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Essai: time, duration and simultaneity; rethinking process and change in organizational analysis

Organization Studies, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Robert Chia

Abstract

The recent rediscovery of concrete lived time from 'clock-time' by process theorists enables us to make important adjustments in our thinking about the true nature of temporality, movement and change. For these process theorists, change is reality itself, and 'organizations' are nothing more than 'temporary arrestations in a sea of flux and transformation. From this perspective it is the phenomenon of organisation that requires analysis and explanation and not change itself. This understanding opens up new avenues of inquiry for Organization Studies as a field of study. Thus the shaping of contemporary modes of thought, codes of behaviour, social mannerisms, dress, gestures, postures, the rules of law, ethical codes, disciplines of knowledge and so on, makes for more appropriate theoretical foci for an expanded realm of Organization Studies -- one which offers a deeper understanding of organisation and its consequences for the world of affairs.

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Descriptors: duration, simultaneity, organization, change, duree

The Nature of Time

Well over fifteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine said of time: 'If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know' (Confessions XI: xii, 14, quoted in Lippincett et al. 1998: 10). Throughout the ages, numerous attempts have been made to throw light on the phenomenon of time. Aristotle, for instance, argued that 'time is the calculable measure of motion with respect to before and aftemess' (Physics IV: 11, 219, bi, quoted in Lippincett et al. 1998: 10). Newton agrees that time flows absolutely and equably, but severs time from its connection to movement. For him, absolute, true, and mathematical time provides an independent objective measure for motion and events occurring in the external world. Kant (1781), on the other hand, insisted that it is meaningless to talk about time outside human consciousness, while Mach (1942) dismissed Newton's idea of absolute, objective time as 'an idle metaphysical conception'. Yet, as every child in school quickly learns, ther e is only one universal absolute time. It flows uniformly and may be divided into equal parts. A quarter of an hour thus becomes the 90 degree arc of the circle travelled by the minute hand on a clock. It is this universal and spatialized conception of time that continues to provide the central epistemological pillar around which our conceptualizations of temporality, movement, process and change have been forged. Such a pervasive view of time is of a more recent origin than most realize.

On 1 October 1884, representatives from 25 major countries convened at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington and came to an agreement on the exact length of the universal day and proceeded to divide the earth into 24 time zones, each zone one hour apart, with Greenwich as the zero meridian. Prior to this important event, a traveller from Washington to San Francisco would have had to reset his watch more than two hundred times as he passed through each of the towns on the way to his destination. The establishment of the World Standard Time, over a century ago, has had an incalculable impact on our everyday understanding of time, temporality and change. Yet, the widespread adoption of standardized clock-time, established and coordinated through fixed time zones, has also led to intensive reflections and speculation on the true nature of time. This has led to distinctions being made between 'private time' and 'public time'.

Against the homogenizing effects of clock-time, novelists, philosophers, psychologists, and, in particular, sociologists began systematically to examine the way individuals experienced different times according to their lifestyles, reference systems and social forms. But it was in the realm of theoretical physics that a revolution in our thinking about time took place during this period of intellectual ferment. Following the results of the Michelson and Morley experiments of 1888, and Hendrick Lorenz's (1895) speculation that perhaps clock-time was dilated by motion, Einstein's theory of relativity (1905/16/52) concluded that all temporal coordinates for measuring time are relative to a specific reference system, thereby implying the reality of a multiplicity of clock-times that are entirely dependent upon individual perspectives and frameworks.

Rediscovering Duration, Consciousness and Lived Time

In Duration and Simultaneity, the French philosopher Henri Bergson (19221999) underscored his conviction that Einstein's theory offered 'not only a new physics, but also a certain new way of thinking' about time: a lived duree that is qualitatively different from Newtonian absolute and objective time, but that is nonetheless singularly real. For Bergson, real universal time is indivisible and has its origin in our consciousness of duration. Bergson insisted that public clock-time is a 'counterfeit' representation of lived experience produced by the conversion of temporal experiences into discrete and measurable instantaneous moments. According to him, real time is inextricably linked with our consciousness and involves the continuous progress of the past that gnaws into the future and swells as it advances, leaving its bite, or the mark of its tooth, on all things. It is this 'ballooning' metaphor of time that is overlooked when we begin to theorize on process and change.

Essai: time, duration and simultaneity; rethinking process and change in organizational analysis

Organization Studies, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Robert Chia

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