Into the Wild Time: Notes from a Traveller

Abstract

I do not quite remember how and what led up to it, but it became very clear that I couldn't move forward. My plan had become painful in all its meaninglessness, and my subject; the way we treat time in modern human agency and strategy, was transforming from intellectual mission to lived experience. It was 2013, and I was trying to realize my postdoctoral grant to study 'temporal hybrids in corporate strategy'. This would entail some sort of a multi-case study, where I would follow various strategic developments in companies and look for their temporal conditions and boundaries. I wanted to explore how ideals to think long-term and embrace sustainability are at all possible for companies—and organizations at large—when they are bound by short-term performance measures, shareholder demands, the acceleration of everything and the general impatience that seems to permeate modern human agency. What is strategy at all, if not a rational idea of knowing where you are going and being able to plot that into a logical route along a series of evenly distributed milestones? while I wait for Big Funding Opportunities in my little semi-precarious researcher life? What should I offer here, at the end of this chapter, as examples of humble but serious play? Well. I try to disrupt, for example; to insist on challenging the managers I interview with uncanny questions about 200-year timescales and to make them hold my 'time pod' in their hands—an artistic sonic device with which you can both feel and hear the sounds of time. I try to make rituals out of taken-for-granted strategy discourses, reclaiming means-ends language of 'goals' and 'milestones' together with participants in Traveller's time laboratory (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)