Unthinking images of time in organizations: ‘The shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz’

Abstract

Drawing on a recent ethnographic enquiry, this article reports on a series of encounters with organization at a British shopping centre that can shed light on the ways in which time is understood by organizational scholars. This article argues that research on time has a tendency to reproduce certain images and metaphors which indicate an unquestioned set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time that dictate how it can be understood. These habits of thinking time render organization studies unable to conceptualize or adequately describe the encounters that characterize ethnography as a mode of research inquiry. As such, following in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze, this article advances the idea of a ‘conceptual entanglement’ and suggests thereby that the problem of time is an aesthetic one which is part of a complex and almost ineffable series of sensoria and connections; describable only by saying that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz. This work of unthinking time will be presented as a part of an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of the entanglements of many different concepts and field encounters.

Introduction

This article aims to describe the ‘entanglement’ of several radically divergent intellectual threads that became available over the course of more than a year of fieldwork at a British shopping centre. It traces the connection of this organization to binaries and metaphors, habits, the work of Gilles Deleuze, novels on Einstein’s dreams, the image of a rubato waltz, accounts of the routines of farming communities in Guatemala, ‘pataphors’ and a refrain in order to tell the story of the emergence of an understanding of the unique orientation of a shopping centre to time.

Time has always been a pressing concern for management and organization studies. This is evidenced by the extensive body of work within the discipline that tries to understand time and its relationship to organization by considering issues as diverse and complex as professional identities (Costas and Grey, 2014), ‘the animal’ in organization (Sage et al., 2016), responses to climate change (Slawinski and Bansal, 2012), concerns around ‘work-life balance’ (Kristensen and Pedersen, 2017; Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra, 2013), strategy (Hydle, 2015), ‘temporary organization’ (Bakker et al., 2016) and following the important work of E.P. Thompson (1967) on ‘time discipline’ considerations of a pervasive ‘culture of busyness’ which dictates the experience of time (Snyder, 2013). Many of these analyses of the various forms, functions and effects of organizational time are contextualized by the work of leading scholars like Hassard (1991, 2001, 2002) and Burrell, (1992, 1997) who establish time as not only one of the most basic elements of human organization but which is underpinned by particular images (e.g., ‘linear’ time and ‘clock time’), and divided by extensive debates (e.g., whether time is to be understood qualitatively or quantitatively).

Despite this theoretical foundation and the pervasiveness of time and temporality as an object of concern in the modern corporation, Lee and Liebenau (1999: 1035) suggest that ‘while there is much “time related research”, there is little “research on time”’. They argue that while organizational research is often related to time and the way it shapes contemporary work, few studies call into question the nature of time or, more accurately, the metaphysical assumptions that we make when discussing time. Many other scholars within organization studies also note time’s under-theorization (Bluedorn and Denhardt, 1988; Butler, 1995; Roe et al., 2009). Consequentially, subsequent research has sought to meaningfully theorize time as a complex socio-cultural phenomenon worthy of extensive philosophical investigation (Chia, 2002; Dawson, 2014). However, there is scope for these conversations to be expanded and developed, particularly as regards what this article shall describe as a series of binary images and metaphors that dictate in advance what we might think time to be, how we might experience it and the ways in which we might theorize it. Thus, drawing upon an ethnographic project at a British shopping centre, ¹ what this article will suggest is that what is needed to advance our theorization of time as a phenomenon affecting organizations is the sensibility and embeddedness that comes with what O’Doherty (2017: 10) describes as ‘an ethnographically transformed Organization Studies’.

Building upon the tradition of ethnographic work within organization studies which has sought to get close to the everyday realities of work in the contemporary organization (see, for example, Cunliffe, 2010; Van Maanen, 1988; Watson, 2011, 2012), O’Doherty signals a revival of interest in ethnographic methods within our discipline as well as the furthering of something which might uniquely be described as ‘organizational ethnography’ (Brannan et al., 2012; Garsten and Nyqvist, 2014; Neyland, 2008; Ybema et al., 2009). Such a resurgence sees ethnographers beginning to go beyond the extant traditions of the ethnographic method and draw upon broader moves throughout the social sciences including non-representational theory (Thrift, 2007), Actor-Network Theory (Law, 1999; Law and Hassard, 1999) and the ‘ontological turn’ (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017) in order to experiment with the limits of what ethnography can offer in terms of unique insight into organization.

Here, the writings of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze can prove invaluable to organizational ethnographers. Deleuze’s work offers important avenues for exploration and development through the conjunction of ethnographic projects with the impetus which Deleuze saw as part of the core of philosophy: experimentation with concepts. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 5), ‘philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts’. The concept for them is understood as a tool for thought and a means by which to move beyond the taken-for-granted aspects of our experience. Concepts offer perspective and reshape how one thinks. What this article notes in particular is that for Deleuze and Guattari, concepts are not eternal or universal. Rather, they change and are reshaped through new connections and encounters, making the project of experimenting with concepts in the context of ethnographic work one that affords significant creative and novel possibilities for mapping how different concepts and lines of thought can become entangled.

