When Time Falls Apart: Re-centring human time in organisations through the lived experience of waiting

Waiting

Waiting is a common experience in people’s daily work and home lives, to the point where it would be difficult for most of us to conceive of even a day when we do not wait for something (Schwartz, 1975). Yet, as a construct, waiting is still theoretically unspecified. Waiting has been defined as an interstitial time that can be considered ‘both as a gap and as a link between the present and the future’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 30). As such, it is closely linked with expectation since, if we are waiting for a train, we do so expecting that it will arrive as otherwise there would be no point in waiting, yet it is not synonymous with expectancy because although we wait for the train, we cannot be certain that it will arrive on time.

Waiting may arise from a number of different causes, including scarcity of goods, services or time which then leads to a delay, for instance, in scheduling an appointment or performing a work task. Inefficiency may give rise to breakdowns or errors which, in turn, leave people waiting (Schwartz, 1975). Waiting can also be caused by the deliberate actions of others when they choose to withhold information or required resources, possibly as an exercise of power, status or control over another (Bourdieu, 2000). Actors may also wait simply due to the length of time it takes for something to happen – an experiment, a natural process or production schedule (Hernes, Feddersen, & Schultz, 2021; Otto & Strauss, 2019). Whatever the cause, the subjective experience of waiting typically arises from ‘chains of events running asynchronously’ (Bergmann, 1992, p. 110). Waiting may paradoxically constitute a temporal resource managed or directed by the waiting individual themselves such that, at the extreme, making oneself wait through delaying action may be a way to gain time and control uncertainty (Gasparini, 1995).

While the two are closely linked, waiting and delay are not the same. Delays have been defined in the context of information exchange as ‘negative workplace events that last from the moment that a focal employee expects to obtain information until the moment that the focal employee (knowingly) receives the information’ (Guenter et al., 2014, p. 284). Delays may therefore be viewed as exogenous events that give rise to the subjective experience of waiting (Efrat-Treister et al., 2020). There are also important differences between waiting time and slack time (Blagoev & Schreyögg, 2019). Slack is generally regarded as unorganised, less busy time during which extreme work pressures are lifted (Styhre, 2008) – social actors may or may not be waiting during slack time. Nor is waiting synonymous with a particular length of time: waiting might last for mere moments, ‘micro-waiting’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 42), or become chronic and long-term, as in the case of migrants or asylum seekers (Rotter, 2016). Waiting is therefore a temporal experience of indeterminate length which, by its nature, implies the anticipation of some future outcome when the waiting will be over and a result achieved and we can move on. It thereby represents a pathway to an altered future state; it is not an end in itself since we are always waiting for something.

Thus far, the scant scholarship on waiting in the context of organisations has generally focused on isolated waiting experiences; for example, Svinhufvud (2018) shows how salespeople embody waiting through professional posture while waiting for customers to decide what to buy, and Efrat-Treister et al. (2020) demonstrate a link between perceived waiting time at the start of meetings and aggression. However, extant research has not considered how waiting relates to temporal structures in organisations. We might imagine that, for many individuals, the working day may be replete with a range of waiting times that serve to interrupt prevailing temporal structures as social actors wait for required pieces of information, for broken machinery to be repaired, or for processes to take their course. Such waits may be expected or unexpected and may also vary in frequency, significance and duration.

Two questions appear especially important when considering waiting within the context of temporal structures. The first is: what do social actors do while waiting? On the one hand, the literature has treated waiting as an empty ‘non-time’ during which other activities are impossible (Minnegal, 2009; Otto & Strauss, 2019; Tang, 2012). Thus, waiting may be conceived as an ‘interstitial time par excellence’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 29). Conversely, it has been noted that waiting actors often put waiting time to good use; Gustafson (2012) highlights the substitute activities in which actors engage to ‘fill the time’ while waiting for a train. It might be conjectured that different types of wait, for example, in terms of the length, cause and context, may give rise to different options in terms of the use of the waiting time.

