Toward an Organization-ecological View of Temporal Practices

Although recent works underline the importance of developing sustainable practices, the specific temporal practices that organizations can employ to address climate change remain undertheorized. In this paper, we advance an organizational-ecological view of temporal practices and discuss how organizations’ temporal practices can afford more adequate responses to the unpredictable, yet often sweeping dynamics of nature’s time. In a first step, we draw on climate studies to conceptualize three manifestations of time that we ascribe to nature: stochastic events, probabilistic change, and tipping points. In a second step, we develop a framework for temporal practices by drawing upon existing literature. We investigate specifically how temporal practices enable organizations to develop resilience to stochastic events, how they enable organizations to enact probabilistic change, and how they enable organizations to navigate tipping points. We then develop propositions for how each manifestation of nature’s time requires different combinations of temporal practices. The propositions reveal how specific dimensions of events influence temporal practices, more specifically event salience, event span and event regularity. The proposed organizational-ecological view of temporal practices suggests how organizations may cope with more complex temporal phenomena in their environment than assumed in extant theorizing and has implications beyond climate change.