ABSTRACT
There is a growing recognition among scholars that time has been seriously neglected in organizational research (e.g., George & Jones 2000; Ployhart, Holtz & Bliese 2002). Since time plays a prominent role in the everyday life of people and organizations, the tendency to leave time aside is somewhat paradoxical. How is it possible that organizational researchers have ignored time to such a large extent, and have done so few temporal studies? Ancona, Okhuysen and Perlow (2001) mention a number of factors, including researchers’ opportunism, the existence of research conventions (such as running short-term experiments), and the fact that temporal research is difficult because of lack of guiding theory, methodologies and lack of practical experience among researchers, in conjunction with the complexity of the phenomena to be studied. It is noteworthy that these obstacles emphasize the circumstances under which researchers operate, which suggests that temporal research would have flourished if conditions had been more favorable. This explanation is not very convincing, though. Already two decades, McGrath and Kelly (1986) noted that researchers do not ‘think temporally’. Although they acknowledged that temporal research requires more resources, they emphasized that the prevailing paradigms stop researchers from studying time. The use of ‘context stripping strategies’ makes time disappear from the problems they study. Concurring with them, I posit that the major obstacles are in the researchers’ minds; there is something in the way of thinking about time and about the organizational phenomena to be studied, that withhold researchers from doing temporal research. I see three main obstacles, to be explored in the following sections, that need to be surmounted before organizational research will be able to illuminate ‘what happens’ in organizations, rather than ‘what is’ (Roe 2008).
