Past, Present, Future in Organizations

How Event Time Would Relate with Organizational Structure

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify how people differentiate the past and future from the present through everyday practice in organizational life, adopting both theoretical and empirical approach. This research especially focuses on event time (Jaques, 1982), because either in retrospect or future-perfect thought, within which people differentiate the past or the future from the present, there is always a recognition of “event” beforehand. At this point, K. Weick and N. Luhmann have a common perspective. Weick's terms used in the theory of organizing implies his idea that with enactment or sensemaking, people recognize and divide present from past or future. Compared to Weick, Luhmann indicates present as a double distinction of reversibility and irreversibility (Luhmann, 1984), and that decisions within organizations separate its past and future. At this point, Luhmann has more emphasis on transitions of tense (past-present-future) than Weick, and thus he clarifies peoples' ability to control their tense within organizational life. And those may enable organizations to hold more time for exploitation intentionally which is essential for innovative creation. After examining the theoretical background, this paper applies theoretical perspective to an empirical study and illustrates how members' time representation in one Japanese internet content company can be understood with their decision making. In addition to it, this paper also considered how organizational structure relates to its recognition of time.