961296

Course

Perspectives on Time and Organization

Faculty

Christina Lubinski, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS
Ester Barinaga, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS
Rasmus Johnsen, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS
Tor Hernes, Department of Organization, CBS
Majken Schultz, Department of Organization, CBS
Silviya Svejenova Velikova, Department of Organization, CBS
R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific

Course Coordinator

Christina Lubinski and Tor Hernes

Prerequisites

PhD students only.

Participants will submit a working paper for discussion. For course participation and submission of working paper a total of 5 ECTS will be awarded.

Deadline for submission of the working paper is 22 May 2018.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that students attend the whole course.

Aim

Many of the major challenges in society are crucially related to time. The majority of these challenges are created by organizations and the particular ways in which they enact their time. For example, being too focused on the present and the short-term may come in the way of staking out longer-term agendas; being overly focused on “linear time” or clock-time may create obstacles to making important changes.

A focus on time and temporality is also a way for reflecting on, experimenting with, and implementing novel and durable solutions. Currently, a new wave of scholarship is increasingly focusing on the issue of time and temporality in organizations, which has been neglected in the literature for some time. This course discusses both past developments of the treatment of time and temporality in organization studies and the most up-to-date discussion and theories. It also suggests new ways of integrating sociological, political and historical perspectives into the debate, opening up the field for new interdisciplinary research questions.

A viable theory of time needs first and foremost to explain how longer-term benefits and threats may become real agendas in the present and future, including their evolutionary developments and political power struggles. For example, a key question could be how longer-term impacts, such as demographics, climate, market and technology changes are enacted in the present by actors. The PhD course addresses such questions by offering reflection, theories, and advice on temporal construction in organizational life from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Grounded in organizational theory, process philosophy, political science, and history, the course will develop new perspectives that account for actors’ temporalities; i.e. their active configuration of present, past, and future. The course develops students’ understanding on how strategies, narratives and histories are brought into the present to actively shape actors’ sense of their own time, and that of other actors. The PhD course will develop frameworks to better understand how actors’ time constructions affect every-day organizational life, strategic decision-making and legitimation processes. It considers organizational actors as diverse as management teams, projects, formal organizations, start-ups, public institutions, and crowds for analysis. Developing an active view of time will be accompanied by elaborating novel ways of empirically researching actors in time, including how they evoke memory, select patterns of events, and anticipate their futures, which may give inspiration to PhD students for their project design.

We invite PhD students with research projects that relate to the issue of time and temporality, be it that time figures as an underlying dimension of the project design, appears in the methods applied, or comes up in the empirical data. Projects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational developments often pay implicit or explicit attention to time and the course is designed to helps students be more assertive about their treatment of time and temporality and make the most of recent waves of scholarship in organization and management studies, which explicitly address issues of time and incorporate perspectives from history, politics, sociology and philosophy.

Course content

This PhD seminar will provide an introduction to the varieties of temporality in organizations. Day 1 will be devoted to theorizing on organizational time, reflecting selected past research debates with great impact as well as the most current scholarly debates on the issue. Students will discuss and contrast approaches from philosophy, history and organization studies, emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses as well as potential for cross-fertilizations. Day 2 will focus on the organizational uses of the past and time, offering an alternative methodological approach and related toolbox to approach time questions in scholarly works. Day 3 and 4 will be devoted to the development of students’ research projects, with a special focus on their empirical and analytical strategies for dealing with time. The final Day 5 will provide a wrap-up and discussion on ways ahead for the field.

Day 1, Theorizing Organizational Time, will examine how to develop an altogether different lens on time and organizations. Using theories from organization studies, process philosophy, political sciences and history, students will consider limitations and opportunities of considering ways to include time in their research. They will be introduced to different traditions of thinking about time and the current state-of-the-art of research in the field.

Day 2, Organizational and Entrepreneurial Uses of History, will focus on how organizations make use of their past and historicize authentically. We will discuss when and why organizations reinvent resources, traditions and/or innovations and how they project them into the future to imagine novel societies. This imagination targeted at the future often breaks with conventions and triggers political resistance. We will explore frameworks that allow systematic analysis of how to use the past strategically and entrepreneurially, pointing to analogues in the past to legitimize claims for the future.

Day 3 and 4, Project Work: Empirical Designs and Project Work II: Analytical Designs, will be devoted to discussion and feedback on student projects. The days will be organized as a series of roundtables and will focus on research design, empirical strategies and analysis.

Day 5, Wrap up: New Perspectives on Time and Organization, will provide a wrap up of the previous days and debate roads ahead for this line of scholarly research. It will include a discussion on publication strategies and signal promising directions for future research and controversial discussions in the field, to which PhD students may fruitfully contribute in their projects.

