Organizing in the Folding of Time: Shaping organizational change trajectories at turning points

Defining turning points

Mainstream views of change tend to depict change as a difference in state between two different points in time (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005). An advantage of such a view is that it emphasizes the before-and-after states of change processes. However, as Langley and Tsoukas (2010) point out, such a view says little about the actual process of changing. A trajectory view of change offers a combination of a before-and-after and process view of change, whereby the difference before and after is described as a change of direction of a course of events, and the process of changing unfolds as a movement throughout turning points. However, although several organizational scholars (e.g. Blagoev & Schreyögg, 2019; Engwall & Westling, 2004; Guérard, Bode, & Gustafsson, 2013; Putnam & Fuller, 2014; Sklaveniti, 2020) have discussed turning points, they have tended to reduce turning points to singular pivotal events. Scholars who have studied turning points in more depth (e.g. Abbott, 1997; Elder, 1985) have discussed turning points as immanent to – and formative of – trajectories. These scholars have asserted that turning points represent a key aspect of temporal trajectories by giving them their particular shape (see also Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). For example, Abbott (1997) argues that a temporal trajectory necessitates turning points; otherwise, the trajectory would amount to a linear process without change. From this perspective, the role of a turning point is not assessed on the basis of perceived impact, but on how it takes part in shaping the temporal trajectory observed at emerging events along the trajectory.

Another undertheorized aspect of turning points, is how they give shape to trajectories of change. With few exceptions (e.g. Sklaveniti, 2020) organizational scholars have considered turning points as part of trajectories of change, but not as constitutive of trajectories of change. Recalling Tolstoy’s argument about the connecting of disparate events across time, it becomes important to understand how turning points taking place months, years, decades or even centuries apart may connect into a recognizable trajectorial shape. In this study, we assume that turning points unfold differently through time and consequently shape temporal trajectories in different ways. This demands a definition of turning points that enables us to understand how they shape temporal trajectories as they unfold. To this effect, we will work from the previously introduced definition of turning points as exhibiting definitional, directional and curvilinear features of temporal trajectories.

Multiple turning points and temporal trajectories

The above discussion suggests the importance of considering multiple turning points in the analysis. Applying the three features to multiple turning points can offer a potentially rich analysis of how actors connect multiple turning points to constitute their temporal trajectory. With few exceptions (e.g. Sklaveniti, 2020) the turning point literature has predominantly focused on turning points as one-off occurrences. As part of a trajectory, a one-off turning point would look like the one illustrated in Figure 1 in the case of the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for data processing.

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Figure 1.

Singular turning point trajectory.

However, actors confront multiple turning points as they construct their temporal trajectory, as argued by organizational scholars (Bothello & Salles-Djelic, 2018; Carlsen, 2006; Guérard et al., 2013; Kraemer, Whiteman, & Banerjee, 2013). Examining multiple turning points enables richer accounts of the change trajectory than one-off turning points because it can help explain how temporal trajectories change direction at different points in time, which may stimulate reflection on the coherence of those changes across time. Figure 2 presents a hypothetical case of three turning points representing three different yet related change processes involving the introduction of a new technology in an organization. Multiple turning points, as Figure 2 indicates, form a trajectory shape that indicates the introduction of different technologies over time as well as how the organization moves towards and away from different technologies at different turning points over time to form the overall shape of the trajectory.

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Figure 2.

Multiple turning point trajectory.

Given that turning points give shape to trajectories as they take place, it is crucial to consider trajectories as being in a state of becoming; that is to say as ongoing accomplishments (Weick, 1995) of emerging events. As Hernes (2017) argues, events or changes along a trajectory are not just mere happenings, but each event or change adds to and modifies the trajectory and changes actors’ sense of where the trajectory is leading (see also Reinecke & Lawrence, 2023). This implies that trajectories are shaped and reshaped at turning points, and consequently that turning points constitute trajectories (see also Abbott, 1997). For example, efforts to implement artificial intelligence (AI) at the ongoing turning point in Figure 2 may be influenced by the ways in which the actors involved draw a line between the past turning point of integrating IT solutions to a possible future turning point of integrating AI into other processes in the organization. In addition, their efforts may be guided by the ways they imagine the movement towards, away from and beyond the three turning points.

