Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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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
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.
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
“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
“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
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
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
4 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
8 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Historical metanarrative
Rhetorical history
Narratives
Events
Historical time
Objective Low agency
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14 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
16 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative 19
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,
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative 23
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),
24 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
. . . 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
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative 25
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.
26 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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).
Temporality, Aspect, and Narrative 27
References
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
30 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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,
34 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality 35
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.
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,
Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality 37
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
38 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
(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.
Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality 39
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
40 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality 41
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.
References
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.
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.
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
The Sociology of Time 47
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”.
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)
The Sociology of Time 49
References
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
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
Studying Organization from the Perspective 53
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.
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
Studying Organization from the Perspective 55
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.
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.
56 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
Studying Organization from the Perspective 57
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.
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.
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.
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.
60 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Actual event
(C)
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.
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
70 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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:
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.
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.
The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World 73
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.
74 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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.
Although time has always fascinated philosophers, it has only relatively recently
entered seriously into the organization studies domain (Antonacopoulou and
76 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
78 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World 79
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)
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.
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
The Timefulness of Creativity in an Accelerating World 83
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,
84 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
90 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
discuss how a particular type of metaphor, i.e. generative metaphors, can be used to
spur such collective temporal change.
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.
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
94 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
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
98 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
100 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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).
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.
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
104 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Flowline at Work 105
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.”
106 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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.
Flowline at Work 107
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
108 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Flowline at Work 109
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
110 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
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’
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 119
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).
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
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 121
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
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.
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.
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 123
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.
124 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
Previous experiences
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.
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)
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 127
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.
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.
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
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 131
Shaping temporal
commons and
orientation toward
the future
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
132 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
Temporal Shaping of Routine Patterning 133
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
134 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
140 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 141
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.
142 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
146 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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).
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 147
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).
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).
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 149
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.
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.
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.”
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).
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
156 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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).
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.
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 157
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
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).
Capturing the Experience of Living Forward from Within the Flow 161
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
162 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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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168 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
170 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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.
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 173
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.
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
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 175
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.
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
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 177
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.
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.
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 181
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).
182 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 183
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
184 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
Organizational Time in Historical Perspective 185
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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188 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
190 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
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
194 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 195
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,
196 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 197
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.
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 199
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
. . . an associated labor mutual, bringing together, in one and same community,
several thousand members, who guarantee each other, on an equal footing, an
200 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 201
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
202 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 203
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
204 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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,
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 205
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
206 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 207
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
208 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 209
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.
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
210 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 211
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
212 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 213
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
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 215
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
216 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
11. Observation notes.
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.
24. Observation notes.
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).
Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool 217
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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:
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.
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).
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).
Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management 225
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
226 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Table 12.1 Objective structures of the field before and after privatization
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,
228 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
(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.
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
Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management 231
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.
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
232 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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.
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.
Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management 233
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.
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)
234 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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)
Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management 235
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)
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
236 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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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
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
13.3 Method
13.3.1 Context
Company Industry US region Revenue** Net income** Market value** Number of employees^
* 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
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.
246 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
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.
Short-term Long-term
memory work memory work
Retaining Reinterpreting
Building heritage
Discarding
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.
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:
248 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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:
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)
. . . 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.
252 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
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
260 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
262 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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).
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.
Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness 269
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
Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness 271
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
272 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
Rhetorical History, Historical Metanarratives, and Rhetorical Effectiveness 273
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,
280 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
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
282 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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
The Life and Work of Edith Penrose 283
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.
284 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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)
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:
(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.)
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)
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)
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).
290 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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:
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:
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.
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
The Life and Work of Edith Penrose 293
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
294 Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
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.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Life and Work of Edith Penrose 295
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Index