The Narrative Construction of Temporality and Meaning in Organizing: A Field Study of Work Safety Management

Abstract

The complexity of temporal matters in organizations has led researchers to question the linear and objective view of temporality and, instead, to develop a process perspective, seeing organizational temporality as a non-linear, narrative, creative and ongoing social construction, a 'temporal work'. This paper addresses the theoretical and practical question: 'which conceptualization can help organizational actors to manage the temporal dimension of their action, and researchers to understand temporal work?' It proposes, as suggested by Paul Ricoeur's narrative approach to temporality, that the chronological and the narrative temporalities not only co-exist, conflict, or complement each other, but construct each other, as consubstantial dimensions of narrative organizing processes, and that their mutual construction requires a third, mediating and not strictly temporal dimension: a narrative logic. By 'narrative logic', following Ricoeur, we do not mean linear causality, but complex causation relations. We apply Ricoeur's threefold conceptualization of "emplotment", integrating chronological time (CT), narrative time (NT) and narrative logic (NL), to a field study concerning the management of work safety in building projects. In light of the case study, we identify some further theoretical, managerial and methodological contributions of Ricoeur's perspective: the plurality of narrative frames potentially involved in the emplotment of a situation, leading to distinct and potentially contradictory views of organizing temporality and therefore of safety management practices; actors' continual reconstruction of the future of their activity and redesign of the culturally available narrative schemes; the construction of a fiction of time reversibility, achieved through emplotment of collective action, and the ensuing risk of turning a blind eye to the irreversibility of experience.

Keywords: Construction, emplotment, narrative, reversibility, Ricoeur, temporality, work safety