Time and temporality as authoritative forces in a busy organization

The following research study examines issues of time, communication design, and power in the context of a busy health research organization. Through an analysis of communicative discourses, issues of time and temporality surfaced as powerful authoritative forces that influenced the communicative choices that individuals made to intervene in work processes. Using Ballard’s (2009) activity cycles as a theoretical framework, I found that members designed their communication to attend to cycles of commotion as opposed to other cycles of activity. In other words, busyness was a norm that made it difficult for members to find time to spend on routine, creative, or long-term tasks. In addition, leaders possessed and could wield time that was privileged over non-leaders’ time. Through discourses of time, a structure of power was talked into being. Three discursive themes emerged from an analysis of the data, including (1) the loudness of work referring to the environment as temporally loud in that members navigated high volumes of work, ambiguous work boundaries, and distracting spaces; (2) the race of work, referring to the marathon that members ran to keep up with the busyness of the organization; and (3) scheduling work referring to dimensions of time allocation where members tried to navigate high volumes of meetings and ‘key’ members determined the calendars of others. These findings contribute to theoretical understandings of the relationships between Collective Communication Design, temporality, and authorityCommunication Studie