12 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2018
    1. Third, the use of time and temporality for mak-ing and giving sense to unfinalized stories, antenar-ratives and future scenarios (see Boje 2011), includ-ing attention to issues, such as temporal depth, timeurgency and temporal orientation in promoting theneed for short or long-term strategies (see Jabri 2016,p. 97; Kunischet al. 2017, p. 1043)

      Future research direction: Temporal depth // Tempo

      See: Bluedorn 2002

    1. “Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a bench­mark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such com­parisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.

      Relationship between present and past for sensemaking and meaning.

      Later Bluedorn notes that interpretation and understanding of the past can be applied to a similar present. If they are different, then "the past provides a context, a frame for the present, and the linkages with the past provide an explanation for the present by suggesting how the present came to be, which makes the present more understandable, more meaningful."

      The question then becomes which past -- how long ago (its temporal depth) is compared to the present (or future) for sensemaking.

    2. So connections and the meaning they generate are funda­The Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.

      Fundamental temporality of connections definition.

      How two factors -- speed/tempo and temporal depth of an experience generate meaning.

    1. Personal and organizational histories occupy prominent figure positions in the figure-ground dichotomy, and that such histories are used to cope with the future is indicated by several pieces of evidence.

      Does this help to explain the need for SBTF volunteers to situate themselves in time -- as a way to construct a history in Weick's "figure-ground construction" method of sensemaking for themselves and to that convey sense to others?

    2. The results presented in Bluedorn (2000e) and the Appendix consistently support the distinction between temporal depth and temporal focus. Concep­tually the two terms refer to different phenomena, and empirical measures of the two share so little variance in common that for practical purposes they can be regarded as orthogonal. Temporal depth is the distance looked into past and

      Differences between temporal depth vs temporal focus are orthogonal -- two separate conceptual ideas and refer to different phenomena.

      Depth = "distance looked into the past and future" Focus = "importance attached to the past, present and future"

    3. However, Boyd and Zimbardo’s interest was not in comparing short-, mid-, and long-term temporal depths; rather, it was in examining the degree to which people were oriented to a transcendental future, and in exam­ining the extent to which this variation covaried with other factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. This is a natural extension of the questions involved in research on general past, present, and future temporal orientations (e.g., Kluck- hohn and Strodtbeck 1961, pp. 13-15), orientations that at first glance appear similar to issues of temporal depth. However, as I have argued elsewhere in opposing the use of the temporal orientation label, these general orientations are more an issue of the general temporal direction or domain that an individ­ual or group may emphasize (Bluedorn 2000e) than the distance into each that the individual or group typically uses. The latter is the issue of temporal depth; the former, what I have called temporal focus (Bluedorn 2000e)

      Comparison of Bluedorn's thinking about temporal depth vs temporal focus instead of framing it as a temporal orientation (the direction/domain that an individual or group emphasizes in sensemaking).

      ZImbardo and Boyd use the phrase "time perspective" rather than temporal orientation

    4. And the determination of organizational age illustrates the constructed, enacted nature of the past, because what at first glance seems like a simple, even objective matter becomes ambiguous when mergers and acquisitions are involved. Is the founding date the date that the oldest of the merger partners began operations, or is it the date when the last partners merged? Families can face the same ambiguities when one or both spouses have been married previously and they and their children combine to form new families. As the definition of the situation principle teaches (see Chapter 1), the important is­sue is when the people in the organization or family believe it was founded.

      Ambiguity about "founding date" of a merged organization is akin to the friction point for SBTF data collection -- is the date/timestamp the original social media post or the shared post (either of which may occur at different points in the stream). What is the boundary?

    5. Steve Ferris and I found that organizational age was positively correlated with both past and future temporal depths, and that these relationships per­sisted after controlling for several organizational and environmental variables (Bluedorn and Ferris 2000). The older the organization, the further its mem­bers looked into both the past and the future, and the positive temporal depth correlations with the organization’s age may suggest why

      Bluedorn argues that "organizational past apparently becomes received history" which is also socially constructed, interpreted and potentially inaccurate.

      Having a longer history provides an organization with a longer timescape to imagine its past and future.

    6. The past leads to and influences the future, but the future does not influence the past.Thus El Sawy s research provided a second clue that past and future are re­lated, and it even added a causal direction (i.e., “A connection to the past fa­cilitates a connection to the future” [March 1999, p. 75])·

      Study demonstrates "time's arrow" that the past influences future but not the other way around.


      This idea also contributes to a spatial sense of time in Western cultures as "behind", "forward", "ahead", etc. Eastern and Global South cultures do not share this spatial representation.

    7. the result is a statistically significant positive correlation (see the Appendix). The proposed connection is accurate: The longer the respondent’s past temporal depth, the longer the respondent’s future temporal depth.

      Past temporal depth and future temporal depth are positively connected. The longer the past perception, the longer the future perception.

      This is true for both individuals and groups.

    8. Perhaps the most noteworthy of the differ­ences is that each of the future regions extends much further into the future than their past counterparts extend into the past. The short-term future ex­tends about five times further than does the recent past; the mid-term future, about three-and-one-third times as far as the middling past; and the long­term future, about twice as far as the long-ago past. So although the steplike pattern is similar for both the past and future regions, the future depths extend over substantially larger amounts of time than do those in the past

      Comparing respondents' differences in temporal depth of past vs future. A person's perception of future is considerably longer than their perception of the past.

    9. the temporal distances into the past and future that indi­viduals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that havehappened, may have happened, or may happen.

      Temporal depth definition -- applies to individuals as well as groups.

      It considers time in two directions (past and future)