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1 – 10 of over 1000Miriam Feuls, Mie Plotnikof and Iben Sandal Stjerne
This paper stimulates methodological debates and advances the research agenda for qualitative research about time and temporality in organizing processes. It develops a framework…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper stimulates methodological debates and advances the research agenda for qualitative research about time and temporality in organizing processes. It develops a framework for studying the temporal in organizing that contributes by: (1) providing an overview to prepare for and navigate various methodological challenges in this regard, (2) offering inspiration for relevant solutions to those challenges and (3) posing timely questions to facilitate temporal reflexivity in scholarly work.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a literature review of studies about temporality in organizing processes, the authors develop a framework of well-acknowledged methodological challenges, dilemmas and paradoxes, and pose timely questions with which to develop potential solutions for research about organization and time.
Findings
The framework of this study offers a synthesis of methodological challenges and potential solutions acknowledged in the organization studies literature. It consists of three interrelated dimensions of methodological challenges to studying temporality in organizing processes, namely: empirical, analytical and representational challenges. These manifests in six subcategories: empirical cases, empirical methods, analytical concepts, analytical processes and coding, representing researchers’ temporal embeddedness and representing multiple temporalities.
Originality/value
This paper allows scholars to undertake a more ambitious, collective methodological discussion and sets an agenda for studying the temporal in organizing. The framework developed stimulates researchers’ temporal reflexivity and inspires them to develop solutions to specific methodological challenges that may emerge in their study of the temporal in organizing.
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Luis Felipe Gómez and Dawna I. Ballard
The concept that an organization's actions or inactions constrain or enhance its future options and outcomes and – ultimately – its long-term survival, is here referred to as the…
Abstract
The concept that an organization's actions or inactions constrain or enhance its future options and outcomes and – ultimately – its long-term survival, is here referred to as the organization's viability. Following a dynamic capabilities framework, we identify two communication practices that help develop both transactive memory systems and a firm's long-term viability, information allocation and collective reflexivity, and call for the development of others. We discuss the interrelationship of these two practices as nurturing the development of transactive memory systems critical for organizational long-term viability. We then discuss organizational structures that prompt or constrain the development of these two communication practices – organizational members’ perceived environmental uncertainty, perceptions of time as scarce, feedback cycles between actions and outcomes, and organizational members’ temporal focus – and offer propositions concerning these relationships. We emphasize the relevance of TMS through the exploration of three characteristics of the relationship between TMS and the long-term viability of organizations. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for organizational development practitioners for fostering TMS through the facilitation of sites for collective reflexivity.
Josette M.P Gevers, Christel G Rutte and Wendelien van Eerde
This chapter addresses how project teams achieve coordinated action, given the diversity in how team members may perceive and value time. Although synchronization of task…
Abstract
This chapter addresses how project teams achieve coordinated action, given the diversity in how team members may perceive and value time. Although synchronization of task activities may occur spontaneously through the nonconscious process of entrainment, some work conditions demand that team members pay greater conscious attention to time to coordinate their efforts. We propose that shared cognitions on time – the agreement among team members on the appropriate temporal approach to their collective task – will contribute to the coordination of team members’ actions, particularly in circumstances where nonconscious synchronization of action patterns is unlikely. We suggest that project teams may establish shared cognitions on time through goal setting, temporal planning, and temporal reflexivity.
Pedro Marques-Quinteiro, Sjir Uitdewilligen, Patricia Costa and Ana Margarida Passos
This paper aims to test if team reflexivity is a countermeasure to the detrimental effect of team virtuality on team performance improvement, in decision-making teams.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to test if team reflexivity is a countermeasure to the detrimental effect of team virtuality on team performance improvement, in decision-making teams.
Design/methodology/approach
Study 1 regarded 210 individuals (N = 44 teams) executing five decision-making tasks. Study 2 regarded 60 individuals (N = 20 teams) executing four decision-making tasks. Study 1 was longitudinal, with no experimental manipulation. Study 2 had an experimental longitudinal design comprising two between-team manipulations: medium of communication and team reflexivity; the outcome was team performance improvement.
