designing the future perfect: developing a temporal understanding of the intentionality and...

Córais Faisnéise BainistíochtaManagement Information Systems

Designing the Future Perfect: Developing a temporal understanding of the intentionality and generativity of organisational practices

Dr Niamh O Riordan Lecturer in Information Systems and OrganisationUniversity College Dublin

Quadrangular Conference14th September, 2015

Agenda

• A history of the present• And a dual core focus• An ulterior motive• A beginning• A middle• An end, an ending

Management Information Systems Córais Faisnéise Bainistíochta

A history of the present


(Metaphysics of) Cyberspace

(Nature of) Technology

(Temporality of) Being

And the end and the beginning were always thereBefore the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now

- T.S. Eliot

And a dual core focus

Can an instantaneous cube exist?

… and Temporality

chronosfungible v epochal time

polychronicityreal time

past - present - future

temporal schematavelocitykairos

chronometry future orientation

synchronisationmulti-taskingtime pressure

linear v iterative

duration

pluritemporalism

timelinessmonochronicity

rhythms

sociotemporalityabsolute v relative

objective v subjective

time-span of discretion

temporal decision-making biasesentrainment

(digitally mediated) Being… Do avatars dream of electric sheep?

know

ing in

prac

tice

embodiment

materiality

perfo

rmati

vity

process orientedintra-action

(auto)ethnographicgenerativity

identity

Being-in-

the-(virtual)

world

procedural

schemata


An ulterior motive

• SM research focuses on the processual, relational and emergentist entanglement of matter and meaning

• The sociomatierality proposed by Orlikowski and Scott (2008) is based on Barad’s (1998, 2003, 2007) agential realism which

“makes a distinctive move away from seeing actors and objects as primarily self-contained entities that influence each other...away from discrete entities of people and technology...to composite and shifting assemblages” (Orlikowski and Scott 2008, p. 455)

• I really like this idea of intra-action over inter-action– But there is a need to develop new ways to express AR arguments– And there is a big danger we’ll fall into the Tempo Trap

• This work is about distinguishing and recommending a SM view of temporality that’s based on the axis of intention over the axis of succession


Intra-action over inter-action!

A beginning

• Time: a non-spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future - Ancona et al, 2001, p. 513

• The temporality of human life differs from the temporality of other beings or objects in that we direct ourselves toward intended futures according to our perception of things of the present moment and yet are bound by the past and our recollection of it (Bluedorn, 2002)– Our capacity to unravel the enigma of time remains limited because

our consciousness moves along it (Wells, 1895, p. 6): its greatest paradox is that even as the past is gone and the future yet to come, they both exist in the present moment for us

– Conceptualisations of time in organisational studies, and in the natural/social sciences more generally, have long been dominated by a narrower view of time, commonly described as objective time, external time, linear time or clock time even though organisational researchers are fundamentally interested in better understanding the intentful interactions of organisational actors


Organisational theorists rarely question or make explicit the casual logics used to build theories which frequently assume that for A to have caused B, A must have occurred prior to B

A middle


The temporality of Being, which Jacques (1988) describes as the temporal axis of succession, relates time to the sense of passing time expressed in successive readings of the clock.

This aspect of time is inherited from Parmenides, who held that things are; Being is and will remain so; all can be known and all is certain. It has an affinity with the natural sciences and is exclusively associated with our ideas of earlier and later, before and after, temporal discontinuity and atomism, constancy and permanence (Jaques, 1988, p. xii).

The temporality of Becoming, which Jaques (1988) describes as the temporal axis of intention, relates time to the experience of purposive, intentional, goal-directed behaviour and is concerned with the flux time in which future, present and past do seem to flow from one to the other (Jaques, 1988, p. 13).

This aspect of time is inherited from Heraclitus, who held that all is f lowing, changing, transforming, never still, opposite becoming opposite, the only reality being the reality of Becoming itself. It has an affinity with the social sciences and is exclusively associated with our ideas of past, preesnt and future, passage and direction, flux and change, durée and continuity (Jaques, 1988, p. xii)


An end, an ending…

• The world of everyday life “has its own standard time which is intersubjectively available” (Berger and Luckmann, 1966, p. 40) and practices exist “in the temporal dimension of the urgency of engagement” and cannot survive in the reversible universe of rules and formal logic” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 63)

• Researchers are fundamentally interested in better understanding the intentful interactions of organisational actors but even though time directly impacts the what, how, and why elements of a theory (George and Jones, 2000, p. 658), science has a time which is not that of practice (Bordieu, 1977, p. 9)

• The past, present and future are always with us: we bring our background to new situations and our actions are based on future imaginings or projections (Bergson). In this sense at least, the future is the source of the past: ‘we are [what] we were, and we will be what we receive and appropriate from what we were’… my past gets its meaning from me only from my projection of a future (Heidegger according to Polt, 1999, p. 96).

So how do we design the Future Perfect?Management Information Systems Córais Faisnéise Bainistíochta

Management Information Systems Córais Faisnéise BainistíochtaManagement Information Systems Córais Faisnéise Bainistíochta

The Philosophy of Time

http://youtu.be/o4xVOi8cHt0

A theory, B theory and McTaggary’s Paradox

http://youtu.be/iB7xZR-1L5M

The reversibility of time

http://youtu.be/4XybFYCt3OY