Materiality and Time

Historical Perspectives on Organizations, Artefacts and Practices

Kenneth A. Loparo, N. Mitev, P. Laniray, E. Vaast, Kenneth A. Loparo, N. Mitev, P. Laniray, E. Vaast, Francois-Xavier de Vaujany

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137432100
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137432124
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The book explores how time is materialized and performed in organizations; examines how organizations and organizational members are constituted by and constitutive of material artefacts; and reflects on what a historical perspective on these materializations can bring to the study of organizations.

Part I

Materializing Time and History in Organizations: What Is at Stake?

Key questions:

How is everyday time materialized and performed in organizations? What is at stake in its materialization through time schedules, time-oriented managerial techniques, vestiges, enactment of old artefacts, etc.?

1

Time, History, and Materiality

JoAnne Yates

This chapter focuses on time, history, and materiality. Change over time, whether 15 months or 150 years is viewed in conjunction with temporal structuring (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). The chapter explicitly examines the historical with a lens that focuses on longer stretches of time (Yates, 1989, 2005). Then, the chapter considers the material aspects of information and communication technologies – from file folders and cabinets to computers – as central to understanding how technologies are used.¹

The chapter uses examples from my research that focuses on the history of industrial standard setting and on Yates’s (2005) “Structuring the Information Age”. Using these examples, I illustrate the three themes and speculate about their implications, both individually and as they interact with each other.

Time

The book “It’s About Time: Temporal Structuring in Organizations” (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002) proposes the notion of temporal structuring as time that is neither objective nor subjective, but as enacted within organizations. The book identifies an array of different temporal structures that groups can draw on in their practices – open-ended and closed, clock-based and event-based, and linear and cyclic. These are often seen as dichotomies, but the book shows that they could be enacted interdependently; for example, with an event serving to initiate a clock-based structure. Orlikowski and Yates also show that in practice, temporal structuring is never permanent but is always only stable for the now. Thus, existing structures can be modified and new structures can be introduced.

Orlikowski and Yates (2002) also use an example of temporal structuring based on data from an earlier joint empirical paper. The paper studies the electronic communication of a geographically distributed group of software language designers negotiating a common LISP artificial intelligence language out of a set of incompatible LISP dialects (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994). By charting events and influences on the volume and nature of the communication from this earlier paper, the authors identify multiple temporal structures. For example, initially, an event-based, open-ended, cyclic pattern of comments, proposals, and discussion emerged implicitly around the issuance of successive drafts of the common LISP manual, occasionally adjusted around an annual, clock-based meeting of the participants’ professional association. Towards the middle of the project, the looming LISP implementation deadlines for some of the participants’ organizations created a sense of time pressure. The project’s coordinator adjusted this pressure by introducing ballots with explicit, closed, clock-based deadlines. At the end of the project, the coordinator declared that midnight on 14 June, Flag Day, would be the final moment for input into the common LISP manual that was to be published. Thus, he organized an explicit, clock-based event to close the process. This example demonstrates the blurring and interdependence of temporal oppositions, consistent with Orlikowski and Yates’s (2002) practice theory of time.

Orlikowski and Yates’s (2002) original example was based on an informal standardization effort. The following is an example of a formal standard setting context in which temporal analysis again demonstrates its value. In a forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Standards Bearers: Engineers and the Industrial Standardization Movement, 1900-Present” (Murphy & Yates, forthcoming), we find a temporal focus is useful in understanding an important inflection point in history: beginning in the late 1980s new standard setting organizations proliferated, many of them not adhering to the voluntary consensus standard setting (VCSS) processes followed by earlier organizations. Several factors play a role in this proliferation, but one of them relates to temporal structures.

