A newer wave of work has stepped back from this approachand sought to explain how multiple motivational “vectors” figure in the cre-ation of common pool resources online – an approach that underscores a coreadvantage of peer production in its capacity to enable action without requir-ing translation into a system of formalized, extrinsic, carrots and sticks.

Future workcan also begin to address questions of whether, how, and why peer produc-tion systems have transformed some existing organizational fields more pro-foundly than others. An empirically-informed understanding of when andwhere organizational practices drawn from peer production provide efficientand equitable means to produce, disseminate, and access information can pro-vide social impact beyond the insights available through the study of any in-dividual community

By structuring design changes as exper-iments, these studies make credible causal claims about the relationship oforganizational structure and project outcomes that previous work struggledto establish. By intervening in real communities, these efforts achieve a levelof external validity that lab-based experiments cannot

Similar cross-organization studies in other areas of peer production, orstudies comparing across differenttypesof peer production, have remainedchallenging and rare. One difficulty with comparative work across organiza-tions, in general, is designing research capable of supporting inference intothe causes of organizational success and failure

Although some of the earliest theories of the organization of peer pro-duction celebrated the phenomena as non-hierarchical, more recent work hasquestioned both the putative lack of hierarchy and its purported benefits (e.g.,Kreiss et al., 2011).

More recent work on organizational aspects of peer production has begunto question the “stylized facts” that prevailed in earlier research.

This research built on earlier work showing that contrib-utors to bulletin boards, newsgroups, forums, and related systems adopteddurable “social roles” through their patterns of contribution (e.g., Fisher et al.,2006) – an approach that was subsequently applied to Wikipedia by Welseret al. (2011) and McDonald et al. (2011)

A large body of descriptive work has also sought to characterize organi-zational dimensions of Wikipedia and the practices of its contributors.

Much of the earliest empirical research inductively sought to describe thestructure and organization of FLOSS communities

Other foundational accounts, like Moglen (1999) and Weber (2004),attended to the emergence of informal hierarchies and governance arrange-ments within communities.

Peer productioncould, Benkler argued, outperform traditional organizational forms underconditions of widespread access to networked communications technologies,a multitude of motivations driving contributions, and non-rival informationcapable of being broken down into granular, modular, and easy-to-integrate

Initial scholarship on the organization of peer production emphasized the-oretical distinctions between peer production, bureaucracy, and transactioncost explanations of firms and markets.

Indeed, peer production com-munities perform all of the “classical” organizational functions like coordina-tion, division of labor, recruitment, training, norm creation and enforcement,conflict resolution, and boundary maintenance – but do so in the absence ofmany of the institutions associated with more traditional organizations.

In the rest of this chapter, we describe the development of the academicliterature on peer production and collective intelligence in three areas – or-ganization, motivation, and quality. In each area, we introducefoundationalworkconsisting primarily of earlier scholarship that sought to describe peerproduction and establish its legitimacy. Subsequently, we characterize work,usually more recent, that seeks to pursuenew directionsand to derive morenuanced analytical insights. Because FLOSS and Wikipedia have generatedthe majority of the peer production research to date, we focus on researchanalyzing those efforts. For each theoretical area, we briefly synthesize bothfoundational work and new directions and describe some of the challenges forfuture scholarship. Neither our themes nor our periodization are intended toencompass the complete literature on peer production. Instead, they reflectcore areas of research that speak most directly to the literature on collectiveintelligence and locate peer production within that broader phenomenon. Weconclude with a discussion of several issues that traverse our themes and impli-cations of peer production scholarship for research on collective intelligencemore broadly.

Although peer production is central to social scientific and legal researchon collective intelligence, not all examples of collective intelligence created inonline systems are peer production. First, (1) collective intelligence can in-volve centralized control over goal-setting and execution of tasks.

Peer production is the most significant organizational in-novation that has emerged from Internet-mediated social practice, among themost visible and important examples of collective intelligence, and a centraltheoretical frame used by social scientists and legal scholars of collective intel-ligence.

Following Benkler (2013), we define peer produc-tion as a form of open creation and sharing performed by groups online that:set and execute goals in a decentralized manner; harness a diverse range ofparticipant motivations, particularly non-monetary motivations; and sepa-rate governance and management relations from exclusive forms of propertyand relational contracts (i.e., projects are governed as open commons or com-mon property regimes and organizational governance utilizes combinationsof participatory, meritocratic and charismatic, rather than proprietary or con-

Consistent with this exam-ple, foundational social scientific research relevant to understanding collec-tive intelligence has focused on three central concerns: (1) explaining the or-ganization and governance of decentralized projects, (2) understanding themotivation of contributors in the absence of financial incentives or coerciveobligations, and (3) evaluating the quality of the products generated throughcollective intelligence systems.

Historically,researchers in diverse fields such as communication, sociology, law, and eco-nomics have argued that effective human systems organize people through acombination of hierarchical structures (e.g., bureaucracies), completely dis-tributed coordination mechanisms (e.g., markets), and social institutions ofvarious kinds (e.g., cultural norms). However, the rise of networked systemsand online platforms for collective intelligence has upended many of the as-sumptions and findings from this earlier research.

mporal features. We have then to consider how organizational participants are affected by situations containing temporal features, but also how these actors shape, by their behavior and beliefs, local context according to their needs.

To this extent, we have made tremendous advancements but we are still lacking reliable findings of the consistency and magnitude of the time effects at each level of an organization and on individuals. Perhaps, the last progresses that drawn upon the sructuration theory (Gomez, 2009; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Wanda J. Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015; Rowell, Gustafsson, & Clemente, 2016) has suffered the same faith of being judged as too notional and not providing enough guidance on how to conduct empirical studies based on this conception.

empirical literature on organizational time has extended research on time as a control variable of boundary condition (George & Jones, 2000; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013)

Events have a time span; actions have a time frame that highlights the urgency of (continuously) deepening our knowledge of time as a key component of organizations (Bleijenbergh, Gremmen, & Peters, 2016). In

But time is a complex and a sensitive topic in reason to the different vantage points; and its meaning often tends to be taken for granted and given commonsense or self-evident attributions (Sahay, 1997).

While Activity Theory provides a useful lens for understanding users’ work practices and a language for communicating models of users’ behavior, there are some aspects of work practice that have been shown to be critical for knowledge work but are not captured in the Activity Theory framework. For example, knowledge workers have been shown to rely on the organization of information used in ongoing activities to accomplish their work, particularly when the value or role of that information has not yet been fully determined (Kidd, 1994; Malone, 1983; Mynatt, 1999). Activity Theory alludes to the fact that tools reflect the history of their use, but does not place a strong emphasis on this critical component of knowledge work.

s a means for coordinating action among groups of users (e.g., Bardram, 2005, this volume)

The hierarchical structure of the Boer et al. adaptation of the Activity Theory model can help to reconcile the differences in granularity and the difficulties of supporting collaboration identified in our work; future activity-centered user interfaces might take advantage of the zoomable user interface paradigm or feature control over the level of detail (LOD) represented in the interface to more accurately reflect the depth at which a given user conceptualizes their own tasks or the tasks of their colleagues.

Activity Theory casts a wide but well-defined net around the multifaceted nature of activity, suggesting that the user’s colleagues and the object of the activity are of the utmost importance, but that the tools, social rules, and roles of collaborators within the community must also be reflected back to the user as critical components of that activity. The idea that components of activity reflect their history of use through time suggest several ways for activity-centered systems to support a dynamic working landscape; for example, they might capture past activities in an archive for quick—and potentially automated—reference during related tasks in the future, and that the tools used in previous and ongoing activities (e.g., documents and information resources) both be available at all times and tagged with meta-information about how they have been used in the past

Engeström (1987) provides a classic visualization summarizing the structure of an activity (figure 3). This model is based around three mutual relationships: that between the actor (subject) and the community (other actors involved), that between subject and the object (in the sense of objective) of the activity, and that between the object and the community. These mutual relationships are mediated by the other components of activity.

Activity Theory is described both as a guiding framework for analyzing observations of work practice and a language for communicating those findings within the community of practitioners (Halverson, 2001).

Nardi (1996) argues that one of the inherent strengths of Activity Theory is in its ability to capture the idea of context in user models for HCI, a notion that is gaining momentum particularly with respect to the ubiquitous computing paradigm and as its own design movement, so-called activity-centered design (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003). The world that Gay and Hembrooke envision relies upon design that is not user-centered (which is currently the dominant view in the HCI community) but activity-centered, since Activity Theory provides the right “orientation” for future classes of interactions mediated by ubiquitous computing devices.

