Phillips, 2005; Rowlinson and Procter, 1999; Schultz and Hernes, 2013;
Usdiken and Kieser, 2004). Organizations remember their history through anniver
saries, commemorative books, and museums (e.g. Delahaye et al., 2009; Nissley and
Casey, 2002; Stigliani and Ravasi, 2007), recollect and forget aspects of organiza
tional identity and culture (e.g. Anteby and Molnár, 2012; Ravasi and Schultz, 2006),
and recall traditions and rituals that are perceived as being central to the organiza
tion’s core values and operations (e.g. Dacin and Dacin, 2008; Dacin, Munir, and
Tracey, 2010). Memory is also deemed important because of the way that memories
can affect organizational decision making and actions in the future (e.g. Brunninge
and Melin, 2009). In all, memory has a powerful impact on the way organizations
conduct their business and achieve their goals.
Despite the importance of memory in organizations, there is surprisingly little
research about how organizational memories are created and maintained. Most
research in the area of organizational memory has focused on knowledge manage
ment, i.e. the collection, retention, and retrieval of organizational information. In
these studies, organizational memory is conceptualized either as reified facts or
information that can be catalogued and stored for future use or as the repositories
where that information is stored. Although this informational metaphor has value, it
omits consideration of the interpretive aspects of memory. That is, with a few not
able exceptions (e.g. Rowlinson et al., 2010; Schultz and Hernes, 2013), there has
been a limited amount of research on the process by which organizational memory
is socially constructed.
William M. Foster, Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby, Memory Work: Corporate Archivists
and Long-Term Remembering in Organizations In: Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by:
Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © William M. Foster,
Elden Wiebe, Diego M. Coraiola, François Bastien, and Roy Suddaby.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0013
Memory Work 241
This more nuanced notion of memory as a process of collective interpretation has

generated growing interest from management and organizational scholars (e.g.
Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Rowlinson et al., 2010). However, there is still the need
to develop a more granular and process-oriented understanding of social memory in
organizations. This study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the activities through
which social memory is constructed and reconstructed in organizational settings.
We investigate the strategies of organizational memory construction in Fortune
500 firms. Drawing on interviews with the archivists and historians in eleven of the
largest corporations in the United States we provide a framework for understanding
the practices underpinning the memory work of corporate archivists and historians.
That is, we show that these professionals manage both the short-term memory as
defined by organizational learning theorists as well as the more long-term remem
bering process encompassing the management of corporate heritage (e.g. organiza
tional artifacts, oral histories, firm legends, past events, iconic images and previous
emotions) and its transformation into active organizational memories. We use the
term memory work to capture these two sets of activities and analytically elaborate
the practices through which archivists and historians rework raw materials from the
past and transform them into a vivid collective memory.
The chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section we review the literature on
social and organizational memory. This is followed by the description of our research
methods and the presentation of our results. In the conclusion we synthesize our
findings and discuss the theoretical implications of the organizational function of
corporate archivists and historians in organizational memory work.
13.2 Organizational Memory

Research in organizational memory can be divided into two main approaches. Early
research treated organizational memory as a reified collection of objective facts. The
key challenge for an organization, in this approach, is to identify the best way to
structure the collection, retention, and retrieval of specific facts in order to enhance
its performance. An emerging stream of research, however, challenges this
structural-functional approach to organizational memory by conceptualizing it as
an ongoing process of subjective interpretation, narration, and reconstruction of the
past in an effort, not to improve performance, but rather to create a sense of common
identity. We elaborate each of these approaches in turn.
The most common conception of organizational memory is as a body of informa
tion about the organization. Walsh and Ungson (1991) constructed the first model
of organizational memory (OM) defined as “stored information from an organiza
tion’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions.” The organizational
challenge is to devise a set of steps whereby an organization acquires, retains, and
retrieves the stored information. To emphasize the objective nature of organizational
memory, Walsh and Ungson (1991) observe that organizational memory is stored in
specific receptacles or “bins.” All organizations have storage bins, according to Walsh
and Ungson (1991). They identify five internal bins (individuals, culture, transform
ations, structures, ecology) and one external bin (external archive) that serve as the
“structure of memory” of the organization. Walsh and Ungson (1991), thus, see
organizational memory through the metaphor of a library in which the largest chal
lenges are in deciding what books to collect, how to find the book you want and how
to prevent the gradual erosion of the collection.
Most subsequent research on organizational memory adopts this functional and
objective position. So, for example, considerable research has been devoted to iden
tifying appropriate ways to store information in organizations. Centralized storage is
seen to be better for retrieval than dispersed storage (Alavi and Leidner, 1999;
Olivera, 2000); the loss of key employees can impede information retrieval
(Becker, 1993; Huber, 1991) and codified information is easier to store and retrieve
in organizational memory than is tacit or implicit information (Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995). Calls for future research on organizational memory, largely, adopt
the assumption that memory is codified information and the greatest challenge is to
understand the ideal structure to improve its acquisition, storage, and retrieval
(Argote, 2012; Argote and Ingram, 2000; Walsh, 1995).
Increasingly, however, the conceptualization of organizational memory as a library
or a computer system has attracted criticism. The core critique is that it adopts a
reductionist model of memory as, largely, an isolated act of discrete events—acquisi
tion, storage, and retrieval—that ignore the collective elements of social memory. In
response to the functional and presentist approach of the OM model, Rowlinson et al.
suggest that organizational memory is a subset of social memory. They note that
organizations have been notably absent from discussion of collective mnemonic
communities. Corporations and business organizations, not-for-profits, sports teams,
fraternal organizations, and clubs all function as mnemonic communities that shape
and define members’ memories and how they ultimately remember. Organizational
memory, they argue, can often take the form of brands (e.g. Balmer, 2011; Urde,
Greyser, and Balmer, 2007), corporate commemorations (e.g. Gough, 2004), and cor
porate museums (e.g. Nissley and Casey, 2002). Moreover, they connect the develop
ment of social practices of remembering in organizations to the process of developing
an organization’s identity. These “organizational mnemonics” are the various activities
and rituals that organizations use as technologies of remembrance.
Recent theory and empirical research suggests that the active management of
organizational memory is an organizational capability that can lead to a strategic
advantage (Coraiola, Suddaby, and Foster, 2017; Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn
Trank, 2010). For example, Foster, Suddaby, Minkus, and Wiebe (2011) show how
managers build a competitive advantage by creating social memory assets, or com
pelling narratives that link organizational identities to individuals’ identification
with both their nation state and their local community. Using the Canadian quick-
serve restaurant Tim Horton’s as their exemplar, they demonstrate how the company
Memory Work 243
differentiates itself from its competitors by appropriating elements of Canadian col

lective memory.
A series of recent studies demonstrate an emerging understanding that organiza
tional memory is more than the mechanical storage and retrieval of information
about the past (e.g. Anteby and Molnár, 2012; Do, Lyle, and Walsh, forthcoming;
Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Schultz and Hernes, 2013). Organizational memory also
has a collective memory component in which elements of the past are used subject
ively and interpretively to construct a common and coherent firm identity. While
these studies highlight the absence of social memory in our understanding of organ
izational memory, we still have little knowledge about the process by which social
memory is routinely constructed in organizations. This study extends our under
standing of organizational memory by elaborating the processes by which large cor
porations that have formalized collective memory as a core organizational capability
engage in the production and reproduction of organizational memories. We extend
the Walsh and Ungson (1991) model of organizational memory by incorporating a
detailed analysis of the process by which corporate historians and archivists contrib
ute to the social construction of organizational memory. Before presenting our
results, however, we describe the methods and empirical context used to explore the
social elements of organizational memory.
13.3 Method
13.3.1 Context
Our primary data consist of semi-structured interviews with corporate archivists

and/or corporate historians1 from eleven companies listed among the Fortune 500
largest publicly traded American companies as measured by revenue. In our sample
the average amount of revenue generated by the companies was $45.8 billion, the
average net income was $2.9 billion, and the average market capitalization was
$67.8 billion. The firms in our sample employed, on average, 145,800 people.2 A full
description of each of the firms in the sample can be found in Table 13.1.
For the corporation to be included in the sample, their archivist had to be either
an employee of one of the firms or hired as a contractor to manage the company’s
archival collection. Our sample was developed first by determining which Fortune
500 corporations employed corporate archivists. To do so we consulted the Directory
of Corporate Archives that is collected and maintained by the Business Archivists
section of the Society of American Archivists. We then contacted the largest of these
firms and asked for interviews. After each interview we would ask our interview
subject for the names of other archivists at Fortune 500 who they felt might be inter
ested in participating in the study.
The archivists were contacted directly by one of the research team members and
arrangements were made to visit them at their place of work. We conducted
Table 13.1 Industry and financial characteristics of sample firms*
Company Industry US region Revenue** Net income** Market value** Number of employees^
A Telecom SE 100–150 2.5–5.0 175–200 250,000+

B Engineering NW 50–75 2.5–5.0 50–75 150,000+
C Consumer goods SE 25–50 7.5–10.0 150–175 125,000+
D Transportation SE 25–50 0.5–1.0 5–25 75,000+
E Retail MW 50–75 2.5–5.0 25–50 350,000+
F Financial MW 25–50 0.5–1.0 N/A 2,500+
G Consumer goods MW 5–25 1.0–2.5 25–50 25,000+
H Manufacturing MW 5–25 0.5–1.0 10–25 5,000+
I Telecom MW 5–25 1.0–2.5 10–25 20,000+
J Transportation SE 50–75 2.5–5.0 75–100 350,000+
K Consumer goods MW 50–75 2.5–5.0 50–75 125,000+
* All financial data collected from 2012 Forbes Fortune 500 list.
** All financial data in $bn.
^ Employee data collected from each firm’s 2011 10K form.
Memory Work 245
s emi-structured interviews at eleven companies over a one-year period. Interviews

took place on site at the company headquarters or at the company’s off-site
archives. Two team members conducted most interviews; however, a few inter
views were conducted by a single researcher. In total, fifteen archivists were inter
viewed. The interviews ranged in length from forty-five minutes to two hours. The
interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Company and archivist informa
tion was made anonymous to ensure that neither the archivist nor the company
could be identified. This produced over 300 single-spaced pages of interview text
for analysis.
We also collected supplemental textual information about each company’s
archives. In some cases, the researchers were provided with materials (e.g. books,
pamphlets, computer files) that pertained to the activities of the archivists. These
materials were also supplemented with data collected from the websites of each
organization. The materials were used as a secondary data source. In many cases,
the members of the research team were given a tour of the organization and the
archives. Most of the archivists were eager to show the research team how they used
the artifacts and materials from the archive at the company. This included not only
a detailed, guided tour of the company’s archives but also a tour of the organization
and the sites at the firm where historical and archival materials were on display. The
information collected during these guided tours was used to enhance the research
team’s understanding of the company and the role of the archivists in their
organization.
13.3.2 Data Analysis
We used a combination of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) and the Gioia
method (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton, 2013) to analyze the data. We began our
analysis by reading through each of the interview transcripts. Each researcher high
lighted important words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs related to the past,
memory, history, and remembering. At this first-order stage we made sure to “adhere
faithfully to informant terms” (Gioia et al., 2013: 20) and we made sure that we made
“little attempt to distill categories.” Our primary task was to be careful to use the
words and phrases of the informants when developing our first-order concepts. At
the end of our first pass through the data, we had over 100 different first-order terms
that we then used in our second-order analysis.
The second-order analysis focused on synthesizing the first-order concepts into
larger theoretical constructs. We looked for similarities and differences between the
concepts and we looked for emergent themes in these concepts. Second-order
themes were developed as we started to apply our knowledge of the theoretical con
cepts to guide our evaluation of what we were seeing in the data. It is at this point
that our knowledge as researchers became more pronounced when looking for pat
terns, connections, and prominent themes across the different informants.
First-order categories Second-order themes Aggregate dimension
Deep dives
New employee orientation Recollecting
Inspiration
Making history work Interpreting
Has to be active Long-term
memory
“Part of something bigger”
Evangelizing
Stories about people Storytelling
Coherence
Encourage use
Memorializing Organizational
Sharing
memory work
Utility
Acquiring and
Both an art and a science
retaining
More than records management
Short-term
memory work
Like a religious archive

Fact finding Retrieving
Quick and mundane
Figure 13.1 Analytical codes and categories
Next, we consolidated the themes down into broader aggregate dimensions. These
aggregate dimensions are the culmination of the early evaluation and analysis of the
data in its natural state along with our theoretical knowledge applied to the data.
Finally, we placed the categories, themes, and aggregate dimensions into a data
structure. This data structure (see Figure 13.1) is useful for two reasons. First, it
offers a visual representation of how the concepts, themes, and dimensions are con
nected together. Second, the data structure demonstrates how the analysis of our
data progressed from the initial raw interview data to a more coherent and cogent
explanation of what is happening in the organization.
From our analysis we developed a model of organizational memory work that
elaborates the processes involved in the social construction of organizational mem
ory (see Figure 13.2). We now turn to our results.
13.4 Findings: Organizational Memory Work

Our data analysis suggests that corporate historians and archivists engage with the
structural and functional elements of memory acquisition, storage, and retrieval, as
outlined by Walsh and Ungson (1991). In addition, our data suggest that the con
struction of the social memory of the organization is another important dimension of
the work they develop. While the traditional view of memory as the result of
organizational learning focuses on managing the recent past for immediate corporate
use, the social memory approach emphasizes long-term processes of remembering
Memory Work 247
ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY WORK
Short-term Long-term
memory work memory work
Acquiring Archiving Recollecting
Retaining Reinterpreting
Retrieving Memorializing Storytelling
Building heritage
Discarding
Figure 13.2 A framework of organizational memory work
and forgetting in which interpretation and narrativity are key components. In the fol
lowing we introduce an integrative framework of memory work that brings together
the processes of construction of short and long term organizational memory.
13.4.1 Short-Term Memory Work
Acquisition and Retention. As with Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) construct of organ
izational memory, our model begins when the organization acquires various mater
ials that are used in the development of organizational memory. These include, but
are not limited to, artifacts, documents, web pages, promotional material, clothing,
legal documents, oral histories, and company books. Utility is the overriding factor
in the retention of the raw materials at all of the corporations we visited, and archiv
ists exercise a high degree of autonomy and judgment about what objects will be
retained.
We anticipated that there would be specific protocols around what was acquired,
what was retained and what was to be discarded. This, however, was not the case.
The predominant answer we received about what was kept and/or removed from the
collection was that the archivist possessed tacit knowledge by which they discerned
what remnants of the organization had the most use. Although there were some
broad guidelines that each company had around retention of records and artifacts,
surprisingly most of the archivists said that they “just knew” what to keep and that
the process was similar to sorting mail when you get back from vacation. Archivist I
describes his view of the process:
It’s also an art and a science . . . And the art comes from long experience with the
company, with a lot of the people in the company, with the customers and it’s very
analytical. I mean, I’m pulling all these factors together in my head and I’m mak-
ing a decision in a lot of cases and it really does require experience. (Archivist I-1)
The primary criterion for retention, thus, was the archivist’s assessment of the
object’s utility. Utility has two meanings in this context. The first is use from a func
tional standpoint. This means that there are a number of things that are kept because
they still provide some functional use to the organization. In this category are legal
documents and other official management papers related to specific d ecision-making
activities. These usually fall under the purview of records management, but often
there are additional records that fall into this category for which the archivist is
responsible.
The second way utility is defined is the archivist’s assessment of whether and how
the raw materials will be used to construct the organization’s memory. The archivists
understand that although they are under pressure to meet the needs of the different
functional departments, they also have a responsibility to develop a specific, consist
ent corporate message that is communicated to stakeholders of the firm. The utility
of many of the acquired materials comes from being an essential component of
many corporate initiatives designed to address stakeholders inside (i.e. employees)
or outside (i.e. customers, suppliers) the corporation. As Archivist C-1 observes,
“our collection is defined by use . . . if people aren’t using it then we have to question
why we’re collecting it.” In other words, archivists only keep things that they feel will
be useful in future memory work.
Retrieval. Consistent with Walsh and Ungson (1991), our archivists engaged in
daily practices of archival retrieval. It begins with a request from another depart
ment. The archivist first evaluates the request, finds the information, and then pro
vides the information that best answers the question they have been asked. These
requests, whether by email, phone or in person, require the archivist to access the
raw materials that comprise the knowledge base of the organization’s archive.
Typically, the archivist will be required to fact check, provide material for a market
ing campaign or ensure that the contents of a speech are correct.
Most requests are relatively routine and typically involve an explanation or con
firmation that the stated date, location of a product launch, or founding date is
correct. Such retrieval leads to the production of organizational facts that then
become part of the general understanding and memory of the organization. This
process mirrors the description of organizational memory put forward by many
researchers (e.g. Argote, 2012; Fiedler and Welpe, 2010; Walsh and Ungson, 1991),
who adopt a structural-functionalist view of organizational memory as mere
information.
However, despite the prominence of the acquisition, storage, and retrieval func
tions in prevailing models of organizational memory, the archivists informed us that
this activity forms only one part of their overall role in the corporation:
Memory Work 249
. . . for me it’s a history program and that all goes in with the idea of making history
work, that it’s much more broader than the idea of we’re just storing stuff, which I
think is kind of the connotation or the impression people have when you talk
about archives. (Archivist B-1)
In fact, we found that much of the archivists’ time is not spent on activities
devoted to structuring and organizing the archival material with a view to
creating a scientifically accurate account of the past, or to facilitating the

expedient storage and retrieval of information. Instead, much of their time is
devoted to interpretive work in which the archivist accesses the material and
creatively reconstructs memories of the organization that responded to specific
issues in the present. This activity, which draws more directly from notions of
social memory, reflects a complementary dimension of memory work, which we
elaborate in the following section.
13.4.2 Long-Term Memory Work
We observed four broad categories of long-term memory work devoted to con