There are strong resonances here with the increasingly prominent ethnographic practice which Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 14) call ‘conceptualization’ or the method of generating ‘new kinds of, and instruments for, thinking out of one’s ethnographic materials’. In this case, ethnographic work offers both the means by which to unthink what this article shall suggest to be the dominant ideology of time in organizations as well as, via Deleuze’s work, develop a pedagogy for working with concepts. By drawing upon previous scholarship within organization studies that sought to explore Deleuze’s work in various contexts (Brewis and Linstead, 1998; Chia, 1999; Clegg et al., 2005; Kristensen et al., 2014; Linstead and Thanem, 2007; Thanem, 2004), this article will present an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of entanglements of the many different concepts and encounters which become available in the course of fieldwork. In doing so, this article shall also seek to contribute to debates around organizational aesthetics (see Linstead and Höpfl, 2000) by advancing an understanding of time as an aesthetic problem. This article proposes that this conceptualization of time is more apposite to the challenges of understanding it in the general context of the modern organization and particularly in the specific context of encounters in a shopping centre where time is best described as experienced as an ineffable sensory bombardment that this article terms a rubato waltz. This ‘pataphor’, a metaphor pushed to the fullest extent of its signification such that it brushes against the boundaries of either nonsense or an alternative form of sense, represents an entanglement of different empirical encounters, lines of thought and theoretical developments. In Deleuze’s tradition, this article shall unfold the rubato waltz as a concept by demonstrating how the messiness of ethnographic work offers this series of connections that render possible new considerations of time.

The article is divided into three sections. The first will seek to build off of existing organizational literature on the metaphors and binaries that are used in order to apprehend or understand time in organizations by holding these, through the work of Henri Bergson on the ‘spatialization of time’, to be indicative of an unexamined temporal metaphysic that determines in advance how we might perceive time in the course of an ethnography at the shopping centre. The second presents, as a means to begin unthinking this unexamined temporal metaphysic, the development of a set of conceptual resources for understanding time through a rereading of Deleuze’s first or ‘passive’ synthesis in conjunction with the work of other ethnographers, like Julia Mahler, who have sought to develop a Deleuzian theory of time in the ethnographic encounter. In the third, the article uses the imagery of what the physicist turned novelist, Alan Lightman, describes as the ‘texture of time’ in order to fully develop the ‘pataphor’ of the rubato waltz as a means by which to speak to the potential contribution of ethnographically developed conceptual entanglements to our understanding of time in organizations.

The time(s) of the shopping centre

The shopping centre sits at the centre of a number of academic discourses that render it as a highly significant object of concern. These include the work of marketing researchers interested in the effects of ‘retail atmospherics’ on consumption patterns (Chebat and Michon, 2003; Michon et al., 2005), geographers concerned with changing patterns of urban development (Lowe, 2010), architects interested in the rise and fall of its popularity (Jewell, 2001), anthropologists attentive to cultural shopping practices (Miller et al., 1998), and scholars in the domain of organization studies who draw upon it as an inspiration for avante-garde poetry (Linstead, 2006), for methodological experimentation with forms of the derive (Phillips, 2010), as a site of quasi-religious practice as a ‘cathedral of consumption’ (Gabriel, 2005) or study it as a highly contested site of resistance to urban planning initiatives (Thanem, 2012). What remains under-considered, however, is the shopping centre’s relationship to time. What this article suggests is that the ways in which we think about the shopping centre can shed light on the images and presuppositions about the nature of time that are common throughout the academy.

To wit, where time is explored within organization studies it is all too often with recourse to certain binaries or systems of metaphoric representation. Time might be described, for example, as objective/subjective (Cunliffe et al., 2004; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002), linear-quantitative/cyclical-qualitative (Hassard, 2001), chronological/narrative (Pedersen, 2009), Kairotic/Chronological (Czarniawska, 2004) or in terms of metaphors of commodification/construction/compression (Hassard, 2002). It is, however, most common to speak of what has been termed ‘social time’ and ‘natural time’ (Hassard, (1991) or ‘clock time’ and ‘rhythmic time’ (Hassard, 1989; Hassard et al., 2008); the former kept by the systems of clocks and machines and the latter as a part of lived human experiences, including the rhythms of the body and so on. These systems of binary and metaphor are reflective of a taken-for-granted language that we use to describe time; one which also shapes the paradoxical ways in which the shopping centre as an organization is represented.

For example, the shopping centre seems to present itself to shoppers as a space without a sense of measured or ‘clock time’. On the surface it always seems to be clean, polished, conditioned and pristine, unchanging and constant, perpetually bustling and brightly lit. Indeed, a shopping centre might appear to encourage an experience of atemporality, not only through its design and its seeming resistance to either seasonal or diurnal change, but because, much like a casino, of the typical absence of visible clocks. All of this contributes to what has been termed the ‘Gruen effect’ or the ‘dreamlike state in which consumers lose track of time and place’ (Csaba and Askegaard, 1999: 34) which has come to be associated with the hedonistic flights and the general sense of disorientation and intoxication that can accompany the spaces of the shopping centre.

