Events and the Becoming of Organizational Temporality

This chapter discusses the becoming of events as complex, emerging, and relationally connected phenomena that come into being through their immanent interplay. In this view, events emerge and change as actors move through time. For example, events that turned out to be consequential at a later stage were not seen as such while they were taking place. Yet, there is arguably a potential for “eventness” in every happening. I will draw upon examples furnished by “Time” by Pink Floyd and President Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg to discuss how, drawing on Whitehead’s epochal theory of time, we may expand our understanding of events. A deeper process ontological understanding of events enables a richer understanding of the mutually constitutive dynamics between organizational continuity and discontinuity.