Managing When the Anticipated Future Constantly Slips Through Your Fingers: Affective Temporality During an Infinite Crisis

The Covid-19 crisis was by many organizations experienced as a never ending crisis, as the length and the scope of the crisis was unpredictable. Indeed, rather than coming to a closure, the crisis reoccurred over and over again, and seemed like an infinite crisis. Managers are expected to continuously make sense of the present to project a meaningful future that can guide organizational members in and through a crisis, yet this becomes increasingly difficult when time over and over again becomes disrupted. Based on longitudinal in depth interviews with managers during the crisis, we show how they initially anticipated the future as “soon back to normal”, but this perception evolved into a sense of a “never ending crisis” and eventually a “collapse of the future”. The ‘collapse of the future’ perception led to managers giving up on projecting meaningful futures caused by their experience of time as increasingly distressing and affective. From these insights we theorize on the evolvement of affect linked to the changing experience of time over the course of crisis. This contributes to a nuanced understanding of crisis management, as well as affective temporality in settings of frequent temporal disruptions, collapse of future and a sense of infinity.