Besides the fact that an activity is situated in a network of influencing activity systems, it is also situated in time....In order to understand the activity system under investigation, one therefore has to reveal its temporal interconnectedness....Rather than analyzing an activity system as a static picture of reality, the developments and tensions within the activity system need to be

However, Gay and Hembrooke point out a weakness in the original formulation of Activity Theory: “The model of activity theory...has traditionally been understood as a synchronic, point-in-time depiction of an activity. It does not depict the transformational and developmental processes that provide the focus of much recent activity theory research” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003).

In their well-known “activity checklist,” Kaptelinin, Nardi, and Macaulay (1999) identified five basic principles of Activity Theory: 1.Hierarchical structure of activity In Activity Theory, the unit of analysis is an activity which is directed at an objectthat motivates the activity. Activities are composed of conscious, goal-directed actions; different actions may be taken to complete any given goal. Actions are implemented through automatic operations, which do not have goals of their own. This hierarchical structure is dynamic and can change throughout the life of an activity. 2.Object-orientedness Activity Theory holds that humans exist in an broadly-defined objective reality, that is, the things around us have properties that are objective both to the natural sciences and society and culture. 3.Internalization/externalization Activity Theory considers both internal and external actions and holds that the two are tightly interrelated. Internalization is the process of transforming an external process into an internal one for the purposes of planning or simulating an action without affecting the world. Externalization transforms internal actions into external ones and is often used to resolve failures of internal actions and to coordinate actions among independent agents. 4.Mediation A central tenet of Activity Theory is that activity is mediated by tools, and that these tools are created and transformed over the course of the activity so that the culture and history of the activity becomes embedded in the tools. Vygotsky’s definition of tool is very broad; one of the tools he was most interested in was language. 5.Development Activity Theory relies upon development as one of its primary research methodologies; that is, “experiments” often include consist of a subject’s participation in an activity and observation of developmental changes in the subject over the course of the activity. Ethnographic methods that identify the cultural and historical roots of activity are also frequently used.

Activity Theory places a strong focus on the mediating role of tools and social practices in the service of accomplishing goals

In particular, the fact that most users are only now beginning to experience the ubicomp vision and integrate this new, unique class of technology into their work practices suggests that another change in focus may be on the horizon: “[T]he shift from user-centered design to context-based design corresponds with recent developments in pervasive, ubiquitous computing networks and in the appliances that connect with them, which are radically changing our relationships with personal computing devices” (Gay & Hembrooke, 2003)

Over the last decade, the focus of the HCI community began to shift away from the quantitative evaluation of user interfaces based on cognitive models and towards more ecologically informed techniques, including contextual and participatory design (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998; Kyng, 1994). This “user-centered design” movement foregrounded the social context of technology use and incorporated user feedback and participation throughout the design process.

Historically, HCI adopted and adapted knowledge, processes and techniques from artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and cognitive psychology in service of understanding and modeling user behavior, and applied those findings to the creation of new interfaces and technologies through design practice. As a result of this lineage, many of the theories and techniques used in HCI to model users have exhibited a markedly cognitive, “agents as information processors” flavor. As a result, much of the research literature on user modeling in HCI has been based on the Model Human Processor (Card, Moran & Newell, 1983), which has its roots in the physical symbol system hypothesis.

Activities also span place; that is, it is common for work to take place outside of the immediate office environment. However, current office technologies sometimes present a very different view of information across different physical and virtual settings.

The idea that activities may exist at different levels of granularity is not a new one. Boer, van Baalen & Kumar (2002) provide a model explaining how an activity at one level of analysis may be modeled as an action—a component of an activity—at another. This holds true for individual users, as in the example provided above, but is even more pronounced when a single activity is viewed from multiple participants’ perspectives.

Additionally, activities need to be represented in such a way that their contents can be shared, with the caveats that individual participants in an activity may have very different perceptions of the activity, they may bring different resources to play over the course of the activity, and, particularly for large activities in which many individual users participate, users themselves may come and go over the life of the activity.

Recognizing the mediating role of the digital work environment in enabling users to meaningfully collaborate is a critical step to ensuring the success of these systems.

User studies and intuition both suggest that the activities that a knowledge worker engages in change—sometimes dramatically—over time. Projects and milestones come and go, and the tools and information resources used within an activity often change over time as well. Furthermore, activities completed in the past and their outcomes often impact activities in the present, and ongoing activities will, in turn, affect activities that will be undertaken in the future. Capturing activity over the course of time has long been a problem for desktop computing.

Supporting the multifaceted aspects of activity in a ubicomp environment becomes a much more complex proposition. If activity is to be used as a unifying organizational structure across a wide variety of devices such as traditional desktop and laptop computers, PDAs, mobile telephones, personal-server style devices (Want et al., 2002), shared public displays, etc., then those devices must all be able to share a common set of activity representations and use those representations as the organizational cornerstone for the user experience they provide. Additionally, the activity representations must be versatile enough to encompass the kinds of work for which each of these kinds of devices are used

The challenges exist due in large part to the inherent complexity of human activity, the technical affordances of the computing tools used in work practice, and the nature of (and culture surrounding) knowledge work.

knowledge workers—business professionals who interpret and transform information (Drucker, 1973).

We describe five challenges for matching computation to activity. These are: •Activities are multifaceted, involving a heterogeneous collection of work artifacts; •Activities are dynamic, emphasizing the continuation and evolution of work artifacts in contrast to closure and archiving; •Activities are collaborative, in the creation, communication, and dissemination of work artifacts; •Activities exist at different levels of granularity, due to varying durations, complexity and ownership; and •Activities exist across places, including physical boundaries, virtual boundaries of information security and access, and fixed and mobile settings.

In order to endow the things we perceive with meaning, we normally ignore their uniqueness and regard them as typical mem-bers of a particular class of objects (a relative, a present), acts (an apology, a crime), or events (a game, a conference).

Nature has been incorporated into social theorizing only in as far as it either has become an object to which meaning is attributed and which hence figures as part of human reflexivity, as object met with emotions or attitudes; or, it is seen as an object of transformation by those forces which act upon it: economic forces, but foremost forces emanating from science and technology. The natural environment, including the biosphere and a multitude of environmental risks which have come to the fore today, negate clear-cut boundaries between the effects of human intervention, and hence agency, and synergistic processes which are 'natural' but still a result of human interaction with the environment. Time, it has been emphasized, is not only embedded in symbolic meaning or intersubjective social relations but also in artifacts, in natural and in culturally made ones. Likewise, the ongoing transformation and endangering of the natural environment is performed by processes which are chemical and atmospheric, biological and physical. But they all interact with social processes tied to energy production and use, modes of food production and land utilization, demographic pressures and possible interferences through use of tech-nology.

This means also that the predominantly linear time is comp-lemented by greater awareness of cyclical times and temporal routines which are overlapping each other.

Social identities have increasing difficulty in being construed in terms of stable social attributes in a highly mobile -both socially and geographically - society. They will have to rely on other, temporal dimensions, in what are becoming increasingly precari-ous, if not completely contingent, identities in constant need of redefi-nition. One's 'own', proper time situated in a momentous present which is extended on the societal level in order to accommodate the pressing overload of problems, choices and strategies, becomes a central value for the individual as well as a characteristic of the societal system (Nowotny, 1989a)

Major societal transformations are linked to information and communication technologies, giving rise to processes of growing global interdependence. They in turn generate the approxi-mation of coevalness, the illusion of simultaneity by being able to link instantly people and places around the globe. Many other processes are also accelerated. Speed and mobility are thus gaining in momentum, leading in turn to further speeding up processes that interlink the move-ment of people, information, ideas and goods.

ut it will also have to come to terms with confronting 'the Other' (Fabian, 1983), with 'the curious asymmetry' still prevailing as a result of advanced industrial societies receiving a mainly endogenous and synchronic analytic treatment, while 'developing' societies are often seen in exogenous, diachronic terms. Study of 'Time and the Other' presupposes, often implicitly, that the Other lives in another time, or at least on a different time-scale. And indeed, when looking at the integrative but also potentially divisive 'timing' facilitated by modern communication and information-processing technology, is it not correct to say that new divisions, on a temporal scale, are being created between those who have access to such devices and those who do not? Is not one part of humanity, despite globalization, in danger of being left behind, in a somewhat anachronistic age?

only structural functional theory, but all postfunctionalist 'successor' theories for their lack in taking up 'substantive' temporal issues, he was also pleading from the selective point of view of Third World countries for the exploration of theoretically possible alternatives or, to put it into other words, the delineation of what in the experience of western and non-western societies so far is universally valid and yet historically restric-ted. Such questions touch the very essence of the process of moderniz-ation. They evoke images of a closed past and an open or no longer so open future, of structures of collective memory as well as shifting collec-tive and individual identities of people who are increasingly drawn into the processes of world-wide integration and globalization. Anthropologi-cal accounts are extremely rich in different time reckoning modes and systems, in the pluritemporalism that prevailed in pre-industrialized societies. The theory of historical time - or times - both from a western and non-western point of view still has to be written. There exists already an impressive corpus of writings analysing the rise of the new dominant 'western' concept of time and especially its links with the process of industrialization. The temporal representations underlying the different disciplines in the social sciences allow not only for a reconceptualization of their division of intellectual labour, but also for a programmatic view forward towards a 'science of multiple times' (Grossin, 1989). However, any such endeavour has to come to terms also with non-western temporal experience.