Given our intention to theorize how actors connect multiple turning points into temporal trajectories, a crucial issue to explore is how past and future turning points become integrated into processes of navigating the ongoing turning point. As curvilinear processes, turning points evolve through connecting events to create a change in the trajectory’s direction. But once a turning point fades into the past, the complex and dynamic processes of interconnecting events that took place at the time of navigating the turning point need to be translated into an aggregate form (as ‘the event’). The same principle applies to future projected turning points that need to be considered as events in aggregate form rather than complex and dynamic processes of connecting events through the turning point. As we will discuss below, although an emerging turning point may be experienced as the connecting of imminent events, turning points become increasingly experienced as singular and pivotal events with expanding temporal distance from the present. For example, Feddersen et al. (2024) show how the energy company Ørsted (formerly Dong Energy) began to expand offshore wind farms in the late 2010s. According to the authors the establishment of the world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, two decades earlier inspired this expansion, in combination with imagining future events of an expanding offshore wind energy market. Between the Vindeby event in the past and anticipated future events of offshore wind energy markets, the company undertook a substantial change process which integrated numerous interconnected events that led to a change of direction from a primarily onshore wind energy trajectory towards an offshore wind energy trajectory. Figure 3 shows how the introduction of a new technology may be experienced as a gradual implementation process, marked by various interconnected events, and how past and future turning points may be integrated into the ongoing turning point in an aggregate form as one event.

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Figure 3.

Ongoing turning points and the integration of past and future turning points.

However, having illustrated the integration between ongoing turning points and past and future turning points, we are still faced with the challenge of theorizing how such integration shapes temporal trajectories. We argue that this challenge may be overcome by drawing upon Deleuze’s (1991) construct of the fold. In the next section, we detail the temporal assumptions behind his concept of the fold, then discuss how his notions of actual and singular events can form the foundation of a framework for theorizing the shaping of organizational change trajectories at turning points.

The fold

Based on his study of philosophy, mathematics, art, music, design, architecture and cinema, Deleuze depicts movement through time using various geometries of folds, the argument being that folds express infinity in ways that a straight line cannot (see in particular Deleuze, 1991, 2006). The radicality of his metaphysics lies in the idea of expressing both the infinity and indivisibility of time. ² Time, he argues, can be folded in an infinite number of ways while preserving the feature of time as indivisible rather than separated events. Taking inspiration from Bergson (1910) and Whitehead (1929), Deleuze (1991) insists that unlike straight lines, movement is seamless and has no endpoints, no starts and stops, no separations and no privileged vantage points. He then uses the fold to express infinite continuity, movement and change across all forms of matter. Any matter, whether organic or inorganic, may be understood as folding and unfolding, whether it moves, grows or transforms. His concept of the fold seeks to explain how matter is ‘defined less by its heterogeneous and genuinely distinct parts than by the manner in which, by virtue of particular folds, these parts become inseparable’ (Deleuze, 1991, p. 245).

Deleuze’s concept of the fold is a subtle way to understand the relationship between indivisibility and change. Indivisibility suggests that no separations can be made because that would destroy the essence of movement. Yet, change occurs, otherwise no movement would take place. The imagery of folds demonstrates how change may be directional rather than step-wise, although the change process is indivisible and continuous. We recognize directional change as folds in folded sheets of paper or clothing (see Serres and Latour’s (1995) dialogue about a crumpled handkerchief, for example). Deleuze (2006) suggests that a material expression of the fold is origami, the art of folding paper into shapes such as animals or flowers. Each fold can be seen as a process of change that relates to the emerging shape as new folds of varied geometries are added to the emerging figure. The resulting shapes are produced by folding a single sheet of paper without adding any external elements, which implies that every part gets its shape (and hence meaning) from its immanent relationship with all the other parts. Deleuze’s focus on movement-as-folding invites an understanding of how indivisibility and change are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other; their coexistence can only be expressed through folding. This fundamental aspect of origami helps us understand the importance of understanding how ongoing change processes give shape to long-term trajectories of change that subsequently shape the ongoing process of change.

Once we accept the fold as a line (or plane; see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of indivisibility and change we can explore the fold as movement through time. Importantly, we can understand the fold as a way to comprehend the multiplicity of change. Deleuze (1991) noted that ‘The multiple is not merely that which has many parts, but that which is folded in many ways’ (p. 228). In other words, multiplicity refers to different shapes and not different parts. The above example of an organization introducing new technology provides a suitable illustration of the multiplicity of folding. Figure 4 illustrates how three different change processes of introducing technological change can be represented as three different folding shapes. Each one folding shape exhibits a different curvature and directionality and ultimately defines the overall trajectory in different ways. The narrowest fold depicts the introduction of new IT systems, which we imagine represents the smallest departure from the current circumstances. In this case, the space between moving away and coming towards represents the narrowest space for implementing change. At the other end of the scale, full-scale AI implementation represents the most radical change, with the difference between ‘moving away’ and ‘coming towards’ representing the widest space for implementing change.