structing the social or collective memory of the organization. The categories are
recollecting, interpreting, storytelling, and memorializing, and describe recurring
patterns of activity in which the intended outcome is not a comprehensive account
of the organization’s history but rather the development of an argument about the
past, be it a narrative, the meaning of an artifact, or an input to the development of a
product. The clear objective of the corporate archivist in this phase of activity is the
conversion of the raw archival material into heritage. By heritage we mean the assem
blage of historical information, narratives, and artifacts to construct memories in
the present. Following Nora (1989) we acknowledge a sharp distinction between his
tory and memory, which are often treated synonymously. Rather, our data suggest
that these four activities (recollecting, interpreting, storytelling, and memorializing)
are devoted to very different purposes than the objective reconstruction of the past.
Instead, they are devoted to an interpretive reconstruction of the past to specific
communal ends defined in the present. In the balance of this section, we elaborate
these four categories of memory work and revisit the distinction between history
and memory in our discussion.
Recollecting. A key element of memory work is the recollection of historical raw
materials to address a specific issue from the present. As noted above, the issue could
be to source material for a marketing campaign, to address an allegation of past mis
conduct by the corporation or to create a defense in a patent or copyright violation.
In all cases, the corporate archivist acts as a strategic partner with the marketing
division, corporate legal counsel, and/or strategic planning group. A key first step in
addressing the issue is for the corporate archivist and his or her team to conduct a
“deep dive” into the archives.
A deep dive occurs when the archivist engages in a prolonged and extensive
search into the archive to find archival material that is relevant for resolving a press
ing strategic issue. Throughout the process the archivist views him or herself as a
guide who collects and displays what is contained in the archive. At Company C
their archivists conduct deep dives with all their marketing agencies.
In our archives we have the space, we created a space, a showcase for what we
call the deep dives for the marketing group . . . our marketing group brought them
down to the archives and I set up an entire display of our history of soccer. All the
way back to 1921, our first print ad. Thirties we have some material related to the
Berlin Olympics and then FIFA itself beginning in 1950. Just to walk them
through—okay we have a long relationship [with soccer], it’s not just brand new.
(Archivist C-2)
As the archivist explains, the deep dive is more than just a tour of the archives and a
collection of dusty boxes. The deep dive is both a focused hunting expedition defined
by a specific question about what the company has done in the past, and based on a
clear understanding of how that information might be strategically used in the pre
sent. Deep dives may also be used to construct specific narratives used to socialize
new employees to the organization:
Another way I would put it is we do a history presentation, a couple of us for our

new employees, we call it NEO, which is New Employee Orientation. There’s a
presentation, actually now it’s held here at the museum which was the way it
should be. So there’s Company H History 101, the presentation I’m giving I guess I
would call it Company H History 102. It’s more for people who may have been
here for a while and I wanted, like the museum we wanted this presentation to
include at least a couple of things that would make . . . people to say “I didn’t
know.” (Archivist H-1)
Deep dives, thus, are the essential first steps of the corporate archivist. They are a
clearly defined procedure through which the professional archivist begins the pro
cess of taking objective archival material and assembling it in a fashion that best
serves a specific and strategic narrative purpose. It is the first step in a process
designed to aid in the creative reconstruction of historical events and is an essential
component in the process of converting history to heritage. Recollecting precedes
interpretation, which is the next stage in this process.
Interpreting. Interpretation is the process of constructing heritage from history.
For archivists it is an important part of creating heritage to ensure that management
understands where it comes from.
. . . what is valuable . . . to the company is the heritage, but you can’t have the heri
tage without the history. And that’s, see and that’s the one thing, that’s always my
Memory Work 251
argument with my management and with the people that I have to go to for
budgets and stuff is you like this heritage stuff, this is great but you know it doesn’t
just come out of thin air. This is the only reason you get these stories is because
we keep that history, you need to support that . . . the heritage is what they see as
valuable they don’t see the history in the way that, they don’t see that as being
valuable. (Archivist B-1)
Once the significance of the raw materials is determined, specific organizational

elements are selected to play a distinct and prominent role as part of the past of the
organization. This could mean, for example, that a speech is chosen to be a key sup
porting document for the construction of a narrative about the organization’s found
ing. Because there are so many organizational raw materials, it is not correct to
suggest that they all are part of the heritage of the organization. What makes the raw
materials of the organization a piece of heritage is when the archivist interprets what
the raw materials mean to the organization and then creates ways for it to become an
important piece of the organization’s fabric.
Similarly, the process of creating heritage is not an end in and of itself. The key to
heritage is that it needs to be used. Thus, the process of constructing heritage is
developed with the end point of creating something that has use and can be used in
the present. As the archivist chooses the raw materials that will be molded into a
piece of company heritage, they do so with an end goal in mind.
Of importance at this stage is the role that interpretation plays in the construction
and use of organizational heritage. Although structural-functional memory work
requires some interpretation of facts and selection of dates, for all intents and pur
poses, this work is a process of finding the right information and retrieving that
knowledge when asked. In the process of social memory work, the construction of
heritage is dependent on the interpretation of what the raw materials mean in rela
tion to the mnemonic community that the archivist is trying to address. Heritage is
constructed for a particular purpose and not every piece of organizational history
will be relevant to what the archivist wants to achieve.
. . . heritage is very flexible. I think some people think heritage is sort of carved in
stone, it is what it is, but the thing is, in any given rich history environment—and
this company is over eighty years old—there is more heritage than you could ever
use or talk about so what I do is look for ways to make the past history support
what we are doing now and show the connections to both our customers and our
employees . . . So I see heritage as being very—it can be very new and the story
changes constantly. (Archivist I)
Consequently, when the raw materials are turned into heritage it is because the sig
nificance of the raw materials has been elevated and the meaning of these raw
materials has been determined by the archivist. What results is the creation of a tool
that can be used for numerous organizational purposes.
Storytelling. The next stage in creating the memory of the organization is “story
ing” the heritage. By this we mean the process by which the archivist elaborates nar
ratives about the organization’s history and archives to infuse meaning, significance
and value, for the present. That is, the archivists strategically narrativize the corporate
heritage by embedding issues of the present in stories about the past. This strong role of
the archivist requires that they use the organization’s heritage as the key component
of the stories that are told throughout the organization.
Yeah, actually, we’ve actually had some discussions. As to whether I should change
the name of the department to the Department of Story Telling. Or have our title to
change to Story Tellers. Because that is what we do every single day. (Archivist C-1)
But I think the more valuable position, I think the one that keeps this operation
going and gives back more to the company is being the corporate historian, being
the story teller, being the person who can interpret the history and make it useful.
(Archivist B-1)
As both archivists observe, their role is to engage in the process of continually creat
ing and maintaining company’s narratives. They build stories that have resonance
with their stakeholders and can be continually retold.
The archivists also understand the strategic importance of shaping the narrative
to the specific issues relevant to key stakeholders of the organization. Archivist I-1,
for example, who works for a technology firm, describes a marked shift away from
consumer-oriented historical narratives after a strategic realignment in the firm:
When we split from Company X, they took the consumer side of the business and
we became more wholly business-to-business. So now a lot of the stories we
loved to tell that had a real consumer focus are no longer as relevant, they’re
interesting, they’re fun, but they’re not really as relevant. So I didn’t drop them
entirely but I downplayed them a little more and looked for more proof points in
the business-to-business side of things and I brought those forward. So yes in a
way, it’s not that they weren’t there all along. It’s just what do you have time to
talk about and you can’t talk about 600 milestones so you pick the ones that res
onate the most with who you are and where you are going. (Archivist I-1)
In this way the archivists delineate the key stories that need to be placed in the
organization’s memory. As “keepers of the organization’s memory” (Archivist K-1)
the archivists are actively engaged in the process of strategic storytelling, a key stage
in converting history to heritage that paves the way to the further conversion of heri
tage into collective memory. Drawing on the heritage of the organization, the archiv
ist can use the past to shape and strengthen the uniqueness of the organization and
construct a coherent and common identity for the individual employee and the cor
poration. This process of creating heritage and building organizational stories is an
important, if not required, skill of corporate archivists. Storytelling serves as a key
Memory Work 253
stage in the process of converting raw history of the firm into targeted and strategic
memories. By emphasizing elements of the past in the context of the present, cor
porate archivists engage in the practice of infusing historical gravitas into relatively
routine organizational activities in the present.
Memorializing. The final component of the model is memorialization.
Memorialization takes place when the stories, which are centered on the heritage of
the organization, are packaged and communicated to the different stakeholders of
the organization. It is at this stage when the stories of the organization are crystal
ized into the organization’s memory and put into an easily understandable format.
Memorialization involves reactivating the past and making it present again in the
lives of the managers, employees, and other important corporate stakeholders.
Memorialization can take multiple forms and can focus on different groups. The
primary means of memorialization is through the narratives disseminated by the
archivists. Many of the archivists are called upon to give presentations to the employ
ees, while others have blogs and web pages that focus on the various stories and
events from the organization’s past. When these archivist narratives are internally
directed, memorialization is addressed to the employees of the organization and
often takes the form of a company newsletter or newspaper. When the archivist nar
ratives are externally focused, memorialization targets customers and, in some cases,
enthusiasts and fans of the company. Regardless there is a key understanding that an
essential part of creating the company’s memory is telling the stories. Archivist B
describes the narrative memorialization and the reason for it when he states:
I’m writing a history paper every day and then I have a regular column in our
internal . . . newspaper that I write, so every month I’ve got to come up with a new
subject, and it’s all historical research, trying to come up with some new angle
and then always focusing on how does this relate to our brand, how can it be
inspirational, it’s because it goes back to that history has to work so I’m not just
telling fun stories . . . it has to be something that the general audience can say you
know I really got some inspiration out of that or that really helped me understand
some part of the company. You know there’s got to be a purpose to it and so that’s
a lot of what we do, everything, I try to tie it back to how does it, how does it sup-
port the business or how does this support the brand.
Another frequent, but less common form of memorialization is the corporate

museum. In many instances the archivist would act as the museum curator. In other
cases, the archivist would work closely with the curator of the museum to select
items for display and to determine how to tell the stories and convey the significance
of the heritage piece to their audience. Most of the museums we saw were for internal
use; however, there were some occasional instances where the corporation either has
a public museum or is closely associated with a public museum. Once again, in these
instances the archivist had an important role in shaping the message associated with
the display pieces.
The heritage wall is another interesting form of memorialization used in the cor
porate setting. These visual representations of the company’s history were located in
prominent positions in the corporation, such as in the lobby of the corporate head
quarters, employee meeting areas and dining spaces, and in central corridors and
passageways. These heritage walls varied in their levels of sophistication and com
plexity. Some displays are comprised of glass cases that enclose a single artifact.
Others are complex, interactive multimedia displays. Despite the vast differences
between these heritage walls, they were all, for the most part, visual narratives of the
corporation’s accomplishments.
The overriding connecting factor in this final stage of social and collective mem
ory work is that the archivists are responsible for disseminating the stories of their
organization through the various mediums at their disposal. After the stories are
constructed around the company’s heritage they need to be presented to the key
stakeholders of the corporation. The goal of the archivist is to create coherence in the
organization and to demonstrate the relevance of the past to current business prac
tices. In so doing, the archivists solidify and sediment the narratives of the corpor
ation, thus creating the organization’s memory.
13.5 Discussion
Our chapter presents a framework of organizational memory work, defined as the
strategic construction of short- and long-term memory in organizations. We demon
strate that Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) definition of organizational memory is but a
dimension of the short-term memory of the organization. The archivists and his
torians we interviewed stressed that these activities were relatively routine and con
stitute the more mundane kind of memory work applied to the management of
active information from the recent past. Their key strategic function, however,
comprised the work with the more long-term memory of the organization and the
generation of useful versions of the past for the organization. Long-term memory
work describes this process, which is largely interpretive in nature and draws heav
ily from the professional experience and judgment of the professional archivist and
his or her team.
Our model thus extends Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) view of organizational mem
ory. First, organizational memory work is highly strategic. Our informants were
emphatic that their activities are structured around defined corporate goals, includ
ing strategic marketing and product development, brand management, facilitating a
positive working culture and strategic human resources management, and creating a
solid corporate identity. The strategic importance of their role is reflected in the
position occupied by the archivists in the corporate hierarchy. Several of the
corporate archivists in our dataset have direct access to the top management team of
their organizations. Some report to the vice president in charge of corporate strategy
or strategic marketing. Moreover, memory work was devoted to the strategic goals of
Memory Work 255
the firm, such as smoothing the discontinuities of organizational change, integrating

new hires into the collective, and creating historical narratives designed to protect
the intellectual property of the firm.
Second, memory work is much more interpretive than factual. The traditional
approach to organizational memory has focused on what is known by the
organization at a specific point in time. This view, however, overlooks the immense
amount of interpretive judgment on the part of the firm in deciding what material to
collect and how it will be retrieved and presented. More importantly, it undervalues
the high degree of work involved in the ongoing attribution of meaning and value
that corporate archivists provide. The key contribution of this research, thus, is the
insight that organizational memory is not simply a static storehouse of information
or a library, but rather is an ongoing process of hermeneutic interpretation and skill
ful storytelling. Organizational memory is not a thing, but rather is an ongoing and
engaged process of elaboration and reconstruction of memories of the more recent
and historical past.
It must be noticed that the size of the organization is a boundary condition of our
framework. Our research was based on Fortune 500 companies and, as a result, it
might apply only to large organizations with well-developed division and specializa
tion of labor and with enough resources to support the provision of a couple of cor
por ate archivists and historians. Smaller organizations might exhibit similar
activities to the ones described in our framework. However, we anticipate that in
these cases specific roles would probably not be created to deal with these activities
and they would probably be coupled with other groups of tasks. The combination of
professional expertise, role specialization, and authority over the voice of the past of
the organization is more likely associated with large, old organizations, with activ
ities in various countries.
A second boundary condition concerns the role of corporate historians and
archivists in the construction of the collective memory of the organization. In this
chapter, we have restricted our analysis to the work of these two groups of profes
sionals. This does not mean that they are the only ones responsible for the social
construction of the past of the organization, or even the most important category of
actors. Managers and employees, for instance, might have large leeway in interpret
ing the past and constructing their own versions of the bygone days of the
organization. The distinctiveness of archivists and historians lies in the fact that
they are trained professionals in the study of the past and have the authority within
the structure of the organization to generate sanctioned official versions of the past.
As such, they tend to have a better sense of purpose, intentionality, and enhanced
reflexivity when dealing with issues about the organizational past. In addition, their
authoritative voice and their invested resources in memory work increase the
chances that the versions and interpretations about the past that they construct will
have more resonance than other competing understandings. In any case, though,
their ability in shaping the social memory of the past within the organization
remains an empirical question.
13.6 Conclusion
Our study offers a fresh conceptualization of organizational memory. Specifically, we
describe the process by which the raw archival material of an organization is con
verted to practical utility in the organization. That is, our model describes the pro
cess by which the past is strategically reconstructed in the form of short- and
long-term organizational memory. In other words, much of what the organization
remembers is defined through the memory work of corporate historians and archiv
ists. Organizational memory is much more interpretive than prior models have
acknowledged. Previous research characterized organizational memory as largely a
process of information management, ignoring the critical subjective importance of
deciding what was collected, stored, and retrieved. Organizational memory, as a
practice, is less factual or scientific and more creative and entrepreneurial. Rather
than representing the past, it is an act of re-presenting the past.
Notes
1. For the remainder of the chapter we will refer to the interviewees as archivists. Although
many of the people we interviewed consider themselves both historians and archivists,
most have the formal title of corporate archivist.
2. All numbers are drawn from firm performance in 2011.
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14
Rhetorical History, Historical
Metanarratives, and Rhetorical
Effectiveness
Andrew David Allan Smith
14.1 Introduction
There is growing interest among management academics in the phenomenon of
temporality, which has been defined as the relationship between perceptions of time
and of other phenomena (Zaheer, Albert, and Zaheer, 1999; Bakken, Holt, and
Zundel, 2013; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, and Van De Ven, 2013; Hernes and
Schultz, 2016; Reinecke and Ansari, 2017; Kim, Bansal, and Haugh, 2019). The turn
towards the study of temporality has been paralleled by the “historic turn” in man
agement and organization studies (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker, 2013; Rowlinson
and Hassard, 2014). In a paper that played an important role in the historic turn,
Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank (2010) identified rhetorical history as a key
source of competitive advantage. Suddaby et al. (2010, p. 162) argue that by creating
and disseminating historical narratives about their firm, managers can communicate
more persuasively with “employees, customers, and/or the general public,” thereby
allowing the firm to achieve its objectives. Organization studies scholars have pub
lished extensively on how managers use the past rhetorically (Foster, Suddaby,
Minkus, and Wiebe, 2011; Anteby and Molnár, 2012; Decker, 2014; Maclean,
Harvey, Sillince, and Golant, 2014; Ybema, 2014; Rowlinson, Casey, Hansen, and
Mills, 2014; Ravasi and Phillips, 2011; Foster, Coraiola, and Suddaby, 2016; Suddaby
and Foster, 2017; Hatch and Schultz, 2017; Smith and Simeone, 2017; Donzé and
Smith, 2018).
Whenever a manager uses a historical narrative in communicating with another
person, they are doing so as a means to some end, such as making workers proud to
be part of the organization or securing the loyalty of customers. Rhetorical effective
ness denotes the ability of a particular rhetorical device to change the thinking, and
ultimately the action, of a listener (Ruebottom, 2013). If the listeners do not accept
the historical narratives produced by the firm, the firm’s expenditure on the produc
tion of historical narratives will be wasteful. Unfortunately, the existing research in
Andrew David Allan Smith, Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness In: Time, Temporality, and
History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Andrew David Allan Smith.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0014
organizational studies on rhetorical history has given us a very limited understanding