From early in the 20th century, there were two basic principles of VCSS (Murphy & Yates, 2009), both of which have temporal implications. First, both the adoption of standards and the participation in their development were voluntary. Thus, taking part in standardization processes was not the primary job of most participants, which limited the time they could put into it (and thus the speed with which they could arrive at standards). Second, and more relevant to the issue of temporal structures, the standardization process was driven by the need to achieve balanced consensus; balanced consensus required agreement between the producers and the consumers of industrial materials, as well as with unaffiliated experts such as academic or consulting engineers (Yates & Murphy, 2014). Although consensus could not be interpreted as a 100 per cent positive agreement, it required both a very high level of agreement (typically two thirds or more) and a due process with regard to any disagreements, which meant that all objections to the standard were addressed, if not accepted. This process of VCSS was constrained by the time necessary to arrive at such a consensus, which required many face-to-face meetings and much correspondence and voting between meetings. So initially, this process was a slow, open-ended, event-based process. Only when certain events occurred did the next stage of the process begin. But gradually standardizing associations started to institutionalize some clock-based temporal structures designed to allow adequate time for such a consensus to be developed, but to limit the time so the process did not go on indefinitely.

In the oldest organizations that set standard, these institutionalized clock-based structures were based on how long the processes took using the oldest, slowest communication technologies. For example, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the first and still-surviving international standardizing organization, was founded in 1906.² As early as the founding meeting, we can see the influence of communication technology on the timing of processes. At that meeting, the proposed rules were decided upon and were circulated to the technical societies sponsoring each national delegation for approval. In discussing the process for circulating the proposed rule changes for approval, and the time period to be allowed for responses from the sponsoring organizations; Colonel Crompton, who had organized the meeting, “suggested that three months was scarcely sufficient time to allow of a reply being received from Japan, and he suggested that the time should be increased to four months”.³ So, from the beginning they were concerned with the turnaround time between the central office and some of the most distant countries.

Over time, an elaborate system – initially of norms and only later of explicit rules – was developed for initiating, developing, drafting, circulating, and revising standards themselves. In one phase of this process, once a committee agreed on a draft standard, it was circulated to the national delegations; each of the delegations had a single vote so members of the delegation had to agree among themselves first on their reactions and comments, and then had to convey a unified response to the central office. By 1912, in circulating one such draft standard, the central office “earnestly hoped” that the national delegations could return their “opinions and observations” in time for them to be considered at a meeting six months after the draft was sent out, suggesting that six rather than four months was beginning to be established as a norm for responses from member delegations.⁴ By the mid-1920s, the emergent norm of six months to circulate the draft to member delegations for comment was institutionalized as the “six months’ rule”.⁵ This rule was based on the time it took for the circulation and response process, with time for transatlantic mailing built in. The draft standards travelled overland to delegation headquarters of other countries in Europe and by ship to all overseas delegations, such as the United States and Japan. They were then mailed out from the national office to delegation members, who had to meet or correspond to reach a national consensus response, and then mail the response back to the central office in Geneva, again by ship for some countries. Although telegrams were occasionally used for special issues, they were never used for routine standardizing processes, presumably because of the cost.⁶ This six-month period for circulating drafts for comment was just one of the many stages in the entire standardization process.

As the oldest international association, dependent on the earliest technologies of international communication, IEC had created temporal structures that ensured a very lengthy process. As late as 1992, when overseas mail was sent by air and when electronic transmission via fax and email were possible, IEC rules still allowed three to six months for this stage of commenting on draft standards.⁷ Veteran IEC standardizers still refer to the six-month rule, suggesting that even today this temporal structure, set so long ago, has some influence on their processes.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), founded right after World War II, also based its temporal structures on a paper and mail system, although by then international airmail could be used for some purposes; again, cost presumably made it prohibitive for routine processes. By the 1980s, producing an ISO standard took, on average, six years (Murphy & Yates, 2009, 38). Beginning in 1987, the ISO tried to address the problem of slow standard setting processes by creating a fast track system that would cut the minimum length of the process down from four years to two years (Egyedi, 1996, 108–111).⁸ Even with some standards using this fast track process, the average time to produce an ISO standard was still over four years (51 months) in 2002 (Murphy & Yates, 2009, 38).

