Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Time and temporality are not only central meta-dimensions of organizing but critical for understanding and theorizing organizational processes in a present that is fraught with disruptive change, grand challenges, and the emergence of complex and often contradictory temporal patterns and demands (Ancona et al., 2001; Bansal et al., 2022; Kunisch et al., 2021). Organizations have to accommodate and account for both increasingly short and long time horizons, as they deal with the immediacy of information flows in the digital age while working towards goals and accounting for sustainability effects in distant futures (Augustine et al., 2019; Nowotny, 2019; Slawinski & Bansal, 2015). They are challenged to adapt and innovate in times that are disrupted by crises (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) and radical (technological) change (e.g., generative AI) without losing their sense of continuity. Urgency around societal problems calls for accelerated organizational action and collaboration. At the same time, sustainable solutions also seem to emerge from slower organizational temporalities, and engagements with natural rhythms (Hernes et al., 2021).
 
In this sub-theme, the first one of the new EGOS Standing Working Group (SWG) 11 on “Time and Organization Studies”, we will focus on conceptual avenues at the interface of materiality and temporality. This interface offers exciting opportunities to delve into the temporalities inherent in material objects, their translation across different contexts, and their temporal processes, such as emergence or decay, to understand the materialization of time or material temporality (Hernes et al., 2021). Similarly, technologies, in particular digital ones, and their materiality shape how human actors and organizations experience, relate to, and structure time and its acceleration (Wajcman, 2014).
 
In line with the EGOS 2026 general theme “Reframing Organizations in the More-than-Human Society”, we invite the EGOS community to explore how materials and other more-than-humans are mobilized to craft time and how that enables adaptive and responsible organizing. For instance, submissions may focus on material temporal work, that is, the study of how interpretations of time are influenced, sustained, or redirected through materiality and more-than-human actors and constellations (Feuls et al., 2025) or individual and collective perception (Shipp & Jansen, 2021). Submissions may also study the recursive and active way in which materials do organizational time (Blagoev et al., 2018; Cattani et al., 2025; Holt & Yamauchi, 2023; Sasaki & Ravasi, 2024) as well as their role in disruptive change. Particularly, we invite submissions that study how time is materialized and enacted (through nature, or spaces, in work practices or in technologies) at the interface between these different temporal dimensions and in light of the temporal complexity that organizations face today (Blagoev et al., 2024).
 
We welcome qualitative, quantitative, and conceptual submissions engaging with these and other theoretical approaches and might explore, for instance, some of the following questions:

• How does materiality facilitate maintaining tradition while also inspiring innovation (Cattani et al., 2025; Sasaki & Ravasi, 2024)?

• How does materiality help organizational actors maintain meaningfulness, dignity, and peace in times of disruptive change and grand challenges?

• How does organizing attune to nature's rhythms and cycles, which Hofmeister (1997) termed ‘nature’s temporalities’?

• How may we attend to small-scale and large-scale environmental processes ( Bansal et al., 2018; Bowen et al., 2018) as well as cross-scale effects, for instance, by mobilizing concepts from ecological science (Howard-Grenville & Lahneman, 2021; Williams et al., 2021)?

• How can we account for the temporalities of heterogeneous, more-than-human actors and their interplay (Ergene et al., 2021), for instance, by distinguishing between the ‘epochal’ and ‘processual’ dimension of ‘material temporality’ (Hernes et al., 2021)?

• How may attention to materiality provide insights into the interplay between temporal and spatial scales, for instance, by employing concepts such as ‘space-time’ or ‘the trace’ (Nyberg et al., 2022)?