of why historical narratives differ in their rhetorical effectiveness, as Foster and
Lamertz (2017) note. The research on rhetorical history thus rests on incomplete
microfoundations, which matters because it impedes our understanding and ability
to produce research on rhetorical history that is both rigorous and useful to stake
holders. The microfoundations movement in management (e.g. Felin, Foss, and
Ployhart, 2015) has called on researchers to reflect on how factors at the level of the
individual (e.g. cognitive biases) influence outcomes at the meso level of the organ
ization and the macro level of society. This chapter will help to put the existing litera
ture on rhetorical history onto a stronger microfoundational basis while identifying
some areas for future research.
When coupled with the work of White (1975) on historical narratives, the psy
chological research on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias helps us to arrive
at an explanation of how historical narratives differ in rhetorical effectiveness: the
major determinant of whether a given historical narrative will be persuasive to a lis
tener is its degree of congruence with the listener’s historical metanarrative rather
than its truthfulness. Some readers, particularly those trained as historians, might be
inclined to think that the rhetorical effectiveness of a given historical narrative
would be closely connected to the narrative’s faithfulness to the surviving evidence.
In an ideal world, perhaps, listeners would decide whether to accept a historical
narrative based on scrutiny of the available evidence and a careful process of fact
checking using historical documents. It is indeed the job of a historian in a university
to undertake this sort of research. However, we know that the painstaking scholar
ship of academic historians has an extremely limited capacity to dispel popular belief
in historical narratives that are wholly or partially inaccurate.
Consider the case of Vimy Ridge, a First World War battle around which English-
speaking Canadians later constructed an elaborate mythology. In the English-speaking
regions of Canada, Vimy Ridge is today remembered as one of the greatest and most
consequential battles of the First World War. According to the standard narrative,
Vimy Ridge in northern France was the site of an unaided Canadian victory that was
of such great magnitude that Canada was soon accorded a status with the British
Empire equal to that of Great Britain itself. Countless Canadian children have been
told that Vimy Ridge was “the birth of a nation.”
In 2009, a group of history professors published a book that methodologically
examined all of the major factual claims that are part of the myth of Vimy Ridge. For
instance, they showed that roughly equal numbers of Canadian and British soldiers
participated in the battle, which meant that present-day Canadians are wrong to
regard it as a uniquely or distinctly Canadian victory. One of the contributors to the
book examined the correspondence of the German officers involved in the battle
and concluded that the Germans did not regard it as a significant defeat, particularly
when compared to the other military reversals they experienced in April 1917. The
historians also showed that this particular battle was regarded as of only modest
importance by contemporaries and was neither decisive neither in the outcome of
Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness 261
the war, which ended more than a year later, nor in the subsequent moves by diplomats
to establish Canada as an equal partner with Britain in the empire. The claims in the
book were backed up by meticulous research that involved the analysis of contem
poraneous historical documents. Despite the publication of this book, the myth of
Vimy Ridge as a great and decisive battle remains cherished in the English-speaking
regions of Canada. In recent years, visual references to the Battle of Vimy Ridge have
been added to Canadian banknotes and passports (Cook, 2014). Canadian tourists
continue to flock to the site of the battle, ignoring nearby Canadian battlefields that
were of equal or greater importance to people at the time. In short, the existing
historical narrative about Vimy Ridge has survived the efforts of myth-busting his
torians to destroy it with an arsenal of facts.
The case of Vimy Ridge illustrates why a historical narrative’s degree of truth and
factualness is not the sole or even the major factor that determines whether it will be
accepted by listeners. Indeed, some firms have been able to get away with disseminat
ing completely untrue historical narratives for lengthy periods. In 2000, the clothing
retailer Abercombie and Fitch created a chain of stores called Hollister that sold mer
chandise inspired by California’s surfer culture. To promote interest in the new chain,
the company’s managers created the entirely fictitious narrative of the firm’s founder,
one John Hollister Senior, who graduated from Yale in 1915. According to this narra
tive, which was told to all employees and many customers, Hollister established the
first store in California in 1922 after a stay in present-day Indonesia. This historical
narrative even included a romantic subplot, as the company explained how Hollister
met his wife, “Meta,” and founded a surfing dynasty. In 2009, an investigative report
by British journalists uncovered that this entire historical narrative was a lie. These
reporters concluded that John Hollister had never existed and the historical narrative
had been created in an Ohio office building in 2000. The announcement of this his
torical deceitfulness does not appear to have damaged the reputation of the firm with
consumers. Indeed, the marketing academic Jonathan Reynolds declared that the
journalists’ findings were a “moot point” (BBC News, 2009). It appears that the ficti
tious nature of Hollister’s historical narrative did not prevent it from being effective.
The use of historical narratives is likely to be strategically efficacious whenever the
narratives of the speaker are congruent with the listener’s historical metanarratives
and with the ontological and cosmological commitments that underpin the listener’s
historical metanarratives. Whether or not the historical narrative is true is far less
important in predicting its rhetorical effectiveness. Lack of congruence between his
torical narrative, metanarrative, and ontological commitments will produce cogni
tive dissonance and will cause the speaker’s historical narrative to be rejected by the
listener. Following Bentley (2006), ontological commitments are defined here as an
individual’s beliefs about the nature of existence and humanity’s place in the uni
verse. These ontological commitments can be derived from a religion or another
source and can encompass cosmological beliefs.
A metanarrative is a master narrative that embodies a generalization or pattern of
how reality is believed to work (Lyotard, 1979; Megill, 2007). A historical narrative
is an account that assembles selected facts from the history of a community or

communities into a coherent pattern (Carr, 1991). A historical metanarrative is a
mode of interpreting historical events that provides individuals with a pattern that
allows them to attribute meaning to a wide range of phenomena in different geo
graphical locations and historical periods (White, 1975). Historical metanarratives
are, thus, typically stories about the history of the entire human race, world, or even
universe. One example of a historical metanarrative is Marxism, which provides
people with a coherent account of human history that begins with barbarism and
slavery, includes the capitalist present, and concludes with fully developed socialism,
the terminal stage of history in the Marxist scheme.
Christians who accept that the Bible is literally true and that the world was created
in six days and will end at Judgment Day use a different historical metanarrative to
understand the world than secular people, who use modern science’s account of the
world, beginning with the Big Bang and including events such as the extinction of
the dinosaurs that go unmentioned in the Bible. Individuals adopt historical metan
arratives that are congruent with their ontological commitments. Since historical
metanarratives rest on ontological commitments, which themselves vary dramatic
ally between cultures, the historical metanarratives that individuals learn differ from
one culture to the next (Woolf, 2011). While all of the historical metanarratives used
as illustrative examples in this chapter are the products of the Western cultures that
are familiar to the author, readers should remember that individuals in other cul
tures would use their own historical metanarratives to understand the world.
Historical metanarratives structure our responses to historical narratives. For
instance, someone who uses the aforementioned Christian fundamentalist historical
metanarrative to understand the world is unlikely to be persuaded by a narrative of a
particular historical episode if that narrative is grounded in a historical metanarra
tive that is incompatible with their core beliefs. The academic historian Yuval Noah
Harari, who is a self-described atheist, has produced a historical narrative that
describes an episode in which modern humans migrated out of Africa about 100,000
years ago and then replaced the Neanderthals and the other human species that had
previously colonized other continents (Harari, 2014). A Christian fundamentalist
would reject Harari’s narrative not because she disagrees with his interpretation of a
particular piece of the archaeological evidence but because his historical narrative is
incompatible with her historical metanarrative. Having first decided to reject
Harari’s narrative, the Christian fundamentalist reader would be highly motivated to
search for any flaws in Harari’s use of evidence.
Although the hypothetical example in the previous paragraph might seem to be
far removed from the types of managerial historical narratives that are the focus of
rhetorical history researchers, the same cognitive processes that govern listener
acceptance and rejection of historical narratives apply. Since the term “rhetorical”
appears in this chapter, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the origins of the word
itself, which comes from the ancient Greek rhḗtōr, or public speaker. The democratic
nature of polities such as Athens and the need to persuade large numbers of citizens
to vote in favor of particular proposals meant that the art of oral persuasion became
a major focus of leading thinkers. Since classical antiquity, the educational institu
tions charged with training future members of Western ruling elites have including
some form of training in rhetoric in their curriculum to allow students to become
more effective persuaders in public fora, courtrooms, and the marketplace of ideas
(Murphy, 1974). In modern capitalist societies, the art of rhetoric is frequently
researched by those who study business communication (e.g., Palmieri, Rocci, and
Kudrautsava, 2015; Harmon, Green, and Goodnight, 2015; Hoefer and Green, 2016).
From antiquity to the present, students of rhetoric have long been taught that they
need to consider which types of arguments are most likely to be effective on a given
target audience (Schiappa, 1992). We also know that effective communicators give
careful consideration to which types of metaphors will work best in a given context
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). This insight is congruent with the work of the literary
theorists (Burke, 2018) who focus on audiences and their reactions in the course of
trying to understand the functions of drama and literature. In determining whether
a listener is likely to accept a manager’s historical narrative, the key concepts are
cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance denotes the mental
discomfort (mental stress) experienced by an individual who simultaneously
attempts to believe two contradictory ideas. This discomfort often occurs when the
individual encounters information that is incompatible with their prior beliefs
(Akerlof and Dickens, 1982). Confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998) is the tendency of
people to interpret new information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs. In
the environments in which our ancestors evolved, confirmation bias and the ability
to deceive oneself into believing one’s own narrative were likely adaptive, which
explains why these phenomena are found so frequently in present-day humans
(Mercier and Sperber, 2011; Smith, Trivers, and Von Hippel, 2017).
14.2 Historical Metanarratives that

Shape our Thinking
Each of the world’s civilizations has produced at least one historical metanarrative
that structures how individuals interpret historical phenomena around them. While
these historical metanarratives are often rooted in a culture’s dominant religion,
there are often competing historical metanarratives within cultures (Woolf, 2011). In
present-day Western countries, the dominant historical metanarrative is known as
the “liberal-progressive,” “linear-progressive,” or “Whig” conception of history. This
historical metanarrative stresses that conditions in each period of history are superior
to the period that went before. In this metanarrative, technological and moral pro
gress are closely linked (Butterfield, 1931). According to this linear historical metan
arrative, each generation has been better off than its parents’ in material wealth,
technological capabilities, intellectual sophistication, and moral development. The
implication of this reading of history is that the future will be even better than the
present. The modern progressive historical metanarrative was anticipated in classical

antiquity by Philo of Alexandria, who used it to make sense of conditions at the
height of the Roman Empire, a time of relative stability and affluence (Sandmel, 1979).
However, it did not become dominant in Western cultures until much later.
From the fall of the Roman Empire until the middle of the eighteenth century, few
people in Western societies used progressive historical metahistorical narratives to
understand the world. During this period, most members of the educated elite who
knew Latin instead used a declinist metanarrative, a polar opposite historical metan
arrative, to interpret phenomena around them. The declinist historical metanarra
tive held that progressive corruption was a universal constant and that human
history was characterized by steady decline from an earlier period of moral perfec
tion and material comfort. According to this theory, modern Europeans could never
hope to recreate the levels of material and intellectual sophistication achieved in
ancient Greece and Rome, but they could hope to improve their miserable condi
tions by intensive study of classical texts. This metahistorical narrative, which had its
origins in the works of Hesiod and other authors in classical antiquity, depicted
human history in terms of five stages associated with progressively baser metals that
begins with the Golden Age and ends with the present Iron Age (Griffiths, 1956).
The declinist metanarrative is congruent with the many examples of decay that one
observes in everyday life, which helps to explain why so many pre-Enlightenment
Westerners found it to be plausible.
Cyclical historical metanarratives, which preclude the possibility of either per
manent progress or decline, were also present in the thinking of Western people,
especially peasants who saw little evidence of material change and whose lives were
dominated by seasonal cyclicality (Smith, 2002). Other medieval and early modern
Westerners, particularly devout Christians whose knowledge of history came from
reading the Bible, subscribed to a dispensationalist metanarrative that began with
the Book of Genesis and ended with Armageddon and Judgment Day. In Christianity,
the practice of thinking about history in this fashion, which is known as dispensa
tionalism, exerted a considerable influence on Europeans in the Middle Ages and
Reformation (Witherington, 2005; Sandeen, 2008).
In the twenty-first century, a version of this historical metanarrative continues to
influence how large numbers of people in some parts of the United States conceptu
alize the past and predict the future. For instance, it informs how many conservative
Americans think about foreign and domestic policy and predict the future, with
such predictions often involving an event called “The Rapture” (Turner, 2017). In the
secular countries of western Europe, there are now relatively few individuals who
use the dispensationalist historical metanarrative to understand the world, with the
exception of some Protestants in Northern Ireland, where dispensationalism is
sometimes used to interpret historical events such as the 1690 Battle of the Boyne as
well as present-day politics (Gribben, 2007). It should also be noted that cyclical his
torical metanarratives continue to be used to understand the world, both by thinkers
associated with the nationalist right (Farrenkopf, 2001) and by other authors inter
ested in the rise and fall of civilizations (McNeill, 1989).
How did linear-progressive historical narratives come to dominate the thinking of

most people in Western liberal democracies? The early eighteenth century witnessed
a clash between European thinkers who used progressive historical metanarratives
to understand the world and those who subscribed to declinist historical metanarra
tives. During this so-called “Battle of the Books,” writers debated whether the ancient
Greeks and Romans were truly superior to modern Europeans (Nisbet, 1994). The
advocates of a progressive metanarrative argued that since the ancients did not know
about the existence of the New World and lacked modern inventions such as gun
powder, they could not have been superior to moderns. This argument against the
declinist metanarrative was persuasive in the eyes of many contemporaries, with the
result that progressive historical metanarratives came to dominate the thinking of
Western individuals during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Spadafora, 1990).
By 1800, most educated Westerners, even those who were devout Christians, viewed
the world through some sort of linear-progressive historical metanarrative. Indeed,
nineteenth-century theologians invented ways of reconciling the linear-progressive
historical metanarrative with Christianity via a doctrine called postmillennialism,
which taught that Christians had a duty to accelerate the rate of human progress via
good works, campaigning for social reform, and so forth (Moorhead, 1984).
The progressive historical metanarrative espoused by Enlightenment thinkers
informed the thinking of many Western classical liberals of the nineteenth century.
The metanarrative influenced a particularly strong force over the intellectuals asso
ciated with Britain’s Whig party, which advocated a package of reforms such as the
extension of the electoral franchise, economic deregulation, abolition of slavery, and
such humanitarian reforms as a sharp reduction in the number of offences punish
able by death. For Whig reformers committed to progress and a linear conception of
history, the term “medieval” became the ultimate term of abuse and “modern” a
term of high praise. In England, as in other countries, those who subscribed to the
progressive historical metanarrative created narratives of national history that were
congruent with the overall metanarrative, which held that the human race as a whole
was inevitably moving towards greater progress. For this reason, the progressive his
torical metanarrative associated with liberalism is still often referred to as the “Whig
conception of history” (Butterfield, 1931). Although the political issues important to
the historical Whig Party have long been resolved, the Whig-style ways of viewing
past, present, and future remain deeply entrenched in Western culture, and in the
historical metanarratives that academics (e.g. Max Weber and his intellectual
descendants in management schools) use to understand phenomena.
The late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a rival metahistorical
narrative that shared the Whigs’ belief that the world was inevitably moving towards
greater progress, but which was associated with a very different political ideology,
namely socialism. The Marxist account of history posits that humanity is inevitably
moving through teleological stages such as: primitive barbarism, feudalism, capitalism,
and finally Communism, the utopian society at the end of history (Bernstein, 1981).
The classical Marxian conception of progress and historical inevitably was rooted in
a worldview that was militantly atheist and which was informed by the ontological
and epistemological theories of Hegel, a conservative philosopher who influenced