The second question is: how is waiting time experienced? Waiting has generally been conceived as a time that is ‘wearisome, boring and annoying’ (Schwartz, 1975, p. 843), associated with negative emotions such as tedium, lost motivation, anxiety or anger as individuals become ‘stuck’ in an interminable present (Tang, 2012; Turnbull, 2016); as Blount and Janicik (2001, p. 574) observe, ‘people generally do not like waiting’. On the other hand, waiting can be associated with hope and anticipation and thus constitute a future-oriented temporal experience galvanised by the expectation of a positive outcome (Liang, 2017). In sum, waiting emerges as a ubiquitous, yet poorly understood, temporal phenomenon that interrupts the flow of time in organisations.

Waiting in the context of temporal structures

Temporal structures comprise explicit work schedules, implicit rhythms and cycles and cultural norms about time-use experienced at the occupational or organisational level (Blount & Janicik, 2001; Dille et al., 2022). In line with this, waiting time is likely to be utilised and experienced in divergent ways depending on the prevailing temporal structures within which it arises (Gasparini, 1995). Perhaps the most ‘extreme cases’ across which the experience of waiting might be contrasted are fast-paced knowledge work on the one hand (McGivern et al., 2018) and craft work (Gasparin & Neyland, 2022) on the other.

Within the contemporary knowledge-intensive organisation, the emphasis is on speed and efficiency. Here, ‘time is money’ (McGivern et al., 2018) with action privileged over inaction (Rosa, 2014; Wajcman & Rose, 2011), and so waiting is likely to emerge as a temporal anomaly or failure (Gasparini, 1995). Despite claims that we may be witnessing the ‘collapse of waiting culture’ (Hassard, 2002), paradoxically, instances of waiting may be increasing rather than decreasing in the face of the hyper-speed associated with contemporary information technologies (Rosa, 2014) and the complexity of integrating and co-ordinating work in modern organisations (Forza, 1996).

Given assumptions of efficiency permeate not only the temporal rhythms of productivity in the workplace but also the felt need to be productive and efficient in those time-spaces, such as waiting, that are experienced outside the labour process (Roberts, 2012), waiting subjects within knowledge-intensive organisations are likely to feel pressured to keep busy and fill any waiting time that does arise via ‘governing’ processes of control (Kunzl & Messner, 2022). From a labour process perspective, we may conjecture that waiting may be positioned at the heart of the inherent temporal antagonism of the capitalist workplace, with employers seeking to maximise working time and eliminate pauses such as waiting, while employees seek to escape time controls (Bell & Tuckman, 2002). According to this view, the ever-increasing intensity of time experienced by knowledge workers thus serves to disrupt ‘the inner temporal unity of human activity’ (Noonan, 2015, p. 111), leaving individuals physically and mentally overwhelmed and unable to keep up (Rosa, 2014). As a marginal temporal experience, we conjecture that waiting might then also afford micro-opportunities to resist or stand aside from prevailing temporal structures (Costas & Grey, 2014), for example, by momentarily slowing down.

In contrast, craft is generally associated with ‘slow’ temporalities; ‘craftsman time’ (Sennett, 2008) arises through deep association and attunement between humans and materials (Bell & Vachhani, 2020). Processes of ‘sensible knowing’ (Gherardi & Perrotta, 2014) through haptic engagement with material objects tell the crafter how to structure their time and what can be achieved. Thus, for crafters, waiting may well arise through the working day as natural and material processes impose their own temporal structures on human ‘doings’ (Jalas, 2006). In this context, waiting may be viewed as intrinsic to the experience of time (Crawford, 2009; Hernes et al., 2021; Kroezen, Ravasi, Sasaki, Żebrowska, & Suddaby, 2021). Consequently, waiting has the potential to become transformed into a liminal time of renewal through the opportunities it provides for playful exploration (Swan et al., 2016; Van Gennep, 1960). Liminal periods arise ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969, p. 95) everyday structures and activities and constitute times that are qualitatively different to preceding and subsequent states yet which contribute to an understanding of them (Söderlund & Borg, 2017). The discontinuity represented by waiting may thereby create pockets of time where imagined future selves (Costas & Grey, 2014) are created and nurtured.

