Making Time

Time is an essential feature of social and organizational life and part of the deep structure of business activity. Plans, performance, productivity, and pay are all linked to and often measured by time. Yet time is often taken for granted in daily life and the business world. The aim of this book is to bring time into sharper focus and in particular to look at the way time is constructed, made, managed, and used in organizations. The book both provides an overview of some of the key concepts in time — time’s arrow, time’s cycle, clock time, etc. — and it explores how particular features of the modern world — global time, futures, etc. — extend and change the temporal dimension of organizational activity. Making Time emphasizes the richness of the temporal relations within organizations and the wealth of competing attempts to order and control time in the act of managing. It describes and explains this temporal complexity as it occurs in management, giving full recognition to the way that people create their own sense of time alongside the official temporal apparatus of the clock and diary. The contributors use a variety of management perspectives — strategy, organization theory, decision making, industrial relations, and marketing — and deliberately place the experience of more traditional industrial settings alongside those at the forefront of the ‘new economy’. Making Time seeks to spark a debate across the field of management that does justice to the richness of the temporal features of contemporary organizations. The book will be vital reading for those who want to understand the complexities of time in organizations and the modern world, and the challenges it presents for the theoretical and practical spheres of management.