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| Burkard Sievers | |||
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sievers@wiwi.uni-wuppertal.de DRAFT, please do not quote without the author's permission |
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The thinking about the relatedness of past, present, and future immanent in contemporary Western society is to a major extent tainted by a notion of time propagated by the contemporary state of post-industrial economy and investor-capitalism. Time in organizations has been reduced to a quantitative, rationalized, and decontextualized means for meeting management's aims. Concern for the past is predominantly negated if not obliterated and both present and future are broadly reduced to an economic function. Psychoanalytic writings on the notion of time, in general, are scarce and provide almost no ground for the conceptualisation and better understanding of the future and its interrelatedness with the past and present. Organization and management studies are mainly limited to a rational and pragmatic perception of time and seem to mirror a certain kind of preoccupation with the present and the future characteristic of their field of study. Based on a socio-analytic perspective, the main emphasis of this paper will be on the knowing and not knowing about time that has been lost in contemporary organizations. The linearity of time, the deification of progress, the reification of time as commodity, the denial of the relevance of the past and the no(w)ness of time are predominant perceptions of time in organizations. These unilaterally aim to subjugate time to what is known and knowable. Contemporary organizations and enterprises often appear so preoccupied with overcoming the present and managing and manipulating the future, that they totally lose sight of any shadow - both history's shadow on the present and the one the future may cast before. The intent of this paper is to grasp some of the hidden meaning and meaninglessness, the gains and losses resulting from the predominant use of time in organizations, and the shadows that the past and the foreseeable future may cast before. The shadow of a future
we don't know any more than we know the past,
The enigma of time is the enigma of life. Time theory is put on too small a basis. I. Introduction The quote I have chosen for the first half of this paper's title may, at first sight, appear weird or suggestive of a lunatic institution. As we are so much accustomed to an idea of time in which the past is behind and the future is in front, the idea that someone is pushing the past backwards in front of him- or herself is clearly not in accord with our everyday thinking. It is also most likely that the following conversation will be similarly perceived: Character # 1: I think it is wrong to be worried about the next day. Perhaps we should restrict our thinking just to today. Character #2 (in response): No, that would mean resignation. I am still hoping that yesterday will become better. The latter almost appears as nonsense in face of the predominant opinion that, once the present has turned into the past, it is beyond our disposal and therefore nothing can be done to change it. Once I explain who the authors are, however, this immediate reaction mqay be modified. The first quote was part of a dream shared recently in a Social Dreaming Matrix. And the second is from Charles Schulz in one of his Peanuts cartoons in which Linus and Charlie Brown are reflecting on the meaning of time. [The German cultural studies scholar, Jörn Rüsen (2003) has recently chosen the last line from this cartoon by entitling his book Can yesterday become better? (Kann gestern besser werden?)] These episodes may appear truly as enigmatic as Bion's (1994, 309; cf. Souter & Wiltshire 2003, 6) phrase that on "the shadow of a future we don't know any more than we know the past, a shadow which it projects or casts before". What at first appeared as mere non-sense may make us aware of our limited and broadly accepted social construction of time. The thinking about the relatedness of past, present, and future immanent in contemporary Western society is to a major extent tainted by a notion of time propagated by the contemporary state of post-industrial economy and investor-capitalism. The thinking of and about time in economy and economics is not only limited and highly distorted but also broadly based on the notion of time as a commodity. Time has been reduced to a quantitative, rationalized, and decontextualized means for meeting management's aims. The following attempt to question the predominant notion of time and its (de-)construction in economy and organizations is guided by the assumption that a more complex perception of time and its meaning in the context of past, present and future will re-open vistas that keep a more sophisticated and differentiated image of man alive. This paper is based on two convictions, i.e. human life is not a simple linear trajectory and all human life is mortal. In order to give meaning to our lives, we have to take into account that the present is not endless and is - at the same time - tainted by the shadows that the past and future cast upon it - regardless of whether we want to be aware of it or not. Thus, based on a socio-analytic perspective, the main emphasis of this paper will be on the knowing and not knowing that has been lost in the contemporary rationalization and reification of time in organizations. In the subsequent attempt towards a deconstruction of the predominant use and perception of time in organizations, I will begin by describing the limited psychoanalytic literature on time. My impression is that any concern for the relatedness to future seems almost lacking. It appears that the notion of time in psychoanalysis is denuded of the future - an impression that is actually reinforced by Bion's scarce and enigmatic reference to the future and its 'memoir'. I will explore some of the main patterns, dynamics, and mechanisms of how time is constructed and the future is controlled, parasitically used and engineered in contemporary organizations. I conclude with an elaboration of what actually is excluded in the mainstream construction of time and what the foreseeable consequences for the future may be. II. Time in psychoanalysis Time, future, and the shadow - including the shadow of the future - are prominent subjects of contemporary scientific and public discourse. Not only does a simple Google search produce almost endless entries but the different notions and meanings of time and shadow throughout history are documented in a respective 'short history' (e.g. Wagar 1989; Stoichita 1997). At the time he wrote his essay 'Time', in 1974, Elias (1984/1992, 45) remarked, "enquiries into the sociology of time are almost non-existent". In contrast time in the social sciences has currently become "a fashionable motif" (Adam et al. 2003, 1). "The interest in social time is burgeoning. Major conferences are devoted to time and a significant number of key social theorists have made it a central feature of their current work" (ibid., 11). The scholarly literature on time provides either convincing evidence - or astounding consensus (Rehn 2003, 77) - that the notion of 'social time' must