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Figure 4.

The multiplicity of folding: Three different folding shapes.

Figure 4 also depicts how folds may contain other folds. As Deleuze (1991) explained, folds ‘do not separate into parts of parts, but rather divide infinitely into smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion’ (p. 231). The introduction of new IT systems and partial implementation of AI represent coherent parts that form the folding shape of the full-scale implementation of AI; however, this also indicates that some folds may become hidden. For example, Cappelen and Strandgaard Pedersen (2021) show how actors integrate certain pasts (e.g. the Spice Road and the Silk Road) to shape a culinary movement’s trajectory (the new Anatolian kitchen movement) while folding other pasts (e.g. Ottoman palace cuisine) into obscurity.

Although the concept of folds may seem abstract, it is important to emphasize Deleuze’s (1991) idea of why we use concepts, which he argues are not to be seen as representations of phenomena but as a means to make new knowledge available about phenomena, i.e. to make something new come into existence (Kristensen, Lopdrup-Hjorth, & Sørensen, 2014). Deleuze offers a different view of ‘theories’ than found in dominant organizational research by arguing for understanding their immanence rather than how they are separated from one another. We will next discuss how Deleuze’s use of events and folds can help establish a different understanding of the dynamics between turning points and organizations’ temporal trajectories compared with previous conceptions.

Events

Events are central to Deleuze’s work (Robinson, 2010). In our interpretation of Deleuze, we apply the concept of events to explain how folds exhibit features that are similar to turning points. First, folds are definitional in that they comprise interconnecting events, which is also based on Deleuze’s reliance on Whitehead’s (1929) notion of events as constitutive of time and mutually interrelated through time. Second, folds exhibit geometric properties. They are directional in the sense that they represent shifts between courses of events. Third, folds are curvilinear. According to Deleuze (1991), folds comprise interconnected events that form a swirling movement through time. He refers to folding as a ‘labyrinth of continuity’, where ‘a piece of fabric or a sheet of paper [. . .] divides into an infinite number of folds or disintegrates into curvilinear movements, each one determined by the consistency or the participation of its setting’ (1991, p. 231).

An important aspect of folds is how events interrelate as distinct entities yet enable a sense of indivisible movement through time. According to Deleuze (1991), events do not exist as isolated occasions stretching along a line from the past to the present to the future. On the contrary, events extend over one another through time in an ‘infinite relation of continuity between wholes and parts’ (Robinson, 2010, p. 124). His treatment of events echoes Whitehead’s (1929) point about events being immanent to one another (Hernes, 2014). Although this may seem abstract, multiple examples in organizational research have shown how events extend through other events in time to give other events their distinctive features. For example, Hatch and Schultz’s (2017) account of the ‘golden words’ of the Carlsberg founder is a case in point that appears in their study of how actors at Carlsberg Group evoked an event from more than a century ago when Carlsberg’s founder coined the phrase semper ardens, which means always burning and stems from an anecdote from Ecole de Rome in Italy. Following the original event, this motto was reintroduced at various times over the years and reinforced when it appeared carved in stone over the portal of Carlsberg’s head offices:

The stone carvings embodied what today is part of Carlsberg’s past, where Semper Ardens lay captive for over a century before a group of master brewers set the motto free in the name of a micro-brewed line of beer they developed in the late 1990s. This first contemporary use of Semper Ardens was active for less than 10 years before it fell into disuse and lay hidden again for almost another decade, following which a team working on Carlsberg’s corporate identity statement brought it to the forefront once again. (Hatch & Schultz, 2017, p. 661)

This example of the origin of a company motto underpinned by a material inscription illustrates how certain events may prove resilient through time and extend over other events through time, despite falling into oblivion at times. However, theorizing the simultaneous connection of adjacent events at turning points and the distant connection of events between turning points requires concepts that relate events at turning points to events at past and future turning points. Put more succinctly, how can we express past and future turning points as events that may be brought to bear on events that make up the movement through the current turning point? We will next discuss how Deleuze’s (1990) distinction between actual and singular events makes this possible. We will consider actual events as those events that make up a fold as it takes place, and singular events as descriptive of ‘aggregate’, temporally distant folds, as perceived from the current fold.

