Abstract
Time is en vogue. Hardly a month goes by without seeing a new paper that deals with time, in at least some of its various dimensions and manifestations, published in one of the leading journals of our field. Thanks to this ongoing and mainly empirically driven wave of time-related research, we have gained novel and original insights into phenomena that are high up on the organizational research agenda, including business sustainability (Nyberg, Wright, & Kirk, 2020), institutional complexity (Ramus, Vaccaro, & Berrone, 2021) and many more.
However, the accumulation of (time-related) empirical insights, though valuable in its own right, often comes at the expense of conceptual clarity and coherence. As more and more novel, empirically derived temporal concepts are incorporated into the debate, the latter risks becoming blurry and burdensome to navigate. Moreover, critical voices could rightfully question the merit of reformulating established concepts and insights of organization studies in temporal terms. Could it be that our scholarly obsession with theoretical contributions may privilege the constant proliferation of new temporal concepts with little attention to how these concepts fit with each other, how they might challenge or reinforce problematic and taken-for-granted assumptions, and ultimately how they enhance our understanding of organization and organizing?
Tor Hernes’ new book Organization and Time delivers a much-needed, timely and highly valuable intervention into this debate. For those who do not shy away from its conceptual (and temporal) depth, it offers a remarkable tour de force of organizational scholarship that will hopefully mark a turning point in current thinking about time in organization studies. In his typical style, Hernes masterfully weaves together insights from various strands of philosophy, sociology, critical theory, economics and organization theory. Doing so allows him to not only illuminate the depths of time but also challenge organizational scholars to think about time in more complex and conceptually cogent ways.
Hernes’ motivation, as laid out in the Introduction, is fourfold. First, he problematizes the dominant tendency in our field to approach time by reducing it to neat conceptual dichotomies, such as clock-time versus event-time or subjective versus objective time. Such dichotomies are problematic, Hernes argues, because they work like magnets that ‘attract emerging phenomena from either side of the magnetic field’ (p. 5) and ultimately mask the complex interdependencies between seeming opposites. In the tangled and messy world of organizing, ‘it can be hard to decide where the objective representation of time ends, and the subjective experience of time begins’ (p. 6). Second, Hernes questions established views of time as either volatile or enduring and argues in favour of seeing both as mutually constitutive, a theme familiar to readers of his previous book (Hernes, 2014). Third, he rightfully criticizes current time-based theorizing for falling victim to the ‘stationarity problem’: instead of adopting a truly temporalized perspective on time, whereby temporal relations are continuously re-negotiated and re-evaluated as actors move through time, prior work has focused on temporal dynamics as something that unfolds at a specific moment in time only. Fourth and finally, Hernes problematizes established views of time as a measure of organizational activity and instead argues in favour of seeing activity as constitutive time.
Hernes’ response to these concerns is no less compelling than his problematization of prior research. The book’s main contribution is undoubtedly the conceptual framework Hernes derives from his review of past temporal research in organization studies and beyond. A core strength of the framework is its integrative approach. In the course of five chapters, Hernes synthesizes numerous strands of temporal research into four categories that constitute the main building blocks of his framework: time-as-experience, time-as-practice, time-as-events and time-as-resource. In joining together temporal knowledge from diverse scholarly disciplines, Hernes carefully crafts each of the four categories in a conceptually coherent and highly original way. This enables him to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions in his exposition of all four categories. Time-as-experience, he argues, should not be seen as a purely individual (or subjective) category but always also entails an element of collective, shared experience. Similarly, he extends discussions of time-as-practice in terms of how social practices occupy time (what he refers to as the ‘stretch-outness’ of practices) by considerations of how practices reach beyond their own time to evoke distant past and future events (what he calls the reach-outness of time). His elaboration of time-as-events nicely connects to insights from his prior work (Hernes, 2014). It emphasizes how events only become events when they are evoked as such by social actors in their practices. And in contrast to most prior research, in Hernes’ thinking, clock time constitutes the most abstract layer of time and hence the least ‘natural’ one. This insight is derived from his discussion of ‘time-as-resource’, which he theorizes as the ‘abstraction of time from actors’ worlds of practice or experiences’ (p. 99); an abstraction that enables time to be translated through measurement by clocks into economic value, for instance.
What is particularly compelling about Hernes’ framework are not simply the categories in and of themselves but how they are brought into interplay with each other. In Hernes’ thinking, experience feeds into practice, practices become ‘eventualized’ and evoked as events, and all three can become abstracted into temporal resources that actors may instrumentalize to various ends. Hernes dedicates an entire chapter of his book to discussing multiple themes of interplay among the four categories, arguing for a ‘processual interplay in which the interaction shapes the interacting entities’ (p. 111). This chapter, though illuminating, is also necessarily selective, as the author admits that he prefers to ‘leave it to others to explore the multiple forms of interplay’ (Hernes, 2014) and instead focuses his discussion on carefully selected examples.
