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New ways of managing change have run aground on the uncritical acceptance of a limited view of temporality, identified here as causal-time. Because it emphasizes identity and state-transitions, causal-time is inherently static and past-centered. An alternative view, called flow-time, emphasizes the dynamic of the always arriving future. The claim is made that a future-centered temporality gives access to the knowledge change agents need to cope with accelerating and ongoing change.

This paper revisits the foundational concepts of agency and action in routine dynamics to provide guidance for intentional and directional change in a world in flux from a routine dynamics perspective. First, the authors put forward a relational-temporal triad of agency as a ratio of the past, present, and future to outline what gives shape to individual action. Second, the authors combine with this a relational-temporal triad of routine as a ratio of patterning, performing, and projecting to outline what gives shape to social action. Based on this, the authors reconceptualize the dynamic of routines as an enfolding inside-out and outside-in process that expresses the relational constraints between the intentionality of individual action and the directionality of social action. In managing a world in flux toward desirable futures, routines – as temporal structures for carrying out organizational work – need to be able to carry some degree of continuity to bring about change in fulfilling a desired and identified direction. The authors identify in-tension-less, in-tension-al, and in-tension-ful as three different degrees of intentionality in individual action and continuing, renewing, and transforming as the spectrum of a continuum of directionality in social action for routine change. Using time to bring in a fully relational understanding of agency and action in routine dynamics, the authors render the complexities of structure-agency and continuity-change dualities clearer and reveal their otherwise latent properties. This more complete picture of routine dynamics would allow for more intentional organizational routine change forward when facing significant environmental and social challenges in a world of flux.

This research highlights the scenarios that might serve as a strategic vision to describe a future beyond the current library, one which both guides provosts and creates a map for the transformation of human resources and technology in the university research libraries. The scenarios offer managerial leaders an opportunity to envision new roles for librarians and staff which brings a much needed focus on the development of human resources as well as a thought-stream to understand decisions which effectively and systematically move the organization toward a strategic vision.

These scenarios also outline possible future directions research libraries could take by focusing on perspectives from library directors, provosts, and administrators for human resources. The four case study scenarios introduce potential future roles for librarians and highlight the unsustainability of the current scholarly communications model as well as uncertain factors related to the political, social, technical, and demographic issues facing campuses. Given the changes institutions face, scenarios allow directors to include more uncertainty when developing and articulating a vision. These scenarios may start a discussion, before a strategic planning process, to sharpen the evaluations and measures necessary to monitor achievements that define the value of the library.

Organizational competences are essential sources of competitive advantage and thus are key drivers of competitive strategies for knowledge-intensive companies like automotive manufacturers. In order to cope with increasing market complexity and dynamism, reduced development times, and relentless cost pressures in a highly competitive environment, knowledge-driven companies need to understand how to be proactive in building and leveraging the competences they will need to be successful in the future, especially within their product development activities.

To help managers become proactive in identifying and building useful future competences, the dynamic and systemic perspectives of competence-based strategic management provide a framework for analysis that can help managers to look beyond their organization’s current competences and identify organizational competences that will be needed in the future. Competence theory emphasizes that an organization’s competences are dynamic and constantly need to be updated and reconfigured to adjust to the competitive dynamics of an industry. Any methodology for identifying future competence needs must begin with some means for identifying strategic gaps between the competences a firm has now and the competences it will need in the future. This paper describes a technology and market roadmap-based methodology for forecasting a firm’s future competence needs – the competences a firm will need to start developing now in order to meet expected market demands in the future. The methodology proposed here is applied and, we believe, validated through application to a competence planning process in a German luxury car manufacturer.

Although criticized as illegitimate, literary elements are necessary features of legal argument. In a modern liberal state, law motivates compliance by justifying controversial prescriptions as products of an appropriate process for representing the will of society. Yet because law constructs the will of individual and collective actors in representing them, its representations are necessarily figurative rather than mimetic. In evaluating law's representation of society, citizens of the liberal state are also shaping their own ends. Such self-expressive choices, subjective but non-instrumental, entail aesthetic judgment. Thus the literary elements of rhetorical figuration and aesthetic appeal are fundamental, rather than merely ornamental, to legal justification.

This chapter explores the multifaceted present-day social and cultural constructions of adolescence in a Nordic Atlantic society, the Faroe Islands. Based on young people’s perspectives and narratives, this chapter delves into the transition from youthhood to adulthood in the context of a small-scale, family-oriented society in shift. Drawing on sociological theoretical writing about “waiting” and “waithood” in relation to the (often temporally extended or delayed) transition from adolescence to full adulthood in a globalizing world, as well as social anthropological studies of future-making, my aim is to outline the new futural orientations of contemporary adolescence with focus on aspirations for work and family life. Young people, the chapter argues, are waiting and navigating in a society with multiple parallel temporalities: When to marry? When to get children? When to earn your own money and have your own home? These and many other questions define waithood in contemporary society, which is characterized by an increasingly precarious avenue toward promising futures resonating the socially accepted ways of performing adulthood. In the Faroe Islands, an island society with roughly 54,000 inhabitants, young people’s waiting is very often also a question of staying or leaving, that is, mobility and migration strategies. The waiting entails pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021). Adolescent islanders aim to “hit the right pace” in their future imaginaries. This chapter contributes to sociological discussions on the social construction of adolescence with focus on the meaning of time and temporalities. It relies on empirical material from extensive qualitative studies in the Faroe Islands.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.