Actual and singular events

Actual events include the myriad encounters of various durations between people in an organization in which they innovate, improvise and modify existing solutions and routines (see e.g. MacKay & Chia, 2013; Orlikowski, 1996; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Weick & Quinn, 1999). Actors experience such events first-hand, as concrete existence, according to Deleuze (Rose, Bingley, & Rioseco, 2022). Actual events succeed one another at short time intervals, overlap or take place at the same time at turning points. Their content (such as who said what, who was present and what the event’s outcome was) is carried over from event to event to form an ongoing change process. The mutual interlocking of events throughout the turning point may be reflected in statements such as: ‘Since the majority of us attended yesterday’s meeting, it makes sense to pursue that matter in this meeting’ or ‘Having decided this and drawn up an agreement, we need to make sure that the next meeting reflects our agreement.’

In Deleuze’s framework folds comprise a series of distinct but intrinsically connected actual events. The immanence between events enables movement through the fold to be considered indivisible. But as actors move through time, actual events such as yesterday’s meeting and today’s will gradually fade from memory as distinct events. As a fold is accomplished, it fades into the past and other folds appear on the horizon, presenting the challenge of considering how more distant folds become aggregates of actual events. For example, weeks or months into the future we no longer remember the actual flow of meetings or the ensuing encounters. The lack of vividness also makes it difficult to re-establish how the various meetings and encounters became connected. Nevertheless, the need remains to represent the fold that took place as an event. Hence the following conundrum: folds proceed through a series of tightly interconnected actual events, but for the fold to be immanent in past and future folds it cannot be expressed through the actual events that comprise it. Still, those folds must be considered events that are expressive of the fold in singular terms, which is where Deleuze’s (1990) notion of singular events becomes useful. A singular event, according to Deleuze, is not a tangible event that can lends itself to description (such what happens at the events, for how long, and so on) is a form of immanently connected actual (lived) events. The process of immanently connected actual events that make up a fold become aggregated into a singular event when the fold is observed from a distance. By defining a fold as a singular event, Deleuze makes the fold available as an object of analysis as observed from distant folds. Although we may refer to the 2008 financial crisis as one (singular) event, we share a tacit understanding that it consisted of numerous interconnected events on multiple levels. Similarly, we may refer to the arrival of a new school president as a singular event, although their arrival consisted of a complex series of actual events.

Singular events distinguish themselves from actual events by expressing aggregates of interconnected actual events (Figure 5) in the singular form. They may be seen as proto events or generic events, which are expressive of the process of actual events connecting through a fold. Hence, singular events are a way to express a series of actual events while retaining the notion of an event. They may be represented as past folds or as imagined future folds ‘sufficiently real to enable actors to perform “actual time travel” into the past and the future’ (Williams, 2011, p. 8). Williams’s point suggests that singular events are not just imagined events in the past or the future but that they are also instrumental to the shaping of actual events as they occur. Singular events may represent a vision, a narrative or a sort of ideal solution to enable the connection between actual events at current folds.

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Figure 5.

Folding as a process of emerging actual and singular events.

Whereas the actual events of a past fold may be aggregated into a singular event that expresses that fold, future imagined singular events associated with a fold may enable actors to imagine actual events of that future fold. By extending over and giving rise to actual events, they enable those actual events to emerge and interconnect. This was the case when the semper ardens motto helped Carlsberg achieve a turning point along its trajectory. The initial inscription of the motto over the company’s door may be considered a singular event that epitomized an early turning point along Carlsberg’s temporal trajectory, although it undoubtedly consisted of multiple actual events when it occurred in the late 1800s. On the other hand, the process of reintroducing the motto more than 100 years later may be seen as a way to use the semper ardens singular event to establish the actual events of the (then) future turning points, which eventually helped put the organization back on course with craft-based brewing (Hatch & Schultz, 2017).