Time' and time research is not ·an institutionalized subfield or subspeciality of any of the social sciences. By its very nature, it is recalcitrantly transdisciplinary and refuses to be placed under the intellectual monopoly of any discipline. Nor is time sufficiently recognized as forming an integral dimension of any of the more permanent structural domains of social life which have led to their institutionalization as research fields. Although research grants can be obtained for 'temporal topics', they are much more likely to be judged as relevant when they are presented as part of an established research field, such as studies of working time being considered a legit-imate part of studies of working life or industrial relations.

The standardization of local times into standard world time is one of the prime examples for the push towards standardization and integration also on the temporal scale (Zerubavel, 1982).

At present, information and communication technologies con-tinue to reshape temporal experience and collective time consciousness (Nowotny, 1989b)

Despite the apparent diversity of themes, certain common patterns can be discerned in empirical studies dealing with time. They bear the imprint of the ups and downs of research fashions as well as the waxing and waning of influences from neighbouring disciplines. But they all acknowledge 'time as a problem' in 'time-compact' societies (Lenntorp, 1978), imbued with the pressures of time that come from time being a scarce resource.

Studies of time in organizations have long since recognized the importance of 'events' as a complex admixture which shapes social life inside an organiz-ation and its relationship to the outside world. 'Sociological analyses', we are told, 'require a theory of time which recognizes that time is a socially constructed, organizing device by which one set, or trajectory of events is used as a point of reference for understanding, anticipating and attempting to control other sets of events. Time is in the events and events are defined by organizational members' (Clark, 1985:36).

The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional

The formation of time con epts and the making of time I measurements, i.e. the production of devices as well as their use and social function, become for him a problem of social knowledge and its formation. It is couched in the long-term perspective of evolution of human societies. Knowledge about time is not knowledge about an invariant part or object of nature. Time is not a quality inherent in things, nor invariant across human societies.

As can be seen by these and other theor~tical formulations, the prob-lem of time in social theory, while gradu~ ly coming to new terms with social action, does not lend itself easily 'to providing bridges for the agents behind human agency, the social actors, nor to those who do empirical research in order to understand the world from an actor's perspective.

As Bergmann (1981), and more recently, Ltischer (1989) and Adam (1990) and before them Joas (1980, 1989) have shown, a radical change in perspective away from time as 'flow' or time as embedded in the intentionality of the actor, can already be found in the social philosophy of time by G. H. Mead (Mead, 1936, 1932/1959, 1964). His is also a theory in which it is not the actor and his/her motives, interests or the means-ends scheme which dominates, but where action is interpreted as event -moreover, an event which is both temporal and social in nature.

The gulf separating social theory from its concretization in specific empirically accessible situations is therefore still a wide one.

Action is but the constant intervention of humans into the natural and social world of events. Giddens adds that he would also like to make clear the constitutive relation between time and action. 'I do not' he says, 'equate action with intentionality, but action starts always from an intentionally-oriented actor, who orients him/herself just as much in the past, as he/she tries to realize plans for the future. In this sense, I believe, action can only be analyzed, if one recognizes its embeddedness in the temporal dimension' (Kiessling, 1988:289).

To show 'how the positioning of actors in contexts of interaction and the interlacing of those contexts themselves' relate to broader aspects of social systems, Giddens proposes that social theory should confront 'in a concrete rather than an abstractly philosophical way' the situatedness of interaction in time and space (Giddens, 1984:110)

It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

quite different and much more radical approach is followed by Niklas Luhmann, who proposes to replace the subject/ action scheme by a time/action scheme, thus eliminating the actors alto-gether and replacing them with expectations and attributions.

To introduce time into present-day social theory means at its core to redefine its relation to social action and subsequently to human agency. It is there that the central questions arise, where differences begin to matter between action theory, structuration theory and system theory with regard to time.

he third strategy is the unen-cumbered embracing of pluritemporalism. With or without awareness that the concept of an absolute (Newtonian) physical time broke down irrevocably at the turn of this century and that a different kind of plurit-emporalism has also been spreading in the physical sciences (Prigogine and Stengers, 1988; Hawking, 1988; Adam, 1990), social theory is free to posit the existence of a plurality of times, including a plurality of social times. In most cases this amounts to a kind of 'theoretical agnosti-cism' with regard to physical time. Pluritemporalism allows for asserting the existence of social time next to physical ( or biological) time without going into differences of emergence, constitution or epistemological

Another strategy in dealing with sui generis time consists in juxtaposing clock time to the various forms of 'social time' and considers the latter as the more 'natural' ones, i.e. closer to subjective perceptions of time, or to the temporality that results from adaptations to seasons or other kinds of natural (biological, environmental) rhythm. This strategy, often couched also in terms of an opposition between 'linear' clock time and 'cyclical' time of natural and social rhythms devalues, or at least ques-tions, the temporality of formal organizations which rely heavily on clock time in fulfilling their coordinative and integrative and controlling functions (Young, 1988; Elchardus, 1988).

Searching to reconcile Darwinian evolutionary theory with Einsteinian relativity theory and, especially, its reconceptualization of simultaneity, Mead followed Whitehead's lead in locating the origins of all structuration of time in the notion of the 'event': without the interruption of the flow of time by events, no temporal experience would be possible (Joas, 1980, 1989)

Related to this encounter of the first kind, in which social theory meets the concept of time, is the question of the relationship between time in social systems with other forms of (physical, biological, 'natural') time or, as Elchardus calls it, 'sui generis time' (Elchardus, 1988).

By clarifying the concept of time as a conceptual symbol of evolving complex relationships between continua of changes of various kinds, Elias opens the way for grounding the concept of time again in social terms. The power of choosing the symbols, of selecting which continua are to be used, be it by priests or scientists, also beconies amenable to social analysis. The social matrix becomes ready once more to house the natural world or our conception of it in terms of its own, symbol-creating and continuously evolving capacity. The question of human agency is solved in Norbert Elias's case by referring to the process of human evolution through which men and women are enabled to devise symbols of increasing power of abstraction which are 'more adequate to reality'.

Unless one learns to perceive human societies, living in a world of symbols of their own making, as emerging and developing within the larger non-human universe, one is unable to attack one of the most crucial aspects of the problem of time. For Elias it consists, stated very briefly, in how to reconcile the highly abstract nature of the concept of time with the strong compulsion its social use as a regulatory device exerts upon us in daily life. His answer: time is not a thing, but a relationship. For him the word time is a symbol for a relationship which a group of beings endowed with the capacity for memory and synthesis establishes between two or more continua of changes, one of which is used by them as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the other.

A definition of social time, like the one I attempted myself in the early 1970s, according to which the term social time 'refers to the experience of inter-subjective time created through social interaction, both on the behavioural and symbolic plane' now calls for a much more encompassing and dynamic definition, taking into account also the plurality of social times (Nowotny, 1975:326)

Martins draws a distinction between two criteria of temporalism and/or historicism. One he calls 'thematic tem-poralism', indicated by the degree to which temporal aspects of social life, diachronicity, etc., are taken seriously as themes for reflection of meta theoretical inquiry. The other criterion is the degree or level of 'substantive temporalism', the degree to which becoming, process or diachrony are viewed as ontological grounds for socio-cultural life or as methodologically prior to structural synchronic analysis or explanations.