Marx. Neither the Marxist historical metanarrative nor any of the national historical
narratives derived from it would be logically tenable if one subscribed to a different
set of ontological and epistemological commitments, such as the belief that a ben
evolent deity controlled the course of human history and that this deity’s actions
could be influenced by prayer. We know from the research of historians who have
studied the decision making of the leaders of the Soviet Union that these individuals
used the Marxist historical metanarrative to make sense of their world and to com
municate with others. The metanarrative also shaped how Soviet leaders responded
to crises such as the German invasion of 1941. For instance, the belief in the histor
ical inevitability of Communist victory informed the battlefield decision making of
Soviet generals during the Second World War, often with catastrophic consequences
for the enlisted men under their control, who were forbidden from making tactical
retreats (Merridale, 2006a; 2006b).
After the fall of Communism in 1989, relatively few people used the Marxist
historical metanarrative to understand the world. Indeed, as early as 1979, the
Parisian intellectual Jean-François Lyotard was able to claim that incredulity toward
all historical metanarratives, including Marxism, was a defining feature of present-
day thought. In Western countries today, linear progressive or Whig historical met
anarratives are typically associated with the worldviews of those at the center of the
political spectrum. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “end
of history” metanarrative articulated by Francis Fukuyama was a popular lens for
interpreting the world (Fukuyama, 1989). Fukuyama, who worked in the adminis
tration of George H. W. Bush, argued that some form of liberal-democratic capital
ism, the social order exemplified by the United States and its NATO allies, was the
terminal point of history. This reading of history led Fukuyama to predict that
future political conflict would involve arguing about the details of public policy
within a framework in which all of the major issues had been settled by universal
acceptance of democracy and capitalism. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, which
vividly demonstrated that not all political actors accepted the liberal-democratic
social model represented by the NATO countries, Fukuyama’s historical metanarra
tive fell into disuse as an interpretive lens. Fukuyama today uses less optimistic
metahistorical narratives in his studies of national decline and the erosion of
democracy (Fukuyama, 2014).
Today, the two leading exponents of the liberal-progressive historical metanarra
tive are the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer (2011) and the Harvard psychologist
Steven Pinker (2017). Singer (2011) regards the expansion of the “circle of ethical
concern” that began during the Enlightenment as evidence of a directional trend in
history towards greater moral progress. In developing this historical metanarrative,
Singer explains that while people have always sought to act ethically towards their
kinfolk and neighbors, evidence of concern for the welfare of distant individuals is a
uniquely modern phenomenon. Singer’s metanarrative links a wide variety of
phenomena ranging from the anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century to

modern animal rights campaigns in a single narrative arc of moral progress. Since
Singer published it in the 1980s, his historical metanarrative has become pervasive
in our culture, which is one of the reasons why Singer has been called the most influ
ential moral philosopher of his generation (Specter, 1999). Singer’s historical metan
arrative now informs the making of philanthropic strategies in Silicon Valley
(Effective Altruism, 2018) and papers that appear in elite management journals (e.g.,
Arnold, 2013; de George, 2017).
Singer argues that the main causal mechanism that has driven the expansion of
the circle of ethical concern in recent centuries is the growing influence since 1700
of the writings of moral philosophers. This historical metanarrative accords tre
mendous importance to Singer’s own profession, as he is a philosophy professor.
Steven Pinker, who advances a similarly optimistic historical metanarrative, pre
sents his readers with a more complex, multicausal explanation for the alleged
tendency of people to become kinder and more ethical with each generation
(Pinker, 2011). Pinker argues that moral progress had been driven by such vari
ables as the emergence of stable governments, democratization, the commercial
ization of societies and the growth of international trade as a percentage of GDP,
as well as the growing influence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philo
sophers. Although Pinker clearly disagrees with Singer about the causal mechan
isms that drive moral progress, he nevertheless agrees with Singer that it is a real
phenomenon that requires explanation. Like Singer, Pinker is a public intellectual
with a significant influence on our culture. Pinker frequently writes for the New
York Times and his optimistic theory of history was explicitly endorsed in a speech
by President Obama (Matthews, 2015).
The iconoclastic British philosopher John Gray has attacked the rather upbeat and
positive historical metanarratives of Singer and Pinker. Gray argues that while there
is abundant evidence of a tendency towards technological progress over the course
of history, there is no force pushing human beings towards progressively more eth
ical behavior (Gray, 2004; 2018). In fact, he suggest the opposite is more likely to be
the case. Although Gray’s political stance is difficult to categorize as either left-wing
or right-wing, his writings on economic, political, and environmental issues exhibit
a strong dislike of globalization and neoliberalism and of many of the values of the
contemporary Anglo-American left, such as multiculturalism and secularism. Gray
has endorsed Brexit, which is a policy preference favored by the extreme left and
extreme right of the UK political spectrum and is anathema to most centrists. As
other researchers have noted, conservative nationalist movements are generally hos
tile to optimistic historical metanarratives and tend to construct pessimistic historical
narratives that emphasize national decadence and racial degeneration (Farrenkopf,
2001). In the twenty-first century, such narratives are used by the populist right to
suggest that life was better in the past and that societies are being destroyed by large-
scale immigration, unpatriotic corporations, and the erosion of traditional gender
norms. Such pessimistic historical narratives are conveyed in slogans such as “Make
America Great Again” (Butters, 2017). Gray’s pessimistic historical narrative needs
to be associated with this political stance.
Within the field of management, there are thinkers who clearly reject all or part of
the liberal-progressive historical metanarrative that centrists use to understand the
world. Of course, linear-progressive historical metanarratives, such as that created
by Max Weber, continue to influence how many management academics conceptu
alize social change. However, a recent paper by Suddaby, Ganzin, and Minkus (2017)
challenged the idea that the world is inevitably and irreversibly moving towards
Weberian rationality by providing examples of this process being reversed in some
areas. For instance, they discuss “the resurgence of fundamentalist religion, the
rejection of sensible science and an increasingly tribal populism” as well as the
“resurgence of craft modes of production.” Suddaby et al. are thus presenting their
readers with data that are more congruent with a cyclical conception of history than
a linear progress historical metanarrative. Although Suddaby et al. (2017) do not use
the term “historical metanarrative,” they are effectively challenging the historical
metanarrative associated with Weber, Singer, and Pinker by presenting a cyclical
conception of history.
14.3 Summary
Historical narratives, the stories that people use to make sense of events in their
organizations and countries, are related to historical metanarratives, the grand
stories about the sweep of human history that people use to comprehend the place
of humans in the universe. In deciding whether to accept a given historical narrative,
a listener will determine whether it is consistent with the historical metanarrative
to which they subscribe. Historical narratives and historical metanarratives are
closely connected to ontological systems that individuals use to make sense of their
world. To be credible to a listener, a manager’s historical narrative must be consist
ent with their historical metanarratives and other elements of their worldview,
including their ontological commitments. Consistency will trigger the psycho
logical mechanism of confirmation bias, which will encourage the listener to
accept the speaker’s historical narrative. Too much inconsistency between these
elements will result in cognitive dissonance, an unpleasant experience. Each histor
ical metanarrative comes with its own set of historical keywords that only make
sense of those who use that historical metanarrative to understand the world. When
narrators insert one of these keywords into their historical narrative, they are con
necting to a historical metanarrative. Table 14.1, which gives examples of different
historical metanarratives and their associated keywords, illustrates the relationship
between rhetorical history, historical narratives, historical metanarratives, and onto
logical commitments.
Table 14.1 Examples of historical metanarratives
Historical Population that Uses Individuals Who Keywords Associated

Metanarrative This Historical Use This Historical with the Historical
Metanarrative To View Metanarrative Metanarrative
the World
Marxism Communists, chiefly in Karl Marx “Historical

the twentieth century Lenin inevitability”
Stalin “Late capitalism”
“Higher stage of
history”
“Dialectal
materialism”
“Transition to
Communism”
Liberal progressive People at the center of Francis Fukuyama “That’s a medieval
the political spectrum (in the 1990s) practice”
Peter Singer “Optimism”
Steven Pinker “Progress of reason”
“Overcoming
superstition”
“Solutions”
Dispensationalism Fundamentalist Rev. John Hagee “Garden of Eden”
Protestants in the US and “Let’s go back to God”
Northern Ireland “End time prophecy”
“Mark of the Beast”
“The Rapture”
“Armageddon”
Declinist Anti-globalization right Oswald Spengler “Global elite”
in US, France, UK Steve Bannon “Things were better
in the good old days”
“Race suicide”
“Make America great
again”
“Take back control”
14.4 Direction for Future Research on

Rhetorical History
The major determinant of whether a given historical narrative will be persuasive to a
listener is its degree of congruence with the listener’s historical metanarrative. We
now need to subject this claim to empirical testing. I see three different ways of con
ducting such research: laboratory experiments, field experiments, and ethnographic
research. One possible laboratory experiment would involve comparing the rhet
orical effectiveness of historical narratives that are congruent with the listener’s pre
ferred historical metanarrative with the rhetorical effectiveness of narratives that are
incongruent. At the start of the experiment, each subject would be asked questions
to identify which historical metanarrative she uses to view the world. The historical
narrative would be presented and then the subject’s reaction to it would be gauged to
test my claim that narrative–metanarrative congruence is the major determinant of
whether a listener will accept a given historical narrative.
A variation of this method would involve conducting field experiments in partner
ship with companies (Chatterji, Findley, Jensen, Meier, and Nielson, 2016). We could
use field experiments to test my claim that a major determinant of whether a given
historical narrative will be persuasive to a listener is its degree of congruence with the
listener’s historical metanarrative. The United States would be an ideal location to
conduct such a field experiment, given that the US population is now highly polar
ized into groups that use different historical metanarratives to understand the world.
Since the historical metanarratives used by individuals to understand the world are
associated with observable traits, we should be able to reliably identify which social
media users employ dispensationalist, declinist, and progressive historical metanarra
tives to understand the world. Social media technology allows us to judge the effect
iveness of particular messages on different groups within the population (e.g. by
measuring how much time an individual spends reading a text or the propensity of
readers to click a given link). By using field experiments, we could help to uncover
relationships between the historical metanarratives and ontological commitments of
individuals and their responses to the historical narratives produced by firms.
Another possible avenue of research would involve an ethnographic study of how
managers use historical narratives. This research, which might involve shadowing
the professionals who produce historical narratives for firms, would allow us to
compare the effectiveness of a given historical narrative on individuals who use dif
ferent historical metanarratives and ontological systems to make sense of the world.
The United States would be an ideal empirical context in which to study this issue
since that country is characterized by a single dominant language and the existence
of subcultures that are associated with very different historical metanarratives and
ontological commitments and which are geographically concentrated. In some parts
of the country (e.g. Boston and San Francisco), it is probable that most people would
view the world using a linear-progressive historical metanarrative and ontological
system similar to that of Steven Pinker. These shared ontological and cosmological
commitments would shape how individuals respond to historical narratives pro
duced by companies. In other regions of the country, substantial numbers of people
view the world using very different historical metanarratives, such as those derived
from fundamentalist Christianity (Froese and Bader, 2010). Firms that operate in all
parts of the country (e.g. automakers, national retail chains) and which use rhet
orical history must therefore construct historical narratives that will resonate with
people from these different subcultures (e.g. Republican voters in Arkansas and lib
erals in Massachusetts).
In an intriguing paper on how a US handgun manufacturer used historical narra
tives, Poor, Novicevic, Humphreys, and Popoola (2016) found that the firm used
historical narratives to connect the company with national historical narratives
related to the westward expansion of the United States and thus a particular reading of
American history. In my view, Poor et al. are right to argue that historical narratives
are important in helping this firm to function, for without the historical narratives
that surround US gun culture and the Second Amendment, US politicians would be
more likely to impose European-style restrictions on gun sales, which would hurt
this company. One could follow up the study of Poor et al. by seeking to determine
whether an American’s preferred historical metanarrative (liberal progressive,
Christian dispensationalist, secular declinist, etc.) influences the likelihood that he
or she accepts the various historical narratives that Colt and its allies in the National
Rifle Association have produced. I would predict that individuals who have internal
ized the Christian dispensationalist and declinist historical metanarratives would be
more receptive to Colt’s historical narratives than someone who uses the historical
metanarrative produced by Steven Pinker.
Alternatively, we could research the extent to which multinational firms need to
tailor their rhetorical history strategies in response to national differences in how
listeners evaluate historical narratives. In 2011, IBM spent lavishly on a worldwide
campaign to mark the anniversary of its establishment in 1911. The campaign, which
was coordinated by Paul Lasewicz in New York, involved using texts, films, and
innumerable events to teach IBM’s history to workers, customers, and other stake
holders across the world. Customized historical narratives were created for dissem
ination to IBM executives, ordinary workers, and even “heads of state and world
leaders” (Lasewicz, 2014: 113). Lasewicz has asserted that IBM’s centennial celebra
tion was very effective at promoting organizational identity and brand recognition
in the markets in which IBM operates. Indeed, he provides some quantitative evi
dence to support the view that the centennial made workers prouder to belong to
IBM and that the historical narratives produced during IBM’s centennial increased
the value of the firm’s brand (Lasewicz, 2015).
Lasewicz is probably correct to say that the historical narratives produced by IBM
in 2011 were rhetorically effective when considered on a worldwide basis. However,
it would be helpful to know whether cross-national variations in the historical met
anarratives and ontological systems people use to understand the world mediated
the responses of listeners to IBM’s historical narratives. Did people in highly secular
ized countries such as the Netherlands respond differently to IBM’s historical narra
tives than did people in Brazil, a country with higher church attendance rates? How
did individuals in non-Western cultures who use historical metanarratives derived
from belief systems such as Islam and Confucianism evaluate the plausibility of the
historical narratives emanating from Lasewicz’s office in Armonk, New York? We
cannot yet answer such questions, but ethnographic and field experiment research
along the lines I have proposed has the capacity to enrich our understanding of how
the rhetorical history strategies of firms actually work.
Future research on the determinants of listener acceptance of historical narratives
could be enriched by drawing on the institutional logics perspective (Thornton,
Ocasio, and Lounsbury, 2012). Institutional logics have been defined as “socially
constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs
and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence,
organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality” (Thornton and
Ocasio, 2008: 101). Institutional logics are collections of values and norms that
frame how individuals make sense of institutions and decide which practices are
legitimate (Bertels and Lawrence, 2016). Modern societies are characterized by ten
sion between different logics. For instance, each of the key institutions of American
society (the market, bureaucracy, democracy, nuclear family, and Christianity) is
guided by its own distinct logic (Alford and Friedland, 1985). Individuals differ in
the extent to which they accept institutional logics: a staunch socialist who believes
in the abolition of all markets would reject any narrative that is informed by the
market’s institutional logic. Similarly, an “anarcho-capitalist” who favors the aboli
tion of the state and the advent of a society in which only markets are used to coord
inate human action would similarly reject narratives that are informed by the
institutional logic of democracy. We would therefore expect that the rhetorical
effectiveness of historical narratives would vary according to which institutional
logics a given listener accepts.
I conclude by encouraging researchers interested in how managers and firms use
historical narratives to engage with the evolutionary psychology research that helps
us to understand why people like listening to narratives and why historical narra
tives can be rhetorically effective (Gottschall and Wilson, 2005, Wilson and
Wilson, 2007; Kenrick and Griskevicius, 2013; Kluver, Frazier, and Haidt, 2014).
This research suggests that the attributes of human psychology that power the rhet
orical history strategies of firms are deeply rooted in millions of years of evolution,
which bequeathed to modern humans a propensity to enjoy listening to narratives,
particularly narratives about the past of their own group. In the evolutionary envir
onment, in which human beings lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, group
origin stories appear to have served to promote group identity and cohesion, espe
cially in the face of competition with other groups for resources. By listening to such
stories, the members of some tribes come to believe that they are all descended from
a heroic founder. These beliefs may or may not be true, but they are functional
(Gottschall, 2012). In modern economies, large organizations tell inspirational ori
gin stories about corporate founders, as in the case of the Desjardins financial group,
which tells stories about its founder Alphonse Desjardins (Basque and Langley, 2018).
As Foster et al. (2011) show, a Canadian coffee chain faced with the intrusion of a
foreign competitor used historical narratives to associate itself with military con
flicts in Canadian history.
It is no accident that corporate historical narratives frequently invoke themes
such as group solidarity, kinship, and the threat posed by outsiders that would have
been familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We must remind ourselves that the
managers in glass offices who create historical narratives for electronic dissemin
ation are of the same species as the hunter-gatherers who enjoyed fireside stories
about heroic group founders. Although competition between firms in an established
market economy is peaceful, unlike the intergroup conflicts that were common in
the evolutionary environment, it can give rise to the same basic emotions. The
evolutionary psychologists’ insight that human beings are “storytelling animals”
(Gottschall and Wilson, 2005) can help management researchers to understand why
rhetorical history can be such a powerful tool for managers.
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15
The Life and Work of Edith Penrose
Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and
Historical Perspective
David Musson
15.1 Introduction
Organizations exist in time, and history provides the means to study not only
organizations in time, and over time, but also the historical context of research, and
the evolution of a discipline. Biography, by definition historical, affords the opportunity
of studying the life of an individual and how context, events, and opportunities may
shape their lives and work.
In the case of Edith Penrose we have an excellent biography by Angela Penrose
(2017) which sheds light on Edith’s own eventful life, and the experience and mind
of a pioneering and original scholar for whom an historical approach to organiza
tions was essential to understanding their growth, and the accumulated resources
that both enabled and constrained growth, as she set out in her most famous work,
The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (Penrose, 1959; 2009). We also have the benefit
of an extensive and rich secondary literature as well as some retrospective assess
ments by Penrose herself on the development and reception of her work (Penrose,
1985; 1994).
In this chapter my aims are to bring together these separate but interwoven his
torical strands to explore her life and work; to show how an historical approach
underpinned her celebrated and influential work on the growth of firms; to offer
some reflections on how we “read” the classics; and in turn to show how an under
standing of the classics can shed light on the evolution of management and organ
ization studies, and how the dominant and determining priorities of research are in
themselves shaped by their historical context, and change over time.
Sixty years ago, Edith Penrose’s The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was first
published. The book is still widely read and discussed—and perhaps more now than
at any time since its first publication. In this retrospective re-examination of the
book—and the author’s life—I want to explore a number of overlapping questions
about the relationship between a scholar’s “life,” “work,” and “times”; the durability
David Musson, The Life and Work of Edith Penrose: Appreciating the Classics in Temporal and Historical Perspective In: Time,
Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies. Edited by: Juliane Reinecke, Roy Suddaby, Ann Langley, and
Haridimos Tsoukas, Oxford University Press (2020). © David Musson.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870715.003.0015
The Life and Work of Edith Penrose 279
of certain classic texts; our “reading” of the “classics” in management and organiza
tion studies, and in doing so to reflect on the evolution of the field.
Penrose’s book is certainly a “classic”:
Strategic management does not have many classics. Granted it is hard to have
established and recognized classics in a field that is not only very young (reaching
back only to the 1950s), but also very fragmented. But there is a handful of books
that most strategy scholars would recognize as truly classic contributions to the
field. Among these is Edith Penrose’s Theory of the Growth of the Firm.
(Foss, 2002: 147)
John Kay described the book as “a jewel of a volume” in the Financial Times, and it
has that brightness and luminosity which enables readers to pick it up and look at it
from different angles to inform and illuminate their own thinking in their own
domain. Using similar imagery, Richard Blundel (2015) writes of the way different
scholars have focused on “selected facets of the study.” One of the remarkable char
acteristics of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is how this has been—and con
tinues to be—the case. Initially, in the 1960s, the main debate was within economics
on the theory of the firm—its growth and optimum size; this evolved in the late
1960s and 1970s, partly due to the changing focus of Penrose’s own work, to the
multinational firm and international business. From the late 1980s, with the growth
of business schools, the development of strategic management and, in particular,
the emergence of the resource-based view of the firm, the book became an essential
reference point for debates on the resource-based view (RBV) and, relatedly, know
ledge in organizations. Along the way it has also nurtured discussion in the fields of
business history, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more recently of different
approaches to research in organization studies, including critical realism (Clark
and Blundel, 2007), “engaged scholarship” (Kor, Mahoney, Siemsen, and Tan, 2016),
and stakeholder approaches to the corporation (Kay, 2019). Penrose’s work and life
will be the subject of a special issue of the Strategic Management Review (Buckley
and de la Torre, 2020). In sum, it is hard to think of a book that has reached into,
and been taken up by, so many areas of management research. In this chapter I will
focus on some of the “facets” of Penrose’s argument that will be of interest to the
organization studies community, facets that, perhaps surprisingly, actually provide
an important foundation for a book that many have regarded over narrowly as a
“treatise in economics.”
I also want to consider why it is that this book has proved so durable and influen
tial, and more generally reflect on the role of the “classics” in the social science,
including management and organization studies. To do that I will draw on Art
Stinchcombe’s famous article, “Should Sociologists Forget Their Mothers and
Fathers” (Stinchcombe, 1982), in which he sets out a number of functions that clas
sic texts can serve in the social sciences. With this useful framework we can then
assess the continuing influence and legacy of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm,
and, further than that, reflect on the development of organization studies, which
was—as a field—taking shape at the time Penrose was researching and writing the
book in the mid- and late 1950s, a context, environment, and time which also shaped
the work of many early pioneers in the field, and one that was very different from the
contemporary research environment.
But first, in wishing to explore the relationship between “life,” “work,” and “times,”
let us rehearse some of the main details of this remarkable woman’s life.
15.2 The Life