Singular events may be alternatively defined as an imaged pivotal event of a fold that enables the interconnection of actual events. For example, large public projects may be defined as the accomplishment of numerous actual events, but to make those events possible the overall ‘singular’ event of the project may be defined in terms of certain features that the actual events converge towards. For example, Pitsis, Clegg, Marosszeky and Rura-Polley (2003) examined how the 2000 Sydney Olympics were planned as a ‘future perfect’ event, which spurred many related events and was subsequently shaped by those events. The case illustrates how the singularity of an event cannot be seen in its entirety in any actual event but may be grasped as the intersection of converging features of the event, such as infrastructure design, technical solutions and the competitions and ceremonies at the event, as shown in the middle part of Figure 5. Although an event may be considered a major turning point, it can also be argued that it became an origami of related folds along separate trajectories.

As the above examples illustrate, although singular events persist, they should not be considered static. Singular events emerge and change in response to the actual events they give rise to. While we may perceive the arrival of a new school president as a singular event, as we move through time, we may invoke the new president’s arrival on successive occasions as a singular event that changes according to the context in which it is evoked. As Figure 5 illustrates, when aggregated, singular events enable new folds to emerge with new actual events throughout the temporal trajectory. Importantly, turning points along the temporal trajectory emerge through the interaction between singular events and actual events, neither of which remain constant (Williams, 2012).

Trajectory shaping by connecting events throughout turning points

Within turning points, processes consist of actual events connecting to shape the curvature of the trajectory at the turning point. Organizations typically structure change processes that consist of closely interlinked events aimed at changing the direction of the trajectory. For example, Weick and Quinn (1999) suggest that sometimes actors improvise change, in which case the change unfolds quickly with planning and implementation running almost simultaneously. Such processes are designed for events to follow one another in a dense and sometimes highly structured temporal pattern, although such patterns may break down or change in response to unexpected events. However, actual events cannot readily feed into one another throughout a curve without a pivotal singular event to prevent the events at the turning point from falling out of orbit. To understand how actual events become interlocked in a curvilinear movement, it is useful to think of a singular event as an emerging pivot for the turning point that guides the interconnecting between actual events throughout the turning point (see Figure 5).

An illustration of how a turning point of multiple actual events may form around a pivotal event can be found in Plowman et al.’s (2007) study of a change process at a church. The change they studied may be considered a turning point as they referred to the directional change caused by the change several times. The authors emphasized how the various change processes (which they refer to as events) connected to form an eventual radical change, summarizing the overall change as follows:

Someone suggested offering hot breakfast to the homeless people who walked by the church on Sunday mornings, and the idea took hold. The group served its first breakfast five weeks later and, within a short time, church volunteers were feeding over 200 homeless people on Sunday mornings. A few months after the first breakfast, a physician volunteer opted out of the food serving line and began seeing anyone who wanted to discuss a medical problem. Within a short time, full-scale medical, dental, and eye clinics emerged as part of the Sunday morning program and, within a few years, a 501(c)(3) spin-off (a tax-exempt organization) of the church was receiving city grants, providing a ‘day center’ for several thousand homeless people and serving over 20,000 meals a year. Legal assistance, job training, laundry services, and shower facilities are a few of the programs, in addition to the clinics that emerged from the initial idea of a hot breakfast. (pp. 515–516)

The case illustrates how multiple interconnected events (Table 1) emerge to form a turning point that marks a change of direction. The duration of the turning point is defined in terms of the events that enable a change in direction to occur. It is possible to interpret evolving actual events in light of an emerging singular event. Much of the case narrative is about the event on Sunday mornings, which changed radically and eventually led to a redefinition of the organization’s (an African American church founded by enslaved people in 1866) identity. We can interpret the change process as pivoting around an emerging singular event that started as a Sunday breakfast to encompass a more elaborate set of interconnected events that marked the overall transition of the church. In our interpretation of the case, although other developments ended up eclipsing the Sunday breakfast, the church expressed its mission as the efforts to meet with homeless people (p. 533) to transform their lives. The turning point in question may be considered definitional in the sense of shaping the church’s trajectory, particularly if interpreted in the light of the origin of the church.

While enabling the trajectory of connected events through the fold, singular events are also subject to change or redefinition in the process of folding. The imminent connection to upcoming events and immediate past events means that the activity during emerging events is likely to exhibit considerable improvisation to align tightly connected events. This means that the activity in the emerging event is focused on aligning ongoing activity with the activity of adjoining events. The activities in the case described by Plowman et al. (2007) emerged from the breakfast concept, but they also subsequently modified the breakfast concept as the singular event. Moreover, by modifying the overall idea, novel and surprising initiatives such as a dental clinic became possible.