Findings
Study 1’s results show that team reflexivity positively moderates the effect of virtuality on team performance improvement over time. Study 2’s results shows that a reflexivity manipulation benefits face-to-face teams more so than virtual teams, probably because team reflexivity is more effective when media richness is high.
Originality/value
The implications of reflexivity’s lack of effect in low virtuality (Study 1) and high virtuality (Study 2) teams are discussed. This study contributes to the team learning and virtual teams’ literatures by expanding current knowledge on how team reflexivity can facilitate team learning under face-to-face versus virtual communication conditions.
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The purpose of this paper is to show the benefit of conceptualizing reflexive ethnographic writing as translation processes across circuits of power that involve researcher, field…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to show the benefit of conceptualizing reflexive ethnographic writing as translation processes across circuits of power that involve researcher, field and audience. For this purpose, a model of translating nodes of power in the ethnographic triangle is developed.
Design/methodology/approach
The author reflects upon organizational ethnography theoretically.
Findings
Ethnographic meaning emerges between researcher, field and audience (the ethnographic triangle). The author conceptualizes their relations as relations of power and draws from Clegg's circuits of power to map these relations. The author argues that ethnographers need to conceptualize power in the ethnographic triangle as three interrelated circuits of power, namely episodic power relations, rules of practice and structures of domination. This approach advances previous work on reflexivity in three aspects. First, it goes beyond individual researcher‐field interaction and integrates agency, practice and structure from a power‐perspective; second, it incorporates exotextual influences; and third, it is also a viable reflexive path if researcher and field cannot establish cooperation.
Research limitations/implications
This paper provides a processual model to interrogate reflexive ethnographic writing. However, this model cannot solve issues of temporal reflexivity.
Originality/value
Reflexive ethnographic practice is viewed as translating nodes of power across circuits of power. This view implies that innocent reflexivity is not possible. Still, it might enable the researcher by providing an alternative reading of ethnographic practice.
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To contribute the process perspective on strategy the systems theoretical concept of time binding and show how time, when unfolded and linked, is compressed or stretched, thereby…
Abstract
Purpose
To contribute the process perspective on strategy the systems theoretical concept of time binding and show how time, when unfolded and linked, is compressed or stretched, thereby demonstrating the motion of temporal spaces within organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Case approach and with emphasis on communicative events.
Findings
The finding of three different time bindings in strategy work showing not only how time is unfolded and multiplied but also how these bindings were unexpectedly found to be experienced simultaneously, thus turning a seemingly linear strategy based on goal achievement into a complex of interrelated motions driven by performativity, potentiality and reiteration.
Research limitations/implications
The research implications are significant to the process perspective on strategy as time should not only be understood and investigated as different unfoldings and time-links within organizations, but also on the motion of these temporal spaces, which is to say, how they move the organization ahead.
Practical implications
From a practical perspective, when taking both the existing and future research on strategy into account, one notices that most management literature and the mainstream courses held at business schools tend to draw on one-dimensional casualities and chronological timelines in order to combine accurate forecasts with predicted end-results. Such attempts reflect one unfolding, one binding, one temporal space and one way of moving, but if managers want to improve knowledge on deliberate change, temporal awareness should be part of their strategic change repertoire alongside the ability to match different motions to the skills and capacity of an organization.
Social implications
The concept of time binding is a way to extend the ways by which we seek to comprehend the temporal nature of social relations and structures within organizations and in particular those practices that are considered strategic. In particular, it offers ways of understanding how strategy is a temporal exercise that provides organizations with different temporal spaces within single events and hence different motions – all of which simultaneously move the organization differently ahead in time.
Originality/value
By providing the system theoretical concept of time binding it brings new and original value into the process and practice field of strategy research. The empirical findings demonstrate how unusual and not yet seen unfoldings and bindings between before and after appears and how such bindings take the form of temporal spaces that simultaneously and differently moves the organizations ahead in time.
