Organization and Time

Observed through a temporal lens, organizational life fluctuates among moments of instantaneity, enduring continuity, and imagination of distant times. This movement stems from the fact that actors are continually faced with multiple intersecting temporalities, obliging them to make choices about what to do in the present, how to understand the past they emerge from, and how to stake out a possible future. Although scholars have widely recognized actors' multitemporal reality, it remains to be more fully theorized into an integrative framework. In this book, Tor Hernes takes up this challenge by combining foundational ideas from philosophy, sociology, and organization theory into an integrative theoretical framework of organizational time. Based on a review of the literature, his definition of time includes four dimensions: experience, events, resource, and practice. He provides examples of how these four dimensions evolve through mutual interplay and how they are underpinned by what he calls narrative trajectory. He then discusses implications for key topics in organizational research, including materiality, leadership and continuity and change. Organization and Time is for scholars and advanced students of organization studies, management studies, technology studies, and sociology.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: A Review and Foundations of a Framework 2: Time-as-Experience 3: Time-as-Practice 4: Time-as-Events 5: Time-as-Resource 6: Themes of Interplay 7: Narrative Trajectory 8: Changing in Time 9: Mattering of Time 10: Leading in Time 11: A Note on Studying Time in Time Afterword

About the Author :
Tor Hernes, Professor of Organization Theory at Copenhagen Business School and Adjunct Professor at USN Business School, University of South-Eastern Norway, is an award-winning researcher who has previously published pioneering works on the topics of organization, process, and time. He directs the Centre for Organization and Time at Copenhagen Business School.

Review :
Tor Hernes presents a highly original treatise of organizational time that sets old oppositions to play, draws attention to aspects of socio-cultural time that tended to be blind-sided in organization theory, and builds a unique conceptual framework from the emerging intersections. The result is a scintillating intellectual journey that keeps the reader in challenged suspense from the beginning of the book to its very end. We live our lives in time but, strangely, when we seek to understand organizational life we abstract from time -- as if the phenomena we study take place in a time-less realm. Tor Hernes is perhaps the most distinguished management scholar to take issue with this approach through his persistent effort to introduce time in organizational analysis. This book is the best epitome of his work - sophisticated, erudite and informative. A must-read book for any scholar who wants to understand the temporal dimension of organizing. Tor Hernes has written a tour de force of time in organizations. He has read widely -- introducing ideas from philosophy and sociology to contemporary organization studies. He covers the classics, reaching as far back as Aristotle, Mead, and Bergson, while also showing incredible breadth in his knowledge of today's scholarship. No student or scholar of time in organization studies should do without this book. This insightful book provides a rich and extensive treatment of time and organizations through relating four mutually constitutive temporal dimensions -- events, experiences, resources, and practices. The result is an integrated and dynamic understanding of time as entailing the active interweaving of past, present, and future. This is a generative approach to time that will offer scholars an invaluable guide to examining temporal dynamics in organizing.