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This chapter presents some basic concepts on time studies and discusses what a temporal approach can offer for higher education research. Being an invariable constituent of life, time structures and organizes activities and processes in higher education, covering all of its levels and functions. Furthermore, the current policy agenda that emphasizes the need for higher education to accelerate innovation flows, and to speed up the production of new knowledge and workers, accentuates the importance of the temporal perspective. The chapter examines the dominant, taken-for-granted conception of time – clock time – which involves a linear, quantitative, cumulative, homogenized, abstract and decontextualized conception of time. The core features of clock time are described by the four Cs put forward by Barbara Adam: creation, commodification, colonization and control of time. It is argued that, in the current digital, post-modern era, social acceleration reshapes and transforms the nature of clock time, which results in compression of time, shrinking future and extended present, all manifest in the overall speeding-up of life. In addition, a temporal lens for analysing higher education is presented, with examples from empirical studies on time and temporalities in academic work and identity building.

Purpose: This chapter examines how healthcare technologies (electronic medical records, personal cell phones, and pagers) help manage patient care work to accelerate processes of communication and blur boundaries between work time and non-work time, thereby revealing dynamics of power as indicated through temporal capital, or the amount of time under an individual’s control.

Method: The data were collected from 35 in-depth semistructured interviews of health practitioners, which included 26 physicians, 7 nurses, and 2 administrators.

Findings: Communication technologies fulfill promises of temporal autonomy and efficiency, but not without cost, particularly as it intersects with organizational/institutional power structures and non-work-related social factors such as pre-existing technological literacy and proficiency. The blurring of work and non-work time gives practitioners perceived higher quality of life while also increasing temporal flexibility and autonomy. The higher up one is in the relevant hierarchy, the more control one has over one’s own time, resulting in higher levels of temporal capital. The power hierarchies serve to complicate the potential recuperation of temporal capital by communication technologies.

Implications: This study uses a critical cultural perspective that takes into consideration structures of institutional power hierarches impact temporal organization through the use of communication technologies by health practitioners. Practitioner-facing research is particularly crucial given the high rates of burnout within the profession and concerns around the well-being of health practitioners, and autonomy and control over one’s time is a factor in work and life satisfaction.

This paper aims to propose a risk identification method which is a synthesis of existing tools and techniques.

Risks are viewed as a temporal hierarchy of major decisions or events at the highest level, projects at the middle level, and routine operations at the lowest level. Furthermore, risks emerge as organizational activities progress over time. The organizational activities, called movements in this paper, typically follow the phases of routine (operations) > major decision/event > project > adjustment > routine which correspond to the chosen temporal hierarchy. Risks are identified by examining the movements in all applicable phases of their development. The method was applied in a case study of an enterprise in the energy sector.

Focus on movements bridges company silos. Risk logs make sense only when supplied with visualization tools. The future state of the enterprise's routines should be modelled early in the decision‐making process. Attention should be paid to changes that major decisions, events, and projects impose on organizational routines.

The method belongs to the minority of approaches which explore risk evolution, relationships, and hierarchy rather than risk likelihood and impact. Risk evolution is explored by choosing movements as the basic units of risk identification. Risk relationships are detected on the level of routines where risk relationships are the least obvious but most important. The chosen hierarchy serves an enterprise‐deep view of risks and makes it possible to be alert for periods when the organization's risks change or new ones emerge.

The ability to identify the root causes of leading environmental crises, and the capacity to design effective intervention strategies, rely on a proper conceptualization of the linkages that join the social and natural worlds. An indispensable feature of an integrated model concerns the temporal frequencies intrinsic to the spatial and organizational hierarchies that comprise the socio-ecological system. The purpose of this chapter is to assemble ideas from a wide range of disciplines to promote a greater sensitivity to the relevance of time, and to alert us to the conceptual challenges of introducing temporal considerations into interdisciplinary environmental studies.

