Modern Times: How Organizational Time Structures Influence Society

At the latest since Max Weber, we have known that organizations strongly shape modern life – and also time. Modern society has been described as organization society, in which organizations diffuse across every sector. Organizations can, and do, operate with different societal macro-logics that contribute towards operationalizing and implementing them: Enterprises strive for economic profit, media organizations disseminate information and schools educate. However, in doing this they use their own specific structures and procedures. Among them are time structures. We focus on such time structures such as projects, deadlines, timetables, time routines and rhythms, and show that these are not necessarily compatible with the societal logics they address. As a consequence, organizations act as Procrustean bed regarding societal macro-logics. In the same way in which Procrustes “adjusts” people to the size of his bed, organizations impose their time structures on society.

As examples, we use the impacts organizations have on media and science.

Media logic dictates that new information is provided continuously. However, editorial departments of television channels or newspapers need stable (temporal) routines. So, editorial departments often privilege the coverage of planned events like international conferences or sport events. As a consequence, organizational temporal structures play an important role by selecting news.

The logic of science implies that the time needed for research and scientific findings can hardly be defined in advance. However, organizations, such as universities, have to plan ahead. So they prioritize research proposals which can convincingly promise deadlines. In the social sciences for example, this gives an advantage to empirical surveys which – in comparison to theoretical analyses – can be more easily planned.

Based on organizational institutionalism and systems theory concepts, we develop a model which allows us to analyze the selective effects of organizational time structures on societal macro-logics.