Though it has not been subject to as much attention as other ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992; Costas, 2013; Merriman, 2004; Sharma, 2009), the status of the shopping centre as such, as well as its frequent concurrence with work on ‘the postmodern’ or the condition of late capitalism (Baudrillard, 1998; Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991) and the frenetic pace of everyday life (Menzies, 2005), would seem to speak to not only this seeming timeless and a-historical quality, but to a popular image of it as cultureless, homogeneous, generic, and interchangeable with any other retail space across the developed world. By such a reading, shopping centres are seen as indistinguishable from each other due to the presence of the same multi-national chain stores which retail the same mass-produced products that are available anywhere and thus a shopper’s experience of spatial difference is blurred and their experience of time is disoriented. In the tradition of the Frankfurt School and Marxist scholarship (Langman, 1991), many critical readings decry these horrors of the shopping centre and go on to point out its contrary and paradoxical representation as a public space which is in fact privately owned (Goss, 1993) or refer to its design as that of a kind of ‘junkspace’ (Koolhaas, 2002; Koolhaas et al., 2001). ² Gabriel and Lang (2008) aptly characterize this consumerist reality:

Shops and malls, the cathedrals of consumption, are minutely engineered mega-shows, to stimulate and delight the eye, to whet appetites and to excite emotions. Saturated by images, most of us […] accept them as spectacle pure and simple, pleasing or annoying, evoking, prompting, comforting, upsetting, entertaining or irritating. (p. 329)

Such readings have a basis in a certain romanticism for a past wherein, we were all less disciplined by clocks and capitalism, traceable in part to E.P. Thompson’s (1967) highly influential work on time which argued that it was the clock and consequent forms of work and discipline which catalysed the Industrial Revolution and ushered in a new era of control wherein everyday life became dictated by the mechanical rhythms of measurable time. While Thompson’s analysis is contentious (see Glennie and Thrift, 1996), it remains the case that the clock and not the steam engine or telephone was the key machine in the birth and proliferation of the modern age (Mumford, 1946). In Mumford’s reading, the mechanization of our civilization begins with the measurement of time in order to facilitate the routines and habits of the monastery, spreading eventually to govern all spheres of social life.

Subsequently, scientific progress has allowed the development and refinement of our measurement of time to ever finer, more precise and accurate methods. Understood as being organized by time, the shopping centre reflects this. In one sense, life in the shopping centre is kept in-time by the ubiquity of various forms of mobile computing device, meaning that one is never far removed from a globally synced network of timekeeping which is maintained by a prodigious system of measurement which is standardized around the alternating energy levels of Caesium 133 atoms (see Cunliffe et al., 2004) which sit at the core of the atomic clocks that facilitate our telecommunications networks. It is this ‘clock time’ which informs discussions of work in the shopping centre via deadlines, opening and closing hours, hourly wages, overtime, vacation time, efficiency and so on.

This reflects what Hassard (2001), building upon the work of the cognitive linguists, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) describes as the commodification of time. Indeed, the discourse around time in the shopping centre seems shaped by the image of time as a variable in the equations of profitability, encapsulated in the adage, ‘Time is Money’. In considering time thus as a resource or fungible commodity, we remain constrained to discussions of time as something to be kept, spent, bought, made, taken, got, found, killed, allocated, divided, wasted, deserved, served, travelled through, looked at, lost, measured, used and misused. As Bluedorn and Denhardt (1988) note in discussion of previous Marxist-influenced research on time, this commodification of time sits at the core of the exploitative relationship between labour and capital which many understand the shopping centre to represent. In line with the critical regard of the shopping centre discussed above, its spaces and times can also be seen as complicit in the shaping of our collective discipline or what might be described as the existential state of the human-condition in Western civilization; the ‘being-of-the-clock’ (Scott, 2006), where the assumption that time is scarce leads to a plague of fears around wasting and efficiently using time. In no small part, this is attributable to the obsessive move towards maximizing productivity through task control as well as the general ‘time-consciousness’ that characterized the popular Taylorist/Fordist working practices at the turn of the 20th century that heralded the emergence of consumerism (see Gabriel and Lang, 2008). Paradoxically then, what organization studies would call ‘clock time’ seems to be at once essential to the organization of the shopping centre through commodified time while also being easily effaced by representations of its ‘timelessness’ and homogeneity.

As Hassard (1989) notes, this logic of ‘clock time’ dominates our understanding of temporal organization and as such it is also worth considering the place of what has been termed ‘rhythmic’ or qualitative time in the shopping centre. Cross-disciplinary scholarship on time has long considered the use of bodies solar and lunar, seasonal and supplicatory, to chart and measure time (Ingold, 1993). To return to the work of Mumford (1946), this notion of time, intertwined with lived or ‘organic’ cycles of heartbeat, hunger, weariness, mood and so on, is the one that is eventually replaced by the fixed mechanical discipline of the clock. Similar reckonings of time present it as something based in the cycles that accompany social ritual or entrenched routine (Cohen and Taylor, 1992; Giddens, 1984). Reflecting upon the trend of ethnographic work that is attentive to time as something made in the fieldsite (see for example Watts, 2008) leads one to be attentive to the various rhythms of the space (e.g. the pounding beat of the shuffling of hundreds of feet through the shopping centre or the comingling of the excesses of pop-songs emanating from different stores which oscillate in their combination between a horrid discordance and a kind of musical genius or the patterns in the mechanism of the ornate water-fountain which repeats the same ostentatious display over 90 seconds). These felt rhythms are best understood in the context of the research tradition which seeks to assign a subjective or intersubjective nature to time (Hassard, 1989), describing time as based in the ritual and following Durkheim (1964) speaking of these patterns as a ‘rhythm of social life’.