We now have the great benefit of knowing a good deal more about Edith Penrose’s
life and work through the recently published, carefully researched, and very readable
biography written by her daughter-in-law, Angela: No Ordinary Woman: The Life of
Edith Penrose (Penrose, 2017).
Edith Penrose was born in California in 1914, and her life spanned the course of
the twentieth century. She studied Economics at Berkeley in the 1930s, became a
researcher at the International Labor Organization first in Geneva in 1939, and later,
when the office was relocated, in Montreal. During the war she worked as a research
assistant at the US Embassy in London, returning to the US after the war to work
with Eleanor Roosevelt on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She began
her “formal” academic career signing on to do a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins
University in 1947, aged thirty-three—as what would now be termed a mature student.
The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was published when she was in her mid-forties,
and she later moved on to become an expert on the oil industry, multinationals,
and the economies of the Middle East, as well as an inspirational teacher and
mentor to many.
Her life had been eventful, and not without tragedy. Marrying soon after graduat
ing, her first husband was killed in a mysterious hunting accident, whilst she was
bearing their child. Working as a research assistant to an English economist at
Berkeley, Ernest Penrose (“Pen”), she moved with him to the International Labor
Organization (ILO) in Geneva, to which he had been recruited by John Winant, the
newly appointed director of the ILO, leaving her young son with her parents in
California. A close ally of Roosevelt, and a great supporter of the New Deal, Winant
was appointed to be the US Ambassador in London in 1940, and he was keen that
“Pen”—and Edith—should work with him in London during the war. Penrose and
Edith developed a close relationship, and married in 1944, he forty-nine and she
twenty-nine.
In 1945 her brother Jack, a pilot in the US Airforce, was shot down and killed in
Italy. In 1947, Winant, who had been the most important linchpin in the relationship
between the US and Britain, and between Roosevelt and Churchill in the difficult
early years of the war, and a much-admired public figure in Britain during the war,
took his own life. Edith suffered an even greater loss, just as she was beginning her
master’s degree, when Pen and Edith’s son Trevan, aged two, died from an infection
resulting from a dirty needle used in a routine injection. With typical energy she
nevertheless threw herself into her academic work, beginning her PhD on the patent
system in 1948, which she completed in 1950. This was published as The Economics
of the International Patent System in 1951, and she became a lecturer in political
economy at Johns Hopkins in the same year. She then joined the research team
studying the growth of business firms, a project characteristic of the climate of post
war reconstruction, and the role social scientists might play in public policy and
research.
As Fritz Machlup wrote in 1948 when supporting her application for a Fellowship
Award from the American Association of University Women in Washington:
Mrs Penrose is the most unusual woman I have ever come in to contact with.
I have never thought it possible that a person could do as many things at the same
time and do them as efficiently and well. Her ability and intelligence, together
with her drive and industry would make her an outstanding performer in almost
any field. (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 116)
This is borne out by memories of most people who met her, or who worked with her.
Her dynamism and sharp intelligence are often remembered, and it goes without
saying that to achieve the success and respect that she did as a woman in the male-
dominated world of 1950s and 1960s academia was remarkable, not made any easier
by the numerous “interruptions” to her “career,” moving from country to country,
and the demands of her family responsibilities. No wonder she wrote in one of her
letters to Machlup, when getting ready to leave the US for the last time in 1957: “And,
as I have often said, I need a wife” (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 150).
The research and writing of The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was a major
project and effort for her from the time of joining the research project through to
delivery to the publisher, Blackwell, probably at some point in 1958. She worked
hard at it, initially in the US, and then later in Australia—but had to fit the work in
alongside all her other commitments and challenges—family life, her work at Johns
Hopkins, playing a key role in the defense of Owen Lattimore against the charges of
McCarthy’s House of Unamerican Activities.
She seems to have worked out many of the core ideas of the book at quite an early
stage, but the writing took time and was difficult. Her supervisor, Fritz Machlup,
played an important role as guide and correspondent in a relationship of equals
sometimes carried out through correspondence across the world. In this correspond
ence she reveals many of the challenges she faced—getting the argument right, dealing
with uncertainties, moments of loss of confidence, and generally meeting the exacting
standards she set herself. The style is clear, written mainly in non-technical language
and showing a relentless logic, line of enquiry, and explanation. It moves from basic
principles and ideas—her definition of the firm, the “image,” the role and work of
managers, knowledge and experience, resources—to size, diversification, merger
and acquisition, in the later chapters. The more “technical” or academic parts of the
book are largely kept to the numerous footnotes which reveal the extent and scope of
her reading, and her command of the relevant academic debates. It is a bold and
creative book written with purpose, wit, and style.
A number of fundamental views about the subject matter, and indeed more gen
erally her outlook and what has recently been termed her “stance” (du Gay and
Vikkelsø, 2017), come through the text. First, as she herself pointed out, and in con
trast to dominant work on the firm at the time, there was a desire to study and
understand the workings of actual firms—the “insides” as she referred to them.
Related to this was a recognition of the role of management and teamwork in organ
izations, and the associated collective and cumulative knowledge. In terms of her
approach to her work, she was broad in her reading and willing to seek ideas and
insights from beyond her own discipline and training. She believed that any theory
should be able to explain the “facts,” and in developing her theory combined induct
ive and deductive reasoning. Developing her “single argument” was ambitious and
far reaching, and in the book she showed a remarkable capacity to develop and sus
tain a sophisticated and original argument, and express it in clear, deceptively
straightforward language, committed as she was to write a book that would be useful
beyond the academic world.
If we think “reflexively” about Penrose and some of her own most important
ideas, we can see that she brought her own “image” and outlook to her work, and
that she was someone who made best use of her own “productive opportunities.”
More or less as soon as the book was finished Pen and Edith left the United
States—never to return to live there permanently. Disgusted by what McCarthyism
revealed about American culture of the 1950s, Pen, in particular, resolved he would
not want to bring up their young family there. This decision took them initially to
Australia, and then to Iraq where they both worked at the University of Baghdad. As
ever coming to terms with the situation in which she found herself, Edith started to
learn Arabic and began her research on oil, the multinationals, and the political
economy of the Middle East, which was to become the focus of her work for the next
decade or more. She was appointed to a joint position at the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS) and the London School of Economics (LSE) in the mid-
1960s, and was widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the oil
industry (but that is another story). On her “retirement” she moved to INSEAD to
be Director of Research from 1978 to 1984, when Pen died. She then moved to
Cambridge to live with her son Perran, and his wife Angela, until her death in 1996.
She very much “moved on” from work on the firm. Whilst it informed her study
of multinationals, she only returned to it in a mostly retrospective manner when her
work gained greater attention in the 1980s and 1990s—first when giving a lecture to
celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the book at Uppsala in 1984 at the invita
tion of Lars Engwall, and then, when fully retired, enjoying the “Indian summer”
of recognition that came with the growing importance of the resource-based view of
the firm in the 1980s and 1990s. She attended the Strategic Management Society
conference as an invited guest in San Francisco in 1989; and the Prince Bertil
Symposium on the Dynamic Firm, in Stockholm in 1994, her last academic meeting,
and for which she wrote her last paper—later published, posthumously, as
“Strategy/Organization and the Metamorphosis of the Large Firm” in Organization
Studies in 2008.
Whilst she did “move on,” it is clear that she felt there was an underlying historical
thread that ran through her work in the 1950s and 1960s. In the preface to the col
lection of essays, The Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil and Other Essays published in
1971, she wrote:
At first glance it might seem that the three subjects dealt with in these essays written
over the last twenty years could hardly be more diverse . . . Oddly enough, however,
these subjects are connected by the same type of historical logic that character-
izes the diversification of an industrial firm: the logic in the simple principle that
one thing leads to another. (quoted in Penrose, 2017: 189)
One of the factors that drove Edith’s work on the growth of firms was her dissatisfac
tion with research done in (mainstream) economics, which she felt did not explain
how firms grew. Not committed to mainstream economics, she was always prepared
and keen to look elsewhere for insight and “answers” to the question she posed her
self. Whilst in Australia, she knew several anthropologists and through them became
interested in how people behave and adapt to environments. This led to an interest
ing exchange with Machlup about the work of Ruth Benedict. Edith wrote:
It is interesting, though, to ask [another question!] why she is one of the most
noted anthropologists, and I have a theory. There are probably more careful
observers, more accurate reporters, more logical thinkers, but none of them
achieves the note she has. Her strength is precisely the thing that gives rise to the
weakness you complain of—the fact that she develops more generalized theories
in to which to place a mass of data. This catches the human mind, helps make
sense of things. The writer capable of sweeping and original, and withal relatively
simple theory-making, providing he (sic) isn’t too far off the beaten track of the
traditions in his science, is the one with impact. The “tidiers up”, the “clarifiers”
come along behind, with perhaps cleaner analysis and more clear-cut distinc-
tions. The same holds for Margaret Mead, and David Riesman.
(quoted in Penrose, 2017: 182)
And perhaps, as her grandson Jago suggests in his summary of The Theory of the
Growth of the Firm in the biography, she may also have been describing herself in
this fascinating comment that reveals something of her own approach: the breadth
of her (inter-disciplinary) interests and reading; and a view that prefigures Thomas
Kuhn’s celebrated ideas on paradigms and “normal science,” with the “tidiers up”
being the puzzle solvers of normal science.
She also had ambition and a vision for the book, revealed in the rich correspondence
with Machlup. As Jago Penrose writes, “As well as an explorer and pioneer, Edith saw
herself as an artist, and The Theory of the Growth of the Firm as a work of art”:
This will be a good book [she writes in 1955—four years before publication]. I have a
real conception of it as a whole, it will not be a treatise on economics alone, but a
work of art with a theme, balance, recurring rhythms, contrasts and symmetries. It
should so hang together that it doesn’t raise an eyebrow anywhere but flows naturally
and inevitably. My dream is high for it, I shall fall short, but I shall get close enough.
(quoted in Penrose, 2017: 182, from correspondence with
Machlup, November 1955)
15.3 The Work—The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

It was indeed “a good book,” and it was also more than “a treatise on economics,”
although that is how it may have been seen by many for much of the book’s own
“life.” In this section I want to highlight some of the striking features of the book,
and also why it is more than “a treatise on economics,” drawing as it does on a range
of ideas from other disciplines—notably, business history, sociology and psychology,
and the emergent field of organization theory—albeit in an understated way, but in a
manner that is crucial to the development of Penrose’s theory and argument.
There is now an extensive, rich, and extremely good secondary literature on The
Theory of the Growth of the Firm which summarizes and debates many of her key
arguments, and I have no intention, nor probably the ability, to rehearse that here. In
his excellent summary Blundel (2015) distils her single argument into six “compo
nents”; Kor and Mahoney (2000) describe “10 major original ideas” that inspire
twenty-two research questions; and Perran Penrose and Christos Pitelis (2002) sum
marize her ideas in thirteen points. My purpose is to draw Penrose’s work to the
attention of the broad community of organization studies researchers, and to present
and parse some of her ideas that prefigure and chime with many subsequent and
current debates in organization studies, notably ones that are of particular interest to
understanding the role of temporality and history.
What is immediately striking is how bold and ambitious a goal she set herself—to
investigate, theorize, and explain the growth of firms from first principles. At the
time there was much discussion in economics about the optimum size of a firm, but
few people had explored how firms grew and what may both enable and constrain
that growth. As she put it in the preface to The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, “Just
one word of warning: this book deals with familiar concepts but in an unfamiliar
way and the reader is cautioned not to treat the introductory chapters lightly; they
are essential to the analysis to follow. The entire study is essentially a single argument
no step of which can be omitted without the risk of misunderstanding later conclu
sions” (Penrose, 1959: xlviii).
Simply put, the book moves from the micro (some understanding of individual
decisions by managers), through the meso (the management, operation, perform
ance, and opportunities of the firm as an organization in its competitive environ
ment) to the final chapters on the macro environment and considerations of policy
in the economy as a whole.
It is the “essential” introductory chapters that underpin the whole, and which are
of most interest to organization studies, as it is here that she “prefigures” many
important ideas later developed within the field. Some of her fundamental proposi
tions were as follows:
• A firm is a purposive human organization—“all the evidence we have indicates

that the growth of a firm is connected with the attempts of a particular group of
human beings to do something” (Penrose, 2009: 2)—thus recognizing the cen
tral role of agency and management in the organization.
• Defining her objective and research question as wanting to understand the
growth of firms, Penrose was inevitably interested in dynamics, change, and
process. Indeed, she explicitly and repeatedly in the opening pages of The
Theory of the Growth of the Firm refers to the “process of growth”—her italics. “I
am primarily concerned with a theoretical analysis of a process” (2009: 3). For
her, “process” was an unfolding stream of activities in an organization over
time, and this inevitably led her to stress the importance of studying an organ
ization’s history.
• Any study of growth had to be based on and consistent with the experience of
a real-world organization. In her case this was her detailed study of the
Hercules Powder Company over the course of its history, originally intended
to be included in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm but cut by the publisher
in the interests of space, and later published by Penrose in the Business History
Review in 1960, winning the annual Newcomen Society best article award
(Penrose, 1960).
• Sensemaking—from her experience of studying the managers at Hercules,
Penrose was very conscious that they made decisions based on experience,
hunch, and their understanding and perception of their own firm and its place
in the market—limited rationality in conditions of uncertainty. This she
termed, after Boulding, the “image” that managers have in their minds. “In
order to focus attention on the crucial role of a firm’s inherited resources, the
environment is treated in the first instance, as an ‘image’ in the entrepreneur’s
mind of the possibilities and restrictions with which he is confronted, for it is
after all, such an ‘image’ which in fact determines a man’s behavior: whether
experience confirms expectations is another story” (Penrose, 2009: 4–5). And
later: “The environment has not been treated as an objective ‘fact’ but rather as
an ‘image’ in the entrepreneur’s mind; the justification for this procedure is the
assumption that it is not the environment ‘as such,’ but rather the environment
as the entrepreneur sees it, that is relevant for his actions” (2009: 189). As Foss
(2002: 156) argues, this is a subjective and constructivist view that probably
signals the influence of Machlup and Austrian economics on her thinking.
Although she does not write about this influence explicitly herself, this has
been explored by several critics (Foss, 2002; Powell, Rahman, and Starbuck,
2010; Connell, 2007; Spender, 2014).
• Collective knowledge, teamwork, and experience—anticipating the distinction
between “explicit” and “tacit knowledge,” she referred to the former as “object
ive” knowledge, which can be “transmissible to all on equal terms” (Penrose,
2009: 48). The latter she refers to as “experience,” “which can never be transmit
ted; it produces a change—frequently a subtle change—in individuals and can
never be separated from them” (2009: 48); and further “an administrative
group is something more than a collection of individuals who have had experi
ence of working together, for only in this way can ‘teamwork’ be developed.
Existing managerial personnel provide services that cannot be provided by
personnel newly hired from outside the firm, not only because they make up
the administrative organization which cannot be expanded except by their own
actions, but also because of the experience they gain from working within the
firm and with each other enables them to provide services that are uniquely
valuable for the operations of the particular group with which they are associ
ated” (2009: 41–2).
• Resources, capabilities, and competences—and the services they render. “In all
of the discussion the emphasis is on the internal resources of a firm—on the
productive services available to a firm from its own resources, particularly the
productive services available from management within the firm” (2009: 4).
Here we can see the ideas that prefigure the most common and familiar take-
up of Penrose’s ideas in the general area of strategy and management studies, in
the “resource-based view” of the firm developed in the 1980s and 1990s by
Teece, Wernerfelt, Barney, Spender, Mahoney, and others. (The transmission,
conduits, and to-ing and fro-ing between Penrose’s ideas and the work of these
later scholars would make an interesting research project in itself.)
After setting out these “essential”—and I would emphasize organizational—ideas in

the opening five chapters, the book moves to the more conventional economics ter
ritory/discourse of size, diversification, acquisition, small and large firms, industrial
concentration and so on.
Stepping back from the specifics and substance of her ideas, it is worth stress
ing some other characteristics of the work. The book is indeed written with great
clarity, freshness, flair, and wit. At the same time, one cannot but be impressed by
the unrelenting logic and sense of enquiry as she builds her “single argument.”
There is a sense of a very sharp, agile, and clear-thinking mind at work, and one
that all the time is balancing some fundamental juxtapositions of any good social
science enquiry—induction and deduction; history and theory; and process and
structure.
Some of this is enabled by a genuinely open-minded and interdisciplinary

