ABSTRACT
Organizational research, like much social science research, has for most of its history been characterized by a rudimentary attention to time and time-related issues. Given the overwhelming importance of time in people’s lives as well as in the operation of organizations, such relative lack of consideration is both paradoxical and confusing. Organizational processes and structures are built around daily and weekly working hours, rhythmic cycles of individual and collective activity, deadlines and production times, and so on. Scheduling and synchronizing activities is a challenge for individual employees seeking to balance the demands of household, daily life and work. For managers, the issues are often posed in terms of managing the entrainment of activities of people in different parts of the firm with those of customers and suppliers. Gaining optimal outcomes is as much a challenge as coping with the effects of misfits – for example, delays and time-stress. One might think that the temporal aspects of everyday human life would saturate the field of management and organization theory but, instead, one is more likely to find that is relatively timeless knowledge which fills our textbooks and journals.