An understanding of time in this sense reflects the sentiments of a mode of reading the shopping centre as ‘a site of cultural change, of social experimentation, a theatre of everyday life’ (Shields, 1992: 6) or as one where various forms of consumer tribe or other forms of postmodern community might emerge (Cova et al., 2007), reclaiming or appropriating the space to other forms of use. Shields (1992), for example, paints the shopping centre as a site where new forms of time and space, empowering consumers with the freedom to produce new identifications, are created. Though more aware of the shopping centre’s consumerism, Miller (2014) also falls into this tradition, observing the rhythms of the shopping centre around a series of benches that shoppers appropriate and claim (e.g. by lying down on them) in alternative forms of life. This work, it must be stressed, stands in stark contrast to the work on ‘non-places’ where time is no longer an intelligible phenomenon (Augé, 1992) that can shape life in the shopping centre.

Timeless, obsessively measured by clocks, alive with human rhythms, an a-historical non-place: this paradoxical continuum represents the taken-for-granted reality of time in the shopping centre. The image of time as simultaneously absent and a pressing concern for working life, as irrelevant to a space that encourages you to wander and also as a disciplinary mechanism, as effaced by the very nature of the shopping centre and as ever-present in felt rhythms (which are always already numerical understood) is worth considering. What this article suggests, following in the tradition of scholars like Hassard who have offered similar commentary, is that these paradoxical images time are all underscored by the same metaphysic. That is to say, whether we think of ‘clock time’ and ‘rhythmic time’, or the image of the line or the cycle, we are failing to consider what these images tell us, recalling Lee and Liebeneau (1999), about the nature of time.

In order to understand the shopping centre and time therein, it is necessary to reflect upon the nature of this metaphysic which philosopher, Henri Bergson, called the ‘spatialization’ of time. Throughout his body of work but particularly in Time and Free Will, Bergson addresses himself to a theory of lived duration, to time as a reflection of man’s condition as opposed to time as that thing measured scientifically by the travel of the hands of a clock through space, or more generally, through representations of space. Bergson (2005) says,

We involuntarily fix at a point in space each of the moments which we count […] No doubt it is possible, as we shall show later, to conceive the successive moments of time independently of space; but when we add to the present moment those which have preceded it, as is the case when we are adding up units, we are not dealing with these moments themselves, since they have vanished forever, but with the lasting traces which they seem to have left in space on their passage through it. (p. 79)

The core idea upon which this article wishes to focus is that of the conceptualization of time as space, for via Bergson’s critique, we might understand that we have all but lost the ability to consider what might be said to be time-in-itself by neglecting it in favour of thinking time through images of space. Writing of Bergson, Deleuze (2002) suggests,

What he condemns from the start is the whole combination of space and time into a badly analysed composite, where space is considered as ready made, and time, in consequence, as a fourth dimension of space. And this spatialization of time is undoubtedly inseparable from science. (p. 86)

What is essential to understand here is Bergson’s notion of time as a ‘qualitative multiplicity’ or as what Linstead and Thanem (2007) call a ‘multiplicity of organization’; a non-countable, non-measurable, absolute and constant flow that is ‘identical with the continuity of our inner life’ (Bergson, 1999: 44). Understood via Bergson and Deleuze, a discussion of ‘clock time’ or ‘rhythmic time’ will always be inadequate to the experience of time as both are predicated on the understanding of time as a spatial problem. Indeed, all of the aforementioned systems of binary and metaphor which organizational scholars use to describe time are, despite their status as useful heuristic tools, problematically resultant from the ways in which we think time in terms of space or movement through space (c.f. Hodges, 2008). They are all predicated upon images of time as measurable, as quantifiable and as organizable.

It is thus that this article suggests that across disciplines and throughout the academy we are involved in the perpetuation of a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that reflect the spatialization of time. Despite the fact that previous scholarship (see Cunha, 2004) notes that these binary distinctions are often not only synthesizable but also transient, intertangled and dependent upon each other, there remains a noteworthy lack of alternative systems of conceptualizing time. It is here that this article sees its potential contribution for ethnographic work offers the possibility of unthinking time as space and thereby, understanding the shopping centre as an organization on its own terms, rather than those which are already part of our discourse – images of a late-capitalist hell-scape or a postmodern consumer paradise. Indeed, when informed by an attention to concepts, the ethnographic experience of time in the shopping centre offers a glimpse into other ways of thinking time beyond the now all too familiar distinctions between subjective and objective, physical and philosophical, linear and cyclical, embodied and clock time.

What this article suggests is that if we hope to continue to foster the growth of organizational ethnography as a unique method of inquiry, we need to find ways of thinking which are rooted in the unique entanglements of encounters and concepts that become available in the field rather than our own taken-for-granted habits of thinking. Indeed, recent ethnographic work like that of O’Doherty (2017) has taken to holding suspended many ‘ready-to-hand concepts’ in order to attend to those that emerge through ethnographic work, sharing resonances with Weick’s (1996) seminal invocation to ‘drop your tools’. As such, this article is similarly compelled to suspend the preceding images of time as a spatialized phenomenon in order to apprehend the complexity of what might be termed time-in-itself, a time without image or, in the very least, time as it occurs uniquely in the shopping centre. In the next section, this article will seek to develop a conceptual framework to articulate non-spatialized time as part of the ethnographic experience of the shopping centre.