There is also a widespread acknowledgement, especially in evidence in the empirical literature, of what I will call 'pluritemporalism'. This is an acknowledgement of the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side, and yet are to be distinguished from the time of physics or that of biology.

The demise of structural-functionalism, he argues, has not brought about a substantial increment in the degree of temporalism and historicism in the theoretical constructs of general sociology, even though this was one of the major goals announced by the critics of functionalism, paramount to a meta-theoretical criterion of what an 'adequate' theory should con-sist of.

The question is, rather, why the repeated complaint about the neglect of time in social theory or in the social sciences in general?

Sorokin and Merton in 1937, entitled 'Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis' that some of the Durkheimian ideas were taken up again. This paper identified social time as qualitatively heterogeneous (e.g. holidays and market days), not quantitatively homogeneous as astronomical or physical time has it. Social time was seen as being divided into intervals that derive from collective social activities rather than being uniformly flowing. Local time systems, it was argued, function mainly in order to assure the coordination and synchronization of local activities which eventually become extended and integrated, thereby necessitating common time systems. The Durkheimian claim of the category of time being rooted in social activities, of time being socially constituted by virtue of the 'rhythm of social life' itself, buttressed by the analysis of the social functions it served, was a tacit rebuttal of Kant's a priori intuitions of time, space and causality.

The claim to the existence of a concept of 'social time', distinct from other forms of time, was thus made early in the history of social thought. It continues to focus upon the claims of the peculiar nature of the 'social constitution' or the 'social construction' of time. These claims evidently put the category of 'social time' into the wider realm of 'symbolic time', a cultural phenomenon, the constitution of which has remained the object of inquiry of more disciplines than sociology alone, but which separates it from time in nature, embedded in things and artifacts.

In the then undeveloped sociology of knowledge, Durkheim held as the most general conclusion that it is the rhythm of social life which is the basis of the category of time itself (Durkheim, 1912:7). These obser-vations opened up important questions about the social origins and func-tions of the category of time and how social time can be distinguished and is distinct from astronomical time.

Using Twitter to detect rumoring activity allows us to measure rumoring at large spatial and temporal scales, but it placeslimits on the generalizability of our results. Activity on Twitter does not represent all rumoring activity or all online, informalcommunication. Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project provides an in-depth examination of how Twitter’sdemographics compare to those of the United States (Duggan and Brenner, 2013). Twitter demographics skew (indepen-dently) young, urban, and minority, while there is no significant difference in participation across gender, educationalattainment, and income. These results may overrepresent rumoring activity from minority, urban, or young populations. It isnot immediately clear, however, how this would bias the results, as the existing literature does not clearly demonstrate thatthese particular groups engage in rumoring activity that differs in volume, content, or form from other populations. None-theless, it is worthwhile to recognize the biased population from which these data are drawn, as a number of electronicallymediated communication media will have similar biases that must be recognized when applyingfiltering techniques.

Through spatio-temporalfiltering of messages we are able to observeevolution of topic signal that is consistent with rumor theory’s predictions. In the area immediately surrounding Moore wefind the strongest evidence that rumoring is an evolutionary process, as the topic and tone of messages shifts notably over thisthree-day span. Although these results may not necessarily generalize to all events, we dofind some initial support thatrumoring is a process marked by topical evolution over time. Once again, the spatio-temporalfiltering approach proves to berobust tool for measuring signal of hazard-related rumoring.

Ahead of major storms such as the Moore tornado Twitterusers frequently retransmit alerts and warnings, or parts thereof, and this bin reflects a surge of this typical retransmissionactivity on the day prior to the Moore tornado

While the counts of messages in the 100e200 and 700e800 mile bins are nearly identical, the latter binincludes the Atlanta metro area and much of the Chicago metro area, two of the top-ten largest metro areas in the country. Asillustrated inTable 1, the counts of messages vary by location based on the populations in those locations. Accordingly, rawcounts of“tornado”messages will be influenced by the population in each bin. In many contexts one would want to accountfor spatial heterogeneity in population by establishing a baseline measure of activity in each bin

Using what is known about social responses to disaster events(impending or realized), we selectivelyfilter timestamped streams of geolocated, informal communication activity by timeand location in order to identify surges of rumoring activity in response to a disaster. Spatio-temporalfiltering enhances ourability to detect events by utilizing the signal produced by sources that are known (or expected) to produce reliable infor-mation, thereby enhancing our ability to detect distinct activity patterns above and beyond typical global signal (i.e. back-ground noise representing the array of signals irrelevant to our focus)

Likewise, such strategies also inform our approach tofiltering across time. In this case weobserve message volumes in 24-h intervals, which illustrates daily changes in activity. For cases with especially rich data (orrapidly changing signals),filtering data at an hourly resolution may be more appropriate, whilefiltering at a weekly ormonthly resolution would be more appropriate for very sparse or slowly changing activity signals.

Similarly, theories of informant accuracy posit that those with accurate domainknowledge provide more reliable responses with less error than those without such knowledge (Romney et al.,1986; Romneyand Weller,1984; Sudman et al.,1996; Weller and Romney,1988). Their observations will cluster around a single“truth”whileinaccurate observations (i.e. error) will be randomly scattered around the truth; that is, error is inhomogeneous and does nottypically converge around a small number of data points.

Tobler’s First Law of Geography states that“Allthings are related, but nearby things are more related than distant things”(Tobler, 1970). Barring sudden, drastic changes tothe landscape, new information from a specific locale should be consistent with what we already know about that location aswell as what we know about nearby locations

Such news frequently is more timely than news from official sources andtherefore becomes the dominant mode of information transmission (Caplow, 1947; Kreps, 1984).

Although the spatio-temporal variation in rumor quantity and content has long been of interest to thefield, collecting data that accounts for temporalandspatial characteristics of rumoring has been extraordinarily difficult to dowith any degree of precision. Some have been able to capture rumoring data with some degree of temporal precision (Bordiaand Rosnow, 1998; Danzig, 1958; Greenberg, 1964) or with some spatial precision (Larsen, 1954), but bridging the two hasbeen difficult. Synthesizing temporal and spatial rumoring data across a wide variety of events had long been beyond thecapabilities of researchers. Simply gathering reliable data on rumoring was already fraught with challenges.

Some have described rumoring as a task of collective problem solving (Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Shibutani,1966) withreasonably well defined start and end points. A process helping individuals make sense of their environments and cope withuncertainty, rumoring tends to dissipate once cognitive unclarity has been eliminated (Caplow, 1947).

Informal communication in this context falls under formal definitions ofrumoring: informal,person-to-person communication pertaining to current, newsworthy topics of interest among a population (Allport andPostman, 1947; Bordia and DiFonzo, 2004; Caplow, 1947; Rosnow and Kimmel, 2000; Shibutani, 1966). A key componentof this definition of rumor is that such statements are not confirmed by official sources. Although rumoring has historicallybeen a notoriously difficult phenomenon to measure, thefield has a developed basic understanding of the general principlesof rumoring behaviors in disaster contexts. These common behavioral patterns allow us to refine our approach for measuringsignal of disaster-related rumoring activity.

Our results demonstrate the promise of spatio-temporalfiltering techniques for“tuning”measurement of hazard-related rumoring to enableobservation of rumoring at scales that have long been infeasible.

While theapplication in the online environment is novel, the general problem is not. Interest in automated signal processing in noisyenvironments (Fawcett and Provost,1999; Hamid et al., 2005; Macleod and Congalton,1998; Ribeiro et al., 2012; Singh,1989;Stauffer and Grimson, 2000) predates the proliferation of user-generated online activity, and we can apply the lessons learnedin those contexts to the online context.

Rumoring about disaster events is typically temporally and spatiallyconstrained to places where that event is salient. Accordingly, we use spatio and temporalsubsampling to increase the resolution of our detection techniques. Byfiltering out datafrom known sources of error (per rumor theories), we greatly enhance the signal ofdisaster-related rumoring activity. We use these spatio-temporalfiltering techniques todetect rumoring during a variety of disaster events, from high-casualty events in majorpopulation centers to minimally destructive events in remote areas.

Measuring features of informal communicationetiming, content, locationewith any degree of precision has historically been extremelychallenging in small studies and infeasible at large scales

It reveals that technology and artefacts not only shape our lives but our knowledge; that the dead things which are so conscientiously excluded from social analyses are not only implicated in our daily existence but constitute our social theories. They therefore need to be moved to the centre stage of social theory. We need to allow the implications of contemporary living to penetrate the depth of our understanding, to connect the complexity of our being to the meanings we impose on it, and to recognise our existing social theories as relics of a bygone age.

