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Unthinking images of time in organizations: ‘The shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz’

Mohammed, Sideeq (2019) Unthinking images of time in organizations: ‘The shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz’. Organization, 26 (2). pp. 199-216. ISSN 1350-5084. E-ISSN 1461-7323. (doi:10.1177/1350508418808241) (KAR id:70609)

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Official URL:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418808241

Abstract

Drawing on a recent ethnographic enquiry, this article reports on a series of encounters with organization at a British shopping centre that can shed light on the ways in which time is understood by organizational scholars. This article argues that research on time has a tendency to reproduce certain images and metaphors which indicate an unquestioned set of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time that dictate how it can be understood. These habits of thinking time render organization studies unable to conceptualize or adequately describe the encounters that characterize ethnography as a mode of research inquiry. As such, following in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze, this article advances the idea of a ‘conceptual entanglement’ and suggests thereby that the problem of time is an aesthetic one which is part of a complex and almost ineffable series of sensoria and connections; describable only by saying that the shopping centre keeps time with a rubato waltz. This work of unthinking time will be presented as a part of an account of ethnography as the tracing and parsing of the entanglements of many different concepts and field encounters.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1177/1350508418808241
Uncontrolled keywords: Deleuze, ethnography, metaphor, ‘pataphor’, shopping centres, time
Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Divisions: Divisions > Kent Business School - Division > Department of Leadership and Management
Depositing User: Sideeq Mohammed
Date Deposited: 04 Dec 2018 13:10 UTC
Last Modified: 28 Jul 2022 22:08 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/70609 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)
Mohammed, Sideeq: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2046-5465
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