To address these issues, we set out to answer two research questions. First, we ask: What is the lived experience of waiting and how does this vary across occupational settings? We then build on this to examine: What does this reveal about temporal structures in organisations?

Waiting under the intensified-organisational temporal macro-structure

A common response to the need to wait was for actors to seek out alternative work tasks to occupy waiting moments. However, the unpredictable length of waits caused by delays in information exchange or rhythm asymmetry led to a fragmentation of the working day. This was especially true for the office workers. For example, Tracey described how she would jump between her focal task and ‘filler’ tasks as she waited for responses to emails, conveying a sense of the rhythmic interruptions to the working day caused by waiting:

If I can’t do number two on the list I’ll go and work on number eight instead because that’s at least filling time . . . that’s the way my job has to be . . . I might get half-way through even thinking what I need to do with number eight before the emails come back on number two, and then OK, it’s drop number eight, we’re back on number two again.

Such short, unanticipated waits of indeterminate length posed particular dilemmas in terms of their effective use (Liang, 2017). Stella’s photograph (Figure 2: Stella) was taken during a short pause as she looked down at her feet while waiting for some information from her line manager without which she could not progress with her work and was consequently struggling to fill the time effectively. Despite her efforts to exert control over her waits, the image reinforces the sense she is stuck at her workstation, and highlights the ongoing paradox of digital working: even if work takes place virtually, social actors are still physically present in their working environments. Thus the speed of digital technologies rubs up against the embodied encounter between actor and machine. Office workers talked of feeling ‘very angry and very frustrated’ (Sarah) at such times, feelings which accumulated when reminders were sent but still no response was forthcoming, and options for filling the time effectively grew more limited. Even ceramicists were not immune to this, since information exchange was fundamental to their self-employed status. Ceramicist Fiona described the time she was waiting for a phone call from a photographer as: ‘this tiny little window of time . . . I just filled by going through old emails . . . with no sense of having finished anything’.

In addition to seeking effective ways to fill waiting time, waiting actors also frequently sought to control, shorten or eliminate their waits. Office workers had developed a range of practices, including the use of time-reckoning systems, for example, automated calendar reminders or post-it notes, such as the ‘to do’ list that Tracey regularly updated through the working day (Figure 2: Tracey). Ultimately, though, given that waits like these generally arose unpredictably and were dependent on others, efforts to manage them often proved futile; although reminders might be sent, responses would only be forthcoming at a time to suit the other party, creating knock-on effects as others were then forced to wait as well in a type of ‘chain waiting’ (Amy, ceramicist). In cases such as these, waiting actors reported devoting a portion of their waiting time to repeatedly checking whether the information they needed had arrived. However, this did little to alleviate the sense of distress and anxiety, and in fact often led to a heightened sense of powerlessness. Ceramicist Helen’s frequent checks on the progress of a fragile parcel of pots posted to an overseas customer served as a reminder of the ‘things could have gone wrong, so it made me more worried while I was waiting’.

For the hairdressers, normative pressures from the employing salon with its disciplinary rhetoric of ‘family’ (Costas & Grey, 2014) signalled that they were expected to occupy waiting interludes, such as waiting for their next client to arrive, with ‘filler tasks’ like cleaning and tidying the salon or unpacking boxes, tasks they regarded as inferior and undesirable. Harry explained, ‘We work as a family . . . so the environment around here is everybody tries to help’ (Figure 2: Harry). Hairdressers reported roaming the salon looking for such low-grade filler tasks that were ultimately unrelated to the practice of hairdressing and were emblematic of the experience of waiting as surplus time (Jeffrey, 2008). Rich described how during one such waiting period he had been asked to help unpack boxes of products:

I hadn’t unpacked products for around five years, it’s a physical job up and down the stairs carrying things . . . . I was wondering, ‘Is this my job now? Is this the right place for me? I’m back unpacking boxes again.’ (Figure 2: Rich)

The cramped and narrow space on the staircase together with the unpleasant and physically demanding task that was far removed from cutting hair called into question the value of his work, but also raised questions of identity. Although on occasion liminal spaces such as corridors and stairwells can constitute productive sites for respite or creativity (Shortt, 2015), here, the staircase became a site for negative affect and lack of autonomy. Rich noted that that ‘waiting and delay are in a sense a failure because you’re not dealing with clients. . . it’s extremely personal for us if someone isn’t in the chair’.

