ABSTRACT
Current research on organizational temporality is still, largely, timeless. That is, despite the growing corpus of scholarship in this area, much of the research ignores fundamental changes in member and team temporality across time. Additionally, researchers often fail to consider the cyclical processes that shape and are shaped by members’ experience of time, as well as the overlapping activity cycles within which members engage at any single time. The resultant theories can offer a misleading portrayal of workplace temporality. One notable exception, the entrainment perspective, recognizes that cycles are definitional to time and the temporal processes experienced by living systems. The perspective was introduced into organizational research by McGrath and Rotchford (1983) and, although it has been elaborated by Ancona and Chong (1996) and Bluedorn (2002), it remains under-utilized in theoretical discussions and under-studied in empirical investigations of organizational temporality (see Ancona, Okhuysen & Perlow 2001; Blount 2004; Waller, Zellmer-Bruhn & Giambatista 2002; and Zaheer, Albert & Zaheer 1999 for notable exceptions). The value of entrainment in highlighting the communicative bases of organizational temporality is illustrated in the present chapter through the introduction of a typology of activity cycles. These activity cycles, the temporal ‘containers’ of work processes, enable and constrain members’ behavior through the symbolic functions they serve, and the frame (Monge & Kalman 1996) that they create acts as a Zeitgeber for members’ activities and interaction patterns.1
