Abstract
Abbie J Shipp and Yitzhak Fried (eds), Time and work, volume 2: How time impacts groups, organizations and methodological choices. Psychology Press: London/New York, 2014; 182 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84872-134-0
These two volumes are informed by the view that ‘most management research does not sufficiently address time’ (Vol. I: 1). The introduction states the aim to ‘translate the ideas of temporal research into a reality’ with reference to work (Vol. I: 8). The main scientific perspective taken is that of organisational psychology and other mainstream positivist strands of management research. In terms of temporal perspective, the way the authors typically deal with the issue of time is set out in the introduction. It emphasises two sides to time: objective clock time and subjective psychological time (Vol. I: 3). Most contributions bear fidelity to one or both of these approaches. Ultimately, however, there is less attention lavished on ‘time’ as there is on temporality itself.
The stated approach differentiates itself from longitudinal studies in which time features. Whereas the latter measure variables at different points in time, here ‘temporal research’ is taken to be that which examines the theoretical nature of time (Vol. I: 4). But it is precisely the theoretical interrogation of time that is missing here. In fact, many contributions come close to the very longitudinal imaginings of time from which the editors of the volumes consciously set out to distinguish themselves.
The key questions posed by the volumes concern the value of temporal perspective, whether this temporal aspect is explicit or implicit in certain issues, and whether time and temporality bear any significance or importance to the study of the main ‘content areas’ of organisational psychology and management research, such as motivation, socialisation, performance, creativity and so on.
The variation in the subject matter of the essays allow many opportunities for the testing of the relevance of the topic of time to the different ‘content areas’ covered. Some attempts are more convincing than others.
Those which most directly deal with the pivotal questions are also those which raise the most interesting questions themselves. It is this handful of contributions that I focus on here, alongside more general remarks about the characteristics and shortcomings of the wider approach taken in the two volumes.
Ashforth, Harrison and Sluss, in their paper on the socialisation process, bring to light some of the difficulties in talking about time at work in such a way that its determinateness in social relations is obscured. Sonnentag, Pundt and Albrecht touch upon some of the problematic aspects of work and work-time, drawing attention to the way that the rigorous scientific approach employed by research in this field exhibits a tendency to otherwise exclude the mess and struggle of everyday life. Day also highlights in an imperfect way the inequalities that one must consider when talking about time in the context of work. Gilson, Litchfield and Gilson and Fulmer, Crosby and Gelfand both helpfully contribute small indications of what other alternative ways of living in and moving through time are possible.
These examples all respond to the two volumes’ stated concern with the relevancy, importance and relative explicitness or implicitness of a temporal perspective. In their own ways, they expose the possibilities and limitations of such a perspective when it is situated in an intellectual tradition that tends to elide some of the key factors that structure our experience and use of time in capitalist society.
Throughout, there is too little engagement with work-time itself. The ‘temporal’ largely describes only the progression of the various individual and collective psychological phenomena through time rather than subject to the temporal structures of the capitalist labour process. Thus, most contributions concern ‘time’ only in so far as their chosen topics take place within it. ‘Time’ is not really at stake here, as something subject to social structuration and contestation, shared unequally and occurring differently for given groups and individuals.
The most contemporarily relevant questions that arise from the volumes are those that the contributions fail to ask. The question of time and temporality has important ramifications for a generation of workers for whom precariousness, insecurity and uncertainty are facts of life. The smooth, continuous temporal progressions of the subjects featured in in this volume (especially the first part) belong to another world entirely than that in which we live. These employees have a future towards which to develop, learn and earn. Elsewhere, in the growingly significant section of the economy devoted to flexibilised, contractually non-standard work in service environments, many employees, most painfully the young, have precisely no such future to speak of. Only in the frame of this non-future can we make sense of Ashforth, Harrison and Sluss’s ascription of an ‘all-consuming present’ to the relatively unusual and privileged workers they research. The present is all-consuming, perhaps, because the future is far away, if not non-existent, even for those workers who inhabit an alternate universe in which they have the permanence and stability in which to develop that rarest of contemporary things: a working identity geared to one job that will last, and, perhaps, some sense of vocation. The recognition of the atypical experience of these participants, who have identities they can develop in connection with just one job rather than a succession of intermittent positions, is relegated only to the cursory mention of alternative and, essentially, ‘othered’ kinds of relationships with employment, buried away as an afterthought (Ashforth et al., Vol. I: 26) or as a footnote (ibid., n. 7 and n. 9, Vol. I, pp. 32–33).
