SWG 11 – Time and Organization Studies: Navigating Change, Emergence & Complexity


Coordinators

Blagoy Blagoev, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
François-Xavier de Vaujany, Université Paris-Dauphine (DRM), France
Miriam Feuls, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Nina Granqvist, Aalto University, Finland
Christina Lüthy, Lund University, Sweden
Lorenzo Skade, European University Viadrina, Germany 
Innan Sasaki, Warwick Business School, United Kingdom
Abbie Shipp, Texas Christian University, United States
 

SWG 11 "Time and Organization Studies: Navigating Change, Emergence & Complexity" aims to provide a platform for a community of scholars to explore how theorizing time and temporality in organizing allows for novel insights into some of the most pressing problems that organizations and societies face today and could face tomorrow.

Time and temporality are not only central meta-dimensions of organizing but critical for understanding and theorizing organizational processes in a present that is fraught with disruptive change, grand challenges, and the emergence of complex and often contradictory temporal patterns and demands (Ancona et al., 2001; Bansal et al., 2022; Kunisch et al., 2021). Organizations have to accommodate and account for both increasingly short and long time horizons, as they deal with the immediacy of information flows in the digital age while working towards goals and accounting for sustainability effects in distant futures (Augustine et al., 2019; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015). They are challenged to adapt and innovate in times that are disrupted by crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) and radical (technological) change (e.g., generative AI) without losing their sense of continuity. Urgency around societal problems calls for accelerated organizational action and collaboration. At the same time, sustainable solutions also seem to emerge from slower organizational temporalities, and engagements with natural rhythms (Hernes et al., 2020).

Unsurprisingly, research and theoretical conversations on time and temporality are thriving in organization studies, not least because of the scholarly conversations on time that have been fostered at previous EGOS colloquia. The SWG on “Organization and Time” that ran from 2018 until 2021 has been very successful, attracting a high number of submissions for all of its sub-themes. The general theme of the 40th EGOS Colloquium “Crossroads for Organizations: Time, Space, and People” which invites scholars to explore contemporary organizations through a temporal lens, emphasizes how the EGOS community has seized the idea and set out to continue these important conversations. For example, three sub-themes explicitly focused on time and temporality as a research lens. To ensure that research using time as a research lens is not only proliferating but also deepening and expanding our understanding of organizational phenomena, the temporal research community requires a continued “home” at EGOS that provides a platform for a shared conversation and learning across different scholarly fields.

SWG 11 addresses the current lack of an overarching platform for time and temporality research at EGOS and the need to both consolidate theoretical knowledge of the role of time and temporality across different academic fields and expand our understanding of time and organization. It aims to contribute to the EGOS community in the following ways:

  1. By giving scholars the possibility to develop and understand organizing at the intersection between business and society through various temporal lenses via a coherent conversation over multiple EGOS Colloquia.
  2. By systematizing and connecting current theories on time and temporality in organizing across different empirical settings and scholarly fields through continuous collaboration and exchange.
  3. By encouraging scholars to pursue novel and exciting studies of the role of time around promising research areas such as time and materiality, time and speed, time and narratives, time and technology, time and institutions, time and capitalism, or time and power.
  4. By offering young scholars the opportunity to cultivate temporal reflexivity and to extend their methodological and theoretical expertise in using time for organizational analysis through PDWs.

  5. By fostering knowledge and collaborations on time and temporality through various network activities and by providing publication outlets and support for publishing research by junior scholars.

The SWG will address three different yet interconnected and partially overlapping foci. The three areas of focus have been designed to provide both analytical and empirical richness to create an inspiring SWG. These foci not only enable theoretical depth, but also help structure the colloquia in a way that maximizes the benefits for participants.