exceed the narrow frame of earlier philosophy represented, for example, by Kant's notion of time as 'a priori' and the Newtonian view that time is singular, unitary, objective and hence independent of man and actual events. There seems to be consensus in contemporary social sciences "that 'time' is a means of orientation created by people. … But .. not simply an 'idea' that appears from nowhere in the heads of individuals. It is also a social institution varying with the state of social development" (Elias 1984/1992, 13), and thus "a means of regulating human behaviour and feeling" (ibid., 35). It is quite striking that in comparison to the social sciences in general, the notion of time in psychoanalysis seems to be broadly unexplored territory. Time is not often explicitly discussed in psychoanalysis (Green 2002, 4f.; Noel-Smith 2002, 39). This is even more surprising in face of the immanent meaning and significance of time in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic practice, i.e. the individual's reintegration of the past into the present. The success of the analytic task to help the individual make the transition "where Id was, there Ego shall be" is key to the future of the individual analysand. That the unconscious is timeless and unaware of time - a knowledge of which the consciousness itself is not aware (Green 2002, 37) - is certainly Freud's major insight and contribution to the understanding of time. Psychoanalytic contributions seem, however, broadly limited to a notion of 'individual' or 'psychic time' without much further concern for 'social time'. In Klein's (1959) phrase "our adult roots in infancy", its focus is mainly restricted to the influence of individual past (and history) on the present. Theoretical approaches and 'guidelines', which would allow conceptualisation and a better understanding of the future and its interrelatedness with the past and present appear to be lacking as are explicit references to 'social time' and its relatedness to 'psychic time'. Not least because traditional psychoanalysis has been unable to grasp at a notion of the 'social' (Puget 1991), it appears that the notion of time in psychoanalysis has to be extended if not revised. It also seems that the 'shadow', the first noun of our Symposium theme, shares a similarly reduced existence in psychoanalysis. The metaphors of the shadow and the double, which is related to it, have a long history in endless myths, literature, and other art forms (e.g. Stoichita 1997; Gold 1999, 437ff.). Although there is occasional reference to the shadow in the history of psychoanalysis, it appears as if both the notion of the shadow and its meaning have been exclusively left to the 'infidels' or the 'dissidents', e.g. to C. G. Jung (1968a/b) and their followers (e.g. Denhardt 1981; Kramer 1989; Bowles 1991; Hubbel 1992) or to Otto Rank (1925/1971). Through its further development psychoanalysis nearly lost sight of the fact that Freud (1894) himself "in the Neuropsychoses of Defence uses the analogy of Plato's cave to illustrate the unconscious: we can never observe the unconscious directly but see shadows of it in dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and in our culture" (Noel-Smith 2002, 2). III. The shadow of the future: a socio-analytic reconciliation At the 1996 ISPSO Symposium in New York, Armstrong (1996/1999) emphasized, "that psychoanalysis (more accurately a psychoanalytic approach) can help us understanding the future" in the sense of helping us "to understand our not understanding". As much as I support this, it also appears to be worth questioning why and to what extent a psychoanalytic approach should be limited to such a position. Though psychoanalysis certainly would fail or be perverted into quackery if used to make concrete predictions and visions of what is to come, there is no evidence that psychoanalytic reflection upon the future - and the perception of the future in the present - should be limited only to The Future of an Illusion (Freud 1927). A psychoanalytic inquiry into the future would certainly have a high degree of insecurity, not understanding and not knowing and thus would be more concerned about the imagination and description of shadows - both from the future and the past - than actually presenting 'facts & figures'. Even though it has to remain a hypothetical and somewhat paradoxical question, it could, for example, be asked: What possible 'insights' into the future might have been gleaned if the dreams recounted in Charlotte Beradt's (1968) Third Reich of Dreams were made public when they were dreamed. One reason that psychoanalytic thinking, in comparison to the broader field of social sciences, is so abstemious about the future is certainly the fact that adequate 'methodologies' for such a venture are broadly missing. Social Dreaming (Lawrence 1991, 1998, 1999b, 2003, 2004a/b) has apparently contributed a most valid and fascinating approach towards an integration of past, present and future for more than two decades. Volkan (1991, 2002; Volkan & Itzkowitz 1994), with the notion of 'transgenerational transmission of trauma' and his many political interventions at working through socio-ethnical conflicts, has had a decisive impact on recollecting collective pasts with the aim of reducing political conflicts in the future. But there may well be other 'methods' that draw on the timelessness of the unconscious that are worth pursuing. Re-questioning our common-accepted view of time and that of the past, in particular, may be one of the more frightening shadows the future casts before. From a socio-analytic perspective, it would above all mean to become aware of the shadows of our social past and to acknowledge them. In order to search for meaning in the past, which we must integrate to grasp at the meaning of the future, we would have to reintegrate its shadow with the light side of the past (cf. Schwartz 1994). Without acknowledging the shadow cast on the 'object', we are not able to perceive it three-dimensionally. (So far as time as a dimension in itself is concerned, the perception actually is supposed to be four-dimensional - or even five-dimensional if one follows Elias' (1992) suggestion that it requires "a fifth dimension of consciousness, experience, or however one may express it" (ibid., 81) which takes into account social symbols and language in particular (ibid., 132).) This may even be the starting point from which a psycho- and socio-analysis of time may be reconciled. Reik's (1949) words in Memory and Reminiscence about psychoanalysis (but with a broader social perspective in mind) may serve as a 'bridge' between the two different visions, i.e. the one of the project of Oedipus - a psychoanalysis "related to the pairing group" and thus referring to the unconscious of the individual or person - and the socio-analytic one represented by the Sphinx which stands for the 'riddle' and is "related to problems of knowledge and scientific method" (Bion 1961, 8; Lawrence 1999a) and thus the infinite. These two perspectives need to 'meet', in order to gain a binocular vision of time. According to Reik reminiscence as a psychic function has not yet received sufficient attention. Whereas the function of memory - which to a major extent is unconscious - is to protect and retain our impressions, reminiscence is destructive in the sense that it "aims at their dissolution. Essentially memory is conservative, reminiscence destructive. Thus single reminiscences involve a perforation of our unconscious memory as a whole. An incipient dissolution is already present in the process of becoming conscious" (Reik 1949, 347, emphasis in original). Reminiscence "represents a particular kind of mental labor, leading to the liquidation of impressions. … What is not brought to reminiscence is psychically immortal. With a certain reservation we can say that the past cannot fade until it has again become the present" (ibid., 348, emphasis in original). There is, however, no doubt that what traditional psychoanalytic theory might be able to contribute towards a binocular vision of time is quite limited. In a similar way that Social Dreaming, through its emphasis on the dream instead of the dreamer, is deeply rooted in Bion's (1962) 'Theory of thinking' (cf. Lawrence 2000), it appears that Bion's (1957) discrimination between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality has further implications for how we think about time if applied to the domain of the social - a thought that will be elaborated further towards the end of this paper. It often appears that organizations are stuck in attempting to defend against the apparent threat and persecution emanating from the outer world of markets and competitors, which - at the same time - they tend to dominate and control with a high degree of aggression, sadism and destructivity. In cases like these, it seems that the psychic dynamic of the organization is caught in a behavior and a way of thinking that is typical of the paranoid-schizoid position. Among the defenses of this position, projection and introjection, splitting into good and bad objects, idealization, and magic omnipotent denial have a predominant significance. As persecutory anxieties dominate, phantasies (and actions) of annihilation and revenge prevail. In the on-going struggle for excellence, growth and survival and the need to gain greater and greater market share, organizations simplify and distort the reality of the external world to fit their inner psychotic anxieties and respective defense mechanisms. As the prevalence of psychotic anxieties diminishes the capacity for thinking, organizations unconsciously bring into being corporate strategies that predominantly serve the purpose of keeping the underlying psychotic anxieties at bay. The narrowness and rigidity with which these strategies often are pursued may lead to an extreme loss of reality, guided by a hatred for thinking. As Isabel Menzies-Lyth recently stated, even though "the idea that people go about being psychotic all the time is a very dreadful thought that ordinary people can't live with, … it doesn't matter what institution you go into, it's going to have psychotic defences" (Pecotic 2002, 11). The fact that roleholders often act, react and - thus - adapt to these psychotic defences and dynamics has to be understood as socially induced rather than an expression of their individual psychopathology (Lawrence 1995, 17; cf. Lawrence & Armstrong 1998; Sievers 1999). Acknowledging psychotic dynamics as a dimension of the social domain leads to the discrimination of psychotic and non-psychotic time or rather to the discrimination of the respective thinking inherent to it. Shaked (1999) and Weiß (2003) have indicated with reference to the individual that the experience of time differs significantly depending on whether it is 'processed' from the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive position. This idea may be applied to an exploration of the different patterns characteristic of organizations. The thinking about time that is tainted by the paranoid-schizoid position either tends towards a splitting in time or to an amalgamation of past, present, and future into a state of timelessness. The mere 'now' in which "the present becomes the split second of immediate experience and knowledge, knowers and knowables disappear" (Emery 1972, 10). By contrast, the depressive position allows both a differentiation and integration of different times. A socio-analytic attempt at grasping the meaning of time requires, therefore, a stance of the depressive position. Bion's (1962) theory of thinking has been extended by Lawrence (2000, 2004a/b) in his differentiation of thinking into conscious and unconscious categories. "Thinking as being ... is the thinking about the human state and condition" (Lawrence (2004b, 2) and thinking as becoming refers to a future state and how it can be attained. "These two kinds of thinking tend to exist in the light of consciousness. There are two other kinds of thinking: thinking as dreaming and thinking as the 'unthought known'. These two ... have their origins in the shadow-land of unconsciousness, or the infinite" (ibid.). Lawrence suggests, in this context, to limit the term 'unconscious' to the personal unconscious and 'infinite' to "the social unconscious when the unconscious of congeries and groups of people resonates with each other and become a shared experience" (ibid., 27). Both differentiations, that of thinking into different modes and that of different terms for the personal and the social unconscious, appear to be helpful for the further conceptualisation and development of a socio-analytic perspective and binocular vision. IV. Construction and de-construction of time in organizations In this paper the 'use of time' in organizations will be restricted to the predominant dynamics and 'mechanisms' of how time is constructed and de-constructed in organizations. Due to the immense literature on time in organizations and management and given the scope of this paper, I do not intend to present a detailed account of my literature search. In comparison to what has been stated about time in psychoanalysis (i.e. its major preoccupation with the relatedness of the present and the past), organizations and business organizations, in particular, focus primarily on the relatedness of the present to the future to come. It thus will become evident that the future is mainly perceived as 'something' that is supposed to be broadly foreseeable, controllable and able to be engineered into an 'extended present' (Nowotny 1988, 1994). As both the category and the image of future thus are abolished; "future is shrinking towards becoming a mere extension of the present" (ibid., 1988, 27). Though the use of time in contemporary organizations is being transformed to some extent through information technology and the parameters set by the actors of investor-capitalism, it is deeply rooted in the previous development of Western industrialisation. "The quantification, decontextualization, rationalization and commodification of time and .. the calculation of time in relation to money, efficiency, and profit" (Adam et al. 2003, 18) is not a new but steadily increasing rationale that only finds its summit in contemporary globalisation and the increasing predominance of financial services, i.e. investor-capitalism. Attention in the present context will be restricted to the following five aspects of how organizations cope with time: (1) the dominance of homogeneous codes, (2) the idealization of progress, (3) the commodification of time, (4) the negation of the impact of the past, and (5) real-time. Although these different aspects interact and occasionally merge in organizational reality, the following differentiation may help to throw some light on the respective dynamics - and thus bring to light our awareness of the shadows. 