In many cases, working arrangements meant that tasks suitable to fill waiting time were not readily available. The office workers were frequently stuck in transitory spaces such as ‘in an empty room or someone else’s office’ (May), or beside malfunctioning printers and photocopiers, spaces that offered few affordances for alternate activity. For the office workers, waiting for meetings to start was time perceived as especially problematic (Efrat-Treister et al., 2020) since ‘it’s not enough time to get stuck into something else’ (Karen).

Hairdressers explained how the late arrival of customers left them waiting for uncertain periods of time in the transitory space of the reception area: John explained:

Thus, efforts to fill waiting time often amounted to little more than purposeless ‘hovering’ near the focal wait as individuals sought to ‘make do’ with the limited resources to hand.

Longer, more predictable waits offered greater affordances to fill effectively with alternative activities as waiting subjects had time to prepare ahead (Gasparini, 1995). Ceramic artist Hannah described the time when she had to take her turn to staff a small gallery where her work was being exhibited alongside those of other artists:

I’d come in, placed down my coat, made myself a cup of tea, got my sketchbook out, and I was literally getting ready to wait . . . I know I’m going to be there . . . waiting for hours and hours and hours for someone to come in. (Figure 2: Hannah)

Nevertheless, despite being able to use the time to engage in ‘equipped waiting’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 35) making use of brought-along resources such as a sketchbook (Ayass, 2020), there were few spatial affordances for productive work. Being stuck generated not just anxiety about the focal wait but also a sense of boredeom and frustration that accumulated over time and thoughts of ‘lots and lots of things I could be doing, but I can’t because I’ve got to be here’.

Waiting under the adaptive-organic temporal macro-structure

Waiting arose under the adaptive-organic temporal macro-structure in two diverse ways; first, through the socio-material engagement between humans and material objects and, second, through human-centred temporalities.

The practices of the ceramic artists were governed by the temporalities of the materials of their craft (Jalas, 2006), including clay and glaze, and organic processes such as the heating up and cooling down of the kiln. Experiential knowledge arose through the performance of material encounters (Gherardi & Perrotta, 2014) concerning the likely duration of the wait. Waiting for clay to dry to exactly the right consistency to be workable (leather hard) was, however, an unpredictable exercise dependent on the vagaries of the weather, the temperature of the studio, humidity and other environmental factors which could lead to variations in terms of hours or even days. Some waits could be slowed down or speeded up, but only within the limits of the temporal affordances of objects or waiting situations. Ceramicists utilised a range of strategies to speed up the drying process such as placing items near a radiator, or alternatively to slow them down when they were drying too quickly, such as covering them with plastic (Figure 3: Mary). However, as Lucy pointed out, materiality may resist human intentions (Symon & Whiting, 2019) and constant checking was required:

If you’re working with clay you’re constantly gauging and judging . . . that’s where that sort of tacit knowledge comes in and that is so related to the waiting part of it. (Lucy)

Thus, monitoring progress formed a key strategy of wait management under adaptive-organic temporality, notably in the case of waiting for kilns to heat up or, even more importantly, to cool down, since opening the kiln too early could lead to cracking or breaking due to thermal shock, so timing was critical. This was often experienced as a time of anxious anticipation. Joanna, who rented a studio some distance from her home, described how she could not sleep when waiting for the kiln, and so would get up very early and drive to the studio:

I think I just feel far away [at home], I’d like to be closer to the kiln so that I can go and check on it . . . Once I’m in here early in the morning at 6 or 7 o’clock, I’m happy, it’s lovely being here . . . it’s warm and it smells all kilny . . . you know, I feel like I’m in control when I’m back here. (Figure 3: Joanna)

While primarily evident among the ceramicists, similar strategies were also utilised by the hairdressers; Clare (Figure 3) described how she would carry around a small hair sample from a new client to test how long the colour would take to ‘lift’ so she could keep checking on progress. However, in contrast with the checking that took place while waiting under the intensified-organisational macro-structure which was associated with feelings of powerlessness and a sense of wasted time, checking on waits under adaptive-organic temporality was experienced as part of the rhythmic natural cycles to which waiting actors became attuned as they accompanied material processes through time (Hernes & Schultz, 2020).

