Waiting for Godot: ‘Situated Waiting’ and Expectations in the Construction Sites of a Cross-Border Company

Our article focuses on the experience of people working at the construction sites of the French-Italian company in charge of the construction of the Lyon-Turin railway, and how this experience takes shape according to the different speeds and spaces within the organization. We focus on how the present time is experienced and how any waiting is endured. We analyze the employees' experience of 'waiting' in the construction sites of this binational organization by combining Taylor and Spicer's (2007) notions of space, conceptualized as distance, power and experience, with Bayles' (2019; 2023) notion of 'situated waiting,' which uncovers the complexity of the lived experience of waiting from the employee's perspective. Since the construction sites of this company, located on the border between Italy and France, operate at different speeds for technical, geographical and socio-political reasons, the employees’ experience of time varies and is influenced by the context in which these sites are situated. This aligns with Schoenberg’s (1997) idea that the issue of time is often an issue of space. Our analysis focuses on one of the construction sites (the Italian one), which started at a later stage than the others (the French ones). People working at the Italian site have therefore experienced a prolonged wait and a dilation of time, leading to a different sensemaking of their work and the development of various strategies and micro-daily practices to manage this waiting in a context of high uncertainty and risk. By adopting a case-study approach and using data from ethnography and interviews conducted at the construction sites in 2024, we will outline the Italian employees’ experience of temporality, their sensemaking of the ‘situated waiting,’ and their ability to enact agency, comparing it with the employees’ experiences at the other construction sites.