It’s about time!


Increasing the temporal focus in organizational research

Symposium held at the University of Maastricht

METEOR and Department of Organization & Strategy

Maastricht, the Netherlands

June 8-9, 2006


Organizers
Robert Roe, Universiteit Maastricht
Mary Waller, Universiteit Maastricht
Stewart Clegg, University of technology Sidney, Universiteit Maastricht


Background

During the last decades there has been a growing interest among organizational researchers in the temporal aspects of organizational life. Especially since the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management and publications in AMJ and AMR emerging from it, a growing number of organizational researchers recognize that time must be explicitly addressed in theory building and research. While longitudinal research has become more popular and some exemplary studies on specific dynamic phenomena have appeared, the mainstream of organizational research has remained unaffected. Time as an intrinsic dimension of empirical organizational phenomena has been the subject of only limited investigative efforts.

Purpose

The purpose of this symposium has been to create a forum for exploring and defining the critical next steps in motivating temporally-focused research in organizations. We have brought together and international and multi-disciplinary group of scholars that will represent different research traditions and methodologies and cover multiple levels of analysis. Both established established and emergent scholars were present.

Participants

Fifteen invited scholars gave short presentations on papers which were available in advance.

Presentations

Questions addressed in the presentations were:

  1. What will be gained by including temporal factors in organizational research?
  2. Which approaches can surmount the factors that dissuade the inclusion of temporal factors in research?
  3. How can we be more effective as community in sharing methods to examine temporal factors?

Book

On the basis of the papers presented at this symposium and edited book is being composed, with the working title 'Doing time - Advancing temporal research in organizations'. Its aim it to inspire researchers to bring more time in their work, both in ways of thinking and modeling organizational realities and in ways of gathering and analyzing data. The overall idea of the book is: "how can we help to further temporal research in organizations?" As in the symposium, we look for a diversity of viewpoints as no single perspective will make us fully understand what time in organizations means and does. We are open to contributions by researchers who did not attend the symposium, but who share our objective.

For information contact:
Robert Roe

Program
Click here for the program.
Click here for the presentations

Pictures
Click here for the pictures

Contact:
Prof.dr. Robert A. Roe
Department of Organization and Strategy
Faculty of Economics & Business Administration
PO Box 6161
6200 MD Maastricht
Tel. +31-43-3884985 – Fax +31-43-3884893
e-mail:r.roe@os.unimaas.nl