A theory of time in habits

The threefold synthesis of time emerges within Deleuze’s corpus at the nexus of several different concerns including his relationship to and reading of Kant, the critique of ‘the subject’, and the project to develop a metaphysics of difference through a theory of repetition as other than the return of the same. For considerations of scope, this analysis will focus on Deleuze’s first or passive synthesis of time since this can shed some light on how our conceptions of time come to be reliant upon the assumption of time as spatialized or otherwise organisable. As he describes it in Difference and Repetition, the first or passive synthesis has its basis in habit, specifically the habitual contraction of past-presents, the present-present and future-presents into and what Deleuze terms ‘the living present’. As Deleuze (2001) says,

Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. (p. 70)

In order to illustrate this contractile power of the mind, Deleuze turns to examples of repeated series in the work of Hume (the AB, AB, AB pattern) and Bergson (the A, A, A, A of the clock striking the hour of four). In both cases, there is no inherent or causal relation between any of the events of the series, but still there is an anticipation, an expectancy that B should follow A or that there should be a fourth A in the series after the third. This expectancy is evidence for the passive synthesis; the series is contracted into a living present where the past is held and a sense of anticipation for the future is born. There is only this expectancy by virtue of the fact that there is a passive synthesis. In summary, one could suggest that the passive synthesis creates an ever-expanding present which reaches into both past and future by interweaving the repetition of instants such that one dismisses the notion of their independence, their separateness from each other as instants. The lived present thus becomes the core of the experience of time.

In the most basic sense, the passive synthesis can be experienced saliently in some of the habits that emerge in the course of everyday life particularly in the ways in which temporal rhythms are understood. Williams (2011) uses the example of the habit of learning to extract water painlessly from a pump or illustrates expectancy in the sudden fright of walking up a flight of stairs and discovering that there were fewer than one expected (Williams, 2005). Both illustrate the extension of the lived present into past and future and time thereby as an uncountable duration. In the course of this article’s ethnographic work, habits of making fieldnotes presented another example. The writing of fieldnotes has long been understood, both within organization studies (see Neyland, 2008) and without (Emerson et al., 1995; Jackson, 1990), as an essential part of the ethnographic method. As part of this article’s ethnographic work at the shopping centre the author developed the habit of making fieldnotes that described what was taking place in and around them on the hour, every time their watch beeped. ³ Consider the following example:

The watch beeps. It is 10:00am. The sound of 10:00 am is a low rumbling B that pervades, tickling the high ceilings and setting a trembling through the faux-marble floor. It is an aggregation of the murmuring of pre-caffeinated conversations, the high-pitched wails of security gates opening, the clatter of the unsteady wheels of cleaning carts and other early morning sounds of the shopping centre through which the cry of the watch pierces into pre-eminence. The subtle vibrations of sound pass up the arm, shivering under the skylights.

This habitual noting produces little snapshots of the shopping centre that provide a general sense of what was taking place at that particular hour by chronicling general sights, smells, sounds and other sensations. Others are, however, more specific:

The watch beeps. It is 1:00pm. 1:00pm is the fast and frenetic buzzing portending the slight blur around the edges of vision that follows a double espresso. It is time to change the bins. Her movements are deft and dexterous as she moves along the deck. Pull, unclip, tie, lift, open, spread, secure, push to close. Over and over. Her eyes, however, do not show the disinterested glaze of one locked into a monotonous and mindless task, but attention to detail and care. Each move seems calculated and precise, as though she was focussing her entire will upon conserving energy, or else was locked in a dance with an unseen partner and was not going to be the first one to lose the rhythm and break time.

Both examples, in and of themselves, demonstrate the habit of notetaking as recurring while also demonstrating the various habits of the shopping centre; the daily rituals and routines like changing bins, opening stores, setting up for the day’s sales and so on. Taken in a surface analysis, these repeated patterns, observed over the course of ethnographic work, become the basis for an understanding of time – one that at once straddles the binary systems of its representation without being entirely subsumed to their spatialization by presenting time as at once habitual but also as uncountable duration. To elaborate, there are two considerations that separate Deleuze’s work on the first synthesis from the understandings of time in the systems of metaphor and binary described in the preceding section.

The first is that it is desubjectivated. Put simply, time is not produced by what Western philosophy terms ‘the subject’, nor is the subject merely ‘in’ it, nor is it merely a part of a shared system of rituals, nor is it an abstracted system which, through its abstraction, constitutes and creates disciplined subjectivities which conform to it. Rather, as Deleuze suggests ‘habit is the constitutive root of the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time’ (Deleuze, 1991: 96–97). In a general sense, as a process in the mind contracts the past into the present and expects the future, there is produced a need for a thing which exists through all three temporal periods by virtue of which there are the periods, that is, a subject which comes to exist as a by-product of time. However, as Deleuze discusses in Empiricism and Subjectivity, this process takes place ‘in’ and not ‘by’ the mind. This opens the possibility that the synthesis might be possible in the non – or other-than human and, more importantly, develops the idea of what Deleuze terms ‘larval subjectivity’ as a by-product of the synthesis of time. For Deleuze, it is not the case that there is a constant or fixed subject who exists unchanged through time nor is there one who produces time in the interrelation to other subjects in the world (e.g.: through ritual). Rather, what space is accepted to correspond to the subject is itself a habit, a habit of saying ‘I’ which always refers to a temporary point or larval subject. As Deleuze says, ‘to speak of the subject now is to speak of duration, custom, habit and anticipation’ (Deleuze, 1991: 92) which is in itself a radical redefinition that eschews consciousness, identity, truth, humanity or any of the other characteristics attributed to the concept of subjectivity over its long history. By Deleuze’s logic, ossified habitual practices define all of our subjectivities. That is to say, the subject becomes readable as a body onto which various forms of habit or organization have agglomerated, rather than a Cartesian cogito or a site of identity politics. There are strong resonances here with the work of organizational scholars interested in post-structural philosophy and the question of ‘the subject’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001; Parker, 1999). Unlike the more familiar Foucault, however, Deleuze writes with a less overt and well-defined concern for the effects of power and a more stringent commitment to a metaphysics of difference rather than identity. This is important because, considering the binaries discussed in the previous section, within organization studies time is either defined by the reification of the subject as the creator of time (either by the mind, body or in the intersubjective ritual) or by the seeming negation of the subject as impotently within time (i.e. time as objective and measured scientifically). Deleuze confronts us with something other, a mode of time that, adequate to the demands of a post-subjective academy (see Cadava et al., 1991), can function without a thinking I.