1. The dominance of homogeneous codes As indicated by various scholars, organizational sciences as well as mainstream management approaches have been mainly - and apparently for too long - "dominated by a theory and philosophy of time in the singular" (Clark 1990, 137) or, as Gherardi & Strati (1988, 149) put it, are "based on time-free statements". Contemporary organizations - gobal corporations in particular - seem broadly to assume that they "could be designed and could be changed in the planned directions desired by management" (Clark 1990, 139). It seems that not only "modern history is still deeply shaped by homogeneous chronologies" (ibid., 151) but the present business and financial world as well. Thoughtful management and a sounder exploration of organizations, therefore, require taking both homogeneous and heterogeneous chronological codes into account. This is not only essential in order to acknowledge intercultural differences but also an indispensable requirement in order to take notice of the often divergent time frames through which organizations are shaped. Not only do organizational subsystems have different time spans and patterns in relation to their specific tasks and environments, they also may vary significantly in their perception of the relatedness of past, present, and future. To the extent that an organization is (or has been) devoted to the predominant neglect of the past, such amnesia may not be in accord with "the degree of past loadedness" (Clark 1990, 147), required, for example, by its R & D department. 2. The idealizaton of progress In both the individual and social realm, meaning derived from a faith in progress is mainly limited to the pursuit of happiness, the denial of mortality and the longing for affluence. Underlying the pursuit of progress is not only a view of time as linear and irreversible but a feeling of discontent - if not contempt - for the present. As progress means progression and thus is linear, the 'new' is doubtlessly supposed to be superior to the 'old' and to ameliorate its shortcomings and weaknesses (Burrell 1992, 169). Given this unquestioned faith in progress, we both individually and collectively "cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life" (Gray 2002, 142). Insofar as a faith in progress exceeds the frame of the immediate future and is perceived as a constituent part of mankind, it mirrors the assumptions inherent in our modern theories of history: "the devaluation of the past and the hypertrophy of the future" (Santos 1998, 84). Whereas the present is denuded of the past, it is the future that promises improvement, revelation, a state free of any suffering or despair, if not immortality. Even though the broadly shared faith in progress may ultimately only be superstition, "progress is a fact" (Gray 2002, 155). Underlying this faith in progress is a notion of history "as an onward march, an unfolding before us of the new in linear ways" (Burrell 1992, 174). It is reigned over by Chronos and the pattern of time he represents, i.e. "an atomized uniform sequential perspective of the passage of time" (ibid.). It seems that inherent in the devotion to progress is a double depriciation - if not negation - of time. Insofar as the progress reached at present is superior to what has been in the past, the past no longer counts. But to the extent that progress is supposed to be unlimited, the present easily may be regarded as only of second or minor value. The meaning derived from progress has no inkling of the tragic and is based on the false belief that time, as such, is completely irreversible (Luhmann 1984, 71). "Progress promises release from time - the hope that, in the spiralling ascent of the species, we can somehow preserve ourselves from oblivion" (Gray 2002, 194). The conviction that scientific and technological advancement, ongoing economic growth and ever increasing profits are the ultimate achievements for which everything else is to be sacrificed, excludes the possibility that all this 'progress' might actually be leading to our doom. This confirms what Gray (2002, 19) states, "if people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear what may come if they give it up." "The growth of knowledge is real and - barring a worldwide catastrophe - it is now irreversible" (ibid., 155). 3. The commodification of time As Adam et al. (2003, 14) indicate, two preconditions had to have been fulfilled in the historic development of our economy in order to instil the equation of time and money: "The sin of usury had to be transformed into a positive economic principle and production had to shift from use value to abstract exchange value". Above all, as Marx (1857/1973, 140-143) has shown, it has been the decontextualization by which "products, tasks, and services can be evaluated and exchanged" (Adam et al 2003, 15) on the basis of an abstract clock time by which time became commodified and an integral part of production. "In Marx's analysis, therefore, clock time is the very expression of commodified time. That is to say, the use of time as an abstract exchange value is possible only on the basis of 'empty time', a time separated from content and context, disembodied from events. Only as an abstract standardized unit can time become a medium for exchange and a neutral value in the calculation of efficiency and profit" (ibid., 16). Being deprived of any meaning beyond its exchange value, commodified time - based on a reification that implies alienation - tends to reduce organizational role holders to mere parts of the 'clockwork'. In a similar way that money should not stink, commodified time bears no further relatedness to any other time, be it the present, the past or the future. Beyond a means of rational accounting and calculation, commodified time is perceived as untainted by any context or emotions. It is apparently this notion of commodified time, i.e. the irrefutable conviction that time is money, that is at the core of management theory and practice and dominates how time is perceived and experienced in organizations. The predominant thinking of (and about) time in the realm of economy is based on 'billable hours', i.e. on the assumption that any time that is not exchangeable for money does not count, is worthless and but a waste. The "way of thinking about and evaluating the world" (Adam et al. 2003, 17) in economy and economics is restricted to the monetary value of time. There can be no doubt that commodified time is not the only time frame of management in organizations. The extent to which commodified time predominates an organization may vary significantly, for example, according to the respective industry or the executed management approach. As Clark (1990, 153) indicates, in the 1980s retail chains, for example, relied much more on developed practices for the commodification of time than schools or hospitals. Stalk (1988) and Stalk & Webber (1993), in