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Chris Rowell, Robin Gustafsson and Marco Clemente
We argue that our understanding of how institutions matter has been undermined by a piecemeal approach to temporality in institutional analyses. This paper addresses this…
Abstract
We argue that our understanding of how institutions matter has been undermined by a piecemeal approach to temporality in institutional analyses. This paper addresses this shortcoming in the literature. We bring temporality to the fore by conceptualizing practices, which constitute institutions, as understood, situated, and coordinated in time by temporal structures. We elaborate an integrated framework of temporal structures that consist of three types: temporal patterns, temporal conceptions, and temporal orientations – and outline how each type contributes to the reproduction of practices. We discuss the implications of this framework for sustainability initiatives and conclude by suggesting future avenues of research on the temporal foundations of institutions.
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Kerem Gurses, Basak Yakis-Douglas and Pinar Ozcan
In this paper, we investigate how digital technology disruptors and the incumbents who stand to be disrupted by them frame their arguments to transform or sustain existing…
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate how digital technology disruptors and the incumbents who stand to be disrupted by them frame their arguments to transform or sustain existing institutional frameworks to enable or deter the market entry of these technologies. Using a longitudinal, comparative case analysis of three digital technologies – namely, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), cloud antenna, and over-the-top (OTT) technologies – we explore how stakeholders use public interest frames for this purpose. We find that entrepreneurs use three specific frames to drive institutional change for the successful adoption of digital technologies in the presence of established incumbents and powerful regulators: frames that emphasize the broad public appeal of the new digital technology; frames that emphasize efficiency, democracy, and technological advancement; and frames that emphasize present as well as future benefits to the public. We find that constructing interpretations of what serves the public interest is the primary tactic used by disruptors to gain market entry, and an equally popular weapon for incumbents to block the entry of new digital technologies. These interpretations lead to a framing contest aimed at influencing regulators and obtaining a more favorable institutional environment. Our empirical findings illustrate that new digital technologies themselves are not the sole contributors to institutional change. Rather, institutional outcomes associated with the introduction of new digital technologies are shaped by how disruptors and incumbents use public interest frames and how regulators react to these frames.
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The purpose of the paper is to present a constructionist framework for reflection upon time in organizational change processes. The framework directs attention towards (1…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to present a constructionist framework for reflection upon time in organizational change processes. The framework directs attention towards (1) institutionalized ideas on organizational change processes anchored in different theoretical epochs, (2) institutionalized norms and virtues that govern the development of specific time regimes in organizations and (3) subjective opportunistic expectations of the future.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is essayistic in character.
Findings
The paper explores how constructions of time might be biased by managerial leaders' opportunistic enactment of specific institutionalized ideas anchored in different theoretical epochs in order to comply with culturally embedded and mediated managerial virtues such as being fast and vigorous.
Research limitations/implications
The paper opens up for a differentiated understanding of time in organizational change processes, and it pinpoints the assumptions that guide both theoretical discussions on time, as well as empirical studies.
Practical implications
The framework proffers the reflective practitioner the opportunity to develop informed expectations on time in relation to organizational change processes.
Social implications
A nuanced and differentiated understanding of how time is construed in organizational change processes might reduce the social costs of underestimating the time organizational changes take – or exaggerating the belief in managerial leaders as sovereigns of time.
Originality/value
The paper contributes with a critical understanding of how time is construed in organizational change processes.
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Jan Erik Karlsen, Erik F. Øverland and Hanne Karlsen
This article aims to contribute to futures theory building by assessing the inherent ontological and epistemological presumptions in foresight studies. Such premises, which are…
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to contribute to futures theory building by assessing the inherent ontological and epistemological presumptions in foresight studies. Such premises, which are usually embedded in foresight studies, are contrasted with sociological imagination and contemporary social science discourse.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is a conceptual analysis of theoretical assumptions embedded in foresight studies.
Findings
Sociological lenses, including concepts like anticipation, latency, time, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, change and plurality of images, offer clarity in terms of both futures studies and foresights.
Research limitations/implications
Explicating presumptions embedded in foresight methods helps recognition of how such methods shape the concepts of future and time. This is vital for assessment of the analytical products of foresights studies.
Originality/value
This research contributes to the ambition of linking the theoretical world of futures research and the practical world of foresights closer together by explicating key concepts and implicit assumptions in both fields.
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