Of course, the authors’ commitment to presenting the career trajectories of their participants as somehow ‘normal’ has the normative function of suggesting it is good, or desirable. Indeed, a problem with the approach utilised throughout is the way it precludes explicit assessments of what is good or bad, and gives instead inevitably covert recommendations of its own. The approach entertains criticism of, say, long working hours only in so far as there is sufficient evidence as to the harmful effects of work-life imbalance upon health or wellbeing. This squeezes out qualitative and normative judgements regarding unquantifiable and contested notions of the good life and how best human life might be spent in light of the limited supply of hours we have at our disposal to pursue, autonomously, individually or collectively, our projects and desires.
Often, as with Ashforth, Harrison and Sluss’s description of the ‘sense of self’ sought by newcomers in job roles (Vol. I: 14), supposed ‘empirical evidence’ is corralled against which one can argue only on the same positivist terms, by bringing to bear some other source of veracity or empirical ‘truth’. Certain questions are ruled out. Are there definitions of self beyond work identity to which they might aspire? Is what one does for work exhaustive of one’s identity? The incapacity of this academic discourse to interrogate the obviousness of our present relationship with work rules out such ruminations.
It takes the chapter by Sonnentag, Pundt and Albrecht (Vol. II: 111–140) to give greater expression to the darker and more conflicted undertow of work, even if imperfectly. The degree to which Sonnentag et al.’s contribution seems to redress the inadequacies and oversights witnessed in prior papers in evinced in a striking passage (pp. 112–113) where they detail the active physical harm wrought by workplace stress.
A stark contrast is struck with the candied optimism of other contributions. Where difficulties are encountered, one gets the impression that these are taken to unfold solely within the psyche or self of the individual, rather than exert themselves in a way subject to prevailing organisational demands and structures. Reducing everything generative of an emotional feeling, good or bad, to an ‘affective event’ (Beal, Vol. I: 41) or ‘emotion episode’ merely serves to strip actions of their context in wider processes and relations of power, and absolves the researcher of the ability to contest the normative nature of workplace phenomena with their own judgement and distinction between what precisely is ‘good’ and what is bad. The language of the ‘affective event’ suggests that acts of exploitation and resistance share in the same emotional and social space- whereas they are subject to the commitments and intentions of actors who, by their own will or otherwise, inhabit and display different sets of material and psychological interests and affinities. This conflict is sorely absent in the discussions of work relations here.
Indeed, outside of Sonnentag et al.’s contribution, we are more likely to find ‘stress and fatigue’ considered only in the respect in which they inhibit ‘goal progress’ (Beal, Vol. I: 45). This suggests that work is not in fact stressful and fatigue-inducing in and of itself by very virtue of the pernicious way in which it diminishes the possibility of having any other goals to which to devote oneself, and the state of affairs whereby, in capitalist society, work is largely predisposed upon a lack of true autonomy which corresponds with the governing principle of the whole process: capitalist control.
Day’s contribution (Vol. II: 30–52) is one of the few to address any inequality in the way that time pressure exerts itself disproportionally on certain unfortunate members of organisational hierarchies. Curiously, however, it is not towards employees that our sympathies are directed, but rather towards the ‘leaders’ celebrated in management literature, whom are burdened with the constant need to decide how to use their time and that of their subordinates. Moreover, Day suggests that the research agendas of academics actually contribute to maintaining this unfortunate state of affairs, by not focusing on the temporal frame in which leadership manifests. It is a valid point that more should be done to understand how capitalist elites use their time (and it is mainstream management academics that have the best chance of gaining the access to do so). Yet I suspect few academics will lose sleep over the lost sleep of ‘leaders’.
