Options
Blagoy Valentinov Blagoev
Title
Prof. Dr.
Last Name
Blagoev
First name
Blagoy Valentinov
Email
blagoy.blagoev@unisg.ch
Phone
071 224 7870
Now showing
1 - 10 of 17
-
PublicationTime as a Research Lens: A Conceptual Review and Research AgendaTime is gaining recognition as an important research perspective, yet the assumptions, concepts, and boundaries of this perspective vary greatly across different fields. This diversity suggests that time offers both significant depth and relevance as a lens for research. However, the diversity of approaches also harbors ambiguity and a lack of coherence, hindering scholars' ability to integrate insights and harness the full potential of time as a research lens. To address this issue, we review the diverse time-based assumptions, domains, and concepts in extant research. Our review reveals three dominant manifestations of the temporal lens: time as resource, time as structure, and time as process. We analyze and synthesize insights of the three lenses to offer an integrative framework to support future research. The framework informs and reveals opportunities for time-based research by foregrounding connections and contrasts among the lenses. Building on this framework, we discuss two principal pathways for future research: connecting the three lenses through the study of tensions at their interfaces, and enhancing the three lenses through the study of more complex conceptions of time.Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Management
Scopus© Citations 5 -
-
-
PublicationFrom temporal myopia to foresight: Bridging the near and the distant future through temporal workThis paper examines how organizations can make long-term, distant future goals related to corporate sustainability actionable in the short-term, near future. Prior research suggests that this challenge is particularly pronounced in traditional organizations used to operate within a highly institutionalized temporal context dominated by economic short-termism. We add to this research by empirically investigating different forms of temporal work at a big German automotive firm that currently undergoes a major strategic reorientation toward sustainability. Drawing on interview, documentary, and press data, we discover and theorize the interplay of four intersecting forms of temporal work: explicit vs. implicit and aspirational vs. translational temporal work. Importantly, we find that explicit-translational temporal work—which focuses on breaking down sustainability goals into KPIs—in itself was not sufficient for deep-level …Type: journal articleJournal: Academy of Management ProceedingsVolume: 2021Issue: 1
-
PublicationThe Dynamics of Prioritizing: How Actors Temporally Pattern Complex Role-Routine EcologiesThe user has requested This paper examines the emergence of temporal coordination among multiple interdependent routines in a complex work setting that does not allow for up-front scheduling. We propose that when actors continuously have to prioritize their expected contributions to multiple interdependent routines, they address this challenge by orienting not just toward routines but also toward person-roles. Drawing on an ethnographic study of an agile consulting project team confronted with continued scheduling failures, we demonstrate how the dynamics of prioritizing enabled the actors to resolve what at first appeared to be an irresolvable and highly complex problem of temporal coordination. We add to the literature on routine dynamics and temporality by setting forth the dynamics of prioritizing as an explanation for the temporal patterning of complex work settings. We introduce the notion of role–routine ecologies as a novel way to conceptualize such complex work settings and contribute to developing a performative theory of person-roles and their significance for coordinating.Type: journal articleJournal: Administrative Science QuarterlyVolume: 66Issue: 2
Scopus© Citations 28 -
PublicationComplex times, complex time: The pandemic, time‐based theorizing and temporal research in management and organization studiesThe Covid-19 pandemic brings time to the foreground as a multidimensional force that pervades diverse phenomena. For example,‘flattening the curve’–the key crisis management strategy pursued by many governments–is about slowing down the spread of the virus so that hospitals gain time to ramp up capacities and to heal patients without overflowing. Stimulus programs are about bridging the time between the pre-and post-pandemic pace of economic activity, because the virus is slowing down large parts of the global economy. Time is also of the essence in the development, production, and distribution of vaccines, complex tasks permeated by questions of timing (‘When will vaccines be available?’), pacing (‘How fast can people get vaccinated?’), and sequencing (‘In what order should people be vaccinated?’). The pandemic also brings to light diverse experiences of time. For some, rushed rhythms of busy …Type: journal articleJournal: Journal of Management StudiesVolume: 58Issue: 5DOI: 10.1111/joms.12703
Scopus© Citations 24 -