enquiry. The core references are to economics texts, but in addition to these she was
reading business histories, psychology, and the existing and emergent literature in
organization theory (Barnard, from whom she borrowed the term “authoritative
communication,” operating in what she referred to as the “area of co-ordination”;
and Herbert Simon). “The influence of ‘organizational structure’ has been particu
larly stressed by the ‘organization theorists,’ ” she wrote, citing an early article of
Cyert and March). Her open-mindedness and interdisciplinary range have been par
ticularly commented on by two leading interpreters. Blundel writes: “Retracing
Penrose’s ambitious journey requires a series of leaps across disciplinary boundaries,
and the spanning of multiple levels of analysis” (Blundel, 2015: 100); and similarly,
Lazonick comments: “For the vast majority of economics graduates, the integrated
research agenda, inherent in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, represented, in
my view, simply too great a methodological leap” (Lazonick, 2008: 72).
We should also remember that this was a book written by a mature woman
scholar in her forties, with three young children, a host of competing demands and
responsibilities, no clear career path or affiliations, and all sorts of interruptions.
Indeed, when the book was actually published she was out of a job, applying unsuc
cessfully for a post at Cambridge, having famously driven, in the summer of 1959,
from Iraq to the UK for her interview. How was she able to write such a book? Any
answer to this question needs to consider the person herself; her life experience; the
support she had from those around her; and the scholarly and research culture of the
times. We know from Angela Penrose’s biography and the testimony of others that
she was remarkably intelligent, with a broad range of interests and a lively engage
ment with the world and the situations in which she found herself. She also had
great energy and a capacity for work.
In the preface to The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, Edith Penrose cites her
greatest debts as being to her supervisor and mentor Fritz Machlup, well known as a
leading economist of the Austrian school who had emigrated to the US before the
war; and also to her husband Francis Penrose, a distinguished economist and policy
adviser in his own right. Machlup became a lifelong friend; and “Pen” was an exact
ing and supportive life partner and collaborator with a wide range of experience, to
say the least. Prior to her formal academic career at Johns Hopkins she had under
taken several important policy research projects at the International Labor
Organization (ILO) and at the US Embassy during the war. Due to her and Pen’s role
there she met and got to know many leading economists and intellectuals on both
sides of the Atlantic. The culture and climate of much academic research in the post
war period for those who had been through the war was pragmatic and applied—the
purpose was to engage with the challenges of the real world and attempt to make the
world a better place. This outlook is a consistent thread that runs throughout her
work. Dividing her life into different stages, the writing of The Theory of the Growth
of the Firm can be seen as just one, which we might refer to as stage 3—stage 1 being
research work before and during the war; stage 2, the beginning of her academic
career (her master’s and doctoral work); stage 4, her work on the oil industry and the
Middle East; stage 5, her time at SOAS and the LSE; and finally stage 6, her research
leadership at INSEAD. At every stage, alongside her academic work she involved
herself in practical, political, and policy issues.
This blending and intertwining of life and work is a good example of the scholarly
vocation described by C. Wright Mills in “On Intellectual Craftmanship,” his appen
dix to The Sociological Imagination (Wright Mills, 1959). Published in the same year
as The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, here is another committed scholar of that
same generation, seeking to bridge theoretical work and practical and political
engagement. He writes, offering advice to the young scholar:
It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most
admirable figures within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not
split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow
such disassociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the
other . . . you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: con-
tinually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftmanship is the center of
yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which
you may work (1959: 215–16)
He might well have been describing Edith Penrose.

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has proved itself to be a “classic,” not only in
its durability and influence, but also in its “generative” capacity to stimulate research,
debate, and enquiry in so many different areas—particularly latterly in different
areas of management and organization studies, broadly defined. The point is that all
these interpretations show the range and richness of the book. It seems entirely
appropriate that Blundel refers to different “facets” of her work—like a jewel it can be
turned in order to illuminate different qualities from different angles.
15.4 The Classics—How Do We “Read” Them,

and What Can We Learn from Them?
The book is a “classic”—in terms of its originality; its enduring influence in several
successive fields; the remarkable freshness of the writing; and the discussion that
repays reading again and again. But classic works can themselves become codified in
a kind of academic shorthand. The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is regarded as an
early statement of the RBV; Burns and Stalker (1961) is “about” mechanistic and
organic forms of organization; Selznick (1949) is “about” formal and informal power
in bureaucracies—and we can often overlook the richness of these books by thinking
that all we need to know is the “thumbnail” summary.
So how should we view the classics, and how should we “read” them? Art
Stinchcombe offered some useful pointers in his 1982 essay, “Should Sociologists
Forget Their Mothers and Fathers” (Stinchcombe, 1982). He described six functions

of classics. The first function is to serve as a “touchstone” or exemplar of excellence
that we can hope to emulate. The second is to provide “developmental tasks” to make
minds more complex. A third function is “small coinage” to act as shorthand for
identifying one’s perspective and orientation. Fourth, the classics help us to under
stand the genealogy of fundamental ideas in a field, the lineage from the trunk to the
branches and twigs, where the trunks are rich in fundamental concepts that can lead
to the creation of new ideas. Fifth, they can be used in routine science as a source of
hypotheses that have not yet been fully explored. Finally, the classics have a ritual
function to bind together the profession and give it a sense of shared history.
Jerry Davis and Meyer Zald added some other characteristics of classics, suggest
ing that they offer the opportunity to review and re-read them, notably to under
stand how we might have misread authors and to consider their work anew; another
was that they give us the opportunity to understand authors in their social (and
research) context. They suggested we should ask:
What is the intellectual, social, and disciplinary context in which these classic
works are written and why are they seen in their time as important, or if neglected
unimportant. What is the process by which the canonical works are established as
part of the foundational writings for a field or subfield? Are there aspects of the
classic works that are given a specific interpretation or reading, so that later gen-
erations use the work in a somewhat different manner that earlier uses?
(Davis and Zald, 2009: 637)
Certainly, Penrose serves some of Stinchcombe’s functions—the book is indeed a

“touchstone”—a fine example of what serious, intelligent, well-grounded, and well-
written enquiry is about.
Classics as models of good work is the original sense of Thomas Kuhn’s much-
abused notion of “paradigm”. A paradigm is a case of a beautiful and possible way
of doing one’s scientific work. A touchstone then is a concrete example of the virtues
a scientific work might have, in a combination that shows what work should look
like in order to contribute to a discipline. . . The touchstone function is to furnish the
mind with intellectual standards, not to furnish it with hypotheses . . . I believe that
the reason we need such touchstone is that first class science functions with aes-
thetics standards as well as with logical and empirical standards.
(Stinchcombe, 1982: 2, 5)
This view clearly chimes with Penrose’s own ambitions of producing “a work of art with its
own rhythms and repeating themes.” The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has also
clearly been generative of much further research (the “routine science” function)—and
strikingly, as mentioned, in several different areas over the course of the book’s life, this
being a good example of what Thornton refers to as “live re-interpretation” (Thornton, 2009).
Du Gay and Vikkelsø in their book For Formal Organization, offer another more
recent interpretation of classic scholarship in management and organization studies.
They assess developments in the field and draw a distinction between what they refer
to on the one hand as the “classical stance,” and on the other as the “metaphysical
stance” in organization studies. The core of their argument is that the main focus of
organization studies should be the organization itself (the formal organization)
rather than a range of perhaps abstract organizational processes. In their view the
classical stance included several features:
. . . characterized, inter alia, by a pragmatic call to experience, an antithetical atti-

tude to “high” or transcendental theorizing, an admiration for practical scientific
focus of enquiry (in the Weberian sense of a “disciplined pursuit of knowledge” . . .,
a dissatisfaction and devaluation of explanation by postulate, and, not least, a
practical focus on organizational effectiveness, for instance, born of a close con-
nection to “the work itself”, or . . . “the situation at hand”. Du Gay and Vikkelsø
(2017: 18)
When reading and returning to the “classics” we may inevitably draw some compari
sons with later and contemporary research and writing. A noticeable trend that has
taken place in a number of recent reviews and reflections on the current state of
organization studies is for some leading contemporary scholars to “return to the
classics” in one way or another. Du Gay and Vikkelsø invite us to reconsider the
work of Chester Barnard, Wilfred Brown, and Wilfred Bion as examples of “the clas
sical stance.” In a similar vein, Alvesson, Gabriel and Paulsen (2017) extol the work
of C. Wright Mills in their book Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something
to Say. Commenting on Jerry Davis’s assessment of the field of organization studies,
in which he brilliantly uses the metaphor of Winchester House, Steve Barley pro
vides another example, writing:
Importantly, our understanding of bureaucracy was not initially built on journal

papers but rather on deep and lengthy studies usually published as books. I have
in mind many of the books we now consider the classics of our field . . . Most were
based on field studies or significant historical research. I propose that there was a
reason our understanding of bureaucracy was significantly shaped by research
published as books. First, extensive and intensive research was necessary for
gathering the kind of data necessary to understand the bureaucratic phenom
enon. Second, books provided the space and freedom to work through the com-
plicated implications of what the researchers discovered and learned . . . But alas,
we once again find ourselves up against the constraints of how our profession has
evolved. Even though we need deep studies of how organizations and employ-
ment relations are changing, our field does not easily reward such research, and it
has all but totally devalued the book as a form of communication.
(Barley, 2016: 7)
When leading figures in a field express strong misgivings about current develop
ments and scholarship, we should take note. Why is this the case? Can one imagine
leading economists having such reservations and misgivings about the state of their
discipline? Am I and these others merely elderly figures looking back to a golden
era, when we should be shuffling off the stage? Or is there an issue of concern, and
something to be learnt from these classic works—not just in terms of the particular
insights and defining concepts these scholars developed, but more importantly in
the way they went about their work?
It seems clear, though, that an argument can be made that much of social science
in the 1950s and the post-war period was characterized by a problem-driven agenda,
with ambitions to produce ideas and findings of policy and social value, which
stands in contrast to the concerns Alvesson et al. (2017) raise about “gap filling” and
other “self-generated conceptions” in contemporary scholarship.
15.5 Classics and the “History” of

Organization Studies
Although we are all aware of a kind of lineage within the field of organization
studies—scientific management, human relations, organizational sociology, the
Tavistock tradition, contingency theory, resource dependency, neo-institutionalism,
labor process, power-knowledge, postmodernism, process studies, identity, etc.,
etc.—perhaps we lack an overarching history of organization studies that attempts to
situate the development of the field in the broad social, political, and academic con
text of the time and the likely values and “images” that scholars may have brought,
and do bring, to their work in different eras.
One sketching out of a periodization of the field was offered by Jim March
(March, 2007), in which he took the vantage point of certain key political moments
to consider developments in the field—his chosen vantage points being 1945, 1968
and 1989—and highlighted the ways in which “significant features of the field were
molded by the moods and prejudices associated with academia after three critical
events in 20th century history.”
His article, titled “The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945,” based
on an address given at the conference of the European Organization Studies Group
(EGOS) in Bergen in 2006, was a typical blend of the perceptive, playful, provoca
tive, and positive. He describes EGOS as a:
broad association of scholars brought together by the myth of organization stud-

ies, by the idea that such a thing exists (or might exist) and by the idea that we are,
however uncomfortably, united in a common endeavor. The myth of a distinct
field of organization studies cannot easily be sustained by a contemplation of
either our teachings, our writings, or our research. It is sustained by our hopes.
(March, 2007: 10)
Edith Penrose was a scholar of the first period—the Second World War and its
aftermath in the 1950s—of reconstruction, the establishment of a new postwar
world order, and more relevant for our purposes what Jim March referred to as “a
mood of the 1950s which was optimistic about social science and its possibilities for
becoming a science that served an enlightened society through rational analysis and
social engineering based on systematic, quantitative research” (2007: 14).
He contrasted this “mood” with that of European scholars shaped by the 1960s,
who were more pessimistic, and “an intelligentsia that had, compared to the immediate
postwar group, substantially less positive attitudes about the academic establish
ment, about business, about science, about mathematics and numbers, about males
and the intellectual prejudices attributed to them, about the older generation, about
progress, and about things associated with North America, but most of all about the
quantitative methods and the mathematical theoretical forms that were hallmarks of
the earlier period” (2007: 14).
March notes that amongst the European refugees to the USA in the 1930s who
shaped significantly large areas of American social science in the 1950s were two of
Penrose’s main mentors—Joseph Schumpeter and, more directly influential, Fritz
Machlup—her supervisor, collaborator, friend, and correspondent over many years.
(Interestingly, Jim March lists Edith Penrose amongst the group of distinguished
European scholars with an interest in organization who established themselves after
the war. Even the smartest amongst us can make mistakes— it is fair to say, though,
that her life had been a transatlantic one from 1939 onwards.)
From her initial research at the ILO in Geneva in 1939, through her work as a
researcher at the American Embassy in London during the war, and her work with
Eleanor Roosevelt drafting the International Declaration of Human Rights in the
late 1940s—all undertaken before she began her academic “career”—it is hard not to
imagine that a significant motivation for her work and research was a positive (not
necessarily positivist) view of social science, and its role in addressing social and
policy issues, pursuing an agenda set by problems in society, rather than “internal”
scholarly debates.
As far as we know, she was also a pragmatist—hard working and focused on par
ticular tasks and problems, to which she brought a remarkable intelligence, curiosity,
and acuity. She was a free thinker who was courageous and independently minded
in her disciplined approach to the research question she had set herself. She brought
her own “image” to the study of the firm—regarded as a purposive organization,
composed of human agents using their collective knowledge to take advantage of the
“productive opportunity” presented to them, much as she did her best to make the
most of the “productive opportunities” she was presented with in the unexpected
and varied contexts in which she found herself—in London during the war; con
fronting McCarthyism in higher education in the US; making the most of the
research team on the firm in the postwar US economy at Johns Hopkins; moving to
Baghdad and becoming one of the world’s leading experts on the oil economy, the
Middle East, and the role of multinationals; establishing a dynamic center for Middle
Eastern studies at SOAS; and late in life inspiring the emerging generation of
scholars at INSEAD, and researchers in the resource-based view of the firm in strat
egy, entrepreneurship, organizational knowledge, etc. She was demanding of herself,
and of others—as recalled by a former student: “Among her many friends, col
leagues, and students, Edith will always be affectionately recalled for her style of
vigorous, frank and democratic engagement in academic discourse. Her sharp and
acute intelligence could be readily engaged in the correction of evasive and illogical
thinking of any kind” (O’Brien, 1997: 643).
The interest that developed in her work in her “Indian summer” was not of her
making—but rather resulted from the recognition by a wide range of scholars in
several different areas of management and organizations of the creativity, rigor, and
insight of her thinking. We can learn much from her life and her work.
Whilst March’s three moments of 1954, 1968, and 1989 are indeed key global
political events, the first two—to my mind—provide more useful milestones for
understanding the evolution of organization studies than 1989. Although for some
1989 may have signaled the highly dubious “end of history” and what March
described as the triumph of markets, if one wants to understand the evolving con
text of higher education and the environment and culture of social science research,
1979, seen generally as the beginning of the period of neoliberalism, would seem
more significant. Soon after this two significant developments in higher education
took place: the rapid growth of business schools and business education through the
1980s and 1990s; and, perhaps more importantly for understanding trends in aca
demic research, the introduction of a range of performance measures and standard
ized outputs in the form of journal articles that have become determinant features of
academic careers. This is the context of the “gap filling,” incremental, problem-
driven, inward-looking research culture bemoaned by critics such as Alvesson et al.,
Davis, and Barley.
Thus “classics” can serve not just as exemplars of fine work, and as foundation
blocks or stepping stones in the evolution of a discipline, but also as a guide to
understanding different research environments, cultures, and “outputs.” The schol
arly environment of the 1950s appears to have offered opportunities for the detailed
study of organizations over time, strong supportive collegial cultures, the norms of
“long form” book writing and reading, a more open interdisciplinary intellectual
context with closer roots to the disciplinary “trunks” of economics and sociology,
and a strong ethos of the values and virtues of applied social science. All this seems
very different from the instrumental, incremental, narrower context of the—ironically
much larger—academic world that has evolved since the 1980s, with its claims to
applied relevance. Perhaps organization studies lacks a detailed intellectual and
institutional history that might trace these developments in the way that Marion
Fourcade has done for economics in her comparative study of developments in that
discipline across the twentieth century in the US, the UK, and France. In addition to
describing how national institutional dynamics structure disciplines, the book “tells
the story of the political and economic forces that have shaped the professional
identities, practical activities, and disciplinary projects of economists” in different

countries over time (Fourcade, 2010: xiv).
The relationship between history and organization studies is an important and
fruitful one, most notably in the use of a historical perspective and methodology in
understanding the evolution and character of organizations over time. A historical
perspective also offers the opportunity to understand the evolution of a discipline, as
Fourcade has shown. A prime source for doing this is reading the “classics” to gain
some understanding of the context in which they were written, and also to trace
their enduring and important influence. The work of Edith Penrose provides a case
in point, and presents us with the sources to examine a third important element in
the relationship between history and organization studies—the context and develop
ment of an individual scholar’s life and work. There is a great deal to be learnt from
her work, and her life, and no substitute for reading The Theory of the Growth of the
Firm as a “touchstone” of creative and enduring scholarship.
A Note on Sources
The Theory of the Growth of the Firm was first published in the UK by Blackwell in 1959,
and in the US by Wiley. A second edition—with an Introduction by Martin Slater, was
published by Blackwell in 1980, and in the US by M. E. Sharpe. The second edition was
put out of print in the 1980s. The 3rd edition was published in 1995 by Oxford University
Press, with a new Foreword by Edith Penrose.
The 4th edition was published in 2009 to mark the 50th anniversary of the o riginal
publication. This included a new Introduction written by Christos Pitelis, and
Penrose’s Foreword to the 3rd edition as an Appendix. This fourth edition was reset,
and consequently repaginated—not making things easy for scholars wishing to cite
the work! As a rough guide, references to the 2009 edition are 4–5 pages before the
1959 edition.
The case study of the Hercules Powder Company which Penrose intended to include
as an Appendix in the original edition, but which was excluded at the publisher’ insist
ence—because it would make the book too long and add cost—was published as an
article in the journal Business History Review in 1960.
This essay is highly derivative and draws on several main sources:
Penrose, Edith (2009). Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Penrose, E. T. (1960). The Growth of the Firm—A Case Study: The Hercules Powder
Company. Business History Review, 34, 1–23.
Penrose, Angela (2017). No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pitelis, Christos (Ed.) (2002). The Growth of the Firm: The Legacy of Edith Penrose.
There is extensive commentary on Edith Penrose’s work in journals—some of the more

