Seminar – Integrating Distant Pasts and Futures Sustainably in the Present: toward a Theoretical Framework of Organisational Temporality

Professor Majken Schultz and Professor Tor Hernes, Copenhagen Business School

Contemporary organisations are increasingly confronted with the need to comply with short-term business cycles while addressing long-term concerns. This tension between short and long-term concerns is pertinent in relation to grand challenges, such as climate change, but is also found when organisations are forced by market forces to succumb to extreme “short-termism” at the expense of long-term concerns. Whereas the relation between short-term and long-term horizons has traditionally been considered a matter of trade-offs, there is a need for exploring other dynamics between short- and long-term time horizons in organisations. This talk suggests a theoretical elaboration of how actors may sustainably integrate distant pasts and futures into ongoing activities. We use the interplay between strategy and identity as an example of how new dynamics between short- and long-term horizons may be found. Strategy and identity exhibit distinctively different temporalities, enabling them to be complementary to one another. Based on a longitudinal study of a global brewery we elaborate which temporal differences are likely to lead to sustained interplay, where strategy is meaningfully framed by long-term identity narratives, while more short-term strategies serves to enact identity over time. These findings, we argue, have major implications for how organisations can comply with short-term business cycles while addressing long-term concerns.

Speaker bios

Majken Schultz earned her PhD from Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and is currently Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Copenhagen Business School, International Research Fellow at the Centre for Corporate Reputation at Oxford University and member of the Centre for Organizational Time based at CBS. Her current work explores how organisation actors construct their temporality. She has applied a temporal view, for example, on studies of organisational identity reconstruction, the interplay between culture and identity in strategic transformation and the use of history for future change. Majken is actively involved in the Danish business community in a variety of networks and holds several positions in company boards.

Tor Hernes earned his PhD from Lancaster University. He is currently Professor of Organization Theory at Copenhagen Business School and Adjunct Professor at University of Southeast Norway. He is Director of the Centre for Organizational Time based at CBS and co-leader of the VELUX funded project “The temporality of innovations in the Danish food sector”. Tor works with theories of time and temporality from process philosophy. His empirical research focuses on dynamics between continuity and change in organisations. Tor won the George R. Terry Book Award for his book A Process Theory of Organization in 2015 (Oxford University Press, 2014).