ABSTRACT
It is in large part because of the neglect of time that power has been neglected in the everyday structuration of life in organizations. Where power and time have been considered they have almost always been thought of in terms of establishing the conditions for causality, such that we may say that a phenomenon, A, preceded and was the necessary and sufficient condition of a subsequent phenomenon, B. The idea that connects such a specific conception of causality with that of power goes back at least as far as Hobbes, and stretches right through to contemporary political science accounts by luminaries such as Dahl (1957). According to these criteria, there can be no power at a distance: where what constitutes a science is thought of purely in terms of experimental models of simultaneity and co-variation of co-present variables, it is difficult to think of power except where almost instantaneous temporal effects are noticeable. The underlying model is very much that of a stimulus causing a specific response.