The second facet of waiting under the adaptive-organic macro-structure concerned the appropriation of waiting time to attend to human rather than material needs. Appropriation has been identified as an innate human need, freeing individuals from everyday constraints (Söderlund & Borg, 2017). However, such opportunities may be limited by the temporal and spatial affordances of work, driving appropriation to the margins and corners of organisational life (Costas & Grey, 2014). While attention has focused on work–life balance strategies at the boundary between work time and home time that enable individuals to rest and recover from the depletions of work, less attention has been paid to the temporal ‘micro’ work–life balance strategies in which actors may engage during the working day itself by creating Eigenzeit or time to oneself (Nowotny, 1992). Waiting emerged as a marginal time that offers affordances for ‘gear-shifting’ (Hopkins, 1986, p. 639), enabling individuals to escape time controls and reclaim fragments of time for recovery, personal care and enjoyable non-work activities, which we have termed micro-self-repair.

For the hairdressers, very brief moments waiting for a client to have their hair shampooed by a colleague would be appropriated to leave the salon floor and descend the staircase into the staff areas where they would chat with colleagues, use their phones, have a drink or something to eat. The predictable length of these waits meant the hairdressers experienced a degree of control over the process:

I had 10 minutes to relax, have a glass of water . . . because we’ve got a system here, we know it’s 10 minutes for a shampoo and I went up just after eight minutes. (Figure 3: Harry)

These personal activities tended to be fitted into the duration of the wait, indicative of the subordinated status of waiting time compared with regular work activities, entailing movement downstairs to the back-stage areas of the salon and away from the client-facing front-stage areas which required a polished presence (Shortt, 2015).

Self-repair through brief times of silence and escape from the emotional labour of hairdressing (Shortt, 2015) was not possible within the confines of the salon building; even the bench outside the salon was not far enough away because ‘sometimes people come out . . . or they’ll come and talk to you, and we’re in a job where we talk all day every day so it’s nice to be on our own for a bit’ (Figure 3: Sally). Instead, Clare described how she would take advantage of waiting between clients to move further away from the salon to sit outside a nearby café and smoke a cigarette, ‘it’s close enough that I don’t feel like I’ve gone too far from the salon, but it’s just far enough . . . I was just feeling like, “I’m out of the salon, thank God”,’ for a few moments of solitude. Others would seek out the green space of the local park, underlining the importance of the natural environment for stress recovery. Thus, spatially moving away from the salon at times of waiting emerged as a time for healing, suggestive of the limited affordances of both the rarefied client-facing zone and the shabbier, bustling staff areas for self-repair (Shortt, 2015). Nevertheless, these waits were circumscribed by the exigencies of clients and the temporal pacing of hairdressing processes, indicative of the tensions arising between intensified-organisational temporalities and efforts to carve out more organic time for the self.

Longer waits, on the other hand, created ‘free space’ for more purposeful activity. The hairdressers used these interludes to go out in small groups or pairs for ‘model hunting’, seeking people willing to have a free haircut or colour so they could practise their techniques and complete the salon’s training programme. These times were viewed very positively: ‘I was out in the fresh air with a colleague, it wasn’t claustrophobic . . . it’s about me, my training, my life’ (Figure 3: Rich). Model hunting thus emerged as a liminal time offering plentiful affordances for personal development and growth and investment in the imagined future self.