interesting articles are those by Michael Best, Richard Blundel, Carol Connell, Nicolai
Foss, Yasemin Kor, William Lazonick, Andy Lockett, Joe Mahoney, and Alan Rugman.
Other References
Alvesson, M., Gabriel, Y., and Poulsen R (2017). Return to Meaning: A Social Science with
Something to Say, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barley, S. (2016). 60th Anniversary Essay: Ruminations on How We Became a Mystery
House and How We Might Get Out. Administrative Science Quarterly, 61(1), 1–8.
Blundel, Richard (2015). Beyond Strategy: A Critical Review of Penrose’s “Single
Argument” and its Implications for Economic Development. European Journal of the
History of Economic Thought, 22(1), 97–122.
Buckley, P., and de la Torre, J. (2020). Strategic Management Review: Special Issue on The
Work of Edith Penrose.
Burns, T. and Stalker, G. M. (1961). The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock.
Clark, P., and Blundell, R. (2007). Penrose, Critical Realism and the Evolution of Business
Knowledge: A Methodological Reappraisal. Management and Organization History,
2(1), 45–62.
Connell, C. M. (2007). Fritz Machlup’s Methodology and ‘The Theory of the Growth of
the Firm’. Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, 10(4), 300–12.
Davis, G. F., and Zald, M. (2009). Sociological Classics and the Canon in the Study of
Organizations. In P. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization
Studies: Classical Foundations (pp. 635–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Kay, J. (2019). The Concept of the Corporation. Business History, 61, 1129–43.
Kor, Y. Y., and Mahoney, J. T. (2000). Penrose’s Resource-Based Approach: The Process
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Kor, Y. Y., Mahoney, J. T., Siemsen, E., and Tan, D. (2016). Penrose’s “The Theory of the
Growth of the Firm”: An Exemplar of Engaged Scholarship. Production and Operations
Lazonick, W. (2008). Business History and Economic Development. In Geoffrey G. Jones
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March, J. (2007). The Study of Organizations and Organizing since 1945. Organization
Studies, 28(1), 9–19.
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33(3), 643–4.
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Cass.
Penrose, E. (1985). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm Twenty-Five Years After. Uppsala.
Penrose, P., and Pitelis, C. (2002). Edith Elura Tilton Penrose: Life, Contribution, and
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17–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Powell, T., Rahman, N., and Starbuck, W. (2010). European and North American Origins
of Competitive Advantage. In J. Baum and J. Lampel (Eds), The Globalization of
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Thornton, P. H. (2009). The Value of the Classics. In P. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations (pp. 20–38). Oxford:
Wright Mills, C. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Index
abductive turning point 148 Atleic aspect in linguistics 19

Abercombie and Fitch, Hollister narrative 261 Augustine, St 74
abstract time 78–9 Confessions 29, 32–3, 34, 172
acceleration authenticity
and creative processes 70, 71–4, 76, 77, 80–1, of historical consciousness 192, 214
81–3 resoluteness and the authentic life 24–5
and linear metaphors of time 172
action-guiding anticipations 143, 144, 150–1 Bakhtin, M.M. 142, 143, 146, 150
action research Bannon, Steve 268
case study (Local News) 94–109 Barden, A. 75
and the withness approach 139, 143, 144, 157 Barley, Steve 290, 293
actor-network theory, and historical Barnard, Chester 290
consciousness 192–3 Bastien, François 9, 240–56
actual events 59–60 Beagle, Peter, The Last Unicorn 48
Adam, B. 77, 79 becoming
agency 3, 10, 11 flows of 81
and events in sequential time 31 future 79
and the flow of time 3 organizational 138
in the growth of the firm 285 of routines 118
past, present and future 3 temporality 80–1
and routines 117–18 time 71, 73, 75, 77, 83
agency question being time 71, 84
in historical scholarship 4 Being and Time (Heidegger) 18, 24
in organizational theory 4 Benedict, Ruth 283
airport analogy, flowline metaphor of news Bentley, M. 261
production 104–6 Bergen, M. 128
alienation 175 Bergson, Henri 34–5, 52, 55, 75, 80, 81
Alvesson, M. 290, 291, 293 on abstract and concrete time 78–9
ambitemporality 133 Berlin Wall 266
ancient Greece Bion, Wilfred 290
Eleatic philosophers 75 Bitektine, A. 192
kairos/cronos views of time 52, 77 Blattner, W. 4–5, 6, 15–26, 79
and rhetoric 262–3 Bluedorn, A.C. 30, 50, 131
Ancona, D.G. 30 Blundel, Richard 279, 284, 287, 288
Anno Domini chronology 172 Boje, D.M. 193, 225
Ansart, S. 133 Bongers, Diane Ella Németh 8, 189–216
Apple 69, 83 Bourdieu, Pierre 9
appreciative inquiry 139, 144, 158 field 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 228–32, 235, 237
Arab-Israeli conflict 22–3 habitus 221, 222, 223–4, 228
archaic societies, cyclical metaphor of time in 172 theory of practice 220, 221–2, 223–5
archeology 4 Bouty, Isabelle 6, 50–63
archivists, and organizational memory work 9, Braverman, Harry 177
241, 243–54, 255 Labour and Monopoly Capital 176
Aristotle 40 Brexit 267
arresting moments 142, 143, 150, 154 Brown, S.L. 70
artifacts of retrospect 138–9 Brown, Wilfred 290
artificial intelligence 31 Burns, T. 288
AT& T 69 Bush, George W.H. 266
298 Index
Business History Review 285 conscresence 37

business process re-engineering 72 Conservative nationalism 267–8
Bygballe, Lena 7, 116–34 continuity of events 29, 30, 31
Bygdäs, Arne Lindseth 7, 89–111 in discontinuity 41–2
the Gettysburg Address 5, 37–40
calendar time 2, 45 and temporality 58, 60–2
calendrical contrasts 48 Coraiola, Diego 9, 240–56
French Revolutionary calendar 48 Cornelissen, J.P. 92, 110
Cameron, K.S. 222 coupling, and historical consciousness 190
capitalist economy coworking 62–3
and linear time 172, 173–4 creativity
and social acceleration 72 flow of 70–1
carefulness 82, 83–4 and language 146
Carr, David, Time, Narrative and History 21 temporal dimensions of 6–7, 69–84
causal ordering of events 30–1 credibility, and rhetorical history 212
Cavendish, Ruth 179–80, 181–2 critical realism, in organization studies 279
change critical theory 4
events and the present 35 Cromwell, Oliver 37
and time as events 29 cultural myths see historical metanarratives
see also organizational change culture
change-blindness 17 and temporality 61
Chaplin, Charlie 174 and time 45–7
Chen, J. 70 Cunliffe, A.L. 54
Chia, R. 80 cyclical historical metanarrative 264, 268
Christianity cyclical-qualitative tradition of time 169, 170, 179
as a historical metanarrative 262, 264, 265, cyclical time 12, 172
270, 271 and news production 109
and linear time 172 Czarniawska, B. 70
and political time 48 Czikszentmihalyi, M. 70–1
chronos view of time 52
circular views of time 46–7 Davis, Jerry 289, 290, 293
Clark, Peter 99, 111, 176, 179, 180, 182–4 days, sociotemporal order of 45
classical antiquity see ancient Greece deceleration 71, 73–4, 81
classic texts Decker, Stephanie 9, 169–85
and the history of organization studies 291–4 declinist historical metanarratives 9, 264, 265, 268
reading and learning from 288–91 Deleuze, Gilles 55
role of in social sciences 279 Deroy, X. 57
Clegg, S. 57 Descartes, René 172
clock time 2, 5, 30, 45 Desjardins, Alphonse 272
and creativity 71, 75, 76–7, 81 Dewey, John 7, 142, 150, 153
hegemony of 174–5 dialogue, situated 143, 145–7, 152–3
and industrialisation 173–4 digital nomadism 62–3
and news production 91, 105 discontinuity of events
and the ontology of temporality 6, 50, 51, 53 continuity in 41–2
Coghlan, D. 157–8 the Gettysburg Address 37–40
cognitive biases 260 dispensational historical metanarratives 9, 264, 268
cognitive dissonance 260, 263, 268 distant future events 59
Cold War 22–3, 24 distant past events 29–30
collective memory 61 Ditton, Jason 179, 180–1
collective time 178 dualisms, predefined 62
commonality of events 40 Du Gay, P. 290
communities of inquiry 149–50, 153, 155, 157 duration 46, 47
and historical consciousness 214 of events 57
Comrie, B. 18, 19 norms of 44
concrete time 78–9 and the present time 32
confirmation bias 263, 268 Durkheim, E. 177, 178, 179
Index 299
ecology of routines 119 experimentation, and pragmatist inquiry 149,

Eisenhardt, K.M. 70, 123 153, 154
Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History 172 explicit knowledge, Penrose on the growth
embeddedness of the firm 285–6
and historical consciousness 214
in routine patterning 127 Fachin, G.F. 139
embodied history 222, 234 family structure, and social acceleration 72
emergence, concept of 6 field, Bourdieu’s concept of 221, 222, 223,
emergent leadership 78 224, 225
emergent temporality 79, 81 in Scandinavian telecoms company study
Emirbayer, M. 3, 35, 41 228–32, 235, 237
employees field experiments, in rhetorical history 269–70
and organizational time 179–85 Financial Times 89
temporal autonomy for 176 finite conception of time 45–6
engaged scholarship 279 First World War, narrative of Vimy Ridge 260
Engwalls, Lars 282 Fleetwood, J. 225
Enlightenment 75, 76 flow of creativity 70–1
and historical metanarratives 265 flowline metaphor, of news production 7, 89, 90,
episodic memory 213 93, 103–10, 110–11
episodic view of change 223 flow of time 3
epochal theory of time (Whitehead) 5, Follett, M.P. 138, 160
35–7, 41 Ford, Henry/Fordism 174, 176
continuity and discontinuity 37–40 Fortune 500 firms, study of organizational
Essen, A. 118 memory work in 9, 240–56
ethnographic conceptions of time 177–8 Foss, N.J. 279, 285–6
European Organization Studies Group Foster, William M. 9, 11, 211, 240–56
(EGOS) 291–2 Foucault, Michel 4
European telecommunications market, Fourcade, Marion 293–4
liberalization of 220 freelancing 62–3
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 179 French Revolutionary calendar 48
events 10–11 frequency of timing 47
assumed objectivity of 11 Fry, Art 82
and the becoming of organizational Fukuyama, Francis 266, 268
temporality 5, 29–42 the future
causal ordering of 30–1 the becoming future 79
frequency of 44 and living forward 141
narratives of 10–11, 12, 20–1 and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim 79
ongoing events and the lived experience of relationship of past, present and future 32–3
storytellers 222 future events 29–30, 31–2, 35, 41
and organizational temporality 5 dating 44
resolution of 21 and the ontology of temporality 6, 53, 54–5,
and sequential time 30–2 55–6, 58, 59–60
timing 44 and the present time 32
and Whitehead’s epochal theory of time 3, future orientation, in routine patterning 119, 124,
35–7, 41 127–8, 131–2, 133
events-based approach to temporality 6, 52,
55–63 Gabriel, Y. 290, 291
applying 58–9 Ganzin, M. 268
implications and contributions of 60–3 Geertz, Clifford 4
notion of an event 55–6 Gelfand, M.J. 190
organization as a structure of events 56–8 generative metaphors 92–3, 110–11
relevance for studying contemporary flowline 7, 89, 90, 93, 103–10, 110–11
organizations 62–3 Gettysburg Address 5, 37–40
evolutionary psychology, and rhetorical Gilmore, David 33
history 272–3 Giota method of data analysis 245–6
experience time 105 global economy, and clock time 76
300 Index
Google 69, 83 embracing 234–6

Graebner, M.E. 123 end of history metanarrative 266, 293
Gray, John 267 impact on organization change management
Grazia, Sebastian de 174 studies 220, 222–3
Time, Work and Leisure 172 objectivity question in 3–4
Grey, C. 72 organization studies 1, 291–4
gross time 46 subjective interpretation of 4
Gurvich, Georges, The Spectrum of Social Time 178 uses of the past in organizations 220, 221, 223
see also rhetorical history
habitus, Bourdieu’s concept of 221, 222, 223, history-as-fact model, of organizational
223–4 change 211
in Scandinavian telecoms company study 228, history-as-power model, of organizational
232, 234, 235, 237 change 211
Hagee, Rev. John 268 history-as-rhetoric model, of historical
Hagen, Aina Landswerk 7, 89–111 consciousness 212–13
Haley, U.C. 193 history-as-sensemaking 212
Harari, Yuval Noah 262 hourly rhythms 45
Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 174 Howard-Grenville, J.A. 119, 120, 131, 132, 133
Hartog, François, Presentism and Experiences of HP 69
Time 178 Hubert, H. 177–8
Hassard, John 8, 9, 10, 12, 169–85 The Human Stain (Roth) 22
Hatch, M.J. 192, 214 hurry sickness 72
Hegel, Georg 172, 266 Hussenot, Anthony 6, 50–63
Heidegger, Martin 75, 79, 80, 81, 82 Husserl, Edmund 34
Being and Time 18, 24 retention and protention 4–5, 15–17, 19–20,
intratemporality 23–5 25, 79
originary temporality 15, 18–19, 20, 21 hypothesis, and pragmatist inquiry 148–9
phenomenology of time 5
“helical” time 172 IBM 271
Helin, J. 161 idealist views of time 75, 77, 78–80, 81
Hercules Powder Company 285, 294 Idea Propeller tool 103
heritage walls 253 identity and temporality 61
Hernes, Tor 5, 6, 11, 29–42, 50–63, 78 ILO (International Labour Organization) 280,
Herodotus 4, 172 287, 292
Heron, J. 95 immanence
historical consciousness of past, present and future events 54–5, 58
and actor-network theory 192–3 in the structure of events 58–9
as a management tool 8, 189–216 Whitehead’s epochal view of time 38–9
and organizational change management 220, impulse, and pragmatist inquiry 148
223, 232–6 industrial societies
see also loose history; tight history and clock time 174–5
historical metanarratives 11, 12, 261–8 and linear metaphors of time 170, 172, 173–4
Christianity 262, 264, 265, 270, 271 social cycle research 177–84
declinist 9, 264, 265, 268 innovation projects 69
defining 261 institutional logics 271–2
and historical narratives 268 intepretive history 9–10
linear-progressive 263–4, 265, 266–8, 270 International Labour Organization (ILO) 280,
Marxism 9, 262, 265–6, 268 287, 292
see also rhetorical history inter-subjective concept of time 91
historical narratives 213, 259–60, 268 intratemporality 23–5
historical reconstruction, and cultural myth 9–10 Intuit Canada 69
historical time 10, 11 Ireland, discontinuities of time 37
historical turn, in organizational research 1–2
history James, William 7, 8, 33, 142, 144, 147, 148,
abandonment of 232–4, 236 150, 151
embodied 222, 234 Jensen, Astrid 8–9, 11, 220–37
Index 301
Johnson, M. 109, 173 power of 192

just-in-time production 72 research study 196, 203, 204–9
Lorino, Philippe 7, 119, 138–62
kairos view of time 52 Lubinski, C. 193, 212
Kay, John 279 Lyotard, Jean-François 266
Kierkegaard, S. 140
King, Martin Luther 38, 39 Machlup, Fritz 281, 283, 284, 287, 292
Koll, Henrik 8–9, 11, 229–37 Mahoney, T. 284
Kor, Y.Y. 284 management, microfoundations movement
Kuhn, Thomas 2, 4, 283, 289 in 260
Kundera, Milan, Slowness 73, 81 managers, and historical narrative research
270, 272
laboratory experiments, in rhetorical history March, Jim, The Study of Organziations and
269–70 Organizing since 1945 291–2, 293
labor process theory 170 Martela, F. 160
Lakoff, G. 109, 110, 173 Marxism 176
Langley, A. 139 as a historical metanarrative 9, 262, 265–6, 268
language Marx, Karl 266, 268
background of 143 Das Kapital 172
in dialogue situations 146–7 Matelli, G. 111
grammar and the temporal aspect of 5, 17–18 mathematic conception of time 46
withness approach to 147 Mead, G.H. 29, 35, 41, 55, 75, 79–80, 81, 82, 142
Lasewicz, Paul 271 and pragmatist inquiry 150
late modernity 70, 72–3 Pragmatist Maxim 79
Lattimore, Owen 281 measured time 46
legitimacy measuring time 44
of historical consciousness 214 Memento (film) 16
of loose history 192 memory see organizational memory work
symbolic standard of 11 Merton, Robert 178–9
of tight history 191 meta-historical narratives 9, 11
Lenin, V.I. 268 metaphors 92, 109–11
Lewin, K. 157 comparison model 110
liberal-progressive historical metanarratives 9, conceptualizing time and temporality 171–4
263–4, 265, 266–8 and dialogue 147
Lincoln, Abraham, Gettysburg Address 5, of organizational memory work 242
37–40 performing metaphorical events 106–9
linear-progressive historical metanarratives 263–4, see also generative metaphors; linear views
265, 266–8, 270 of time
linear views of time 12, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 169, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson) 173
170, 172 microfoundations movement in management 260
events 57 Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination 288
and industrial societies 170, 172, 173–4, 175 mindfulness 82, 83–4
linear-quantitative tradition 169–70, 174, 176 Minkus, A. 268
and news production 7, 109, 110 Mische, A. 3, 35, 41
rethinking the linear tradition 175–7 Missonier, S. 54, 55
linguistics, tenses and aspects in 17–18, 19 mobilities 83
LinkedIn 69, 83 months, sociotemporal order of 45
liquid journalism 89 moral progress, historical metanarrative of 267–8
literary criticism 4 Morgan, Gareth 92, 93
living forward 140–1, 143, 152 Images of Organization 171
abduction and experimental action 153–4 movement 83
loose history 8, 189, 190, 191–4, 214–15 multinational firms, historical narratives 271
legitimacy of 192 multiple histories, weaving together of 10
narratives 193 multitasking 72
organizational frictions between tight and loose Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization 173
history 209–10 Murphy, Arthur 80
302 Index
museums, corporate 253 ontological commitments, and rhetorical