Trajectory shaping by connecting turning points

Actual events at turning points are closely interwoven as they follow in succession around an emerging singular event, whereas actual events at previous or future turning points take place at a distance from the current turning point. To describe the temporal distance of reaching into the past and the future it is useful to apply the concept of temporal depth (Bluedorn, 2002). Bluedorn (2002) defined temporal depth as ‘the temporal distances into the past and future that individuals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen’ (p. 114). If we apply this definition to an organization’s trajectory of change, temporal depth describes the part of the temporal trajectory that is framed by the earliest and last turning points that the actors typically consider. The temporal depth of a turning point is typically limited to the duration of the turning point or parts thereof, whereas the temporal depth of a trajectory may span turning points taking place years, decades or centuries apart (Table 1). Hence, the temporal depth attributed to trajectories considerably influences the outcome of the analysis (e.g. Feddersen et al., 2024).

Turning points, as argued above, are represented by singular events across time. They constitute the shape of trajectories while also being influenced by the shape of the trajectory. Above, we discuss how Hatch and Schultz’s (2017) analysis of the semper ardens Carlsberg motto exemplifies how the long-ago turning point of defining the motto was used as a basis for future brewing in the late 19^th century and became integrated into the actual events that made up the turning point towards craft-based brewing more than a century later. To exemplify the connection between turning points we extend the Carlsberg case with a study (Hernes, Feddersen, & Schultz, 2021) on how Carlsberg brewed and commercially launched beer from 120-year-old yeast cells in 2017, allowing the brewery to aim towards the future turning point of achieving 100% sustainable brewing. Figure 6 presents the trajectory of the brewery’s turning points over time. In 2013, when workers at Carlsberg came across old beer bottles that were still intact and contained yeast cells from a bygone era, the idea was born to reproduce beer from that era, which scientists at Carlsberg believed was around the time of the company’s founding in 1847. They then began testing 130-year-old barley seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and experimenting with how to grow them. While the beer was produced in small quantities, their efforts led to the launch of future novel beers based on a brew that was more than a century old.

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Figure 6.

Trajectory shaping from the rebrew event at Carlsberg Group.

The rebrew process can be broken down into three actual events: discovery of the bottles, growing the barley and rebrewing the original beer, which we dub the rebrew event. Once the rebrew process materialized into a singular event, i.e. as the process drew to a close, the actors were able to connect the event to past and future singular events. On the one hand, they integrated the initial turning point of founding the organization in the 1840s. On the other hand, the search for ways to reproduce past brews yielded outcomes that were more decisive than the symbolic process of rebrewing as the crops could serve as a foundation for brewing organic beer, which became part of the organization’s trajectory towards sustainable brewing. This became part of the organization’s ‘together towards zero’ programme developed from 2016 (Schultz & Hernes, 2020). Taken together, the three turning points (the founding of the company, the rebrew process and the future turning point of sustainable brewing) can be considered as provisionally shaping the temporal trajectory within a temporal depth of close to 200 years.

When actors in organizations connect turning points that are years or decades apart, those turning points are depicted as singular events around which actual events become connected. From this perspective, while actual events take place with the participation of a singular event within turning points, temporal trajectories are shaped by connecting singular events across time. This is where turning points serve to define the organization’s long-term temporal trajectory and are brought to bear on the ongoing processes of enacting turning points. While the rebrew event was a singular event in the making, it also became part of the shaping of Carlsberg’s long-term trajectory. Although remaking a 130-year-old recipe was initially intended as an experimental idea, it became increasingly consequential over time, and the successful recreation of the beer resulted in a turning point of actual events. A video produced by Carlsberg shows how multiple activities (materializing as actual events) went into the brewing process, e.g. seeds had to be obtained, crops had to be cultivated and the production process had to be adapted to technology from the late 1800s. All of these activities were connected with the help of the emerging singular event, which connected to other singular events across the temporal depth considered by the actors to redefine the shape of that trajectory.

The rebrew case exemplifies how trajectory shaping is selective and is influenced by the temporal depth across which actors consider turning points. As it began to take form, the rebrew (singular) event became a turning point that can be considered coherent with Carlsberg’s distant craft-based past and the company’s intended sustainable future. The case also suggests how achieving coherence between distant singular events is a process that emerges through activities in actual events (Table 1). Making the brew made Carlsberg realize that challenges other than brewing, such as future sustainability, might also be tackled. The case also suggests that creating a sense of coherence between distant turning points may involve creative and potentially uncertain processes.