I am proposing that we need to take on board the time-scales of our technologies if our theories are to become adequate to their subject matter: contemporary industrialised, science-based technological society. Giddens's concept of time-space distanciation might prove useful here despite its association with the storage capacity of information Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 167 which makes the present application of the concept primarily past, rather than past and future orientated. There seems to be no reason why the concept of time-space distanciation, with its link to power, could not be exploited to theorise influences on the long-term future. Such an extension would allow us to understand the present as present past and present future, where each change affects the whole.

Contemporary thinkers from a wide range of fields arrived at an understanding that recognises the implication of our past in the present; in other words, that our personal and social history forms an ineradicable part of us. I can find no good reason why we should exlude our biological and cosmic past from the acceptance of this general principle.

Bearing in mind the conceptual difficulties and limitations of the level approach, we can see that an understanding through levels achieves a number of things. It emphasises the complexity of time and imposes order on the multiple expressions. It prevents us from focusing on one or two aspects of time at the expense of others. In addition to the more obviously social components, it establishes the centrality of the physical, living, technological, and artefactual aspects of social time. It stresses and affirms connections and relationships. It brings to the surface both the continuities and the irreducible aspects of social time. It helps us to avoid confusing the time aspects of our social life with those of nature

To Mead the past is irrevocable to the extent that events cannot be undone, thoughts not unthought, and knowledge not unknown. In this irrever-sible form, he contends, the past is unknowable since the intervening knowledge continuously changes the meaning of that past and relentlessly recreates and reformulates it into a new and different past. He argues this on the basis of the proposition that only emergence in the present has reality status. He does not accord the past and future such a status because they are real only with respect to their relation to the present. In Mead's thought the past changes with respect to our experiencing it in the present and the meaning we give to it. In contradistinction to the past, he conceptualises the reality of the present as changing with each emergence.

Not the number of levels or their content are at issue here since these might be varied according to the degree of the analysis' generality but their static developmental stages where the level 'below' is denied aspects that characterise the level 'above'. In other words, whilst theories of time levels are theoretically of interest and echoed in many subsequent social science conceptualisations -including those of Sorokin ( 1964) and Elias (1982a, b, 1984), for example -they deny to non-human nature what we have found to be central: the importance of past, present, and future extension; of history, creativity, temporality, time experience, and time norms. If time differ-ences are conceptualised with reference to stable, integrative levels then this prevents any understanding in terms of resonance and feedback loops. With discrete, unidirectional levels, consciousness cannot be shown to resonate throughout all of nature; and what we think of as 'human time' stays falsely imprisoned at that level.

Despite these important advantages, however, there are difficulties associated with the conceptualisation of social time in terms of levels. These relate to our tendency to reify the levels, to conceptualise them hierarchically, and to postulate clear cut-off points between them. The three, as we shall see, are closely interconnected.

A conceptualisation in terms of levels seems therefore well suited to explain and theorise the multitude of times entailed in contemporary life. To think of these times as expressions of different levels of our being avoids the need to discuss one aspect at the expense of all others. It means that we do not need to chose on an either/ or basis. It encourages us to see connections and not to lose sight of the multiplicity while we concentrate on any one of those multiple expressions.

The exclusion of non-symbolic expressions from social science analysis has not only resulted in a highly problematic conceptualisation of nature and natural time but it has also meant the omission of artefacts and technology from social science. As Carlstein ( I 982: 8-9) points out, 'social scientists have commonly refused to see 'dead things' as social or have left them aside for the natural scientists. Social scientists have also commonly Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 157 refused to look upon artefacts as social in the sense that they impinge on how individuals interact with each other. These 'dead things' are, at best, seen as symbols and are not considered to be genuine ingredients in social situations and processes.' Yet, with respect to time, it is difficult to see how we can understand society without the time aspects of those 'dead things', those created artefacts and machines that shape our lives and our understanding of reality.

Recognising ourselves as having evolved, and thus being the times of nature, allows for the humanly constituted aspects of time to become one expression among the others. Biologists have dispelled the idea that only humans experience time or organise their lives by it. Waiting and timing in nature presuppose knowledge of time and temporality, irrespective of their being symbolised, conceptualised, reckoned, or measured. Yet, once time is constituted symbolically, it is no longer reducible to the communication of organisms or physical signals; it is no longer a mere sensory datum. For a person to have a past and to recognise and know it entails a representational, symbolically based imagination. Endowed with it, people do not merely undergo their presents and pasts but they shape and reshape them. Symbolic meaning thus makes the past infinitely flexible. With objectified meaning we can not only look back, reflect, and contemplate but we can reinterpret, restructure, alter, and modify the past irrespective of whether this is done in the light of new knowledge in the present, to suit the present, or for purposes of legitimation.

More importantly non-symbolic expressions of reality are traditionally understood to be outside the disciplinary boundaries of the human social sciences. These reasons may explain the convention but they cannot justify it. We can accept that for us to be able to talk and think about time necessitates our putting it into words. If this is all that is being expressed, it is not very much; if it equates reality with the symbol, it goes too far. There is no need to deny that all humans formulate meanings symbolically or that this is a fundamentally social process. There is an urgent need, however, to appreciate that time is an aspect of nature, and that nature encompasses the symbolic universe of human society. Once we recognise ourselves as bearers of all the multiple times of nature, and once we allow for nature to include symbolic expression, the gulf between the symbolic knower and nature as an external (unknowable) object can be dispensed with. The mutually exclusive dichotomies of nature and culture, subject and object become irrelevant.

The idea that time is not separable from the meaning of time, that it always symbolises something that is socially formulated, is a more complex one to untangle.

In other words, the idea of time as socially constituted depends fundamentally on the meaning we impose on 'the social', whether we understand it as a prerogative of human social organisation or, following Mead, as a principle of nature.

A brief expansion of these general social science assumptions about nature will clarify this point. Nature as distinct from social life is understood to be quantifiable, simple, and subject to invariant relations and laws that hold beyond time and space (Giddens 1976; Lessnoff 1979· ~yan 1979). This view is accompanied by an understanding of natural time as coming in fixed, divisible units that can be measured whilst quality, complexit~, ~nd mediating knowledge are preserved exclusively for the conceptuahsat10n of human social time. On the basis of a further closely related idea it is proposed that nature may be understood objectively. Natural scientists, explain Elias (1982a, b) and Giddens ( 1976), stand in a subject-object relationship to their subject matter. Natural scientists, they suggest, are able to study objects directly and apply a causal framework of analysis whilst such direct causal links no longer suffice for the study of human society where that which is investigated has to be appreciated as unintended outcomes of intended actions and where the investigators interpret a pre-interpreted world. Unlike their colleagues in the natural sciences, social scientists, it is argued, stand in a subject-subject relation to their subject matter. In a?ditio? to the differences along the quantity-quality and object-subject d1mens10ns nature is thought to be predictable because its regularities -be they causal, statistical, or probabilistic -are timeless. The laws of nature. are c?nsi~ered to be true in an absolute and timeless way, the laws of society h1stoncally developed. In contrast to nature, human societies are argued to be fundamentally historical. They are organised around :alues, goals, morals, ethics, and hopes, whilst simultaneously being mfl~enc~d by tradition, habits, and legitimised meanings.

Since our traditional understanding of natural time e~erged as inadequate and faulty we have to recognise that the analysis of social time is flawed by implication.

Past, present, and future, historical time, the qualitative experience of time, the structuring of 'undifferentiated change' i?to episodes, all are established as integral time aspects of the subJect matter of the natural sciences and clock time, the invariant measure, the closed circle, the perfect symmetry, and reversible time as our creations.

Sorokin and Merton (1937) may be said to have provided the 'definitive' classic statement on the distinction between social and natural time. They associate the physical time of diurnal and seasonal cycles with clock time and define this time as 'purely quantitative, shorn of qualitative variation' (p. 621). 'All time systems', Sorokin and Merton suggest further, 'may be reduced to the need of providing means for synchronising and co-ordinating the activities and observations of the constituents of groups' (p. 627).

Whilst social theorists are no longer united in the belief that all time systems are reducible to the functional need of human synchro~is_ation and co-ordination they seem to have little doubt about the validity of Sorokin and Merton's other key point that, unlike social time, the time of nature is that of the clock, a time characterised by invariance and quantity. Despite significant shifts in the understanding of social time, the assumptions about nature, natural time, and the subject matter of the natural sciences have remained largely unchanged.