References

• Ancona, D.G., Goodman, P.S., Lawrence, B.S., & Tushman, M.L. (2001): “Time: A New Research Lens.” Academy of Management Review, 26 (4), 645–663.
• Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019): “Constructing a Distant Future: Imaginaries in Geoengineering.” Academy of Management Journal, 62 (6), 1930–1960.
• Bansal, P., Kim, A., & Wood, M.O. (2018): “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Importance of Scale in Organizations’ Attention to Issues.” Academy of Management Review, 43 (2), 217–241.
• Bansal, P., Reinecke, J., Suddaby, R., & Langley, A. (2022): “Temporal Work: The Strategic Organization of Time.” Strategic Organization, 20 (1), 6–19.
• Blagoev, B., Felten, S., & Kahn, R. (2018): “The Career of a Catalogue: Organizational Memory, Materiality and the Dual Nature of the Past at the British Museum (1970–Today).” Organization Studies, 39 (12), 1757–1783.
• Blagoev, B., Hernes, T., Kunisch, S., & Schultz, M. (2024): “Time as a Research Lens: A Conceptual Review and Research Agenda.” Journal of Management, 50 (6), 2152–2196.
• Bowen, F.E., Bansal, P., & Slawinski, N. (2018): “Scale matters: The scale of environmental issues in corporate collective actions.” Strategic Management Journal, 39 (5), 1411–1436.
• Cattani, G., Ferriani, S., & Sasaki, I. (2025): “Balancing act: leveraging tradition in the pursuit of innovation.” Advances in Strategic Management (forthcoming).
• Ergene, S., Banerjee, S.B., & Hoffman, A. J. (2021):” (Un)Sustainability and Organization Studies: Towards a Radical Engagement.” Organization Studies, 42 (8), 1319–1335.
• Feuls, M., Hernes, T., & Schultz, M. (2025): “Putting Distant Futures into Action: How Actors Sustain a Course of Action toward Distant-Future Goals through Path Enactment.” Academy of Management Journal, 68 (2), 297–325.
• Hernes, T., Feddersen, J., & Schultz, M. (2021): “Material Temporality: How materiality ‘does’ time in food organizing.” Organization Studies, 42 (2), 351–371.
• Hofmeister, S. (1997): “Nature’s Temporalities: Consequences for Environmental Politics.” Time & Society, 6 (2–3), 309–321.
• Holt, R., & Yamauchi, Y. (2023): “Ethics, Tradition and Temporality in Craft Work: The Case of Japanese Mingei.” Journal of Business Ethics, 188 (4), 827–843.
• Howard-Grenville, J., & Lahneman, B. (2021): “Bringing the biophysical to the fore: Re-envisioning organizational adaptation in the era of planetary shifts.” Strategic Organization, 19 (3), 478–493.
• Kunisch, S., Blagoev, B., & Bartunek, J.M. (2021): “Complex times, complex time: The pandemic, time-based theorizing and temporal research in management and organization studies.” Journal of Management Studies, 58 (5), 1411–1415.
• Nowotny, H. (2019): „Eigenzeit. Revisited.” In: M. Hartmann, E. Prommer, K. Deckner, & S.O. Görland (eds.): Mediated Time. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 67–85.
• Nyberg, D., Ferns, G., Vachhani, S., & Wright, C. (2022): “Climate Change, Business, and Society: Building Relevance in Time and Space.” Business & Society, 61 (5), 1322–1352.
• Sasaki, I., & Ravasi, D. (2024): “Historical Consciousness and Bounded Imagination: How History Inspires and Shapes Innovation in Long-Lived Firms.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 10 (1), 63–94.
• Shipp, A.J., & Jansen, K. J. (2021): “The ‘Other’ Time: A Review of the Subjective Experience of Time in Organizations.” Academy of Management Annals, 15 (1), 299–334.
• Slawinski, N., & Bansal, P. (2015): “Short on Time: Intertemporal Tensions in Business Sustainability.” Organization Science, 26(2), 531–549.
• Wajcman, J. (2014): Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Williams, A., Whiteman, G., & Kennedy, S. (2021): “Cross-Scale Systemic Resilience: Implications for Organization Studies.” Business & Society, 60 (1), 95–124.
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