  • Focus 1 – Time as resource, structure and process
  • Focus 2 – Temporal complexity, disruptive change, and emergence
  • Focus 3 – New conceptual frontiers in time and temporality research

References

  • Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019): „Constructing a Distant Future: Imaginaries in Geoengineering.” Academy of Management Journal, 62 (6), 1930-1960.
  • Ancona, D.G., Goodman, P.S., Lawrence, B.S., & Tushman, M.L. (2001): “Time: A New Research Lens.” Academy of Management Review, 26 (4), 645-663
  • Bansal, P., Reinecke, J., Suddaby, R., & Langley, A. (2022): “Temporal Work: The Strategic Organization of Time.” Strategic Organization, 20 (1), 6-19.
  • Hernes, T., Feddersen, J., & Schultz, M. (2020): “Material Temporality: How materiality ‘does’ time in food organizing.” Organization Studies, 42 (2), 351-371.
  • Kunisch, S., Blagoev, B., & Bartunek, J. M. (2021): “Complex times, complex time: the pandemic, time-based theorizing and temporal research in management and organization studies.” Journal of Management Studies, 58 (5), 1411–1415.
  • Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015): “Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability.” Organization Science, 26 (2), 531–549.

About the Coordinators

Blagoy Blagoev is a Professor of Organization Studies at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His research draws on a temporal lens to examine the interplay of people, organizations, and society in the context of current technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. His main research interests include (1) organizing and managing for sustainability, (2) emerging technologies and organizing, (3) new and decentralized forms of working and organizing, and (4) organizational change, innovation, and persistence. He draws on qualitative and historical research methods to examine a wide range of organizations such as multinational corporations, knowledge-intensive firms, museums, and coworking spaces. His work has appeared in journals, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Organization, and Scandinavian Journal of Management.

Francois-Xavier de Vaujany is Professor of Organization Studies at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, France, researcher at DRM, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Methods (CeFOM). His research deals with (1) new ways of organizing work & alternative modes of management and (2) the American genealogy of our management and digital capitalism . He draws in particular on process philosophy and post-phenomenologies to explore the apocalyptic process and temporalities of our digital capitalism, and the managerial processes underlying it. His last books are The rise of digital management (Routledge), Organization as time (Cambridge University Press) and The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies (OUP).

Miriam Feuls is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Organization and Co-Director of the Centre for Organization and Time at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Miriam’s research draws on insights from organization studies, process studies, and cultural and social studies to advance understanding of processes and practices of (organizational) change, innovation, and transformation. Her work is driven by a deep curiosity towards the interplay 8 of multiple temporalities, especially in multi-actor collaborations, focusing on advancing both the theoretical and methodological approaches to this study area.

Nina Granqvist is a Professor of Management at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. Her research focuses on temporality, language, and categorization in organizations and markets, examining the emergence of novelty and transitions of ideas and technologies from margins to mainstream. She is a senior editor in Organization Studies and an active contributor to EGOS, previously leading the Institutions, Innovation and Impact SWG as well as convening sub-themes and organizing PDWs.

Christina Lüthy is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Browaldh fellow at the Department of Business Administration at Lund University School of Economics and Management, Sweden, where she explores cultures of speed in management and organization. Trained in organization and cultural theory, her research is interested in the affective, material and temporal dimensions of creative organizing, entrepreneurship and social change. She draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods and uses different process theoretical perspectives such as affect theory, practice approaches or processual theories of materiality to explore organizing and time. Her work has appeared in international book volumes and journals such as Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

Lorenzo Skade is a Senior Research Associate at the Chair of Management and Organization at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. His research interests include time and temporality, strategy-as-practice, and societal challenges. Empirically, he studies startup accelerators and other innovation contexts. He is particularly interested in a process and practice-based perspective of these topics and approaches these interests with various qualitative methods such as critical discourse analysis and ethnographic case studies, among others.

Innan Sasaki is a Professor in Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School, UK. Innan is an expert in collective memory and traditions in organizations and fields. Her research intersects sociology and management studies to unveil how social and organizational changes take place in the encounter of tradition vs. modernity. She has studied long-living and heritage-based craft firms, refugees, and indigenous people to understand how they culturally survive in the changing institutional environment. Her work has received best paper awards and is published in leading peer-reviewed journals.

Abbie J. Shipp is the M. J. Neeley Professor in the Management & Leadership department at Texas Christian University, USA. Her research focuses on the psychological and subjective experience of time at work including: how individuals think about the past/present/future, trajectories of work experiences over time, how individuals react to change, and how time is spent on work tasks. Her work appears in journals such as Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Review, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personnel Psychology.