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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.

We expand the concept of time in the workplace by examining the different ways that time is discussed and the different meanings attached to time. Drawing upon observation, informal discussions, and focus groups, we examine worker discourse about clock time, work time, and family time, and argue that the meaning attached to each is related to workers’ ability to exercise some control over time. Using survey data collected from shift workers, we illustrate the connection between time and control by examining the predictors of job satisfaction and work–family conflict.

Temporary and permanent organisations have contrasting yet co-dependent perspectives regarding time; temporary organisations are made to ‘die’, yet most of them exist to enable permanent organisations to ‘survive’. The authors studied the temporal tensions of strategic initiatives – that is, temporary organisations that aim to implement strategic change in permanent organisations. Our empirical data identified three temporal tensions emerging when senior managers timed their strategic initiatives: ambition versus realism when enacting the time horizon, patience versus urgency when enacting the pace, and clock time versus event time when enacting the temporal perspective. By evoking the literature on paradox and temporal work, the authors extend the view of temporality at the temporary and permanent interface and indicate how temporal work played an important role in creating, reinforcing, or transforming temporal tensions. The authors conclude by providing implications for theory and practice.

In initial teacher education (ITE) there is interest in developing the use of lesson study as it is seen as a positive tool for aiding student-teachers in developing their pedagogic understanding and practice. However, there are often concerns about the potential sustainability of lesson study in teacher preparation programmes which are already very intensive, requiring a great deal of work from school-based mentors and university tutors as well as student-teachers. This intensity leads to a number of competing priorities and a belief that the time taken to complete lesson study projects is not sustainable in the long term. In this chapter the author discusses how a consideration of the complex nature of time can help reframe the issues of sustainability of lesson study projects in ITE contexts. A number of studies from the literature are used to exemplify how a consideration of how the amount of time needed to complete a project and the rhythms of the school year, can lead to the use of different approaches to lesson study which are sensitive to the timescapes of any given context.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, classify and analyse temporality in information systems development (ISD) literature.

The authors address the temporality and ISD research gap by using a framework – which classifies time into three categories: conceptions of time, mapping activities to time and actors relating to time. The authors conduct a systematic literature review which investigates time in ISD within the Senior Scholars' Basket, Information Technology & People (IT&P), and top two information systems conferences over the past 20 years. The search strategy resulted in 9,850 studies of which 47 were identified as primary papers.

The results reveal that ISD research is ill equipped for contemporary thinking around time. This systematic literature review (SLR) contributes to ISD by finding the following gaps in the literature: (1) clock time is dominant and all other types of time are under-researched; (2) contributions to mapping activities to time is lacking and existing studies focus on single ISD projects rather multiple complex ISD projects; (3) research on actors relating to time is lacking; (4) existing ISD studies which contribute to temporal characteristics are fragmented and lack integration with other categories of time and (5) ISD methodology papers lack contributions to temporal characteristics and fail to acknowledge and contribute to time as a multifaceted interrelated concept.

This work has developed the first SLR on temporality in ISD. This study provides a starting point for ISD researchers and ISD practitioners to test commonly held temporal assumptions of ISD researchers and practitioners.

Drawing on an empirical investigation situated in 25 households of professional managers, who worked regularly at home, this article explores how internalised time discipline is evoked, appropriated and challenged through and in home‐based telework. The notion of clock‐time is opposed with the notion of task‐time and it is shown how both temporalities inform the organisation of paid and unpaid work. It is shown that in some households the simultaneous co‐presence of conceptually different temporalities led to an increasing bureaucratisation of time as boundaries between “work” and “the household” had to be maintained and protected. In other households such co‐presence resulted in the emergence of more task‐based approaches to the co‐ordination of all activity and more elastic temporal boundaries drawn around them.

This chapter draws on recent literature in I/O psychology, management and sociology to posit a relationship between organizational structure and temporal structure and develops the construct of layered-task time. Layered-task time is similar to polychronic time (P-time) in the inclusion of simultaneous, multiple tasks but includes additional dimensions of fragmentation, contamination and constraint. The chapter links the development of this new time and its resultant time-sense to variation in the degree to which organizations are hierarchical and centralized and develops propositions about these relationships. The chapter contributes to the growing literature on workplace temporalities in the contemporary economy.

Rational time accompanies the onslaught of hyper-globalization. The Inuit of Arviat, Nunavut, paradoxically use rational time to resist rational time, setting aside temporal zones to protect Western cultural paradigms from impinging on their lives all of the time. Additionally, because temporal norms indicate membership in a group, doing time differently is one of the most effective ways in which to say “I’m not a part of your group!” While resisting rational clock-time, for example by walking off the job each day promptly at 4:59 pm, the Inuit of Arviat nevertheless have a myriad of clocks in their homes. This chapter explores their temporal resistance and the riddle of “why so many clocks in Arviat?”