Change and continuity at turning points

Mainstream perspectives of sequential change processes still dominate organizational change research (Van de Ven & Poole, 2021). A contribution of our discussion is to theorize the connections between change processes across time that shape the organization’s long-term trajectory. This view implies that actors are in a continuous process of effecting change, both as the change of direction at the turning point and in shaping the overall trajectory of change as represented by singular events. Our definition of turning points as directional, definitional and curvilinear is a way to describe how continuous change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002) at turning points shapes the trajectory while also being shaped by the trajectory. In this way, we temporalize change by placing turning points in imminent and long-term contexts. By relating change to shaping temporal trajectories, we respond to previous calls to explore the potential of trajectories for explaining change (Kunisch et al., 2017). As discussed, examining the shaping of trajectories may aid in understanding how actors imagine and enact various shapes of change in terms of curvature and directionality through their activities and how those shapes define the overall trajectory of change. For example, we discuss how some organizational trajectories may exhibit sharper and more frequent turning points, whereas other trajectories may exhibit more gradual turning points that unfold over longer periods such as the Carlsberg Group case. We argue that such considerations are important for planning and implementing strategic change processes, for instance, because they affect how human, financial and technological resources are deployed over time.

Although we do not focus on continuity in this paper, our framework makes a strong case for specifically studying the dynamics of continuity in change. Typically, continuity has been considered as a given state that may hinder or enable change. In most research, as Sminia (2011) noted, continuity tends to be relegated to the status of a background of routinely connected acts or events and, as such, does not need to be explained. However, although continuity is frequently examined in organizational research, it remains undertheorized, as recent studies have suggested that continuity may take different forms and may entail effortful processes with uncertain outcomes (Feuls & Hernes, 2023). Drawing inspiration from Deleuze, we suggest that connecting events within and between turning points crucially demands effortful and creative processes to establish a sense of coherence between actual events within turning points as well as between turning points. In this perspective, continuity is not a backdrop to change but an integral aspect of the change process.

Our framework of temporal trajectory shaping offers a view whereby the continuity–change interplay can be studied through a more dynamic lens than has been the case previously. Viewed as a temporal imaginary, the fold dissolves important dualisms such as those between change and continuity and between difference and repetition, by considering them as different sides of the same coin. As suggested above, gradually enacting a turning point involves the enactment of continuity, which is nevertheless aimed at a resulting change of direction once the turning point is accomplished. In such cases, the turning point represents processes of ‘changing continuity’, where change is the change of direction of the course of events rather than a difference in state between two different points in time (Van de Ven & Poole, 2005).

The continuity–change interplay becomes even more complex if we consider that actors enact multiple turning points, each of which gives a sense of change as it occurs but also contributes to a sense of continuity between turning points. Importantly, the shape of the trajectory may offer actors a sense of coherence (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013) between turning points. Coherence, we hasten to add, is not to be seen as consistency. Whereas consistency implies sameness, coherence may harbour tensions, contrasts or opposition. For example, it may seem coherent for an organization to temporarily shift towards a technology that is not expected to exist in the distant future, but the shift may nevertheless offer the time required to adapt to future technologies when actors look at related change processes in the past. Therefore, by seeking coherence in connecting change processes through time, scholars can use trajectories to show how more distant change processes may connect across time.

By extending Deleuze’s concept of the fold further, continuity and change may also be understood rhythmically. Gherardi (2023) notes how Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of refrain can be used to understand how actors both reproduce and modify their temporal realities as they move through time. She then contributes a temporal view of rhythm consistent with our perspective of folding time, discussing how the concept of refrain ‘ties together critical, rhythmic moments, those threshold moments in which repetition and difference are nested’ (p. 67).

Trajectorial shape

Scholars have discussed how organizations perform directional change along temporal trajectories, illustrated by studies that have focused on how organizations responded to major events in their external environments such as natural disasters, financial crises or disruptive technological change (e.g. Feldman et al. 2021; Johnsen, Olaison, & Sørensen, 2018; Tourish & Hargie, 2012). However, thus far, trajectories and turning points have largely remained separate in the organizational literature. The articles drawing explicitly on trajectories reviewed for this paper make little or no mention of turning points. ³ Nevertheless, trajectories have been increasingly used to analyse time-related organizational phenomena such as organizational or strategic change (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Stensaker & Langley, 2010), organizing processes (Scheller, 2022), organizational resilience (Hernes, Blagoev, Kunisch, & Schultz, 2024), organizational learning (Berends & Lammers, 2010), organizational identity (Cloutier & Ravasi, 2020; Ybema, 2010) and narratives (Hernes & Obstfeld, 2022). Alongside this literature, an emerging body of research has addressed turning points in organizations (e.g. Blagoev & Schreyögg, 2019; Engwall & Westling, 2004; Guérard et al., 2013; Putnam & Fuller, 2014; Sklaveniti, 2020), but without making turning points immanent to trajectories.

