ABSTRACT
A few decades into the twentieth century, famed American historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford (1934) declared in Technics and Civilization that: “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. For every phase of its development the clock is both the outstanding fact and the typical symbol of the machine: even today no other machine is so ubiquitous” (p. 14). This declaration came on the heels of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, which depicted the centrality of clock-based timekeeping in fueling modern industrialization. More than a decade into the twenty-first century, communication, connection, and connectivity have joined time clocks and conveyor belts as the zeitgebers, or “time givers,” that fuel global commerce. Today, in postindustrial work, the communication network has joined the clock for a large segment of the global workforce, as new forms of time and space have emerged (Castells, 2000). Consequently, the nature of work is being redefined. While industrial work centers largely on sequential individual contributions,
network-based (or postindustrial) work centers on concurrent collective contributions. As a result, both those who manage and those who perform network-based work are struggling to shift from a focus on the time needed to complete a well-defined task in industrial work to a focus on the organizational and individual capabilities required to reliably achieve the more complex, interlocking outcomes
characteristic of postindustrial work. According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, the fastest-growing segment of the workforce in advanced economies is the interaction worker (McKinsey, 2012). This suggests that scholars must consider the utility and relevance of extant theory and models to account for the experience of this new front line of the network-based economy. Indeed, because interaction work relies upon complex communication and coordination with others yet requires independent judgment, the study of communication is critical to consider the implications of this shift for organizations and their members. All of the above shifts-in the key-machine that drives work, in the practices
needed to accomplish it, and in the relationships among the people who perform it-translate to equally profound shifts in how organizational members come to apprehend time and space, or spatiotemporality. Particularly, Castells and colleagues (2000; Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qui, & Sey, 2007) theorize about how societal shifts associated with new communication technologies find us collectively experiencing “space” that is not defined by place but by a given network of relationships, and “time” that is not defined by a clock but through constant interaction that saturates all moments with activity. Indeed, Castells and colleagues argue that these new communication processes associated with space and time are key to the emergence of the network society, owed to the fact that: “Time and space are the fundamental, material dimensions of human existence. Thus, they are the most direct expression of social structure and structural change.” (Castells et al., 2007, p. 171). Therefore, the growth of interaction work means that these organizational
members have experienced profound spatiotemporal change in a remarkably short period of time. Not surprisingly, this has led to intense work pressures as organizations and their members seek to develop effective organizational communication practices to manage this shift. Therefore, our focus in this paper is to explore the various spatiotemporal interaction genres-coworking, commuting, choosing, contemplating-and the broader repertoire-multiminding-that emerges from an oscillation within and among the various genres. We begin our discussion by exploring the temporal dimension, separation,
described by Ballard and Seibold (2003) in their meso-level model of organizational temporality. It is conceived as a measure of (spatiotemporal) connection or availability among organizational members; therefore, it is an excellent starting point to consider contemporary enactments of spatiotemporality (Ballard & Seibold, 2003). We then explore Orlikowski and Yates’ (1994) concept of an interaction, or communicative genre, and describe four genres-contemplating, choosing, coworking, commuting-used to manage spatiotemporal connection in various ways (Ballard & Seibold, 2003; Ballard, 2007; Ballard & Gossett, 2007). Finally, we define a larger genre repertoire, multiminding, that includes each of these genres yet extends our understanding of contemporary enactments of time and space at work.