Musson, David 10, 278–94 history 261, 268, 270
ontology of temporality 6, 50–63
narratives 12, 225–6 events-based approach to 6, 52, 55–63
conclusion 21 and the onotology of time 50–1, 52–5
embodied 222, 225 ontology of time 50–1, 52–5
of events 10–11, 12, 20–1 organisational time 175–6
historical 213, 259–60, 268 Organisational Transitions and Innovation-Design
loose history 193 (Clark and Starkey) 176
narratable processes 20–1 organisations, historical narratives of 259–60
narrative habitus 225 organizational becoming 138
narrative temporality 54 organizational change
and organizational change 142, 233–4 in the growth of the firm 285
and organizational memory work 241, and historical consciousness 211–12
242–3, 253 and organizational memory work work 255
plot 40 time and history in 1–2
of prospect 139 withness approach to 142–3, 145, 151
relevance of 21 organizational culture, and historical
rhetorical history 12, 191 consciousness 190
strategic narration of history 222 organizational memory work 9, 240–56
see also historical metanarratives approaching the past in 9, 220–37
Nayak, A. 159 deep dives into archives 249–50
near past events 29–30 defining 241, 254
neoliberalism 293 heritage walls 253
net time 46 importance of 240, 254–5
news production 7, 89–90 interpreting 247, 250–2
case study (Local News) of flowline interpretive nature of 255
metaphor 92–109 library metaphor of 242
deadline regime 7, 89, 90, 91, 98–101, 104, long-term 9, 241, 247, 249–54
105, 109 memorialisation 247, 253–4
“digital first” strategy 95, 99, 102, 105, 109 recollection 247, 249–50
digital platforms 105 retrieval 247, 248
liquid journalism 89 role of corporate archivisits/historians in 241,
moving to a continuous flowline 7, 89–111 243–4
online 89–90, 109 short-term 9, 241, 247–9
page planners 100–1 and size of organization 255
technology-accelerated 70 social construction 240
time and temporality in news storytelling 247, 249, 252–3
organisations 90–2 structural/functional approach to 241, 251
Newtonian time 30, 52, 76–7, 172 organizational scholarship 12
non-successive temporality 21–5 organizational temporality 2
Nordic model of work and welfare 226–7, events and the becoming of 5, 29–42
231, 232 organizational time in historical perspective 8,
Northern Ireland, discontinuities of time 37 169–85
Novick, Peter 3 foundational thinking on time and
temporality 170–5
Obama, Barack 267 organization frictions, between loose and tight
objective concept of history 8, 9, 221, 221–2, histories 209–10
223, 236 organizations
objective concept of time 5, 6, 8, 10, 53, 75, 79, 91, creativity in 69–72
171, 222 events-based approach to 52, 55–63
objective knowledge, Penrose on the growth of the organizations characteristics as temporal
firm 285–6 phenomena 60–1
objectivity question in history 3–4 role of in temporal frames 53
O’Brien, P.K. 293 organization studies 1, 279, 280
OMEN research project 95, 109 classical and metaphysical stances in 290
Index 303
core constructs in historical 11 physicotemporal order 5, 44–5, 48

history of 291–4 physics 75
originary temporality, in Heidegger 15, 18–19, Pinker, Steven 266, 267, 268, 270, 271
20, 21 Pink Floyd, “Time” 33–4, 35, 36–7, 39, 40
Orlikowski, W.J. 140 Pitelis, Christos 284
ostensive routines 117, 118 Plato 52
playfulness 82, 83–4
pace, in routine patterning 126–7, 130, 130–1, 132 political conversion, non-successive temporality
Paleolithic artists 74 in 22–4
paradigms 283, 289 politics of time 6, 47–8
passing time 46 Poor, S. 270–1
the past Post-It Notes 82
history and uses of the past in postmodernism 171, 179
organizations 220, 221, 223 Poulson, R. 290, 291
and living forward 141 power
and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim 79 of tight history 191
and narratives of organizational actors 222 and time 5, 47
relationship of past, present and future 32–3 practising time 77–81
past events 29–30, 31–2, 34–5, 41 pragmatist inquiry 139, 140, 147–9, 147–57,
dating 44 150–2
and the ontology of temporality 6, 53, 54–5, abduction and narration 153–4
55–6, 58, 59–60 community of inquiry 149–50, 153, 155, 157
past orientation, in routine patterning 119, 124, and experimentation 149, 153, 154
125–6, 127 and hypothesis 148–9
Peck, C. 189, 193 and impulse 148
Peirce, C.S. 153–4 methodological requirements for 151–7
Pelto, P.J. 190 Pragmatist Maxim (Mead) 79
Penrose, Angela, No Ordinary Woman: The Life of the present
Edith Penrose 278, 280, 287 extension of time from 29, 32
Penrose, Edith 10, 278–94 and living forward 141
Economics of the International Patent and Mead’s Pragmatist Maxim 79
System 281 and narratives of organizational actors 222
Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil and Other relationship of past, present and future 32–3
Essays 283 present events 31–2, 41
and the history of organization studies and the ontology of temporality 6, 53, 54–5,
292–4 55–6, 58, 59–60
life 280–4, 287–8, 292–3 present orientation, in routine patterning 119,
“Strategy/Organization and the Metamorphosis 124, 126–7, 131–2, 134
of the Large Firm” 283 primitive societies 179
Theory of the Growth of the Firm 278–80, process
281–2, 283, 284–8, 294 in the growth of the firm 285
Penrose, Jago 283, 284 process consulting 144, 158
Penrose, Perran 284 processes unfolding in time 4–5
Penrose, T.F. 289 process ontology
Perfect-aspect attributes 5, 18, 19, 21–2, 24, 25 continuity in discontinuity 41–2
performance management, study of Scandinavian events-based approach to 31–2
telecoms company 9, 220–1, 226–37 on organizational change 144
performative routines 117, 118, 119 and pragmatist inquiry 152
personal identity, and Heidegger’s and the withness approach 157, 158
intratemporality 24, 25 process organization 12, 77
pessimistic historical narrative 267–8 process philosophy 6, 8, 12, 55
Pettigrew, A.M. 222 process theory 1, 10
phenomology, experiencing a process unfolding in process as withness 139, 141–5
time 4–5, 15–17 productive dialogue 144
Philo of Alexandria 264 product life cycles 76
philosophy, temporal analysis in 170–1 projectification of work 51
304 Index
project team work 70 Saylors, R. 193

protention and retention, in Husserl 4–5, 15–17, Scandinavian telecoms company, change
19–20, 25, 79 management study of 9, 220–1, 226–37
Schein, E.H. 146, 147
qualitative time 47, 169, 170, 184 Schón, D.A. 92–3, 140, 146
quality routine, Alpha research study of 120–30, Schultz, M. 192, 214
130–3 Schumpeter, Joseph 292
Scientific Management 175
Raelin, J.A. 157–8 Second World War 280–1
Ratnecke, J. 133 invasion of the Soviet Union 266
Rawlinson, Michael 9 Seixas, P. 189, 193, 212
realist views of time 75, 77, 81, 82–3, 169 self-employment 62–3, 174
Reason, P. 95 Selznick, P. 288
reckoning time 44 semiotics of time 47
reflection-in-action 140–1, 146 sense-making, Penrose on the growth of the
reflexivity, and historical consciousness 214 firm 285–6
relational-processual ontology 139 sequential ordering of time 47
relational-responsive attitudes 144 sequential time 44
resoluteness, and the authentic life 24–5 and events 30–2, 35
resource-based view (RBV) of the firm 279, 286, 288 service sector 176
retention and protention, in Husserl 4–5, 15–17, Shotter, John 7, 139, 142, 143–4, 147, 150, 158,
19–20, 25, 79 160, 161
retrospective illusion 138 Silver, Spence 82
Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Simon, Herbert 287
Something to Say (Alvesson, Gabriel and Simpson, Barbara 6–7, 69–84, 119
Poulson) 290, 291 Singer, Peter 266–7, 268
Reuters Digital News Report 89–90 situated creativity 149
rhetorical history 2, 4, 10, 11, 193, 212–13, 215, situated dialogue 143, 145–7, 152–3
262–3, 268 Slow Cities 74
directions for future research 269–73 Slow Democrats 74
historical metanarratives and rhetorical Slow Food movement 74
effectiveness 9–10, 259–73 Slow Radio 74
narratives 12, 191 Smith, Adam 175
and organizational change management Smith, Andrew 9–10, 12, 192, 215, 259–73
studies 223 social acceleration see acceleration
subjective-objective duality in 11 social change
see also historical metanarratives and social acceleration 73
Richtermeyer, G. 131 time and history 1
Ricoeur, P. 40, 52, 54 social cycle perspectives 177–9
Rindova, V. 118–19 ethnographic exemplars for organizational
Roman Empire 264 research 179–84
Roman time 172 social groups, and the organization of time 5, 44
Roosevelt, Eleanor 280, 292 socialism 265–6
Roosevelt, F.D. 280 sociality, and temporality 79–80, 82
Rorty, R. 149–50 social media 270
Rory, Tracey 6–7, 69–84 social memory 242–3, 245–7, 248
Rosa, H. 70, 71, 72–3, 81 social rhythms 44
Roth, Philip, The Human Stain 22 social time 171
routine patterning 7, 117–34 socio-cultural time 45
Alpha study of 7, 120–30, 130–3 sociology of time 5–6, 44–8
and temporality 7, 130–3 culture and time 45–7
Rowlinson, M. 242 political time 47–8
Rowlinson, Michael 9, 169–85 the sociotemporal order 5, 44–5, 48
Roy, Donald 179, 180, 182 sociotechnical systems design 176
Rudningen, Gudrun 7, 89–111 solar year 45
Russel, J 192, 215 songs, and events 33–4, 35, 36–7, 39, 40
Index 305
Sony 69 Thompson, E.P.

Sorokin, Pitirim 45, 178–9 The Making of the English Working Class 172
Soviet Union 48, 266 “Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial
space, and the ontology of time 53 Capitalism” 173–4
speed and time 46 Thornton, P.H. 289
Spengler, Oswald 268 3M 69, 82
Stalin, J. 48, 268 tight history 8, 189, 190–1, 193–4, 214–15
Stalker, G.M. 288 legitimacy of 191
Standifer, R.L. 50 organizational frictions between tight and loose
Starkey, K. 176 history 209–10
Stinchcombe, Art, ‘Should Sociologists Forget power of 191
Their Mothers and Fathers?’ 279, 288–9 research study 196–204
storytelling, in organizational memory work 247, time famine 72
249, 252–3 timefulness 6, 80–1, 82
Strategic Management Review 279 acceleration and creative practice 81–3
stress 72, 73, 76, 83 time horizons, in routine patterning 120, 123,
and news production 91, 99 126–7, 130, 131, 132
structural poses 183–4 time impoverishment 76
subjective concept of history 8, 9, 221, 222, 223, 236 timelessness 80, 82
subjective concept of time 8, 10, 11, 50, 75, 79, 91, Time, Narrative and History (Carr) 21
171, 222 time orientation, in routine patterning 120, 123,
see also ontology of temporality 125–7, 131–2
substantialist view in organisation studies 60 time scarcity 173
Suddaby, Roy 9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, Tolsted, Ingrid M. 7, 89–111
240–56, 268 trade unions, and the Nordic model of work and
Swárd, Anna 7, 116–34 welfare 226–7, 230, 235
symbolism of timing 47 Tsoukas, H. 145, 146
Turner, S.F. 118–19
tacit knowledge, Penrose on the growth of the
firm 285–6 Ungson, G.R. 241–2, 243, 246, 247, 248, 254
Talking About Organizations podcast 138, 140 United States
Taylor, F.W. /Taylorism 72, 175 Civil War and the Gettysburg Address 37–40
Technics and Civilization (Lewis) 173 historical metanarratives 264, 266, 270, 272
technological determinism 174–5 institutional logics 271–2
technology, and social acceleration 72 McCarthyism 281, 282, 292
Teleic-aspect attributes 5, 19, 21–2, 24, 25 neoconservatism 22–3
temporality 5, 12, 91 Silicon Valley 267
defining 259 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 280, 292
in Heidegger 15, 18–19, 20, 21, 23–5
non-successive 21–5 Vaagaasar, Anne Live 7, 116–34
ontology of 6, 50–63 Vaïsse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a
in routine development 117–19 Movement 22–3
in routine patterning 7, 119–34, 130–3 video-ethnography 154–5
temporal consciousness 224 Vietnam War 22, 23, 24
temporal depth 30 Vikkelsø, S., For Formal Organizations 290
temporal dimensions of creativity 6–7, 69–84
temporal directionality 77 Wadhwani, R. 214
temporality turn in organizational research Walsh, J.P. 241–2, 246, 247, 248, 254
1–2 water clocks 29, 33
the temporal trajectory 2 Weber, Max 265, 266
see also ontology of temporality; organizational weekly rhythms 45
temporality Wegener, Frithjof 7, 138–62
temporal language 5, 17–18 Weick, K.E. 130, 139, 141, 151, 161
temporal sequences, and narratives 222 Weston, Alia 6–7, 69–84
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy) 174 Whig metanarrative 263–4, 265
Thatcher, Margaret 37 White, Hayden 11, 12, 260, 261
306 Index
Whitehead, A.N. 29, 55, 58 to language 147

epochal theory of time 5, 35–7, 37–40, 41 see also pragmatist inquiry
Wiebe, Elden 9, 240–56 Wittgenstein, L. 142, 150, 158
Winant, John 280 Woodman, R.W. 222
withness approach 7–8, 139–40 worker cooperatives 8
action-guiding anticipations 143, 144, research study of historical consciousness
150–1 and 194–209, 211, 212, 216
arresting moments 142, 143, 150, 154
comparison with other research approaches yearly rhythms of social life 45
157–9
data, analysis and theorizing 154–7 Zald, Meyer 289
future research 161 Zbaracki, M. 128
and living forward 140–1, 143 Zeitz, J. 37, 39
process as withness 141–5 Zeno 32
role of the researcher 144–5 Zerubavel, E. 5–6, 37, 44–8

Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies

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Time, Temporality, and History in

Process Organization Studies

Volume 1: Process, Sensemaking, and Organizing

François Bastien is an Assistant Professor at inter-organizational relationships, particularly

Diane Ella Németh Bongers is Associate Diego M. Coraiola is Assistant Professor at

research interests include rhetorical history, philosophy, which serves as a point of

has published in international journals such organizations as organizing processes rather

Philippe Lorino is Emeritus Distinguished Michael Rowlinson is Professor of

Gudrun Rudningen holds an MA in Visual Academy of Management Review. His

Andrew David Allan Smith is a Senior Ingrid M. Tolstad is a social anthropologist

Frithjof E. Wegener is a PhD candidate in Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors

Editorial Officer and Process Organization Studies Symposium Administrator

“The new series—Perspectives on Process Organization Studies—is a timely and

Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization

For instance, understanding a process as ever becoming highlights its temporal

1.1 The Puzzle: Questioning Objectivity and

unfolding processes or stable objects—and how we view agency in general (Reinecke

The assumptions on which it [the objectivity question] rests include a commit-

humanities some decades ago by writers as diverse as Thomas Kuhn, Michel

1.2 Contributions to this Volume: Exploring Time,

unfolding. By “retaining” the prior elements of experience and “protaining” or

strands of process philosophy. It emphasizes living forward within the flow of

ethnographic study of historical practices inside a Scandinavian telecom, twenty-five

extent to which a reconstructed history resonates with prevailing cultural myths or

1.3 An Emergent Model

history). It is in the act of constructing the narrative, the selection of events to

Subjective High agency

Figure 1.1 Core constructs in historical organizational studies

Narratives are a final thematic construct threaded through several papers.

1.4 Concluding Remarks

Langley, A. (2007). Process Thinking in Strategic Organization. Strategic Organization,

This chapter examines the phenomenological conditions of the possibility of our

2.1 Experiencing Process: The Husserlian Background

2.2 Tense and Aspect: On the Way from Husserl

successor notion to Husserl’s conception of time-consciousness. It is an account of

able to experience objects as undergoing change or processes as unfolding. Heidegger

2.3 Narratable Processes

A narrative frames a course of events in part by selecting what is at stake in the

2.4 Non-successive Temporality

which is essentially a way of talking about temporal position. Temporal position is

Blattner, W. (1999). Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Vaïsse, J. (2010). Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, A. Goldhammer

Standifer, 2006; Hernes, 2014a; Hussenot and Missonier, 2016) and further distinctions

3.2 On Sequential Time and Events

time, it also has important consequences for understanding organizational change

3.3 The Event of a Drop and the Experience of a Song

The problem, however, as posed clearly by St Augustine, is the relationship

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

3.4 Events as Continuity or Discontinuity in Whitehead

in Whitehead’s conception, seeds of continuity while we listening to the song, which

3.5 Becoming of Events, Discontinuity and

im­port­ant political moment, but little more. A search of 15 major American

3.6 Continuity in Discontinuity

Adam, B. (1998). Timescapes of Modernity. London: Routledge.

Hussenot, A., and Missonier, S. (2016). Encompassing Novelty and Stability: An

4.1 A Sociotemporal Order

4.2 Culture and Time

4.3 The Semiotics of Time

4.4 The Politics of Time

The political aspect of time is also manifested in the establishment of calendrical

Beagle, Peter S. (1968). The Last Unicorn. New York: Ballantine.

(see Hernes in Chapter 3 of this volume), the ontology of temporality is expressed

emergence and evolution of organizational phenomena (Hernes, 2014a; 2014b; 2017;

important political moment, but little more. A search of 15 major American

The ontology of temporality, i.e. a process-view of time (Hernes, 2014a; Reinecke

newspapers, underperformed in terms of the number of stories produced by its own