ABSTRACT
Time has historically been a central notion in the life of modern organizations, but with the fin de siècle the relationship between time and organization moved to the center of the management debate. The idea that organizations and their members are now pressed by time urgency became a common perception. Rather than considering time pressure or techniques to make better use of time as a competitive weapon, a complementary theme is considered: the rhythms of organizational life. More precisely, the chapter discusses how the organizing of rhythm (the management of chronos as sequential time) influences and is influenced by the rhythms acquired/entrained by the organization (the experience of kairos as discrete moments of time). The central idea is that organizations develop shared approaches to time (Gherardi & Strati 1988), thereby turning time into a fundamental component of their lives and cultures. Four types of organization are distinguished according to how they experience the objective and psychological dimensions of time, chronos (the Greek personification of time) and kairos, respectively. The four types are the hypercompetitive, the pulsed, the pressed and the out-of-time organizations. The theoretical analysis of organizational types from the perspective of rhythm may complement typologies developed from other perspectives (e.g., structure, strategy, culture) and open up alternative approaches to the analysis of the relationship between time and organization.