Above and beyond the framework, three additional conceptual contributions are worth highlighting. First, a topic that runs through the entire book is temporal complexity. Though Hernes never explicitly defines the term, his entire book is written with a sharp eye for the complexities that emerge when multiple temporalities intersect, interact, interconnect, or collide. Hernes highlights that even the most mundane situations in organizing – such as a weekly meeting – are temporally complex to the extent that meeting participants continuously interconnect multiple pasts, presents and futures in new and unexpected ways. In my reading, temporal complexity – its recognition, assessment and navigation – is one of the core issues that future research on time in management and organization studies needs to focus on. Temporal complexity, not least in relation to climate change and sustainability, confronts organizations with entirely different challenges compared to other forms of complexity.
A second concept that runs as a red thread through the entire book is temporal translation. Here, Hernes builds on insights from the sociology of translation. His application of the term to time-based theorizing is compelling, not least because it offers a promising alternative to entrainment as the currently dominant lens on how multiple temporalities interact. Entrainment envisions the interplay of multiple temporalities as a synchronization process, whereby one temporality comes to dominate another or is simply ‘copied’ from the environment into an organization. By contrast, temporal translation emphasizes the constant circulation, displacement and adaptation of temporalities (or temporal templates, as Hernes calls them) as they are enacted in various local contexts. From a translation perspective, no temporal structure or template can be copied from one organization to another. Instead, the very enactment of time implies an ongoing adaptation and transformation in light of the contingencies of the present. As with temporal complexity, temporal translation is one of the terms that may hopefully become a cornerstone for future research on organization and time.
Third and finally, Hernes dedicates an entire and highly inspiring chapter to the interplay of time and materiality. In this chapter, he challenges organizational scholars to adopt a ‘view of materiality as embodying, as expressive of, time’ (p. 165). For example, material objects inherited from the past might inspire new courses of action, such as a strategic turnaround or an innovative product directed at the future. Moreover, materiality, Hernes argues, can serve as a translator of time. That is, material objects can displace and transform time and, thus, interconnect disparate temporal practices and worlds. For example, innovative food packaging might serve as a temporal translator between the temporalities of food production, the material temporalities of food itself (e.g. its natural process of decay) and the temporalities of food consumption. Hernes’ treatment of time and materiality is necessarily selective. Still, it should serve as a valuable source of inspiration for future organizational research and offers exciting opportunities for connecting research on time with research on new and emerging technologies.
What makes Hernes’ book distinct from prior attempts at systematizing research on organization and time (e.g. Bluedorn, 2002) is the depth and scope of his approach. Hernes’ framework, for example, is not simply a synthesis of prior research. In fact, it can also be read as a temporal theory of the constitution of the social, understood as an ongoing process of translation between temporal experiences, practices, events and temporal resources. However, it is not necessarily a temporalized theory of organization. Hernes delivers the building blocks and the inspiration for thinking about time and organization, but he does not try to develop a new theory of organization and organizing that has time built in from the get-go. Indeed, to an extent, he already covers some aspects of time in his brilliant A Process Theory of Organization (Hernes, 2014). But time, as he clearly shows in his new book, is more than process. Or put differently, there is more to time than process.
As with any academic endeavour, Hernes’ journey through the depths of time also includes several puzzling omissions. For example, though he is aware of recent contributions to the sociology of time, such as Rosa’s (2013) theory of acceleration and resonance, Hernes has decided not to weave them into his argument as strongly as he draws on process philosophy, for instance. Similarly, Luhmann’s (2018) extensive work on time, more specifically his event-based understanding of organizations as temporalized systems that constitute themselves by continuously (re-)producing and interrelating events, is puzzlingly almost absent from the book despite its apparent affinity with some of Hernes’ arguments. The same applies to time-based theorizing from post-colonial and queer studies.
Such omissions by no means render Organization and Time less valuable or original. Instead, they highlight that there is still much more to be done in the field of time-based organizational research. If scholars take Hernes’ arguments seriously, then questions of time and temporality are likely to move from the periphery to the core of organization and management studies. For one thing, the debate on organization and time now has an up-to-date foundational work to build upon. Yet, it remains to be seen how the trajectory of the debate will unfold in the future: Will the temporal research wave eventually fade away, or will it transform our theories and methods in such ways that time can no longer be ignored? Given the temporal complexities inherent in organizing in the face of challenges, such as the climate crisis, Hernes would probably argue: time is here to stay, and that’s a good thing.