Teaching style

The course is taught in lectures, small group and plenary discussions and exercises.

Lecture plan

Days	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5
Theme	Theorizing Organizational Time	Organizational and Entrepreneurial Uses of History	Project Work I: Empirical Designs	Project Work II: Analytical Designs	New Perspectives on Time and Organization
Faculty 1	Tor Hernes	Christina Lubinski	Ester Barinaga	Dan Wadhwani	Rasmus Johnsen
Disciplinary background	Process Philosophy	History and Entrepreneurship	Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship	History and Strategy	Philosophy and Management
Faculty 2	Dan Wadhwani	Majken Schultz	Silviya Svejenova Velikova	Christina Lubinski	Tbd
Disciplinary background	History and Strategy	Organization Studies	Esthetics and Organization	History and Entrepreneurship	Tba
Topics	- sample different approaches to time and organization - compare theories from organization studies, process philosophy, political sciences and history - limitations and opportunities of ways to include time in their research - introduction to different traditions of thinking about time and the current state-of-the-art of research in the field	- how organizations make use of their past and historicize authentically - discussion about when and why organizations reinvent resources, traditions and/or innovations (and how to research them) - discussion about how organizations project into the future to imagine novel societies - issue of political resistance when breaking conventions, including frameworks that allow to systematically analyze uses of the past	- based on PhD students' own projects: explore new empirical strategies to integrate time systematically in different projects - discuss opportunities and limitations of such approaches - address students' questions about time questions in their projects - debate empirical designs of successful projects in the literature reflecting the new sensitivity towards time	- based on PhD students' own projects: explore analytical strategies to research with a specific focus on time - consider opportunities and limitations of such approaches - sample successful examples of analytical approaches in existing research with sensitivity to time - address students' questions and concerns in their own projects	- roads ahead for research in time and organizations - critical reflection on previous four days: where are the voids? Which innovative strategies could move the field forward?

Learning objectives

The PhD seminar will be designed to allow participants to:

1. Understand and engage with new approaches to time and temporal constructions in organizational life; see how they compare to other types of ways of studying management and organizations.

2. Understand the range of ways in which time-sensitive methods and perspectives can be engaged, including the epistemological assumptions involved in these choices and their implications for the types of research questions that can be addressed.

3. Explore and contrast different disciplinary traditions with an interest in time and temporality questions, including management, organization studies, history, entrepreneurship, political sciences and philosophy.

4. Apply these methodological issues and choices to their own research interests and determine strengths and weaknesses of such approaches. Understand the opportunities of this novel and heatedly debated field of research, including (but not limited to) how to make research contributions in journal articles.

Exam

N/A

Other

Start date

11/06/2018

End date

15/06/2018

Level

PhD

ECTS

Language

English

Course Literature

Anteby, Michel, and Virág Molnár. "Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History." Academy of Management Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 515-40.Hatch, Mary Jo, and Majken Schultz. "Toward a Theory of Using History Authentically." Administrative Science Quarterly (forthcoming).Hernes, Tor. A Process Theory of Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.Maclean, Mairi, Charles Harvey, and Stewart Clegg. "Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies." Academy of Management Review 41, no. 4 (2016): 609-32.Schultz, Majken, and Tor Hernes. "A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity." Organization Science 24, no. 1 (2013): 1-21.Stjerne, I. S. , and S. Svejenova. "Connecting Temporary and Permanent Organizing: Tensions and Boundary Work in a Series of Film Projects." Organization Studies (forthcoming).Suddaby, Roy, William M. Foster, and Chris Quinn Trank. "Rhetorical History as a Source of Competitive Advantage." Advances in Strategic Management 27 (2010): 147-73.Wadhwani, R. Daniel, and Marcelo Bucheli. "The Future of the Past in Management and Organizational Studies." In Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods, edited by Marcelo Bucheli and R. Daniel Wadhwani, 3-30. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Wadhwani, R. Daniel, and Christina Lubinski. "Reinventing Entrepreneurial History." Business History Review (forthcoming).

Fee

DKK 6,500 (covers the course, coffee/tea, lunch and one dinner)

Minimum number of participants

Maximum number of participants

Location

Copenhagen Business School
Kilen 14 A
2000 Frederiksberg
Room: K3.41 (3rd floor)

Contact information

The PhD Support
Katja Høeg Tingleff
Tel.: +45 38 15 28 39
E-mail: kht.research@cbs.dk

Registration deadline

30/04/2018

Please note that your registration is binding after the registration deadline.

In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have places, the registrations will be prioritized in the following order: Students from Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS), students from other CBS PhD schools, students from other institutions than CBS.

Top