PublicationWhy Do Extreme Work Hours Persist? Temporal Uncoupling as a New Way of SeeingThis paper develops temporal uncoupling as a new way of seeing the puzzling persistence of extreme work hours, as well as the temporal relations of organizations and their environments. Drawing on a historical case study, we trace and analyze the genesis, reinforcement, and maintenance of extreme work hours in an elite consulting firm over a period of 40 years. We find that a small shift in temporal structuring mobilized two positive feedback processes. These processes consolidated a temporal order that increasingly uncoupled from the traditional workweek. Grounded in these findings, we make two contributions. First, we challenge the orthodox view of entrainment as an ideal synchronous relation between organizations and their environments. Instead, we offer temporal uncoupling as an alternative lens. It enables us to see how both synchrony and asynchrony are potentially viable options, which coexist and sometimes coconstitute each other. Second, we shed new light on temporality as a constitutive force that underpins extreme work hours and offer a novel explanation of their persistence as a case of systemic temporal lock-in. We develop positive feedback as a mechanism that explains how small temporal shifts can become consolidated into hardly reversible temporal lock-ins.Type: journal articleJournal: Academy of Management JournalVolume: 62Issue: 6
Scopus© Citations 47 -
Publication‘We are all herd animals’: Community and organizationality in coworking spacesThis article develops an understanding of coworking spaces as organizational phenomena. Based on an ethnography of betahaus in Berlin, we demonstrate how coworking spaces not only provide a sense of community but also pattern the work activities of their members. We theorize this finding by drawing on the emergent literature on organizationality. Our contribution is twofold. First, we challenge current understandings of coworking spaces as neutral containers for independent work. Instead, we show how coworking incorporates the disposition of becoming organizational. That is, coworking spaces can frame and organize work and may even provide a basis for collective action. Second, we add to research on organizing outside traditional organizations by drawing attention to the complex and shifting interplay of formal and informal relationships in such settings. In doing so, we inform current debates about …Type: journal articleJournal: OrganizationVolume: 26Issue: 6
Scopus© Citations 93 -
PublicationOrganizational working time regimes: Drivers, consequences and attempts to change patterns of excessive working hoursA 40-hour working week is the norm in Europe, yet some organizations require 60 or more working hours and in investment banks an alarming 120-hour weeks are known to be worked. What is more, these organizations often require workers to be permanently on call and demonstrate high production rates. Consequences of such practices include frazzled employees, with their families’ and their own health under pressure. This article introduces our special issue of the German Journal of Human Resource Management. It tackles the many reasons behind excessive work hours and failed attempts to change working time arrangements in organizations. It first identifies three core ideas in previous research, namely the dispersed nature of regimes of excessive working hours, their high levels of persistence and their constitution at multiple levels of analysis. It then summarizes the contributions in this special issue. Finally, it proposes avenues for future research, such as focusing on the genesis and the historicity of organizational working time regimes, studying the interrelation of factors across multiple levels of analysis, and probing new theories to explain the extreme persistence of excessive working hours. The overarching aim of our special issue in this core area of human resource management is to contribute to an understanding of organizational working time regimes and the tenacity of excessive working hours in an effort to deepen our knowledge of how to change them.Type: journal articleJournal: German Journal of Human Resource Management: Zeitschrift für PersonalforschungVolume: 32Issue: 3-4
Scopus© Citations 25 -
PublicationThe Career of a Catalogue: Organizational Memory, Materiality and the Dual Nature of the Past at the British Museum (1970-Today)The emergent ‘uses of the past’ literature challenges traditional perspectives on history as an objective constraint for organizational action. It does so by putting forward an interpretivist view that highlights the moulding and shaping of history as a resource that enables action. We build upon and extend this approach by demonstrating how a more explicit attention to materiality reveals ‘the dual nature of the past’ as not simply constraining and/or enabling but also actively orienting organizational action in the present. We draw upon research on organizational remembering and the concept of affordance to theorize the entanglement of organizational remembering and the material technologies of memory. We examine the dynamics of organizational remembering and materiality in the context of the British Museum’s digitization efforts. We show how narratives about the past enable organizational actors to make sense of and repurpose a novel material technology of memory (computers) through the construction of affordances. However, we also demonstrate how the materiality of objects inherited from the past also actively constrained and oriented how actors worked upon various obstacles on the path to digitization. We make two contributions. First, we develop how the dual nature of the past constitutes a novel way to reconcile deterministic and voluntarist interpretations of the past in organizations by assigning a more active role to material objects in organizational remembering. Second, we introduce a novel way to theorize organizational memory as an ongoing process of mutual constitution between technologies of memory ( Speicher) and social practices of remembering ( Gedächtnis).Type: journal articleJournal: Organization StudiesVolume: 39Issue: 12
Scopus© Citations 28