These painstaking processes and long time limits reflected in part the technology and processes of the time they were institutionalized, in spite of subsequent changes in technology. By the late 1980s, the accelerating speed of product development in the computer hardware and software arena led to a serious mismatch between the pace and competitive pressures experienced by companies involved in this industry, and the speed of standardizing in the traditional VCSS organizations.

These temporal challenges were an important factor in the emergence of new standard setting organizations starting in the late 1980s, initially sparked by emergence of the Internet. During the 1970s, the ARPANET evolved under the US Defense Department’s sponsorship. This network used a primitive packet switching protocol (Abbate, 1999). In 1977, after it became clear that computer networking was the next major development in the computer industry and at a time when some proprietary systems for networking the computers of single vendors were being developed, ISO established a technical committee to develop a standard for Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI. This committee and the many national committees involved in it followed the ISO paper-based timetables and processes in spite of the fact that they were working on a standard for electronic internetworking. For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Murray Freeman, the committee secretary for ANSI X3T2, a US standards committee involved in the OSI effort, tried to convince the committee members to communicate electronically via email and electronic file transfers by using the Internet. This effort failed because many members did not yet have email access so the committee continued to use paper; consequently, the pacing was still influenced by the older technology and related temporal structures.⁹

Meanwhile, the computer scientists who were networking computers in universities, the Defence Department, and defence contractors in the 1970s and 1980s had developed an initial version of the more advanced TCP/IP protocol, and it was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983. In 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was created to stabilize and continue to develop the protocol in the context of the broader Internet. This informal, fluid group adopted a fast-paced and iterative standardizing process based on the principles of “rough consensus and running code”,¹⁰ rather than the traditional, slow-paced ISO standards process (Russell, 2006). They communicated electronically between face-to-face meetings, which were open to anyone who was motivated and had expertise to participate. They saw this process as more open and democratic than the ISO’s process, though it did not attempt to maintain any kind of balance between producers, consumers, and independent computer scientists/engineers; and the process was, at least in theory, open to being skewed by a company sending large numbers of employees to participate in a meeting when they wanted to affect the outcome. The IETF process also lacked the IEC and ISO requirement to respond to every single objection, requiring only rough consensus.

By the mid-1990s, with the IOS technical committee bogged down, TCP/IP had become the de facto standard, and the IETF had become an important new standard setting organization. It was followed by W3C (the WorldWideWeb Consortium) founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to set standards for the developing Web and by company consortia in other computer-related areas. The consortia were typically limited in size based on what is often referred to as a pay-to-play model with only the companies willing to pay large membership fees having a say in standard setting. All of these new organizations promised a faster pace than the traditional VCSS organizations. They did not, however, necessarily follow the principles that had made voluntary consensus standard setting so valuable. The notion of a balanced consensus of the producers and the consumers as well as the unaffiliated engineers has often lost out in the newer, faster paced standards bodies.

Focusing on time and temporal structures helps us better understand the rapid proliferation of standards setting associations that has occurred since the late 1980s. The institutionalization of temporal structures based on earlier communication technologies and an earlier industrial product development pace, as well as on the time taken to reach balanced consensus, made traditional standard setti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Time and Materiality: What Is at Stake in the Materialization of Time and Time as a Materialization?
• Part I  Materializing Time and History in Organizations: What Is at Stake?
• Part II  Temporal Dynamics of Artefacts and Materiality in Organizations: The Importance of Material Traces
• Part III  Stretching Out Time and Materiality in Organizations: From Presentism to Longue Dure
• Conclusion: Understanding Materiality and the Material Underpinnings of Organizations through a Longue Dure Approach
• Epilogue: Strategic Coordination Information Technologies and Europe-USAs Organizations. Time-and-History Regimes and Information Technologies in Refolding Long-Term Elective Affinities
• Index