ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we explore a set of alternative concepts of time and temporality as they apply to organization theory and analysis. Specifically the chapter offers a historical review of paradigms of temporal structuring and experience in the evolution of work organizations. The chapter is developed in three parts. Initially we outline some key images of time and temporality to emerge from philosophy and social theory. In particular, we discuss images of temporal structuring reflected in the two key time metaphors, the line and the cycle. Second, we examine some of the main time paradigms to emerge from the history of industrial organization. While initially the focus is upon those modernist linear time images that stem from the progressive commodification of the labour process, subsequently this analysis is juxtaposed with time images that reflect the social construction of organizational culture and meaning. Here an examination of the homogeneous time-reckoning systems of Taylorism is contrasted with examples of heterogeneous time-reckoning from anthropological traditions and ethnographic studies. The final part of this historical review, discusses what can be termed, basically, the postmodern debate in the sociology of time. Having devoted much of the foregoing analysis to issues of modernist and industrialist ‘clock-time’, this section sees discussion of what has been referred to variously as postmodern or postindustrial ‘instantaneous-time’, whereby organizational practices are based on time-frames that lie beyond conscious human experience. This concept is associated historically with the purported complex shifts from Fordism to the flexible accumulation of post-Fordism. Central to this debate is the notion of the time-space compression of physical processes and human experiences.