The second is that there is more to the first synthesis than simply a concern for habit. Here, the connection to Bergson is important to develop and this can be meaningfully done through a consideration of what Julia Mahler (2008), in the context of her ethnographic work among farming communities in Guatemala, calls ‘passive time’. Mahler recounts a story of sitting in a kitchen with her interlocutors, listening to the radio and watching as they tended the fire; attentive to the rhythms of cooking, cutting the wood, stoking the fire and so on. She explains the experience as one wherein ‘time seems to stand still’ (Mahler, 2008: 75), an event or moment that, experientially, engulfs the whole of time; where, to return to Deleuze, the first synthesis seems abducted and the habitual patterns of counting time seem broken apart. The stillness of allowing time to, in one sense, ‘pass by’, passively, in all of its weight and import, is notably juxtaposed against the powerful existential urges to keep ‘moving forward’ or the lived discomfort and disease of squandering commodified time that are so germane to contemporary life in Western civilization. In one sense what Mahler suggests is that the experience of passive time unfolds a particular dynamic in the living present wherein one can become lost in a moment and, understanding time as an undividable and ostensibly unknowable duration (recalling thus Bergson’s durée), live a single moment before a fire or around the beep of a watch as an ineffably dense and complex experience that seems to last for eternity, echoing into both past and future.

Towards a theory of time in the shopping centre

What Deleuze’s rendering of time in habits, and Mahler’s elaboration of this via her conceptualization and account of the experience of ‘passive time’, offers is the beginnings of a conceptual entanglement, a set of seemingly sporadic connections that produce a language capable of rendering the ethnographic experience of the shopping centre in terms other than those of the binary representations presented it the preceding sections. There is something to Mahler’s accounts which suggests an unfathomable weight and gravity to time, and her descriptions make it seem to be at once a corporeal force and a spectral presence, to have an incommunicable set of qualities which shape and mould the experience of the Guatemalan village. In the same vein, there is something unique to the shopping centre’s time that reflects something more than the descriptions of the images of time in organization can contain, something which we perhaps do not have linguistic resources to describe or otherwise chronicle. Consider, for example, another encounter, described in the same style of fieldnotes as above:

The watch beeps. It is 5:00pm. 5:00pm is hot and sticky, clinging to the clothing and giving a gloss and sheen to the skin. Words and memories move sluggishly, as if just waking up from a fire-soaked dream; making conversations about changes in the shopping centre’s management structure seem viscous. There persists a kind of lazy-afternoon malaise that slips inside, in-between and through the everyday activities of the space […] Suddenly, the floor of the ‘great feeding pit’ opens up. What seems to be an enormous chasm is carved out within the context of the sondering routines of Tuesday afternoon by a sundering practice, casting tables and chairs aside; disrupting normal patterns of organizing, feeding and shopping. There it moves, with a 3/4 rhythm with a strong accent on the first beat; the waltz. A twofold rotation. Revolutionary motions! The left foot crests outward and the right follows, gliding backwards in an unencumbered arc, with the left following swiftly behind it again. It is visible only for a moment before it changes to a shuffling quickstep and so disappears from view.

While this article might, in order to describe this ethnographic encounter with a group that meets weekly for a dancing session in the shopping centre’s food court, follow the work of previous organizational scholars on the way the waltz, as music, could shape our understanding of the ethnographic as Humphreys et al., (2003) do with jazz or pursue the corporeality and politics of dance (Kavanagh et al., 2008) or contribute to broader trends within ethnographic research to consider the waltz as cultural knowledge (Sklar, 1991), its representation (Martin, 1992) or the rhythms of work as dance (Chandler, 2011), this would not be adequate to the complexity to the ethnographic experience of the shopping centre and the ways in which it paradoxically obfuscates and obsesses over time. ⁴ However, the waltz emerged in over the course of ethnographic work as a concept co-implicated with and entangled in a whole host of other questions which are not easy to parse or otherwise separate, including the question of Deleuze’s reading of time, questions of the role of the subject in ethnography, various experiments in fieldnote-taking and so on. As such, what this article wishes to unpack is the ways in which the waltz, as a concept, can help us to understand time in the shopping centre in conjunction with the resources offered by Deleuze’s writings on the passive synthesis.