Explored in these multiple expressions, time emerged as a fundamentally transdisciplinary subject and necessitated an understanding that is no longer containable within the traditional assumptions and categories of social science. We now need to reflect on the implications of these findings for social theory. This entails refocusing on some issues and re-assessing a few of the classical social theory traditions in the light of our findings. It requires that we spell out the limitations of the classical practice of abstraction and dualistic theorising for an understanding of 'social time' and that we question the tradition of claiming time exclusively for the human realm by locating it in mind, language or the functional needs of social organisation. This involves us in a re-evaluation of the dualistic conceptualisation of natural and social time and the closely related idea that all time is social time. It necessitates further that we explore the role of metaphors and focus explicitly on the social science convention of limiting the time-span of concern to a few hundred years

phase-angle differ­ences simply refer to whether the phases, the parts of one rhythmic pattern,

Flaherty’s data and theory indicate that rather than the amount and nature of the objective experiences in a situation, what makes time seem to pass extra slowly or quickly is the extent to which the individual engages in conscious infor­mation processing during the time. When the amount of conscious information processing is about average for the individual, the individual experiences time as passing at what that individual has come to perceive as the usual rate, but when the amount of such processing is high, time appears to slow down (pro­tracted duration); when such information processing is low, time appears to speed up (temporal compression)

“Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a bench­mark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such com­parisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.

the idea of entrainment presented in Chapter 6—the adjust­ment of the pace or cycle of an activity to match or synchronize with that of another activity (Ancona and Chong 1996, p. 253)—does suggest a reason why faster could be better, but it also suggests that faster could be worse.

So connections and the meaning they generate are funda­The Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.

Put succinctly, these principles indicate that the definition of the situation guides human behavior, and according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, lan­guage is a necessary prerequisite for defining any situation (see Chapter 1). Language provides the elements from which meaning is constructed—the names of things and their qualities and the manner in which they may be re­lated—and the definition of the situation combines these elements to con­struct sense-making explanations of events, definitions of the situation.

Lewin’s famous final clause, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” means that understanding (theory) can guide useful action (the practical), so theory (understanding) can be empowering. A lack of meaning and under­standing of events also makes it very hard to know what one should do (norm- lessness or anomie), because it is nearly impossible to know what to do in a situation if one cannot comprehend it.

“the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, situations, and phases that comprise those relationships” (2000, p. 27), the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, and situations being very similar to narrative.

A narrative consists of three essential elements: past events, story elements, and a temporal ordering (Maines 1993, p. 21).

Personal and organizational histories occupy prominent figure positions in the figure-ground dichotomy, and that such histories are used to cope with the future is indicated by several pieces of evidence.

Temporal focus is the degree of emphasis on the past, present, and future (Blue­dorn 2000e, p. 124).

The results presented in Bluedorn (2000e) and the Appendix consistently support the distinction between temporal depth and temporal focus. Concep­tually the two terms refer to different phenomena, and empirical measures of the two share so little variance in common that for practical purposes they can be regarded as orthogonal. Temporal depth is the distance looked into past and

However, Boyd and Zimbardo’s interest was not in comparing short-, mid-, and long-term temporal depths; rather, it was in examining the degree to which people were oriented to a transcendental future, and in exam­ining the extent to which this variation covaried with other factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. This is a natural extension of the questions involved in research on general past, present, and future temporal orientations (e.g., Kluck- hohn and Strodtbeck 1961, pp. 13-15), orientations that at first glance appear similar to issues of temporal depth. However, as I have argued elsewhere in opposing the use of the temporal orientation label, these general orientations are more an issue of the general temporal direction or domain that an individ­ual or group may emphasize (Bluedorn 2000e) than the distance into each that the individual or group typically uses. The latter is the issue of temporal depth; the former, what I have called temporal focus (Bluedorn 2000e)

And if Weick has drawn the correct conclusion about how the past is used to enact the present, being able to note the differences may be even more im­portant than being able to see the similarities. This is especially so in equivocal enactments, which Weick (1979, p. 201) described as involving a figure-ground construction, one in which the ground consists of the strange and unfamiliar

Among the reasons this may be so is that the simple future tense is more open-ended than the future perfect tense, the latter seeming to con­vey a sense of closure and a focus on specific events, which is unlike the sim­ple future tense in which anything is possible (Weick 1979, pp. 198-99). It is well to note that although Weick did not explicitly frame his argument in terms of metaphor, it is really another example of the past-as-metaphor-for- the-future idea developed in this chapter, albeit a more precise manifestation of it. The precision comes in Weick’s conclusion that some futures are more like the past, are more similar to it than others. In his argument, the future described in future perfect terms is more similar to the past than the future de­scribed in simple future terms.

To consider the future, it may help to treat it like the past, that is, as ifit had already happened. This is the premise Weick proposed in his discussion of fu­ture perfect thinking (1979, pp. 195-200). Future perfect thinking is a gram­matical prescription instructing managers and planners and all who consider the future to do so in the future perfect tense. Thus rather than the simple fu­ture tense as used in a statement like “We shall overcome,” the future perfect128Eternal Horizonstense would have us say, “We shall have overcome.” Alfred Schutz believed that the “planned act bears the temporal character of pastness' (Schutzs emphasis), be­cause the actor projects the act as completed and in the past, a paradox that places the act in both the past and the future at the same time, something the future perfect tense makes possible (1967, p. 61). These were insights that Weick both noted (1979, p. 198) and built upon to explain why future perfect thinking may make it easier to envision possible futures.

Weick argued that the past was used to understand the present and the future, that neither could be understood without the past. And how the past can provide this understanding, this meaning, is a major insight

Unfortunately, the similarities, the likenesses, may overwhelm the differ­ences (see Morgan 1997, pp. 4-5). And according to Weick, “people who select interpretations for present enactments usually see in the present what they’ve seen before” (1979, p. 201). In terms of the past-as-metaphor perspective de­veloped in this chapter, “what they’ve seen before” implies the use of “an eye for resemblances,” the ability to see the similarities. But as Aristotle, Morgan, and Neustadt and May all noted, there is more to the mature use of metaphor than detecting the similarities between events and situations; the differences matter too. They matter, in part, because the ability to detect and deal with novelty may be a key to both organizational learning and performance (Butler т995> PP· 944-46)

And the determination of organizational age illustrates the constructed, enacted nature of the past, because what at first glance seems like a simple, even objective matter becomes ambiguous when mergers and acquisitions are involved. Is the founding date the date that the oldest of the merger partners began operations, or is it the date when the last partners merged? Families can face the same ambiguities when one or both spouses have been married previously and they and their children combine to form new families. As the definition of the situation principle teaches (see Chapter 1), the important is­sue is when the people in the organization or family believe it was founded.

the past generally being ignored in organization science (for excep­tions, see March 1999; Thoms and Greenberger 1995; Webber 1972; and others cited later in the chapter), not that the rest of the social sciences are much less deficient in this regard (see Zimbardo and Boyd 1999, p. 1272).

Steve Ferris and I found that organizational age was positively correlated with both past and future temporal depths, and that these relationships per­sisted after controlling for several organizational and environmental variables (Bluedorn and Ferris 2000). The older the organization, the further its mem­bers looked into both the past and the future, and the positive temporal depth correlations with the organization’s age may suggest why

The past leads to and influences the future, but the future does not influence the past.Thus El Sawy s research provided a second clue that past and future are re­lated, and it even added a causal direction (i.e., “A connection to the past fa­cilitates a connection to the future” [March 1999, p. 75])·

the result is a statistically significant positive correlation (see the Appendix). The proposed connection is accurate: The longer the respondent’s past temporal depth, the longer the respondent’s future temporal depth.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of the differ­ences is that each of the future regions extends much further into the future than their past counterparts extend into the past. The short-term future ex­tends about five times further than does the recent past; the mid-term future, about three-and-one-third times as far as the middling past; and the long­term future, about twice as far as the long-ago past. So although the steplike pattern is similar for both the past and future regions, the future depths extend over substantially larger amounts of time than do those in the past

the temporal distances into the past and future that indi­viduals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that havehappened, may have happened, or may happen.

Drawing on the theory of distributed cognition [5], we utilizerepresentational physical artifacts to provide a tangible interface for task planning, aural cues for time passage, and an ambient, glanceable display to convey status

Since time elapses in a linear fashion and users may switch between tasks during the course of a day, the “elapsed” marbles roll into a track below the storage cylinders.