analysing the potential competitive advantage of using extensive time management in Japanese corporations, give some insight into an organizational dynamic in which everything that counts is time, and speed in particular. The relevance of time in organization also further depends on the extent to which cooperation is engineered by 'Just-in-Time' management where wasteful time is supposed to be eliminated (see Ikuko 2003). Business rationalizations and downsizing more often than not lead to an increased amount of work expected to be crammed into a unit of time. 4. The negation of the impact of the past An entire burgeoning business, the financial services industry, prospers by either financing the present by borrowing from the future or offering a future of affluence through pension funds and other financial products (cf. Sievers 2003). To the extent that management is preoccupied with the future, the present tends to be devalued or even sacrificed to it. The present thus not only "makes parasitic use of the future" (Adam et al. 2003, 21) but also seems to be perceived as a 'not good enough object' in comparison to the better future to come. The predominant concern for the future is reflected in disregard or disdain for the past. The past is broadly seen in the corporate world either as 'history' in the limited sense of the "collective way of agreeing not to remember the past but to replace it with a myth … about the past" (Stein 1994, 176) or denigrated as useless and put into oblivion. In its extreme case, the past is not only regarded as more or less irrelevant, but history itself is often repressed and regarded as meaningless or even reengineered. In a metaphorical sense, contemporary enterprises often appear so preoccupied with overcoming the present and managing and manipulating the future, that they totally lose sight of any shadow - both history's shadow on the present and the one the future may cast before. Strategic management, in particular, provides a whole 'body of wisdom' that is devoted to overcoming the past and transferring the present to a means for attaining a more prosperous future. Instead of reviewing the vast body of critical literature on the use and meaning of strategic management, I would like to limit my argument here to one specific strategic approach that, though perhaps still occasionally applied, mainly found an immense following in the 1990s: Business-Process-Re-engineering (BPR). What is most important in the present context is the fact that BPR is based on a "particularly nihilistic attitude towards the past" that serves "to construct a version of the past in order to advocate its subsequent destruction" (Case 1999, 424; cf. Grint 1994; Grint & Case 1998). As Hammer and Champy, the creators and first promoters of BPR, state: "Business reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch (Hammer & Champy 1993, 2)" (quoted in Case 1999, 428). Or, similarly: "Tradition counts for nothing. Reengineering is a new beginning" (Hammer & Champy 1993, 49; quoted in Case 1999, 419). BPR thus has, as Grint & Case (1998, 564) state, "promoted a rhetoric which nihilistically condemns past methods of production, past managerial techniques and past organizational forms". The protagonists of BPR thus present themselves as 'spokesmen of historical agnosticism' who, as Jonas (1971, 32) notes, seem convinced that "from the eternally misunderstood past, knowledge has nothing to gain, and we ought to converse only with ourselves". The business revolution promised by Hammer and Champy (1993, 49) is based on a reconstruction of industrial and economic history. Above all Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations and the accomplishments of the industrial era represented by Ford (and Fordism) are turned into 'bad objects' insofar as they are protagonists of a dangerously outmoded paradigm. Within BPR's rhetorical scheme, Smith, in particular, "features as a kind of secular Satan" (Case 1999, 431). The resulting feelings of guilt and inadequacy experienced by managers loyal to apparently antiquated modes of management lead them "to implicate themselves within the Satanic plot which BPR texts contrive, and the scene is perfectly set for some kind of redemptive drama" (ibid.). Insofar as the proponents of BPR are "offering cathartic absolution of the collective guilt associated with 'mismanagement'" (ibid., 432), this management device is a convincing example of what Lawrence 1994) calls the 'politics of salvation'. BPR is also striking evidence of what Gabriel (2002) refers to as a parapragammatic application of organizational theory, in the sense that both 'programmatic' and 'pragmatic' are fused into one single model that allows simple and fast instruction for action. Despite BPR's enormous resonance and success at the time, it remains puzzling that countless managers and their corporations bought into what otherwise would be perceived as rigorous naïvety. The believers and their corporations apparently were able to cope with the enormous contempt expressed by its protagonists towards the past - and towards a past in particular into which these believers had previously invested an endless amount of energy and managerial activities. From a more recent view on the contemporary development of the perception of time in organizations and contemporary economy it appears, however, that BPR (with its summit in the early 90s) is more the tip than the whole iceberg. 5. Real-Time - or: no(w)-time? Though there can be no doubt that through the exploding development of information technology communication in real time will dramatically increase, it is already propagated by the respective high priests as the ultimate 'way of working, commerce - and living'. They "dictate the need for greater speed and acceleration in organizations" (Purser 2003, 157). Real time thus is praised as "a world in which time seems to vanish and space seems completely malleable" (McKenna 1997, 3; quoted in Purser 2003, 155). McKenna (1997), one of the main protagonists of real-time, propagates an ideal vision of timelessness for the not too far future in which thoughts can be acted out and desires fulfilled in the very moment of the immediate 'now' - a notion that is quite different from Walter Benjamin's (1973, 263; quoted in Osborne 1994, 68) Jetztzeit ('now-time'): "History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled with the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]". As Purser (2003, 156; in reference to Adam [1988] and Jameson [1997]), states, "real-time technology compresses temporal distances, creating a sense of 'instantaneity' by processing information at increasingly faster speeds. Its concern, however, is with the future, which it aims to control through digital technology. Instantaneity supersedes the future, replacing it with a despatialized, dehistoricized, and detemporalized present. … The result is a managerial temporal orientation that is fixated on instantaneity, and an increasingly limited attention span. Knowledge is reduced for knowledge of the present, a bundle of information that can be instantaneously consumed. In so called real time there is no history or future - no time available for serious reflection or creative imagination." Or, as Luhmann (1978, 