Via the conceptual language developed in the preceding section, one might describe an experience of becoming lost in the moment of watching the dancers drift across the floor; bearing the full weight and intensity of passive time. Further, reading via Deleuze’s passive synthesis of time, each moment of the waltz might seem, in its succession, inseparable from those which preceded and follow it. Each beat presupposes the last and expects another, as a contraction takes place between these moments and creates time with the subject as a by-product. That is to say, to recall Bergson’s point about the inseparability of instants, each moment of the waltz, interpenetrates each other, intersects each and every other in an unimpeded flow. The process of this contraction into the lived present (again, the core of Deleuze’s passive synthesis) is one in which repeated or successive instants are habitually drawn together. The 1,2,3 of the waltz is the product of a process taking place within the mind as it attempts to make sense of time in the shopping centre; a new unit of measure that crests in to replace the learned habit of dividing and commodifying time. The rhythm of the waltz slips inside, in-between and through this taken-for-granted habit. It emerges gradually as a coalescence of differing effects, a steady aggregation of the widely varying types of time in the shopping centre that comingle to produce something new. One simply feels the waltz from the moment one enters the shopping centre, an expression of the ways in which it organizes.

There are significant resonances here with the work of Henri Lefebvre (2004) on ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Beyes and Steyaert, 2011) as well as the work of Gernot Böhme (2017) on the aesthetics of ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Borch, 2010) which are regrettably beyond the scope of this article to develop. What this article wishes to focus on instead is what Deleuze and Guattari (2005) describe in A Thousand Plateaus as ‘the refrain’ in order to underscore a key point about the waltz. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the refrain in the context of rhythm and melody which can become affective to the degree that it can be said to construct a particular territory; to characterize a space, a time, a mood, a colour, or an aesthetic (Beyes and De Cock, 2017). Deleuze and Guattari discuss the refrain of the scared child who sings to remind herself of the safety and comforts of home. The song acts to connect the territory which she inhabits to past and future, to the memory and the expectation of a home. They say, ‘we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 323).

Within Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the first mentions of the refrain occur in A Thousand Plateaus where the term is notably translated from the word ritournelle, a three-step much like the waltz. This seeming dance is explained as ‘the refrain is rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have become expressive’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005: 317). Sørensen (2005) connects this to the novel The Tin Drum, where the refrain can at once demarcate a territory, that of a fascist state, and mark out a line of escape from within it; describing a scene from the text wherein the protagonist transforms a song to herald a visiting dignitary into a waltz by beating his drum to cut through the military march with a line of subversion, something other and uncontrollable. It is by a similar logic that the shopping centre constructs its waltz, not as a military cadence, rigidly kept, but in rubato, varying in intensity, feel and sensation that seems to intermingle and interpenetrate what we might call ‘clock’ or ‘rhythmic’ time and creating a temporality unique to its territory which can only be apprehended ethnographically. This is not a rhythm that is imposed, a discipline to which one is expected to conform, rather it is one that seems to appear almost by surprise.

The synesthetic consideration of time as a rubato waltz opens the door for us to turn our attention from the traditional concerns of work routines and entrenched habit (either clock or rhythmic) in order to see time as red, blue or sometimes as the black-blue-grey of the roads that lead to the shopping centre; feel it as a texture, perhaps jagged or sanded; taste it as everything from sweet to savoury; hear it as music whether harmonious or discordant or in the key of B-flat which functions as the ambient tone for the shopping centre; smell it in different possibilities from ripe and pungent to as fresh and clean as the bathrooms after their 9:00 am cleaning; feel it when it begins to tremble or heat up with the frenzied air of the crowd gathered to see the Christmas lights being turned on. Over the course of the author’s ethnographic work, these surreal descriptors were often the only means through which they could render the complexity of the fundamentally ineffable experience of time through language.

What if we were to accept that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz? In order to understand this proposition, which seems in itself a ‘theory’ born more out of ‘pataphysics and play rather than the empirical ‘reality’ of the shopping centre, this article proposes the following as an example. In the novel Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman presents a number of thought experiments for conceptualizing the nature of time in the form of a dream journal which Einstein may have kept during the writing of his theory of special relativity. Among these experiments is the discussion of the ‘texture of time’ (Lightman, 1993: 47). What Lightman paints is a picture of time as feeling differently within different spaces; sticky in some with individuals trapped in particular points in time, lost in a nostalgic moment that sees them stop moving forward. Expanding upon this thesis, one might come to think of time as smooth in places, flowing quickly by; at times rough and coarse and at others gently undulating; sometimes seeming to freeze coldly and hold in stasis and at others to slip by as though wet and warm. These are not metaphoric descriptions but rather are those that require an entirely different affective dimension to be perceived, understood, and intuited, challenging thus our taken-for-granted understanding of time and replacing them with something new: an aesthetics of time.

