ABSTRACT
Introduction Information technologies (IT) are bound up with time and space issues and embedded in social and cultural dimensions of life. In the context of international IT, organizations using and producing IT, information technologies play a double role in shaping social life and organizing work in enterprises while serving as a model for structuring time and social relations in other social contexts. In multinational IT enterprises when several teams are involved in the production of software in different national contexts, information technologies play a crucial role for coordination and synchronization of activities expecting an acceleration of working processes. However communication using email or instant messaging does not substitute and often does not even sustain personal contact (Sharpe 2001). Emails for example, are often written in schematic and context related language needing additional explanations to clarify misunderstandings and thus represent sometimes a factor for working processes when the use of information technologies is not integrated in day-to-day working habits. Thus, expectations for overcoming time and space constraints in global IT offshoring processes using IT often fail because of cultural divergences in time structures and habits at the workplace. Social contexts have their own rules about time and also about places and space, so that even using the same information technology tool, the nature of relations between the context of use and the process of using such technologies can much vary and bring many different social implications. In order to overcome intercultural conflicts multinational IT organizations develop and use several methods under the label of quality management methodology (i.e. ITIL, Six Sigma, BS 7799, Balance Score Card) focusing on completion of deliverables on time (Carmel and Beulen 2004: 142) and contributing to the rationalization of international work. Such methods function as common sharing rules and serve as a legitimate basis for action in international environments, and as a basis for distant action taking place on the Internet. However, local cultures do not lose their importance. Employees working in international teams are not only integrated into the flows of work and global temporalities, but also into local social and cultural life. Working in different national locations also means involvement in particular
time regimes of scheduling qualifications, continuous education, and entrance into labor market and occupational as well as professional prospectives, and also institutionalized work-life balance programs influencing career opportunities of men and women (Ruiz Ben 2007). Such bundling of time norms institutionally supported in particular countries shape day-to-day situations as well as biographical trajectories. Information technologies create a new social space connecting local places and time norms, thus challenging contingent time and space concepts. Information technologies alter the intrinsic relationship between time and space allowing communication between persons in unlimited distanced locations shrinking distance in time to a minimum. Face to face properties of communication get lost (facial or body gestures with different meanings in different cultural settings) whereas written and oral language, particularly English, predominates. However, as Giddens (1984: 60ff.) points out, routine forms of behavior must be worked out by those sustaining them. This means particularly for the situations of no co-presence of collaborating teams in dispersed geographical locations that day-to-day routines and social relations between distant groups must be created through mediated communication and through sporadic encounters, coordinated and synchronized. Consequently, enterprises and also employees are increasingly confronted with multiple and divergent temporalities (Castells 1996: 472). The question at this point is how are such multiple temporalities synchronized and coordinated? In this chapter I attempt to build a theoretical model to explain this on the basis of Lewis and Weigert’s (1981) typology of social time and some concepts of Orlikowski’s (1992) structurational model of technology to approach an understanding of the interrelation between social time and the use and design of information technologies in international working environments. The chapter is organized in three sections. First, I briefly explain some theoretical perspectives concerning the transformation of time in relation to work and information technologies in order to explain the different levels of social time in the workplace. Second, I explain Lewis and Weigert’s (1981) typology of social time to provide a theoretical basis for the analysis of temporalities in international IT workplaces. Third, I discuss how this theoretical basis for understanding time experiences might be improved in international working settings.