The design principle of the Time Machinefollows the stage-based model of personal informatics systems proposed by Li, Dey and Forlizzi

Figure 2. The stage-based model of personal informatics systems (after [6]).

We have introduced a novel approach to time management using a device embodying characteristics of both an ambient display and a tangible user interface.

Thus, people have historically relied on visual or auditory signals to estimate, determine, or track time. Initially, these time signals were derived from nature: theposition of the sun in the sky orthe sound of a rooster in the morning. Eventually, these time signals became technology-based. Many people now rely on displays, or signals, of time that derive from our world of pervasive devices: digital time displayed on a device screen, a notification sound from a calendar application.

Because time is not physical, the human perception of time is subjective: the passage of time can seem slower or faster depending on factors liketask

This conjecture leads us to promote the ideal of a “balanced TP” as most psycho-logically and physically healthy for individuals and optimal for societal functioning. Balance is defi ned as the mental ability to switch fl exibly among TPs depending on task features, situational considerations, and personal resources rather than be biased toward a specifi c TP that is not adaptive across situations. The future focus gives people wings to soar to new heights of achievement, the past (positive) focus establishes their roots with tradition and grounds their sense of personal identity, and the present (hedonistic) focus nourishes their daily lives with the playfulness of youth and the joys of sensuality. People need all of them harmoniously operating to realize fully their human potential.

A further limitation of the generalizability of our scale may lie in its cultural relevance to individualist societies and their ambitions, tasks, and demands rather than to more collectivist, interdependent societies in which time is differently val-ued and conceptualized (Levine 1997 ). Obvious cross-cultural adaptations of the ZTPI are called for.

Our scale also has dem-onstrated predictive utility in experimental, correlational, and case study research.

The scale is based on theoretical reflection and analyses, interviews, focus groups, repeated factor analyses, feedback from experiment participants, discriminant validity analyses, and specifi c attempts to increase factor loadings and internal consistencies by item analyses and revisions.

State of Research on TP

Thus, we conceive of TP as situationally determined and as a relatively stable individual-differences process.

Such limiting biases contrast with a “balanced time orientation,” an ideal-ized mental framework that allows individuals to fl exibly switch temporal frames among past, future, and present depending on situational demands, resource assess-ments, or personal and social appraisals. The behavior of those with such a time orientation would, on average, be determined by a compromise, or balancing, among the contents of meta-schematic representations of past experiences, present desires, and future consequences.

In both cases, the abstract cognitive processes of reconstructing the past and constructing the future function to infl uence current decision making, enabling the person to transcend compelling stimulus forces in the immediate life space and to delay apparent sources of gratifi cation that might lead to undesirable con-sequences.

More recently, Joseph Nuttin ( 1964 , 1985 ) supported the Lewinian time-fi lled life space, where “future and past events have an impact on present behavior to the extent that they are actually present on the cognitive level of behavioral functioning” ( 1985 , p. 54). Contemporary social–cognitive thinking, as represented in Albert Bandura’s ( 1997 ) self-effi cacy theory, advances a tripartite temporal infl uence on behavioral self-regulation as generated by effi cacy beliefs grounded in past experiences, current appraisals, and refl ections on future options. Behavioral gerontologist Laura Carstensen and her colleagues (Carstensen et al. 1999 ) have proposed that the perception of time plays a funda-mental role in the selection and pursuit of social goals, with important implications for emotion, cognition, and motivation.

TP is the often nonconscious process whereby the continual fl ows of personal and social experiences are assigned to tem-poral categories, or time frames, that help to give order, coherence, and meaning to those events.

Lewin ( 1951 ) defi ned time perspective (TP) as “the totality of the individual’s views of his psychological future and psychological past existing at a given time” (p. 75).

he two patterns—monochronic and polychronic—form a continuum, because polychronicity is the extent to which people prefer to engage in two or more tasks simultaneously, and the complete absence of any simultaneous involvements, engaging tasks one at a time, is the least polychronic position on the continuum.

The retention of “many problems in their minds simultaneously” speaks direcdy to the definition of polychronicity, men­tal activity being a component of polychronicity as well as overt behavior (Per­sing 1999)

Demographic Characteristics.

Such questions not only point the direction for expanding our knowledge of polychronicity but also suggest the likelihood of various social and psycholog­ical determinants of it. One such determinant seems especially intriguing, and it is the individual’s breadth of attention. Breadth of attention is “the number and range of stimuli attended to at any one time” (Kasof 1997, p. 303). This concept is used to describe screeners, people who focus on a small range of stimuli and filter or “screen out” other stimuli. Conversely, nonscreeners attend to a large range of stimuli and are aware of a much larger range of potentially unrelated stimuli (Kasof 1997)

So does polychronicity scale? Or is it a nested phenomenon whereby someone might be monochronic within hour- long intervals but polychronic when the frame enlarges to a month? And if so, what might be the consequences of different nesting combinations?

figure 3.4. Forms of polychronic and monochronic patterns of behavior

June Cotte and S. Ratneshwar (1999) have certainly documented the ability of some people to vary their behavior radically along the polychronicity continuum as they moved between work and leisure activi­ties. Hall suggested the facility to make such shifts may be related to what he called a “high adaptive factor” (Bluedorn 1998, p. 114), such people being more flexible along the polychronicity continuum than others. In a life context of varying polychronicity demands, perhaps an individual whose own polychro­nicity lies near the average of the varying environmental demands might be able to cope most readily with them because the largest adjustment required would be smaller, hence less potentially uncomfortable or stressing than from any other position on the polychronicity continuum

Brown and Eisenhardt studied change and project management in com­puter firms and found that firms with less successful project portfolios demon­strated very low amounts of communication across projects. This was part of the context in which projects were planned, divided into small tasks, and then executed in a “structured sequence of steps” (1997, p. 14). A structured sequence is, of course, a monochronic strategy, and the low amount of communication is consistent with the proposition that monochronic strategies generate less awareness of other activities and tasks. One of the managers in their study re­marked, “Most people only look at their part” (p. 14); another, “The work of everyone else doesn’t really affect my work” (p. 14). These responses contrasted with the pattern of work in the companies that managed their portfolios of projects more successfully, which Brown and Eisenhardt characterized as “it­erative” (p. 14). Iterative (repetitive) patterns are suggestive of the back and forth flow of polychronic strategies

Group Effectiveness

So individual polychronicity is related to several individual variables. Rela­tive to less polychronic people, more polychronic people appear to have more of the following:• Extraversión (extroversion)• Favorable inclination toward change• Tolerance of ambiguity• Formal education• Striving for achievement• Impatience and irritability• Frequency of lateness and absenteeismThose same people appear to have less of the following:• Conscientiousness• Stress (only in some jobs)But, as will be revealed in the following section, these are not the only in­dividual variables to which individual polychronicity is related

Both studies reveal a positive correlation between polychronicity and speed values: The more polychronic the organization, the more doing things rapidly is valued in its culture. Although these consistent findings about the speed-polychronicity relationship support the explanation of the size- polychronicity relationship developed in this discussion, they are not a direct test of this explanation, which is, admittedly, speculative. More direct tests must await studies deliberately designed to investigate this explanation

in a more polychronic culture, people would stand closer to each other while talking. So time and space are related in the social as well as the physical world.

At the level of individual beliefs and behavior, the nature of polychronicity as either a trait or a state becomes an important issue. Ifit is a trait, individu­als will be much more consistent, even habitual, in the polychronicity process strategies they follow, more consistent than if polychronicity preferences are a state. But if polychronicity is a state, it will be affected much more by the con­textual factors in an individual’s environment, leading to much greater vari­ability in patterns of polychronicity behavior. So the degree of stability or its converse, the amount of variability, would provide important clues about poly­chronicity’s statelike or traitlike identity.

At the group level—group referring to all potential culture-carrying aggre­gations larger than a single individual (e.g., departments, organizations, soci­eties, etc.)—polychronicity is a value and belief complex that manifests itself in overt process strategies. Although the strength with which it is held may vary, as a fundamental process strategy—it is fair to say the fundamental process strategy—whichever position along the polychronicity continuum is normative in a culture is apt to be held strongly. This is because such process strategies are mainly learned unintentionally, usually unconsciously. Such learned knowledge is retained at the level of culture Edgar Schein (1992) labeled basic underlying assumptions. This deepest of cultural levels normally contains beliefs and val­ues prescribing behaviors that are so taken for granted and institutionalized that they seldom rise to the conscious level for extensive examination and dis­cussion (Schein 1992, p. 22). Consequently, they are difficult to change, and in this sense they are strongly held.

