The chapter assumes a feminist new materialist approach to explore the entanglement of temporality, materiality and power within a practice agencement. Feminist new materialism in empirical research is a methodology that emphasizes the vitality of matter and the performative and affective flow of agency. The chapter deals both with the materiality of human bodies (and normative embodiment in organizations) and with the materiality of digital technologies and their normative power over teens’ sexuality. Temporality is explored by means of two concepts – refrain and feminist snap – that create orientations for thinking about how the entangled elements that form a practice assume in time different configurations according to the elements’ capacity to affect and be affected. While refrain illuminates the lines of flight within differentiating practices, feminist snap highlights the breaking moment of discontinuity when digital networking subverts the control on women’s bodies.

In the ‘future of work’ in particular and organizations more generally, the future is a ubiquitous companion and serves as a key point of orientation for actions. However, at the same time, the future is elusive, as its open-endedness undermines attempts to fully predict and ‘manage’, but also examine this temporal mode. In response to the intricate challenge of exploring the role of the future in organizations, we argue that practice theory can help us gain a deeper understanding of how organizational actors engage with the future. By revisiting key principles of practice theory and their relationships with time and the future, we propose to explore ‘future work’, i.e., the situationally enacted, performative, heterogeneous, and relationally entwined bundle of practices through which organizational actors engage with events that are to come. We conclude by discussing the implications of gaining a practice-based understanding of the future in organizations and suggest avenues for future research.

The bulk of management and organization studies draw on cybernetics and control-oriented views of time. Management is expected to follow a goal-oriented temporality, and activities keep correcting or adjusting both goals and patterns of organizing. In this chapter, the authors defend a more paradoxical view of temporality. By means of a detour towards the works of Guy Debord and John Dewey, both dérive and flânerie on the one hand, and inquiry and determination on the other hand, are jointly conceptualized as key organizing processes. From that perspective, collective activity and its politics appear as the productive differences in-between an infinitude of events oriented either towards activity or passivity, horizontality or verticality.

Poised between attentive ethnography and urgent critique, the chapter asks whether politics can be re thought by combining or seeing the connections between phenomena normally considered irrelevant and separated by scale. Specifically the politics that might emerge from a haircut. By tracing unruly affects and effects of the radiate outwards from the material presence of a bob cut.

The study explores the materiality of clock towers to understand how temporal order was constructed and changed in the late Ottoman Empire. It takes a microhistorical perspective with a critical realist lens. Specifically, it focuses on the 24 clock towers constructed between 1876 and 1909 outside Istanbul, remaining within the national borders of Turkey. In addition, the study has developed case studies of three “exceptional typical” clock towers at Kastamonu, Çorum, and Izmir. Results indicate that these clock towers were symbols of continuous and hybridized changes in the temporal construction of Ottoman societies. The study illustrates how alternative time conceptions can exist, combine, and transform autonomously, constituting a polychronous context. In addition to the Ottoman state, the local elite was central in negotiating and contesting the diffusion of modernity into their realms. The study contributes to understanding the politics of time from a non-industrialized and non-Western historical context.

The history of management (and its science) could be seen as a long attempt to master or dominate time. Whether it is objective, subjective, social, or processual, time is conceptualized by management as a resource or as a place of creativity. Management sciences focus on individuals’ temporal agency over the agency of time itself. However, managers’ daily experience, the literature in social sciences (Rosa, 2003), or some authors in management science (Johnsen, Toyoki, 2019; Holt, Johnsen, 2019) show that individuals are not masters of time, and even may suffer from it. In this work we want to take seriously the agency of time itself, and build a new managerial posture where managers no longer dominate time but learn to “deal with it”. Our desire here is to build a theoretical framework that takes seriously the domination of time over us. From this negative conception of time, we want to redefine the process of temporal structuring as a way for individuals to inhabit it. The aim of this process is not to dominate time but to “deal with it”. This theoretical framework must be able to restore a balance between individuals’ temporal agency and the agency of time.

This chapter explores the material temporal work involved in protecting a radical artistic innovation, conceived ahead of its time, from incomprehension and projecting it into the future in search of receptive audiences. Inspired by the trajectory and recent rediscovery of the pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint, we suggest that it is temporal agency (i.e. anticipating of and acting upon one’s future significance) and material temporal work (i.e. influencing, sustaining, or redirecting interpretations of time through materiality) that enable the radical artistic innovation to reach receptive audiences, spanning over a century. We distinguish two processes of material temporal work: bifurcating time by working in parallel along established and unknown temporalities, and bridging time by narrative construction, waiting time, and emotional resonance with distant-future artists, museum curators, and critics. Taken together, these two processes power time as the ultimate organizer of a radical artistic innovation’s comprehension and appreciation, i.e. engage time in the politics of meaning.

Drawing on a combined ethnographic and historical case study of BLOX, a landmark building in Copenhagen, this chapter advances a processual understanding of buildings by exploring the intersection between materiality, temporality, and politics. We analyze organizing processes unfolding between the material building and public, private, and philanthropic organizations. We distinguish between three dimensions of the building’s material temporality, which we analyze drawing on an event-based approach: historicizing the building through time, projecting the building over time, and enacting the building in time. While the ‘projecting’ and ‘enacting’ dimensions are inspired by prior work on material temporality, our study adds the ‘historicizing’ dimension. We develop an empirical model showing the interplay between these three dimensions. A main implication of our study is to show how the organizing effects of material buildings emerge not only from their material durability, but also from their temporal malleability. In closing, we discuss implications for a temporal understanding of affordances and propose a temporally relational view of affordances.

In this chapter, I explore the different temporal layers involved in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the process of bringing something into being that did not exist before – either a new venture, product or service – and this process can only be understood if we consider how entrepreneurship unfolds in time. However, there is no ‘one’ time of entrepreneurship. Instead, time have many layers that are expressed in the way that entrepreneurship unfolds. To explore these layers, I draw on insights from the philosophy of time, and show how these insights are valuable for thinking about entrepreneurship. I focus on two ways that time relates to entrepreneurship. The first is the way that entrepreneurship is a journey or process. The second is the way that entrepreneurship involves actions that take place in time. Although these two aspects of entrepreneurship are interrelated, they must nevertheless be understood against the backdrop of different categories of time.

This chapter begins by unpacking the concept ‘technical image’, as explained by Vilém Flusser. The technical image is used by Flusser to describe the camera as the machine at the start of a new imagining regime, culminating in video and computer-generated images. My use of Flusser’s term is slightly different. I would like to use the method for analysing images given to us by Flusser, but use the term ‘technical image’ to unpack and explore the differences between synthetic images – images that present viewers with a unified whole – and images that break a pre-given unity into discrete pixelated elements. I try and go further than Flusser’s original formulation of the technical image by tracing its genealogy in much older media used for measurement and the particalisation of events: these are what I refer to in this essay as analytical media. I argue that analytical media, which pre-date the synthesis of the cinema, are now returning in the world produced by technical images. From here, I look at some contemporary artworks that further explore what it is to live in the conditions produced by these machines and how this produces a different temporality.