105) put it: "The present is punctualized, is concentrated on the moment, which alone is lived with irreducible certainty". - Whereas BPR is a convincing example of the tendency to negate the past in organizations and management, real time is based on the assumption that time can be negated because it does not even exist. Even though the consciousness of real time may, at first sight, appear analogous to the unconscious because it does not know time, the timelessness on which it is based has almost a total opposite 'quality' to the one Freud and psychoanalysis had in mind. Whereas the unconscious is timeless and unaware of time, real time is based on a conscious that is unaware of its timelessness. Unlike the unconscious that integrates past, present, and future in the present of, for example, a dream, real time conscious demolishes any time frame that goes beyond the instant now. As the new timelessness of real time relies on instant responses and decisions and does not provide any 'space' for thinking or reflection, it seems to be based on the opposite of what the unconscious represents, i.e. non-conscious. Everything that is not in the instant mind of the communicators does not count and "is totally independent of our own consciousness" (Purser 2003, 167). Whereas the timelessness of the unconscious is infinite, the new timelessness is an expression of the finite, i.e. limited by the very now of instantaneous communication. What is beyond the very moment does not exist and, therefore, is irrelevant. As the "gap between need or desire and fulfilment collapses to zero" (McKanna 1997, 3; quoted in Purser 2003, 155), the awareness of time is substituted by 'eternal instantaneity' or 'infinite finiteness'. "The perpetual present suddenly serves to illuminate duration" (Virilio 1997, 137; quoted in Purser 2003, 162). Though concepts of time, in general, and in organizations, in particular, are particularly prone to reification (Elias 1992, 69), real-time on the basis of digitalisation is the incarnation of reified time. The reification of the present is based on an infinite fragmentation of time and is reminiscent of Aristotle's aporia of movement, in which the arrow shot from Zeno's bow remains unmoved at its point of departure (Fachinelli 1981, 13; Jaques 1982, 17ff.). Similar to the impact the mechanical clock had on organizational behavior, real time has an unforeseeable impact on organizational and social life. The verve with which its protagonists propagate real time as the ultimate accomplishment of management parallels with the predominant belief that money is supposed to serve no other purpose then to generate money (see Sievers 2003). The way in which both the technological imperative of real time and the economic one of money are pursued in contemporary business and organizations appears to be dangerously totalitarian (Purser 2003, 160). They are expressions of a 'totalitarian state-of mind' (Lawrence 1995, 1997). "With little time available to digest experience, or reflect on intentions and actions, knowledge that could improve the quality of our lives seems out of reach. …The time required for sound human judgement, communal reflection, and deliberation - the sort of relief necessary for making sense of the world - is simply not available in real time. Perhaps the greatest danger and threat to our temporal ecology are the erosions of human judgement" (Purser 2003, 158) - and as I would add - of those major qualities and competences which so far have been regarded as constituent for being human. However one may think about real time - whether one may be prepared to follow the new prophets of management or whether one may take a more skeptical stance - it seems to be most likely that real time management will become an increasingly predominant mode of thinking and experience in organizations and economy as well as in wider parts of the 'world' in which they becoem embedded. If we can not resist the danger of becoming subjected by this new timelessness, we soon may end up as 'Eintagswesen' (day creatures), a term used by the Gods in ancient Greek mythology to describe the ephemerals because of the limited and narrow time span of their lives. V. In the shadow of organizational time What I hope has been made obvious in the previous part of this paper is that the apparent negation of the past (and history), the decontextualization of the present and attempts to engineer the future tend to restrict (social and economic) reality to what is (more or less) foreseeable, controllable, known and mastered. In so far as this perception and conceptualisation of reality is limited to what is finite, it is further proof of what T. S. Eliott (1972a, 280) once stated: "human kind cannot bear very much reality". The socio-analytic perspective underlying the above reflections on the dominance of homogeneous codes of time, the idealization of progress, the commodification of time, the negation of the impact of the past, and the tendency towards instantaneous timelessness is more of an immanent kind - the background so to say. In this final chapter, I would like to put the socio-analytic perspective into the foreground and take the opportunity for some more explicit considerations in order to acknowledge the shadow cast by the predominant conceptualisation and use of time. Earlier in this paper it has been indicated that the shadows of organizational time - that from the past and that from the present - are most likely to overlap - somehow resembling the multiple shadows cast by an object illuminated by flood lights in a sports stadium. Re-questioning our commonly taken for granted view of time and that of the past, in particular, may be one of the more frightening shadows the future casts before. Like the future, the past is broadly unknown - and thus infinite. The function of memory for the individual is - according to Reik (1949, 346) - mainly unconscious. Its role is to protect our impressions in order to retain them. Reminiscence in social systems can equally be understood as destructive, as single reminiscences destroy the infiniteness of our social memory as a whole, i.e. reminiscence "represents a particular kind of mental labor, leading to the liquidation of impressions" (ibid., 348). The 'spirit of enterprise', however, aims for a more 'creative destruction' of 'artefacts' from the past. To the extent that organizations tend to negate the past - both their own and that of the society (and world) in which they are embedded - and either miss or actively refuse to reminisce it, the non-reminisced remains socially immortal. As the view of organizational (societal and economic) future is ambiguous in the sense that it both aims at a finite and an infinite future (the former via control and engineering, the latter by progress unlimited), organizational future also tends to be tainted by a longing for infiniteness. The immortality projected into the future thus becomes legitimated, maintained, and supported by an unconsciously 'engineered' immortality of the past through the lack of recollection. On previous occasions, I have emphasized to what extent psychotic thinking is tainted by both individual and social longing for immortality, in a vain attempt to overcome mortality and the inevitable limitation of