Workplace temporalities are being reshaped under globalization. Some scholars argue that work time is becoming more flexible, de-territorializing, and even disappearing. I provide an alternative picture of what is happening to work time by focusing on the customer service call center industry in India. Through case studies of three firms, and interviews with 80 employees, managers, and officials, I show how this industry involves a “reversal” of work time in which organizations and their employees shift their schedules entirely to the night. Rather than liberation from time, workers experience a hyper-management, rigidification, and re-territorialization of temporalities. This temporal order pervades both the physical and virtual tasks of the job, and has consequences for workers’ health, families, future careers, and the wider community of New Delhi. I argue that this trend is prompted by capital mobility within the information economy, expansion of the service sector, and global inequalities of time, and is reflective of an emerging stratification of employment temporalities across lines of the Global North and South.

Accurate segmentation of artificial assembly action is the basis of autonomous industrial assembly robots. This paper aims to study the precise segmentation method of manual assembly action.

In this paper, a temporal-spatial-contact features segmentation system (TSCFSS) for manual assembly actions recognition and segmentation is proposed. The system consists of three stages: spatial features extraction, contact force features extraction and action segmentation in the temporal dimension. In the spatial features extraction stage, a vectors assembly graph (VAG) is proposed to precisely describe the motion state of the objects and relative position between objects in an RGB-D video frame. Then graph networks are used to extract the spatial features from the VAG. In the contact features extraction stage, a sliding window is used to cut contact force features between hands and tools/parts corresponding to the video frame. Finally, in the action segmentation stage, the spatial and contact features are concatenated as the input of temporal convolution networks for action recognition and segmentation. The experiments have been conducted on a new manual assembly data set containing RGB-D video and contact force.

In the experiments, the TSCFSS is used to recognize 11 kinds of assembly actions in demonstrations and outperforms the other comparative action identification methods.

A novel manual assembly actions precisely segmentation system, which fuses temporal features, spatial features and contact force features, has been proposed. The VAG, a symbolic knowledge representation for describing assembly scene state, is proposed, making action segmentation more convenient. A data set with RGB-D video and contact force is specifically tailored for researching manual assembly actions.

We analyze spatio-temporal data on U.S. unemployment rates. For this purpose, we present a family of models designed for the analysis and time-forward prediction of spatio-temporal econometric data. Our model is aimed at applications with spatially sparse but temporally rich data, i.e. for observations collected at few spatial regions, but at many regular time intervals. The family of models utilized does not make spatial stationarity assumptions and consists in a vector autoregressive (VAR) specification, where there are as many time series as spatial regions. A model building strategy is used that takes into account the spatial dependence structure of the data. Model building may be performed either by displaying sample partial correlation functions, or automatically with an information criterion. Monthly data on unemployment rates in the nine census divisions of the U.S. are analyzed. We show with a residual analysis that our autoregressive model captures the dependence structure of the data better than with univariate time series modeling.

Many mobile devices today are equipped with diversified sensors that enable the acquisition of rich user context (e.g. GPS location, phone activity) for application utilization. With the growing usage of mobile devices in daily life, the problem of conveniently and promptly searching a piece of content that a user has viewed on his/her device before becomes more and more crucial. This paper aims to propose a context‐based query processing framework called UCQP that supports unstructured queries for content search in a user's access history.

Beyond the keywords related to the content properties, a context query in the framework is specified with freeform phrases that describe high‐level mobile contexts of the user at a previous time when the user viewed the searched content.

Experimental results on a prototype system of the framework illustrate its good accuracy and small response time.

To tolerate the incompleteness and inaccuracy in user query texts caused by fading human memory, the authors develop several semantic query parsers that are tailored for different types of contexts using natural language processing and information retrieval techniques. The authors further propose a similarity model to rank the multiple result contents of a query by comparing context entities specified in the query and historical context values associated with each result.

This article seeks to further understand the significance of “organizational nostalgia” for processes of organizational change and to develop the mirror concept “managerial postalgia”. If nostalgia is a longing for a paradisical past, postalgia refers to a longing for a heavenly future, a desire that is central to change‐talk and change‐initiatives in organizations. The meaning and role of postalgia will be clarified in this paper by comparing and contrasting it with organizational nostalgia and by analyzing ethnographic studies that provide empirical support to substantiate the analogy. It is argued that the glorification of the past, just as the idealization of the future, are part of internal struggles in which organizational actors try to instigate or resist change by praising or dispraising the collective past, present and future. The argumentation demonstrates the significance of temporal constructions of change and continuity through organizational discourse.