In this sense, when compared to the metaphors, binaries and other spatialized images of time common to the study of organizations, the ‘rubato waltz’ may also be thought of as, to build upon the works of writers like Alfred Jarry and Pablo Lopez (Hugill, 2012), a ‘pataphor’. Here, this article follows in the tradition of O’Doherty (2007) who suggests that organization studies might pursue the ‘pataphysical in order to recover a unique mode of theorization. The ‘pataphor’, being a figure of speech whose relation to metaphor is analogous to that of a metaphor to reality, is a figure of speech of possibility, one that affords precisely the experimentation with concepts and, by extension, philosophy that Deleuze advocates. Here, the ‘original meaning’ of the ‘rubato waltz’ is lost, even to the fieldnote which would have recorded it during the course of an ethnography and what we are left with is a mode of a describing time that is the product of the weaving together of a number of different concepts and encounters. It is thus at once reflective of clock discipline but also alludes to something more which is lived. It seems at once machinic and abstract as well as human and organic. It simultaneously indicates time as important in terms of the commodified ‘reality’ of life in the shopping centre and also acknowledges something ineffable, something textured, an aesthetic to time, something that seems borne out of Deleuze’s passive synthesis but also seems radically divergent from it. Thinking of time as a rubato waltz is here indicative of the ways in which a conceptual entanglement presents itself: a number of different inseparable and at times paradoxical images that connect across different forms of sense, field-sites, genres of writing, and empirical realities, all of which speak in some way to time in the shopping centre.

Writing from this position of entanglement galvanizes an altogether unique understanding of the shopping centre as an organization in a way which does not subsume the experience of it to existing theoretical paradigms. It is not sticky or viscous, rendering one trapped in time that seems slow to move, eager to progress. Nor is it overly liquid, runny or frenetic. It impels but affords re-turns and revolutions. It is sometimes slippery, allowing for slippages into what some might call the pure past, that time during which, for Deleuze (2001), the passive synthesis takes place, but moreover it is high and bright, loud and buzzing, ostentatious and charming, sweeping in grand circles. All of this becomes indescribable in the context of a preoccupation with spatialized time. We can only simply say ‘a rubato waltz’.

Conclusion

As this article has tried to demonstrate, though the shopping centre sits at the centre of a number of social, cultural and political discourses we do not yet have the means to describe one of the most fundamental aspects of the experience of it: time. In this regard, what this article has sought to describe as the spatialized representations of time can be seen to constitute what Deleuze calls an image of thought or an entrenched and taken-for-granted orthodoxy which dictates the conditions under which it is possible to think time, not only blocking or disbarring creativity and the possibilities of the new but also limiting our ability to speak about the ways in which the shopping centre organizes us in time and our thoughts on time.

Within organization studies, the study of time affords the scope for much continued experimentation and this article has sought to contribute to this line of inquiry by unpacking what, for our ethnographic work, presented itself as an enmeshed and perplexing set of concepts and ideas around the phenomenon of time. In this regard, this article argues that it takes an ethnographic sensibility to be able to apprehend an entanglement of concepts such as this; that one needs to be immersed in the mores and practices of a space in order to not only appreciate the polyphony of its temporality but the ways in which the organization of a concept like time might be tracked across various disciplines and through various literatures. As such, far from being divorced from the ‘realities’ of time in the modern corporation the discussion of binaries and metaphors, Deleuze’s passive synthesis, explorations of duration in Guatemala, Einstein’s Dreams, and time in the shopping centre experienced as a rubato waltz, constitutes an ephemeral and elusive connective line of thought indicative of organization as a phenomenon. That is to say, in the entanglement of concepts and moments which this article has tried to trace, we find an understanding of the shopping centre that resonates with that of O’Doherty et al. (2013) describes as white spaces on ‘the boundary of the knowable’, as an organization not bound to its walls or spaces but sensible only in sporadic and diverse connection; in conceptual entanglements. For this, O’Doherty’s (2017) vision of an ‘ethnographically transformed organization studies’ is one that involves an increased sensitivity to concepts and the ways in which different intellectual threads become entangled in the field to produce new forms of understanding.

What this article would like to stress in conclusion is that discussions of the pataphor of the rubato waltz are, in the first place, adequate to the demands of the shopping centre and in the second, a meaningful direction for the theorization of organization.

As regards the former, even in the surface analysis, the shopping centre presents a series of affective challenges which, reflective of the contemporary milieu, confront the consumer with an unprecedented challenge in the form of an unparalleled juxtaposition of signs, imagery and sensations that cannot be disentangled or otherwise rendered as ordered. As such, this article developed a description of time which, commensurate to the ethnographic experience of the shopping centre, was not dependent upon the taken-for-granted systems of binary and metaphor that have come to dictate our ability to think about time but rather sought to push these beyond their limits to think about time aesthetically. It was, however, not this article’s intention to merely replace such pre-existing binaries with another system. As such, this article suggests that whether we think time as subjective, objective, lived, clock-based, rhythmic, linear, quantitative, cyclical, qualitative, as part of space, as a commodity or even as the flow of life itself, it is worth holding these images in question (even if thinking ‘time-in-itself’ may be an impossibility), if only to ask what other kinds of time we can organize our thoughts to think.

With respect to the latter, it has currently been more than a decade since some organizational scholars suggested a ‘Deleuzian future’ (Thanem, 2005) for the discipline, and though organization studies has done much to realize this, we have arguably failed to realize either a uniquely Deleuzian mode of thinking organization or a uniquely organizational mode of thinking the problems which Deleuze’s philosophy poses. This article offers one such interstice, in the form of ‘conceptual entanglement’ compounded by an understanding of the first synthesis of time which experiments with the stillness of passive time and risks the turn to ‘pataphysical description in order to propose a new image of time in the organization of the shopping centre. Doing this though the entangled experiences of ethnography offers organization studies a direction for conceptual development: thinking time as a rubato waltz.