It seems churlish to review a book on the basis of what is missing, especially when it has made no clear claim as to the inclusion of a given theme or perspective in its purview. However, what is missing in this volume constitutes a lack significant enough to warrant sustained scrutiny, a lack that, via its exclusion of certain avenues of critique and inquiry, establishes the conditions for the implicit presence of other positions and commitments. All intellectual production, however neutral and scientific it purports to be, expresses a theory of society, and with this, certain inevitable normative affinities, however understated. In this instance, the absence of conflict, struggle, contestation, strife, misery, pain, boredom, alienation and exploitation, and the critique therein of these aspects which are so commonplace in the experience and practice of work, constitutes an exclusion which seems to be both informed by and in service to a specific social theory that betrays the suggestively ‘scientific’ status of the procedures of investigation and analysis.
This is seldom accounted for in the text itself. In the second volume, Day cites speculation that management scholarship is stricken by a ‘theory fetish’ which precludes the reporting of empirical results that do not fit a given theoretical perspective (Vol. II: 47). He follows such critiques in arguing that research should instead be geared towards inductive inference from empirical evidence aimed at changing current management practice. I would argue, however, that it is not so easy for management to disavow theoretical commitments, no matter how credulous its appeals to unsentimental, theory-free evidence-based science. This volume repeatedly exposes, on the one hand, a complicity with the standpoint of the section of the economic apparatus from which the name of the discipline is derived, and, on the other, whilst working on the basis of this half-formed essentially implicit theory, an abject lack of any totalising theoretical perspective capable of understanding what makes work and time as they are in the kinds of social formations under study, and what alternatives might lie beyond the prevailing organisation of work and time.
There are a few rays of light in the direction of the exploration of alternatives. Gilson, Litchfield and Gilson’s contribution has the considerable merit of reflecting upon an alternative ‘timelessness’ which would liberate activity from pressure and compulsion and encourage free creativity (Vol. I: 142, 154). This at least allows us to place things within a historical horizon where the certainties of the current juncture may one day no longer be so, offering the possibility of the critique of and escape from the present. Additionally, in its interesting and stimulating discussion of cross-cultural differences, Fulmer, Crosby and Gelfand’s paper suggests that there are other ways of using and moving through time other than that to which we are accustomed in capitalist societies. This is principally a result of the different focus it exerts when compared to other contributions, looking beyond a one-sided and eternalising representation of working life. In so doing, it undoes and renders unstable some of the naturalness awarded to the organisation of work and time in the unquestioning treatments found elsewhere in the two volumes.
Overall, the two volumes represent an attempt to break new disciplinary ground in giving serious thought to the interrelationship between work and time. But it is precisely the disciplinary context in which this takes place that inhibits the ability to make good on this aim. In other disciplinary environments, the role that the manipulation and organisation of time takes in the social practices and conflicts of the workplace significance is fairly transparent, commonplace and well-researched. This is especially so among scholars committed to critical understandings of capitalism from sociological, political economic and other such perspectives. In organisational psychology and traditional mainstream management research, the uncomfortable questions raised by such critical understandings have by and large not been asked. This is perhaps due to the way in which the research area is framed, and the location of struggle, conflict and domination outside the normal parameters of inquiry in this field. It may also have something to do with the implication of the discipline within the object of its study, and its complicity with the industrial agents and actors to which the research is addressed. At best, the undertakings towards an analysis of the organisation and appropriation of time in the workplace presented in these volumes offer the promise that, the deeper such researchers look into the topic, the more they will have to contribute to the theorisation, criticism and overturning of its worst aspects.