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This paper aims to examine how metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time.

The data consist of 113 speeches by vice‐chancellors of a distance learning university, recorded in texts. Texts are apposite for this research as they transmit meaning across time and space. Hermeneutics is an appropriate methodology because it enables interpretation across temporal and spatial distance.

The paper finds that textual metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time in five ways: transferring from familiarity to strangeness, providing coherence, “breaking distance” changing reality through changing language, and recontextualising.

The study focuses on formal organizational texts and excludes informal texts and conversation. Change outcomes are not studied; there should be further research on how metaphors affect change over time and space.

Metaphors enable managers to communicate change across time and space. Textual metaphors are continuously available and interactive, enabling dialogue between managers and staff across space and time.

The paper furthers our knowledge of how metaphors mediate change across both space and time. Metaphors translate the organization across distance, fusing spatial and temporal horizons, effecting organizational change by changing language. The organization becomes a metaphor of itself, recontextualising across time and space.

The paper aims to introduce the manner in which management and organization theory have viewed space and time as significant resources and to put forward a number of more contemporary views as to how space and time is both managed and experienced.

The paper adopts a postmodern approach in assembling what it regards as “fragments” from a variety of disciplinary discourses on space and time. Each fragment presents, putatively, a different voice, theme or motif which are intended to help the reader better understand the trajectories contained in the other papers in the volume.

The paper finds that conceptions of space and time are fundamental to the manner in which organizations are managed and organized and are a symbolic order inter‐related to themes of power and control. The manner in which we experience space and time is open to manipulation and specifically a form compression that displaces critical reflection and may make individuals prone to external locus of control. The manner in which time and space are linked to the suppression of human agency and the imperatives of capitalism cannot be overestimated and require reflexive consideration.

The paper, and the volume as a whole, recognises time and space as social constructions and thus open to “reconstruction”. Space and time are not simple a priori categories that are fixed, immutable absolutes and knowable entities. The recognition of the intersubjective “nature” of space and time is shown to help us better appreciate the different manner in which space and time is experienced and the manner in which space and time are used in the management of change.