By integrating turning points and trajectories into the same framework, we have taken the challenge of theorizing how actors shape trajectories by confronting multiple turning points. We have discussed how trajectories are shaped by integrating turning points across time, which may help explain how actors can select or deselect singular events in their past or future to give temporal trajectories a different shape. There are multiple examples of how actors may focus on some events in their trajectory while backgrounding others to create a sense of coherence between events. Investigating the events surrounding the great East Japan earthquake in 2011, Danner-Schröder (2020) shows how actors created a greater sense of wholeness by simultaneously focusing on and backgrounding actual events to form a joint temporal trajectory. Examining actors’ selection and deselection of events can elucidate how missed opportunities, i.e. near and distant past events that have not been actualized, may be restored (Miller, Gomes, & Lehman, 2019), and how actors connect an organization’s future to a forgotten past (Howard-Grenville, Metzger, & Meyer, 2013) or distance themselves from a competing or undesired narrative (Cappelen & Strandgaard Pedersen, 2021). Furthermore, the distinction between actual and singular events may also inform theorizing of what does not (yet) exist (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022) in terms of events and how such events may or may not influence imagined change (Augustine, Soderstrom, Milner, & Weber, 2019). Finally, turning points may confer important narrative dimensions upon trajectories (Abbott, 1997; Hernes & Obstfeld, 2022). In particular, the definitional feature of turning points introduced at the beginning of the paper may enrich the notion of temporal narratives, particularly as some turning points may carry powerful symbolism (Gabriel, 2008, p. 191) and take on mythical proportions in a narrative.

Theorizing time as folds

Our theorizing concerning organizational change processes as shaping of temporal trajectories is closely affiliated with the process lens on time (Blagoev, Hernes, Kunisch, & Schultz, 2024). Although previous research has examined the successive unfolding of periods or moments, a process lens assumes that actors are embedded in the present in which they enact different patterns of past and future events through ongoing activity. Empirical studies have built on this premise to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Schultz & Hernes, 2020) and theoretical works have extended the implications of such assumptions (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Hernes, 2014, 2022; Hussenot & Missonier, 2016; Reinecke & Lawrence, 2023). Underlying the process view of time is the assumption that time is constitutive of organizing and not a backdrop against which organizing is understood. The process view of time is ontologically distinct from recent views that have distinguished between subjective and objective understandings of time (e.g. Shipp & Jansen, 2021) and has important methodological consequences for the study of organizational processes as phenomena that take place in and through time (Feuls, Plotnikof, & Stjerne, 2022).

While the process view of time has focused on the dynamics by which past and future events are reinterpreted and reimagined in the present, it nevertheless represents what Hernes (2022, p. 41) calls a ‘stationary view of time’. According to Hernes, this perspective implies that future and past events are empty space waiting to be filled by projections from the present but does not account for how ongoing projections are the means by which actors move through time (Feddersen et al., 2024). The folding imagery challenges actors to imagine movement through time as a complex and dynamic process of connecting events not yet addressed in process views of time. Applying the imagery of the fold allows us to appreciate how it falls back on itself (Deleuze, 1991, p. 234) in a way that both differs from and repeats previous and future folds (Williams, 2011). It invites actors to imagine the future as moving beyond the present, which then comes towards them as a different yet recognizable shape of the future trajectory. Similarly, it invites reflection on past change processes as a trajectory of events that moves beyond them as the present becomes a past event, which will turn back on itself in a different yet recognizable shape of the past trajectory. While the temporal imagery of folds invites viewing the projection of future and past events as folded lines of different shapes, it also invites reflection on the process of enacting such shapes by enacting the movement through folds. This is important for studying organizational change as turning points through a temporal process lens as it helps ask important questions about the activities through which actors bring more-distant turning points to bear on ongoing processes of enacting a turning point, as well as how they are confronted with how their ongoing processes give shape to their overall trajectory of change.