@bout time seminar with Daniel Wadhwani

Abstract: While management research has devoted increasing attention to how actors shape temporal structures within organizations and industries, it has typically treated “clock time” – the daily temporal standards that facilitate coordination at the societal level – as exogenous or objective. Yet, such a stance fails to account for the role of managerial actions in the construction of modern clock time and discounts possibilities for organizational actors’ future role in reshaping societal time standards, such as those pertaining to the work week, the digital second, and the environment. In this paper, we examine the construction of clock time using a microhistorical approach focused on a single moment in its much longer development: the introduction of time zones in the United States on November 18, 1883. Despite the notoriety of that single day, our study argues that “clock time” was constructed accretively, as new social, technological, and scientific experiences produced “temporal frictions” with existing temporal structures for actors across multiple fields. Moreover, we theorize four social processes by which actors resolve these temporal frictions by creating new structures of clock time: ideating, mobilizing, materializing, and narrating. The paper contributes to research on temporality by reconceptualizing clock time as objectified rather than objective and by theorizing the role of knowledge, power, materiality, and meaning in how actors socially construct it. We conclude by drawing out the implications for research and practice related to time and temporality in management today.

Brief Biography: Dan Wadhwani is a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business and at Copenhagen Business School. He is a member of the “Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society” Research Environment at CBS. A historian by training, Dan has published in leading journals in management and organization (AMJ, AMR, SMJ, SEJ, OS) as well as in business history. He is former chair of the AOM Management History Division and the former president of the Business History Conference, the leading association of business historians in North America. His research examines entrepreneurship, broadly construed, as a driver of socio-economic change.
We look forward to seeing you there!

Time and date April 8th, 2024,13.30-15.00

Location K. 2.53, Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg

Registration Please register through this link