From the beginning (Hall 1981b), polychronicity has been analyzed at both the group and individual levels. As such, it has been seen as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon. And values about the same phenomenon can and do occur in both cultures and personalities, but this does not mean that rela­tionships involving them are the same across levels of analysis (e.g., Dansereau, Alutto, and Yammarino 1984; Robinson 1950). Relationships found at one level of analysis, individual or group, are suggestive of those relationships at another and are reasonable justifications for hypothesizing their existence as a prelude to their empirical investigation, such investigation clearly being necessary to establish the existence of relationships across multiple levels of analysis

Although it is easier to see this distinction in terms of a dichot­omy—polychronic or monochronic—polychronicity is a variable that reflects an underlying continuum of engagement preferences and practices, and a po­tentially infinite set of gradations distinguish one individual’s preferences from another’s, as well as one culture’s from another’s

Moreover, the correlations between the preference-for-engaging-two- or-more-events-simultaneously dimension and the other dimensions in the best-fitting model were very low, so Palmer and Schoorman concluded, “The three dimensions of time use preference [ preference-for-engaging-two-or- more-events-simultaneously], time tangibility, and context do not represent . highly correlated measures and should be considered separately” (1999, p. 336).

Following Blue­dorn et al. (1999, p. 207) and Hall (Bluedorn 1998, p. no), polychronicity is the extent to which people (1) prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks or events simultaneously and are actually so engaged (the preference strongly implying the behavior and vice versa), and (2) believe their preference is the best way to do things.

The “going back” is indicative of the back-and-forth pattern of polychronic behavior, because it is another way of engaging several activities during the same tim

And although an infinite number of patterns are possible, all strategies for engaging life’s activities fall along a con­tinuum known as polychronicity, a continuum describing the extent to which people engage themselves in two or more activities simultaneously. That this choice is fundamental is revealed by the fact that most people most of the time are unaware that they are even making it. This is because the choice of strategy results from a combination of culture and personality, both of which store these choices and preferences at deep levels, very deep levels. Nevertheless, a choice or a decision made unconsciously is still a choice or a decision

A concept in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory explains how pat­terns like these are maintained with such regularity and precision. The concept is “duality of structure,” by which Giddens meant that “the structured proper­ties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts(Giddens’s emphasis; 1995, p· 19)·

Thus for meaning (significance) to be attributed to events, behaviors, and objects, to things in general, they must be seen in their relationships with other things. They can have no meaning as isolated phenomena.

Barbara Adam said it well: “Much like people in their every­day lives, social scientists take time largely for granted. Time is such an obvi­ous factor in social science that it is almost invisible” (1990, p. 3).

Less explicit and less emphasized in the literature is time’s role in the creation of meaning. Malinowski and Adam hint at this capability in their statements: “sentimental necessity,” “orientation,” and “symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and social events,” the last of the three phrases most directly indicating time’s role in generating meaning. So both capabilities increase with the development of greater temporal expertise.

Bronislaw Malinowski addressed the functions of time as fol­lows: “A system of reckoning time is a practical, as well as a sentimental, ne­cessity in every culture, however simple. Members of every human group have the need of coordinating various activities, of fixing dates for the future, of placing reminiscences in the past, of gauging the length of bygone periods and of those to come” (1990, p. 203). Sixty-three years later Barbara Adam would state it thus: “As ordering principle, social tool for co-ordination, orientation, and regulation, as a symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and so­cial events, social scientists view time as constituted by social activity” (1990, p. 42).

As with the geological epochs and archeological ages, human times become more epochal as they become more homogeneous within themselves and more differentiated from other periods, units, or types. In analysis of variance (anova) terms, the times become more epochal as the within-unit variance decreases and the between-type variance increases. Movement toward more epochal times is illustrated by phrases such as the “New York minute.” This metaphor for the fast pace of life in New York City (see Levine 1997; also see Chapter 4) is so effective because it violates a tacit understanding about min­utes:

Thinking in terms of degrees of difference rather than just two extremes allows more precise statements to be made about the form of time under consideration than if one’s conceptual portfolio contained only the two extreme forms

Epochal time is defined by events. The time is in the events; the events do not occur in time. Events occurring in an independent time is the fungible time concept that Newton described so influentially as absolute time and Whitehead described so critically as a “metaphysical monstrosity.” When the time is in the event itself, the event defines the time. To take an everyday example, is it time for lunch or is it lunchtime?

I have written elsewhere that time “is a collective noun” (Bluedorn 2000e, p. 118). That pithy statement summed up the belief that there is more than one kind of time. For example, Paul Davies thought long and hard about time, es­pecially as it is conceptualized in the physical sciences. Yet despite those labors, he felt time’s mystery still: “It is easy to conclude that something vital remains missing, some extra quality to time left out of the equations, or that there is more than one sort of time” (Davies’ emphasis; 1995, p. 17). So in the physical sciences just as in the social, the possibility is explicitly recognized that there may be more than one kind of time.

Several of the distinctions drawn by Joseph McGrath and Nancy Rotch- ford (1983, pp. 60-62) to describe the dominant concept of time held by West­ern industrialized societies in the twentieth century seem to describe this type of time well. This temporal form is homogeneous, which means that one tem­poral unit is the same as any other unit of the same type, and this means that such units are conceptually interchangeable with each other.

So the vital point is that all conceptions of time are and always will be social constructions, which is, in Barbara Adam’s words, “the idea that all time is social time” (1990, p. 42). After all, all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is socially constructed knowledge. But this point does not ipso facto invalidate any or all concepts of time. Their validity rests, instead, on their utility for various purposes, such as prediction and understanding. And as societies and cultures evolve, it is likely, perhaps even incumbent, for their concepts of time to evolve as well. So it would be well to understand how concepts of time differ in order to understand them and their differences better.

Temporal RealitiesSome theorists have taken the multiple-types approach further and pro­posed multiple types of time that are arranged in hierarchies. It is interesting to note that these approaches all seem to rely on a hierarchical view of reality itself.

Another way of saying this is that there is no imperative to see such categories as mutually exclusive. Neither partner is the true, real, or even preferred time; instead, they may coexist, in­termingle, and even be tightly integrated in specific social systems.

a binary classification system exacerbates this tendency, with one choice receiving the imprimatur of “real time” and the alternative being condemned as a “perversion” of it, if it is perceived at all

metaphor is a potentially powerful tool for understanding human beliefs and behavior, and the meta­phors people hold about organizations (which encompass much of the way they define organizational reality) explain much about the decisions they make and the actions they take (see Morgan 1997, especially p. 4).

The possibility that time can explain other phenomena, especially human be­havior, is the scientific raison d’être for studying time and caring about it: If times differ, different times should produce different effects. And an impor­tant mechanism through which differing times affect human behavior is thedefinition of the situation

Time is a social construction, or more properly, times are socially constructed, which means the concepts and values we hold about various times are the prod­ucts of human interaction (Lauer 1981, p. 44). These social products and beliefs are generated in groups large and small, but it is not that simple. For contrary to Emile Durkheim’s assertion, not everyone in the group holds a common time, a time “such as it is objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilization” (1915, p. 10). This is so because in the perpetual structuration of social life (Gid­dens 1984) individuals bring their own interpretations to received social knowl­edge, and these interpretations add variance to the beliefs, perceptions, and val­ues.

However, as Mark Poster points out, 'the new level of interconnectivity heightens the fragility of the social net­works. '·50 The source of control now undermines its execu­tion. For clock time to exist and thus to be measurable and controllable there has to be duration, an interval between two points in time. Without duration there is no before and after, no cause and effect, no stretch of time to be measured. The principles of instantaneity and simultaneity of action across space, as I have shown in chapter 3, are encountered in quantum physics; they have no place in the Newtonian world of causality and bodies in motion, the world chat we as embodied beings inhabit. The control of time that has reached the limit of compression has been shifted into a time world where notions of control are meaningless. More like the realm of myths and mysticism, the electronic world of interchangeable no-where and now-here requires knowledge and modes of being that are alien to the industrial way of life. Other modes of temporal existence, therefore, may hold some viral keys, their 'primitive' understanding of time point­ing not ro control but to more appropriate ways of being in the realm of insrantaneity.