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Socially Constructed Time and Social Time as a Context

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Time and Temporality in Organisations

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Abstract

In this chapter, the subjective temporality discussed in the previous chapter is placed into a broader social context. Therefore, this chapter discusses intersubjective temporality and the socially constructed nature of time. The chapter highlights the plurality of social times. It covers attempts to align objective and subjective time in organizational settings through temporal structures and temporal work. The temporal orientation of activities questions the dominance of the temporal orientation of human actors. Finally, I discuss a multi-layered social time as a temporal context for all social activities, and the mutual interdependencies of all the layers in their becoming in irreversible time.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Chap. 2 for the prevailing contemporary economic values and a general societal temporal focus, and Chap. 3 for a discussion of temporal depth.

  2. 2.

    Also called ‘the sociology of anticipations’ or ‘expectation studies’ (Sovacool & Hess, 2017: 723).

  3. 3.

    The Soviet occupation in Estonia took place in years 1940-1941 and 1944-1991.

  4. 4.

    For example, Zerubavel (1987) describes macro-time in a way that in Tateo’s time-as-a-context model would classify as eso-time. Therefore, exact categories and the distinctions between them could be fluid and arbitrary, and it is important to pay close attention to how different categories are defined by different authors.

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  1. Estonian Business School, Tallinn, Estonia

    Kätlin Pulk

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Pulk, K. (2022). Socially Constructed Time and Social Time as a Context. In: Time and Temporality in Organisations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90696-2_5

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