Centre for Organization and Time (COT)
The Centre for Organization and Time (COT) explores how organizational actors experience and enact time — and how time, in turn, shapes organizations and society.
About (Panel content)
About
At the Centre for Organization and Time (COT) at Copenhagen Business School, we draw on processual, relational, and critical perspectives from social sciences and humanities to better understand how organizational actors enact their time and how these enactments shape them.
Our temporal focus applies to several areas of research, teaching, and engagement, including organization theory, project studies, entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation, sustainability, business history, critical time studies, accounting, strategy, and leadership.
By developing more dynamic and expansive models of time, we aim to understand not only how organizations function but also how they contribute to shaping societies.
The centre addresses questions such as:
- How do actors enact and experience near and distant pasts and distant futures in the present?
- How do actors connect multiple temporalities in and through time?
- How does temporary organizing enable transformations of business and societies?
- How do actors connect pasts and futures through projects?
We are an intellectually curious, engaged, and generative group, committed to exploring the interplay between time and organization. COT was founded in 2017 to advance a research agenda on time and temporality in organization and management studies. Building on a tradition of process ontology, the centre has developed into a vibrant research environment that brings together diverse backgrounds, all connected by a shared curiosity about time and temporality, how it is shaped, and how it in turn shapes organizations and society.
Alongside our internal COT research workshops, where we discuss our ongoing research, we host activities for both regional and international research communities. These include a CBS-wide reading group, where we read and discuss classic and contemporary texts and draw inspiration from different disciplines, and our @bout Time, a hybrid seminar series that hosts distinguished scholars to discuss their perspectives and work in light of research on organization and time, open to our wider international network.
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COT Events
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Activities (Panel content)
New podcast (in Danish) with Majken Schultz
Klimamål og net zero med Majken Schultz (Podcastserie: Rig på viden) I denne episode af Rig på Viden har podcast vært André Thormann besøg af professor ved CBS og chair i Carlsbergfondet, Majken Schultz.
Sammen med en gruppe forskere har Majken undersøgt, hvordan virksomheder arbejder med klimamål i praksis: Hvad kendetegner de virksomheder, der sætter ambitiøse mål? Og endnu vigtigere – hvilke konkrete handlinger sætter de i gang for faktisk at nå dem, i stedet for at udskyde omstillingen?
Vi taler om ledelse, ansvar og om at komme i gang i tide – før klimamålene blot bliver flotte formuleringer i en strategi.
Collaboration and Outreach
Podcasts
- Only in Danish: Podcast med Majken Schultz - Klimamål og net zero med Majken Schultz - Rig på Viden
- Only in Danish: Ny podcast med Majken Schultz — Få det til at ske
- Discussion of the paper: Time as a Research Lens: A Conceptual Review and Research Agenda with Tor Hernes and Blagoy Blagoev — Organized by Practice Process Reading Group
People (Panel content)
COT Associates
COT Associates
Anne Reff Pedersen, Professor
Anthony Hussenot, Professor at Université Côte d’Azur Nice.
Christina Luethy, Postdoc at Lund University.
Christina Lubinski, Professor
Dan Wadhwani, Fletcher Jones Professor of Entrepreneurship at University of the Pacific and professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Daniel Nyberg, Director PRME & Professor, University of Queensland Business School, Australia
Haridimos Tsoukas, Professor at University of Cyprus and Warwick Business School, UK.
Henrik Koll, Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark.
Iben Sandal Stjerne, Assistant Professor at Technical University of Denmark.
Jane Bjørn Vedel, Associate Professor
Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
Joanna Karmowska, Senior Lecturer, Oxford Brookes University.
Juliane Reinecke, Professor, Said Business School, UK
Mie Plotnikof, Associate Professor at Aarhus University
Raghu Garud, Professor, Smeal College of Business, Penn State University, US
Roy Suddaby, Professor Winspear Chair of Organization Theory at University of Victoria, Canada.
Shaz Ansari, Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Organization at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
Simon Grondin, Professor at École de Psychologie at Université Laval (Québec, Canada).
Stine Grodal, Associate Professor at Northeastern University D'amore-McKim School.
Tima Bansal, Professor, Ivey Business School, Canada
Research (Panel content)
Ongoing research projects
The Politics of Time – Navigating Conflicting Imaginaries
The project on politics of time with Miriam Feuls and Tobias Olofsson, funded by the DFF Inge Lehmann programme, examines how and when future imaginaries become dominant in society and shape collective action toward climate change solutions.
EcoCorp: Reconciling Ecosystem-Based and Corporate Management Across Scales (VELUX Foundation, 2025-2028)
The EcoCorp project with Lise Justesen and Jonathan Feddersen, funded by the Velux Foundation, explores how biodiversity can be integrated into offshore wind energy using existing planning tools in collaboration with CBS, WWF, and DTU.
Sexual Transgressions in Aid: Humanitarian Perceptions and Responses (STAid)
The STAid project explores how humanitarian actors perceive and respond to sexual transgressions. Working with two humanitarian organizations, we focus on the plurality of perspectives about what ‘counts’ as transgressive behavior. We focus on organizational concepts of responsibility; accounts of unsafe spaces by international aid workers; and local perceptions of transgressions.
VELUX-Fonden - Det intuitive møde. Eksistens og etik i Bindeleddets ekspanderende arbejde med unge
With Camilla Sløk, Jacob Dahl Rendtorff and Alexander Bruggisser
01/09/2024 → 01/09/2028
Previous Research Projects
Making Distant Futures Actionable: Innovating for a Net Zero Future
This 2022-2025 project with Majken Schultz, Tor Hernes, Miriam Feuls, Jonathan Feddersen and Sunny Mosangzi Xu, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, studied ongoing projects in Danish companies in different industries to understand how large companies are working toward distant climate goals in the present.
Temporality of Food Innovations
This 2019-2022 project with Tor Hernes, Silviya Svejenova, Mie Plotnikof, Iben Stjerne and Miriam Feuls, funded by the Velux Foundation, explored how actors draw on the past while imagining new futures. Focusing on the Danish food sector, we studied how tradition and innovation interplay across companies, events, and public institutions to reshape the meaning and role of food in society.