Essai: dislocating organizational time

In a recent essay, Cooper and Law (1995: 238) compare the 'distal and proximal modes of thinking in organizational analysis'. They explain that, 'Distal thinking privileges results and outcomes, the "finished" things or objects of thought and action. It privileges the ready-made' (p. 239). Accordingly, when Cooper and Burrell (1988: 93) claim that the 'object of contemporary modes of organizational analysis is the organization as a discrete system which subordinates bureaucratic logic to its own hypostatized needs', they are referring to the prioritization of distal thinking in organizational analysis. From this perspective, organizations may be viewed as 'ready-made' presences (i.e. entities) that are fully available to the researcher's gaze.

Cooper and Law (1995) contrast the distal approach to organizational analysis with what they describe as proximal thinking, 'Proximal thinking views organizations as mediating networks, as circuits of continuous contact and motion - more like assemblages of organizing' (p. 239). Whereas in the distal mode the boundary between organization and environment is crystallized, in the proximal mode it is viewed as an 'intervening medium, a point or line of passage for action, movement' (pp. 239-240). Proximal approaches, therefore, always see organizational systems as precarious and partial rather than stable and whole. However, this emphasis on contingency does not preclude analysis of how organizations emerge as organized systems. A proximal approach to organizational analysis focuses on those forces and agents that 'order relatively stable effects (such as organizations, societies) out of intrinsically partial and precarious processes' (p. 240). In other words, proximal thinking explores the processes responsible for the emergence of organizations as relatively stable systems.

It is this attention to the processes that achieve organization as effect that reconciles proximal and distal thinking. As the distal approach suggests, the organization can be legitimately 'represented' as a unified system, as a presence. However, the ontological status of this presence is grounded in the contingent and precarious proximal processes that constitute organization as a seemingly unified effect or product (p. 264). For this reason, Cooper and Law urge organizational theorists to 'attend to what has been forgotten, and explore the proximal processes that generate the possibility of the distal' (p. 264). One intriguing approach to studying the proximal processes that constitute distal, entity-like organizations involves dislocating linear and teleological views of organizational time. As Cooper and Law explain, researchers' implicit conceptualizations of time largely determine their orientation towards either distal or proximal modes of analysis. Since I am particularly interested in the role of time in distal and proximal thinking, I will briefly sketch their insights before specifying my own approach to these issues.

Cooper and Law (1995: 241) suggest that the distal approach presupposes a linear and teleological view of time. Indeed, they argue that this view of time plays a critical role in the constitution of the organization as a singular and bounded presence. Accordingly, in everyday life we unreflectively approach an 'organization' by retrospectively constructing a unified image out of the heterogeneous experiences and events associated with a primary signifier - for example, a name such as 'Exxon' or 'IBM'. By retroactively ordering events and phenomena within a teleological temporal framework, 'organizational' actions are represented as constituting a singular, bounded, goal-oriented presence (see also Weick 1969). This retroactively intuited image of the organization is then projected into the future in the form of planning, or anticipation.

The linear and teleological view of time that is retroactively imposed on the flux of events presumes a transparent past which can be readily re-presented. Moreover, it presumes that all facets of this past inevitably anticipated present circumstances and understandings. These assumptions are necessary for the (distal) constitution of a singular organizational identity because identity is constructed out of (the apparent) repetition of the same across time. Idiosyncrasy, heterogeneity and possibility are retroactively subordinated to necessity, singularity and homogeneity. Phenomena that cannot be readily assimilated to the over-arching principle(s) of identity are necessarily marginalized as nonsensical or unimportant. In effect, identity requires a denial of difference across time and, therefore, presupposes a past that never really was. Thus, Cooper and Law claim that 'retrospection is really the engineering of time. It is a matter of constructing the future so that it looks like it's always been here' (p. 242).

Given the centrality of time to organizational analysis, a proximal approach that focuses on partial and contingent processes would require an alternative approach to temporality. With this in mind, Cooper and Law suggest that time and tense be viewed as 'products, effects or outcomes' rather than fixed, transparent and necessary. Thus, they suggest that a proximal approach to organizational analysis would defer our commonsense understandings of the ways in which we think about the future and the past, of anticipation and retrospection. By replacing a fixed, necessary and transparent view of temporality with one best described as 'dislocated' (Laclau 1990), organizations would emerge as 'assemblages of organizing' rather than as fixed presences.