In contrast, the ceramicists did not need to appropriate their working time for personal activities or repair since their studios and their working practices had been designed and organised by them to meet their personal needs and those of their craft. The craft worker invests ‘his or her personality or self into the object produced’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 27), thus waiting becomes a project of the self. Working time was actively sought out as a period for the construction of their primary identity as artists and makers. Whereas the hairdressers sought to exit their workplace to reclaim the self, the ceramicists conversely described their workplace as somewhere to ‘hide’, a place to go ‘if I feel I need a bit of personal space and that kind of thing. It’s my shed as well as my studio’ (Fiona), a refuge from competing demands of family life on the one hand and the business side of ceramics on the other, with their divergent and conflicting temporal demands.

The rhythm of the working day with its ebbs and flows of socio-material waiting afforded the possibility of using waits to achieve a positive work–life balance or to move between work locations to foster creative energy. Amy explained how movement around and between her work and personal space enabled her to balance the waiting time necessitated by her enamelling work with her private activities: ‘I would start enamelling, do some cooking, go and do shopping, come back and do some enamelling’, while Stuart described how he used time waiting for his clay to dry to experiment with new forms of craft on his knitting machine (Figure 3: Stuart), reflecting the comparatively high degree of control experienced by the ceramicists. At the extreme, the practice of craft work and the connections among skill, physical processes and material objects became so absorbing that immersion in the rhythms of work obviated any personal needs, reflecting the transcendence of the creative act and the experience of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990): ‘So if I am properly in the creative zone, I experience something like a warp on time, so I don’t feel hungry or thirsty’ (Fiona).

Such ‘enclaves of time’ (Hopkins, 1986, p. 640) were generally not available to the office workers. The mediating role played by ICTs in the workflow (Wajcman & Rose, 2011), and the management of these by continuously flipping between tasks, meant that they rarely experienced a few moments of ‘pure’ waiting as an opportunity for repair and recovery. Instead, office workers reported proactively carving out brief temporal interludes that forced them to wait (Gasparini, 1995) with the aim of gaining some respite from the incessant demands of work. Often this would entail snatching short moments of personal time while waiting alone at the confines of their workstations ‘sneaking in a little bit of browsing of news sites’ (Stella). Many office workers were found to engage in ‘temporal decoupling’ (Blagoev & Schreyögg, 2019) during waiting times, or intentional efforts to create a state of asynchrony with the dominant structure. Emma deliberately left her workstation around ‘once an hour’ to make a cup of coffee so that she was:

. . . forced to wait, even if it is less than a minute; it is a period where you can stop and think about what’s next and then go back to your tasks with a renewed sense of focus . . . just the fact that you can step away, even if it’s just for two minutes to the kettle in the corner, is still a feeling of control. (Figure 3: Emma)

Even though largely stuck at their workstations, office workers thus engaged in minor acts of temporising (Gasparini, 1995) that could serve to bolster the individual’s ability to cope with an intensive flow of work. Waiting thereby emerges as a form of ephemeral and covert individual resistant practice enacted in the face of ever-hastening workplace temporal rhythms.

Limitations and directions for future research

While our research has contributed to theory on waiting and on temporal structures, there are nevertheless some limitations. Although we included three diverse occupational groups, additional insights might be gained from including others – for example, what does waiting signify for individuals in zero hours contract occupations where waiting time is unpaid? Moreover, do those working in occupations whose core focus is on waiting, such as hospitality staff or taxi drivers, have a different orientation towards waiting experiences? Further research could incorporate groups such as these to extend our understanding of waiting in organisations.

Second, our findings indicate the existence of two temporal macro-structures that become evident during waits; however, it may be that other such macro-structures exist, and further research that explores this possibility would be welcome. Third, we found that intensified-organisational and adaptive-organic temporal macro-structures appear to co-occur in diverse work settings. Further research could explore the contextual conditions under which they conflict with one another and those under which they can be reconciled.

Finally, our study has brought to light how individuals use waiting time to engage in micro self-repair during the working day. In light of the ever-increasing intensification of work (Rosa, 2014), further research that explores the conditions under which individuals carve out such fragments of time for self-repair and their effectiveness would be welcome.