individual lives (Sievers 1986, 1990a/b/c, 1994, 1996, 2000a). Here, I want to focus on the psychotic implications of the use of time in organizations in the frame of the finite/infinite suggested by Lawrence (2000). Though I may that what has been elaborated so far is but the result of my own bias (in the sense that I was only able to see what I wanted to see - every way of seeing is a way of not seeing), I have come to the conclusion that neither psychoanalysis nor most of organization theory are of much help in relating social past and future. There is almost no reference to 'irrationality', the unconscious dimension and dynamics or the infinite in contemporary reflections on time in organizational and management theory. These fields of study are based on a rational theory of thinking in (and about) organizations that is concerned about 'being' and 'becoming', i.e. an organizational analysis based on 'secured' knowledge from the past, extending and modifying it in relation to the respective present and laying the ground for (change) management. What Clark (1990, 137) takes as a starting point for his exploration of time in organizations may equally be applied to the exploration of thinking in most of contemporary organization theory: organization sciences are dominated by a theory and philosophy of thinking "in the singular", i.e. a homogeneous code of thinking. A heterogeneous code of thinking that includes unconscious/infinite modes of thinking would not only allow a more adequate and thorough analysis of thinking in and about organizations but also further provide an additional access to the understanding (and non-understanding) of time in organizations. In a similar way that "theories of time have passed through .. paradigmatic revolutions in the sciences" (Clark 1990, 141) - and organization sciences are still mainly devoted to a hegemony of the "Newtonian conception of a singular objective time" (ibid., 142) - the theory of thinking has undergone a comparable revolution, leaving most of the sciences - and organization sciences, in particular - committed to a rational accumulation of objective thoughts and knowledge. By expatriating a reality, which might be endless, unconscious, and thus infinite, our contemporary perception of time in organizations and economy contributes to making social reality resistant towards a view of thinking as un-known and not understanding. Cox (1997, 627) states, "that the essence of one-dimensional/forward-backward thinking is on making gains and minimizing losses, both personally and organizationally". Though Cox's view mainly seems to refer to the conscious and rational implications of thinking as being and becoming, the inherent 'economy of losses (and time)' also has unconscious implications. In a paradoxical sense, the rational conscious thinking about time also functions to maximize losses and make gains. Similar to psychic economy in general and that of time in particular, it can be assumed that the imagination of time in organizations is based on a variety of defences both against a more accurate perception of 'reality' and the very act of thinking. It thus can be assumed that, analogous to the individual, organizations, in their use of time, are inclined to rationalization, idealization, splitting and fragmentation, negation, displacement etc.. These defensive mechanisms provide the illusion that what is unconsciously excluded from the perception and meaning of 'reality' is not worth acknowledgment, because it does not exist. The finite is nothing but finite, period. Organizations - in order to function - must reduce the contingency and complexity of the 'world' to an extent that allows reference to meaning for action, communication, and the pursuit of tasks (see Luhmann 1984; cf. 1978). The very fact that an unknown 'amount' of what is excluded by such a reduction may include losses has to be broadly ignored or denied. (And as these losses cannot be acknowledged, they thus cannot be mourned.) The denial of loss, so far as the predominant imagination of time is concerned, is not only related to the homogeneous code of time propagated by 'mainstream' organizational theory (cf. Rehn 2003). It above all represents a total ignorance of timelessness and the inherent fact that the unconscious experience and thinking of time actually is based on such 'curious' modes of time as referred to in the introduction of this paper - 'pushing the past backwards in front of oneself' or 'the hope that yesterday will become better' - as well as to the simultaneous visualization of what unconsciously is supposed to be part of the past, present and future in the present - as, for example, in a dream. Whereas the unconscious is the realm of the psychotic, insofar as it does not discriminate time and allows access to a reality that otherwise is perceived as irrational, chaotic or 'mad', the predominant conceptualisation and use of time in organizations are rational and finite. As organizational time serves to subject every experience to the rules and limited constraints of an endless and permanent game of monopoly, it equally can be understood as an expression of the psychotic parts of organizations (and economy) and its inherent thinking in particular. Referring to the hypothesis that organizational time is - to a major extent or even exclusively - psychotic, not only takes a different stance on time but further leads to the question of how time could be perceived (and managed) from a non-psychotic perspective. As already indicated, such a stance would allow a return to the experience and view of time that has been lost in organizational time or, as T. S. Eliott (1972b, 238) once stated, "the wisdom we have lost in knowledge" Even though Social Dreaming is not the primary focus of this paper, a few examples may indicate the possible vistas, insights, riddles, and questions that such a recognition of timelessness and the inherent infiniteness may reveal for the realm of the social both in organizations and society. As did Beradt (1968) in her Third Reich of Dreams, Clare (2003) writes about a Social Dreaming Matrix held shortly before 9/11 in which dreams of the coming disaster were shared months before it actually occurred. Lawrence (1999b, 2004b), in his work with the top management of a French company, illustrates the otherwise unavailable insights and understandings they derived for future business strategies from the work with dreams. And Sievers (2001) describes how dreams helped members of a political party acknowledge the experienced banality and apparent meaninglessness of the politics represented by their political party through significant recollections from its past. It seems that organizational consultation bound to a socio-analytic perspective needs in general to be aware of the integration of past, present, and future and their simultaneous relevance to the consultation process. This is, for example, particularly important in the case of a pending succession either in family owned businesses or other organizations (cf. Gilmore 2004; Guerin & Reichard 2003), in mergers and acquisitions (cf. Sievers 1999, 599ff.) or when an organization's founding process has an ongoing traumatic impact on its business in the present and its strategies for the future (cf. Sievers 2000b). To the extent that in our everyday lives and in organizational roles in particular we tend to buy into the assumption that time can be mastered and thus calculated and known, we lose sight of the underlying paradox - already posed by St. Augustine (Book 11, Ch. XIV) in the 4th century: "If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know". The fact that we both know and do not know what time is and cannot explain it - neither to ourselves nor to others - is an expression of our not understanding. Instead of staying with this paradox in order to make it available for further thinking and understanding, we mainly tend to ignore it because we prefer (or are made) to assume that we cannot bear the tension between knowing and not-knowing, between the finite and the infinite (Lawrence 2004b, 37). Unlike managers who are not supposed to problematize time (Adam et al. 2003, 3), we as socio-analytic scholars may allow ourselves to recognize that time, in general, can be seen as something not known, an un-known. Though it may be somehow easier to acknowledge that the future is unknown to a major extent, it may equally be so for most of the past as well as the present in which we are living. In order to allow both thinking about time and about how time is thought in contemporary organizations, we have to consider not knowing as a capacity rather than a lack of competence or knowledge. Allowing oneself to struggle with the non-understanding and to have thoughts about time and the relatedness of past, present and future thus may require a similar negative capability - like Winnicott's (1958/1965) 'capacity to be alone' or the ability to tolerate frustration - i.e. the capacity to be conscious "of the period elapsed between the presence and the absence of the objects" and thus the ability to discriminate past from present and future in order not to reduce time to a mere 'now' that denudes it of past and future (López-Corvo 2003, 286; referring to Bion 1965, 55). The five aspects of organizational time (slightly reframed here) - the dominance of a linearity of time, the deification of progress, the reification of time as commodity, the denial of the relevance of the past and the no(w)ness of time - unilaterally aim at subjugating time to what is known and knowable. As the remaining uncertainty and insecurity is projected into the environment, the shadows they may otherwise cast are extinguished in the light of corporate grandeur. The finiteness of organizational (and economic) time mainly has disappeared from predominant rational thinking and action, because the finite has been colonized by capitalism to such an extent that it lacks any awareness of its own limitation. The ongoing accumulation of money and the unlimited increase of economic growth through progress might be the only exceptions. And as the experience of absence, unanticipated presence or future thus has to be denied, the potential inherent meaning can no longer be acknowledged, reflected and processed. As Armstrong (1996/1999) indicates, the denial of this experience is most likely to provoke "flight: action/reaction or withdrawal". To the extent that the present or the instantaneous predominate and broader meaning cannot be grasped, meaning appears to be reduced to the limited frame of business wisdom - and the burgeoning meaninglessness often inherent in it. As organizational role holders may most likely feel helpless in the face of this meaninglessness and are preoccupied by phantasies of annihilation, impotence, and despair, they appear to be subject to a sort of psychotic thinking that makes them all too receptive to all sorts of management tools, methods, and strategies, which most importantly promise to reduce their not-knowing and not understanding. As already indicated, especially in the case of BPR and real-time management, it thus is not too much of a surprise that managers on behalf of their corporations tend to buy into what the protagonists of the 'politics of salvation' (Lawrence 1994) or 'of damnation' (Armstrong 1996/1999) seem to propagate as a panacea. Much of what often is regarded as 'normal' "shall be viewed as psychotic production that demand to be dealt with accordingly" (Sandler 1997, 50). Driven by an unsatisfying present, which they cannot master or bear, holders of management roles all too easily fall for 'prefabricated' and 'masterminded' strategies and methods that help them in their thinking as becoming. Despite the fact that this thinking can primarily be regarded as a conscious mode of thinking, it is obvious that the apparent rationality of time as a linear chronological sequence of never satisfying presents is deeply rooted in unconscious assumption and defences and tainted by psychotic dynamics that mainly remain unthought in organizational and economic theory and practice. The conscious or the actual experience of lack of progress or economic growth either in the form of stagnation or regress(ion) is perceived as devastating because it raises phantasies of loss, decline, defeat, poverty and ultimately death. VI. Conclusion Once again, I experience some uneasiness if not resistance to coming up with a conclusion as often expected in academic tradition. What I have elaborated (or rather sketched) so far on the impact of the predominant notion and use of time in organizations on contemporary and future social constructions of reality does not, by far, end the matter. It is most likely that what I attempted to accomplish is ultimately but to make us - myself and hopefully some others - aware that the shadow that organizational time casts on the past, the present, and the future is as 'real' - and enigmatic - as the 'object' itself. Acknowledging the shadow may add some light to our understanding of organizational time, but it even further confronts us with the 'Augustinian' paradox that our knowing intertwines with our not-knowing, that we find it difficult if not impossible to understand and 'explain' what (organizational) time and its shadow are. The 'end' of these reflections thus may resemble the beginning, i.e. to acknowledge that we are left with the insight that we live with 'the shadow of a future we don't know any more than we know the past, a shadow which it projects or casts before" (Bion 1994, 309). It thus seems that we have no choice but to stay with this paradox in order to make it available for further thinking and understanding, not to ignore it. We may find in us as well as in others the courage and capacity to (from time to time) bear the tension between knowing and not-knowing, between the finite and the infinite and to treasure this tension as a source of further meaning and a way of acknowledging meaninglessness. This may help protect us from a fate of limited existence, as mere appendices of our organizations and the predominating economy. *I am very grateful to Rose Redding Mersky. Without her ongoing feedback on previous drafts of this paper, her repeated readings and editings of the text, I would not have been able to write it. References Adam, Barbara (1988): Social versus Natural Time:
A traditional distinction re-examined. In: M. Young and T. Schuller
(eds.), The Rhythms of Society. London: Routledge, 191-226
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